"I like to think that the blogosphere is different -- and based on dialogue and reason."

Why? Most face-to-face political arguments are relatively free of reasoned dialogue, and the internet provides a buffer that allows people to be far nastier than they'd ever dare to be in person.

It would be great if every blogger tried to be as civil as Glenn Reynolds and Mickey Kaus (scroll down to "Trustworthy Blogging Initiative II"), but it'll never happen.

Of course it will never happen! I too am guilty of what I condemn, and I have resorted to personal attacks. What I'd like to see is a consensus emerge that such attacks be acknowledged to be a sign of failure rather than of victory as they so often are. I'd like to see them be the exception rather than the rule. Because, once we allow vicious personal attacks become the standard rather than the exception, human nature being what it is, dialogue will inexorably degenerate into thuggery – and I mean real brownshirt stuff. Surely we can all agree we don't want that. I think it can be stopped earlier if there is at least recognition that personal attacks are beneath a basic standard of civility – rude, "over the top," whatever you want to call it.

Recognizing something is wrong is not the same thing as stopping it, and I am the last person to be so naïve as to imagine stopping it is possible. (We'll never stop lying either, but surely that doesn't make lying right.)

You make a good point that "most face-to-face political arguments are relatively free of reasoned dialogue" and that is a major reason why I blog, because people can't interrupt my stream of thought. But there isn't anything I say here that I wouldn't say in person if people would be crazy enough to give me the time to say it. As to the Internet being a buffer allowing people to be "nastier than they'd ever dare to be in person," I think that's more a characteristic of anonymity. I have long noticed, for example, that the nastiest commenters (and most annoying trolls) are anonymous people without real names and without identified blogs.

Bloggers and blogging are for the most part very different from the chat room and its denizens. In my view this use of the Internet is different, and better. I truly believe there's a higher purpose involved in blogging, and it is ill served when chat room invective becomes the standard.