I haven't been on the Crevo threads so I don't know about the stuff you've been involved with. When you said that you had abuse pressed for disagreeing with someone's point, it's the same thing I've been seeing lately on a lot of other threads, not that abuse was actually pressed, but it was threatened, and no attack took place at all. There's getting to be a lot of people that won't stand for disagreement.
I posted to every nasty, backstabbing, broken-beer-bottle-in-an-alley flame group in Usenet for years before I found FreeRepublic. The only rule in some of these newsgroups is that eyeballs plucked out of their sockets during a flamewar must be handed back intact and not stomped into the sawdust on the floor.
The crevo threads scare the living bejeebers out of me.