No problem, as long as you drop your condescension.

As for site owners’ responsibility, if they want to heavily moderate their comments, I don’t have a problem with that. But if they don’t, absent something directly threatening or harmful or something (like, for instance, posting the home addresses and phone numbers of people who disagree with you), then no, I don’t think they’re accountable for what people have to say about their posts.

Another implication of Davis’s article that’s particularly troubling to me is the implication that all of the commenters on these blogs are in lockstep, in terms of their opinions. But I’ve seen several heated arguments between commenters there. Should one side be deleted because the blog’s author doesn’t agree with it? I don’t think it’s incumbent upon the author to do that, no.

Strike as non – responsive. How about trying a different tactic next time, like actually answering the question? Why are you in favor of total abdication on the part of site owners as pertaining to what their commenters post on their blogs? Should hate speech be completely unregulated in this medium, or is your Tourette’s Syndrome/cheap fallback position that “there’s a fundamental difference?” If so, let’s hear all about the fundamental differences that you sagely pointed out above.

Sorry about the gender confusion.

OF COURSE that is not a problem, I just have this dumbass need to proclaim my gender!

What appears to be lost on you is that Davis’s piece certainly had the tone of attacking the liberal blogosphere at large using the evidence not of prominent liberal bloggers,

Well, I don’t know but the anti-semitism is alive and kicking on the left and so whether the prominent writers are writing it or not, does not erase the fact, that it is there and showing up on liberal blogs. Seems to me you want to proffer that because the actual traffic getting blogs haven’t actually written anything anti-Semitic, this allows you to ignore and discount the anti-semitism the traffic givers leave.

Gosh, I’m sure you’re right. I also assume you think the Tooth Fairy still exists and that Karl Rove is planning on taking over the world next year. Try a little research, please – no one can make this claim with a straight face (but perhaps you were smirking when you typed it).

“But it’s fundamentally wrongheaded to attribute others’ comments on the piece to the author of the piece itself.”

OK – you’re the New York Times. In response to an article, many readers write in with a good dose of virulent notions. Should they print them all? Of course not, because then the majority of their audience would tend to correlate the letters page with the paper itself. You’re abdicating any responsibiltiy on the part of the site owners themselves. That’s not grown – up, that’s patently infantile.

Nothing’s lost on me at all. What appears to be lost on you is that Davis’s piece certainly had the tone of attacking the liberal blogosphere at large using the evidence not of prominent liberal bloggers, but the almost-anonymous nobodies who comment on them. Again, if the attack was on the readers of liberal blogs, the piece would have made marginally more sense (if, that is, he could have convinced me that the commenters were somehow representative of the readership of those blogs at large).