VRob
I have been known to perpetrate vicious attacks of my own in the past. In my defense, my most withering assaults have been directed against a few specific types of people:
A gentleman called Hahnemannian received perhaps the greatest amount of my abuse some while in the past. I spent especial effort ragging him out because he was selling homeopathic medicine.
Why does this deserve extra venom? Well, one of the tenets of homeopathic medicine is that normal medical treatment is destructive and will kill you, and should be avoided at all costs. Instead, if you - say - have cancer, you should sip their watery concoctions and hope that it somehow realigns your vital patterns so that you no longer have cancer. Now, I have no problem with their potions and such, but I do have a problem with their long and strident insistence that all standard medical care is instantly lethal and has never helped anyone - this is a fabrication which harms those people who believe it.
Interestingly, when asked about Emergency Medicine (first aid and such), he informed all of us that he found it horrible and did not believe in it and that, no, there was no such thing as homeopathic first aid. So presumably, as a homeopathic believer, you should carry a pistol at all times. That way, if you are critically injured, you can put yourself out of your misery.
Any beliefs that cause harm to others in this way deserve to be insulted.
People like ManMadeFlyingSaucer do not injure people with their beliefs that I know of, but are willing to leap in and misrepresent nearly any situation as supporting what they believe. He will cheerfully identify a photo of a speck as a "spy saucer", when even the photographer was not able to see clearly what it was.
Many people approach unexplained phenomena as already being explained by things that they previously believe, since ET, the Shadow Government, and other such explanations are so rich in possibilities that they can be used to explain almost anything.
I cannot discount the possible existence of ET and the Shadow Government, even in the ridiculous forms that they take in some accounts. BUT, that doesn't mean that I have to accept them as the basis of every theory that is expounded... and I have learned the hard way that "speculation" quickly becomes too thick to sort through, although people like fluid1959 will claim that all of their statements are speculation, as if that was a proper defense of their spurious claims.
So, in addition to those who actually harm people I am also inclined to have no patience for those who practice intellectual dishonesty on a regular basis.
When it comes to the major questions, like whether ETs exist, I can only say... I dunno. The evidence is not convincing. There's no evidence at all that they don't. So we're stuck, until something actually convincing comes along.
I should point out that those who engage in intellectual dishonesty are undermining not only their own position, but also that of the others who make similar-sounding claims... so you should be careful of some of these guys too, Vrob.