You are right - CheeseLord (cool nick btw). These factors are always present in any society. However, I think you'll agree that they should be discouraged; people's statements should be evaluated on their own merit.

I think it's funny, after I posted my opinion piece on Women Programmers, Sex, Tai Chi and Reincarnation the other day, I found a whole load of old nodes of mine being downvoted. The chatterbox client I use tells me when my nodes get downvoted, and what I was seeing was a whole bunch of parallel downvotes happening within the space of about 2 minutes, to, say - 7 articles. This happened more than 5 times, occasionally corresponding to a flame to my original post. This leads me to believe the people doing the downvoting were downvoting my nodes en masse, just because they didn't like something I said in my most recent post and perhaps felt the need to dish out more "punishment". Obviously the other slews of downvotes came from people who couldn't formulate their disgust at what I'd said into words.

All I can say is that the etiquette here is supposed to resemble a monastery, which amongst other things means this:
Check your Ego at the door, please.
Do not believe what others tell you on face value.

Common themes for most religions that call their places of worship "monastaries", no?