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.

That was my response to the following comment (left by Scrutineer) to my last post:

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.

A blog is not an Internet chat room.

The statement is so self apparent that you wouldn't think I'd need to make it. Yet there is this feeling -- from somewhere -- that "the Internet" is just a wild and uncivilized place, and so be it. That is certainly true of much of the Internet, whether it be the squalid commercial popups, the XXX-rated chatrooms, the endless spammimg, and the unlimited adolescent rudeness of the sort characterizing chat rooms and discussion groups.

But blogs are not like that. As many have observed, a blog is like a home. It is identifiable and named, and usually so is the person or persons who write it. While commenting -- especially anonymous commenting -- changes things somewhat, it doesn't alter the fact that blogging is personalized, individualized communication.

I saw firsthand that there was a gap between the blogosphere and the chat room types during the uproar over the networks's refusal to show Nick Berg's beheading, and when I made the video available I was inundated with "regular" (i.e. non-blog related) visitors, who left the rudest comments I have ever had. The comments were, of course, anonymous, standard chat room fare.

The gulf between blogging and chat rooms/discussion groups is so great that the latter are often used as a smear against the former by people in the mainstream media who should know better. ("The Internet!" "Another cowardly Internet smear!" they say, despite the fact that bloggers are more public and more forthright than most mainstream journalists!)

Anyway, I believe it is important that the blogosphere remain as accountable as possible, and that accountability ought to include some sort of basic recognition that personal insults, aside from not being a valid argument, are generally outside the scope of civilized discourse.

Of course, the Internet is wild, uncivilized, and unregulated. Not only would I never change it, I'd fight those who would with everything I've got. What I'm advocating is voluntary acknowledgment that self-civilization is desirable, and that rudeness is, well, rude! There are no rules, and there's no way to make anyone obey them anyway. It's just a heartfelt plea, that's all. I wouldn't even go so far as to call it a pledge, because I know I'll break it at one point or another, and I dislike hypocrisy. I'm simply refusing to acknowledge or accept institutionalized rudeness in the blogosphere, and I hope you do too.