I'd have to say that people on this forum are generally a whole lot more thoughtful and polite than the average. Frankly, I think that this is partly due to some vigorous moderation over the years, which led to vigorous moderation on the part of the users. There were some early threads that went kind of wild, such as the immigration thread where somebody started off on a fairly xenophobic subject...then got worse. Though the OP deleted the thread in that case (they could do that back then, if I remember right), I felt it was fairly gratifying that nearly all of the responses were relatively tactful disagreements with the original statement.

On the other hand, I'm not surprised that Dee-U became dismayed by the general trend. What a buncha doubters!!