Conversations are out, and have been ‘out’ as far as these folks are concerned for a very long time. The web merely offers them the unfettered ability to say in a crass way that they’ve felt even before having such an unmoderated or uncontrolled evironment.

These types of people are not interested in any form of dialogue, or an exchange of ideas. I cannot fathom their motivation for the behavior they exhibit, and the moderating of certain forums will only limit (to a small degree) their ability to hurl their invective into cyberspace.

Water seeks its own level and these folks, like rioting/protesting crowds, always seem to find cameras and sympathetic journalists that give them a format for publicizing their stock & trade.

It just galls me that our GI’s have to defend them.

While that is true, what I ment was I think we will see more blogs that just don’t allow a comment to go on the blog until it’s been looked at.

As for stuff that isn’t comments, I am not sure what can be done about that because people are going to say whatever they are going to say. While I agree that what we are seeing now goes beyond what would expect to see in a civilized society, I am at a loss as to any ideas of what can be done about it. It isn’t against the law to be a jerk.

A treatening email or phone call can be prosecuted but what one posts on their own blog is pretty difficult to do much about.

“Unless the blogosphere as one rises up in righteous anger and condemns without equivocation, without qualification, and without regard to ideology or party affiliation those who seek to sully this medium with the poisonous tactics of bullying, or threatening, or crossing over from the virtual world into the physical world in order to carry out vendettas against opponents, we will become a sideshow, a gaggle of carping, sniping, irrelevancies who deserved to be laughed at rather than taken seriously for our ideas or beliefs.”

I am quite prepared to stand against this behavior. I am disgusted by it. I also believe it is an example of why the extreme left is pushing itself into irrelevance; most people don’t want to be associated with that kind of public behavior.

That kind of behavior isn’t sustainable and I believe we are witnessing the coming apart of the most extreme fringe elements of the left. Everyone is abandoning them, even the Clintons. Now if they can just get Dean out of his chair, they can begin to clean things up because I think this fringe sees Dean as their source of legitimacy. But I suppose if Dean is replaced we will hear a howl of how Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Diebold, and Israel all conspired to “get him”.

This goes to the heart of the problem with the manipulation of language I keep referring to. Robert Frost once said, “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net.” What he means by that is “poetry” written without structure, without metre, rhythm, rhyme, is not poetry. You can call it whatever you want, but that does not make it into something it’s not.

The same is true of music. Without structure, melody, harmony, it’s not music. And the same is true of language. Without structure, grammar, syntax, punctuation, it’s not language.

This is why the “progressive” movement to abandon the teaching of traditional liberal arts–grammar, logic, rhetoric–is perhaps the most profound betrayal ever perpetrated on the American people, but especially on children. Without a structure to language, there can be no structure to thought. So by not teaching the structure of language, and more by not teaching how to structure language, the student is left without structured thought and without any way to structure thought. In other words, the student is taught to not think, and even worse is not taught how to think at all.

And we see the results all around us today. In the coarsening of our culture, the vulgarity of our communication, and the degradation of our civilization.

This is no trivial matter. We’re talking about our survival as a free people here. And about the future we bequeath to our children, whom we have allowed to be reduced to thoughtless animals and left out in the cold.

John Keats best stated the ideals of high culture in his Ode on a Grecian Urn: “‘Beauty is truth. Truth beauty.’ That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” When there is no structure to language or thought, when words have no meaning, when truth is no longer relevant, there can be no beauty in anything. Only ugliness. And with ugliness comes all the vulgarity we endure all around us today.

God help our children.

If it were only the comments that were the problem, I’d say that most bloggers already moderate comments to one degree or another.

It is when the threatleave the virtual realm of the internet and enter the real world that we have a problem.

And no amount of comment moderation will alleviate the pain of a parent who has had to endure the kind of filt dished out by Frisch. That kind of hurtful language goes beyond anything left in a public forum and strikes deep at the heart of a person’s psyche. And there’s no excuse for it.