Steve,
Here are my observations and opinion. I have learned a key lesson from this board.
On message boards of this type, there are always lots of guys who enjoy putting other people down. These people usually have self-esteem, confidence or security type issues. They enjoy getting a response from someone and are entertained by seeing you type back in an angry manner.
The best way to deal with these situations is simply by hitting the ignore key. Once you see a negative comment, dont reply, just hit the ignore key. Otherwise, you then start saying negative things and that puts people off. If you say nothing, then it appears that the other poster is being a hostile jerk. However, if you reply, then you fuel the debate and make yourself look like one of the hooligans.
Pretty soon, the hostile posters find that they are just talking to themselves as you are ignoring them. They will move on to a different target.
My opinion is that Baron needs to lay down the law on this site. He needs to more aggressively ban users, delete threads and issue warning notices. There are other trading sites where moderation is very aggressive and you dont find this much graffiti. However, since elitetrader gets lots of hits, Baron will not take this stance.
Therefore, the best you can do is hit the ignore key since Baron is not willing to take an aggressive moderation stance. Unfortunately, we will have to live with the Nazi threads in the politics&religion thread and other such nonsense.