As the victim of that previous attack, I know how this hurts, but I truly think there is a big difference between these two episodes. This latest one is not an attack at all.

In the dwon attack I gave lengthy serious posts to try to counter his bald statements but his replies were always one liner abuse or wild unsubstantiated claims. Then he stopped posting anything and went into an almost atomated mode, finding every comment I had made for years and voting against them without reading them. He made 300 negative votes in one week. It was clearly malicious.

In this latest round, on AGW, we had ones side repeating the wild claims of the shock jocks, without any supporting evedince other than those pathetic e-mails, and alleging on that thin basis that the entire international scientific community was part of a massive conspiracy motivated by making billions of dollars. The main proponent was no school kid. He is a police officer with military officer experience who should have known better.

The counter arguments were put with patience, courtesy and care by a range of veteran nerds of whom I was one. There was no collusion to negative vote on my part with the others, and I know how they would react to any such suggestion. So I don’t believe it happened.

It was not malicious.
These were simply poor posts that deserved to be voted down in line with site conventions.

The suggestion of cowardice is nonsense because the system does not allow the name of negative voters to be recorded. I am opposed to changing that, because I think it would discourage negative voting and we need that to improve the quality of the site.

I still believe that malicious negative voting would be best controlled by taking the votes from the stock of positive votes earned previously by that voter.