But I do agree that your opinion was biased by the behavior of the people participating that discussion (if that's what you meant). Nonetheless, IMO, a community leader should be able to deal with criticism, and I don't recall reading personal attacks.
As of your link, I was being sarcastic.
I'm 100% fine with code criticism - I think you'll find no JS library more open to it than the jQuery project, we've shifted the code base many times over the years making large quality/performance/API improvements based upon criticism. That being said I have no interest in talking with people - valid code criticism or not - if they're personally attacking me as well.
I'm not judging or anything, but sticking around on clj and trying to argument could have been very beneficial for both jQuery anc clj itself. There are ways of ignoring people in usenet, you know.
Also, Juriy, whom you cite in the book's preface, was a regular there long before his website really took off. That means you didn't dislike every member ;)
Resig's actions towards clj effectively turned his whole userbase against everyone and everything that was written in that newsgroup. Thousands of unexperienced js developers shunning great advice just because it came from someone Resig had a beef.
I do believe that it had a negative effect on the javascript industry for a few years.
The nannying influence of people like you is poisonous to a community. Your own comment is a veiled but difficult-to-analyse attack. Your weak observation asks us cow to your vision so that we will all respect one another and feel good about ourselves. You do not respect the technical aspect of this community which would value truth and quality discussion over feeling.