It's a problem. The question is, what to do? As long as there's a baseline of civility, I'm not personally interested in policing the content of other people's posts.

That thread was a classic case of how conversations go wrong on blogs: one person says something mildly inflammatory, another person overreacts, and then we're off to the races. When docents have attempted to intervene in the past by inviting people to stay within certain parameters, the bloggers tend to attack the docents as being biased. For example, I think "McMansion" is just part of the English language, and not an insult. If I had made that contribution, I can guarantee that jstplnrny would have responded negatively, causing an even bigger mess. If other bloggers do the work of bringing the conversation around, it seems to be more acceptable (other bloggers are not perceived as authority figures). It seemed to me that others were able to make the relevant points.

If you have any suggestions about how to promote civil discussion, I'm all ears.

Thanks for sharing that DC. I think the docents have kicked this around frequently, but Rick put it pretty well up above. I don't blame them either, it feels "wrong" to bonk someone on the head when they aren't really stepping out of line, they are just being insensitive. I think a lot of that goes around though, we can call folks on it, or not, but I think they normally know that they are being insensitive.

...we shouldn't accept "better than the Olympian" as a metric. We can create something that is qualitatively different here.