Kool-Aid refers to people's ideas? Labeling somebody a zealot refers to people's ideas?

My point is that the 5-10 most vocal anti-Delta posters during the "wars" often cast me and many other "moderates" (for want of a better term) as Kool-Aid drinkers, zealots, loyalists, apologists, etc.

Which totally misrepresented the overall opinions of the moderate posters, and reduced the forum to the equivalent of the political attack ads we've just suffered through here in the States. Dumb slogans that don't come close to representing complex positions.

Those 5-10 most vocal anti-DL posters also often then warped reality by accusing me of personal attacks when I criticized their stereotyping of me.

You may decide for yourself whether you were a member of the group which I then termed the "Gang of Five" until I was asked by the mods not to use that term.

A proper response to my points, according to your perspective right in this thread to discuss ideas rather than people, would have been to engage on my (and many others in the same boat) ideas that NW's FFP was great but the airline was not as good an airline as DL; that DL's staff seemed on the whole friendlier than NW's, that NW's website was far better than DL's and should have been kept, etc. How anybody expressing that mix of views could be labeled by simplistic and damning slogans such as "apologist", "zealot", "loyalist", "kool-aid drinker" escapes my comprehension.

I'm not trying to re-fight that battle here. I'm trying to ensure that none of us find ourselves in that same kind of battle this time, in the UA/CO merger and FT forums combination process.