Don't go, Dior. You have nothing to berate yourself with.
Rhubarb. What an excellent post. I am with you.
Mr Justabout, thank you for your objectivity. (Are you actually from Trollope?)
Dear Moldies: (several people have expressed this already - sorry to repeat)
People are angry and need to express it. You have made a choice that you all appear to be happy with - fine.
When you try to justify it, it throws just enough meths on the fire to reignite the anger. When you (not all of you - really) are a little economical with the, you know, people like me and MP feel honour-bound to get involved again.
Personally I am glad that you are still here.
However, when some Moldies (I must be frank and mention PrincessPeaHead's shocking character assassination last night on the deleted thread) come here to attack, they will be told to fuck off back there - that's surely to be expected.
Remember: we have no idea what you are saying on Moldies. We are therefore, unsurprisingly, a little suspicious. We may be wrong - but you cannot change this. It is the inevitable result of the choice that you made.
All our nastiness is, luckily or unluckily, out in the open (and I apologize again for my unpleasantness last night.)
I am sure that nastiness from this end upsets you: but again, I hope you can see that this is a result of the choice that you made. It didn't just pop out of the ether.
Trying to be objective, and in the spirit of the New Year, I think that one thing that would help would be if you could agree with each other to swallow your tongues for a bit. I'm sure this will be hard - but it will be the quickest way back.
I am (once again) going to try and withhold from posting unless I see untruths being bandied.
Before I do that, I must say that the untruth which has me perpetually pinging back to these threads as if on knicker-elastic is the one where Moldies say 'we had no idea that we would cause such hurt'.
There was a very long Moldies thread in which this was discussed in depth and I remember very clearly who was involved. Since Moldies is so small and that thread was so controversial, I feel justified in assuming that almost all of the regular posters will have seen it. So you cannot, in all conscience, claim that this potential hurt had never occurred to you till now.
This doesn't mean that you are wholly without defence; simply that this particular one is not an honest one - and that every time it is offered, I feel obliged to post.
I really, really hope that things can move forward. If it is possible for you to assign to this thread the status of 'Steam Vent: for the express purpose of the Angry Ones to Be Angry and thus Move On', it will be over all the more quickly.