Puritan City recently posted a guide of sorts, entitled “how to insult your fans“–about bloggers raging on those who write in to comment on their blogs. This is, as many of you know, a topic dear to my own heart.

There’s some highflown rhetoric about how democratic the blogosphere is, and all that, but the truth is that the “delete” button is a blogger’s best friend, and not only to rid the record of those who disagree with you, but for just generally chuckleheaded comments that have the cumulative effect of wasting everybody’s time to read them. Low-quality comments devalue your blog in the end. It’s a “company you keep” type thing. He who lies down with dogs wakes up with fleas, know what I mean?

I am all for vetting comments. I have not done so on T-Rage! as of yet, but I’m certainly not for suffering fools. The main thing that starts my itchy delete finger is name-calling. I deleted several comments from my mennonno.blogspot.com blog (which contains only my Metro opeds) because I had someone cyberstalking me, and the comments were invariably more about his obsessive-compulsive disorder than about anything I had written. But there are also comments that are garbled beyond intelligibility. There are comments that are flippant, and do nothing to advance the great cause of democracy. I usually leave them in, myself, but each one I get sort of erodes my faith in humanity a little more. Familiarity does indeed breed contempt.

But all this talk of democracy cracks me up. Democracy is really not about just saying what you think and that being of inherent value to the debate or the community. If you spout hateful epithets, what value to the debate is that? If you toss out flawed assertions or assumptions as fact, what value does it have to producing a fruitful dialogue? If every time we dialogue on an issue we have to waste an hour debating again whether the earth is really round, what’s the point?

It’s absolutely true that civility is a vital part of democratic debate, and because of the anonymity of the web people are emboldened to behave badly. I don’t think bloggers should berate those who comment, or delete comments merely because they present views that differ from their own, but I don’t object in the least to bloggers moderating their comments, and removing those that are of no value or include offensive epithets. That’s not a devaluation of democratic ethics, it’s just a recognition that even in democracy–and even in the blogosphere–there is such a thing as decorum.