People should wander through Deja News [now owned by Google] to see what was going on in the mid 1990’s on the news groups when almost everyone was tech savvy, willing to use that knowledge for their own ends, and bringing down a mail server was a point of honor.

Godwin’s Law was a description not a rule.

If they want uncivil, they should look at what was said about the Clinton administration, Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc.

Death threats are matters for law enforcement, not blogger ethics committees or comment rating schemes. As to the rest, as watertiger emphasized, can’t people moderate their comments? Good grief. The notion that I am responsible for the content of my comment threads, but simultaneously prevented by “free speech” considerations from pruning them, is so much crap. It’s not that there’s no problem here: it’s that the solution is plain to see, and it doesn’t involve any rating committees or icons.

The primary virtue of the blogosphere is its diversity of individual opinion, style and quality of discourse, in the face of a nearly complete collapse of every other major public forum for actual discussion of our critical societal issues. We do not need another venue in which the Thought Police are checking who uses how many obscenities, who posts how much snark, who coins derogatory nicknames for which opposing bloggers, who puts up parody blogs, etc. We need more obscenities, more snark and more nicknames… not for their own sake but as an inevitable byproduct of a wide-open, full-throated airing of individuals’ opinions.

My objection to trolling is hardly that trolls disagree with me, or even that they can be uncivil, though I find that unpleasant. My objection is that a troll’s objective is disruption, pure and simple. As you know, I answer all their whines about “free speech” with one statement: “git yer own damn blog”; they’re cost-free from at least two services.

I’ve had enough of watching the mainstream channels of discourse bought out, co-opted, astroturfed, filled with pundits having no understanding of journalism, and otherwise abused: it’s time for individuals to let it all out on their own blogs. This isn’t elementary school… we don’t need any goddamned fucking hall monitors.

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Afterthought: If they think today’s bloggers are uncivil, they really have short memories, because both of those guys are old enough to remember the flame wars of 20+ years ago, before there was a web. Now THAT was incivility, with a vengeance and with a flair!