Samizdata

I am fairly used to intermittently getting peeved e-mails from people who get their comments deleted wailing about how they cannot understand how a ‘libertarian’ blog can ‘censor’ free speech (never mind that Samizdata is a blog that has many libertarian writers, rather than a libertarian blog per se).

But today I got two such e-mails within minutes of each other, one from a racist troll whom I have long banned and one from a Muslim troll who keeps posting passages from the Koran in random articles. As a result I thought I would revisit the issue yet again, even though Samizdata has several articles on this subject, such as this one.

It is really simple: this is private property and as a result anything published here is at the sufferance of Samizdata’s editors. We invite comments but that does not mean we relinquish control over our property, just as when you invite people into your house, you do not relinquish the right to subsequently un-invite them if they act inappropriately or if you just want them out for whatever reason.

Apart from spam comments, the main reason we axe people’s remarks are that they are gratuitously insulting, grossly and uninterestingly off-topic (interesting but off-topic is sometimes tolerated) or they are endlessly repetitive. Racists and Muslim extremists, who between them make up 85% of the non-spam deletions, almost always fall into the last category. It does not matter that their arguments are shredded and rebutted, neither group are psychologically capable of accepting their questions have been asked and answered unless they have been agreed with. Even more annoying, the racists are capable of hijacking a discussion about cricket or Beethoven into yet another absurd phrenological rant about racial IQs. The Muslim extremists tend to just reply to reasonable questions with great long quotes from the Koran as if that will magically end all arguments. Well life is just too short to tolerate such people flogging their dead horses on our turf and preventing rational discourse and reasonable progression of a discussion.

And when certain commenters wear out their welcome, sometimes they do not just get their comments deleted, they get banned completely. This is often a shame because a couple of the banned commenters had some interesting things to say when on the rare occasion they can bring themselves to stop obsessing about the issue that dements them. Yet there are only so many hours in the day we can spend moderating Samizdata (we do have off-line lives, believe it or not) and when the majority of a person’s comments have proven to be obsessive rants, they get banned.

And who gets to make that call? We do. Our house, our rules. End of story.