See previous: "Caution: This blog purchases civility offsets"

The Rebirth of Civility?
A revolt against people who are behaving badly.
By Daniel Henninger

And so it came to pass in the year 2007 that a little platoon came forth to say unto the world: Enough is enough.

Two leading citizens of the Web, Tim O'Reilly and Jimmy Wales, have proposed a "Bloggers Code of Conduct." The reason for this code is the phenomenon of people posting extremely nasty verbal comments about other people on Web sites devoted to political and social commentary. For Mr. O'Reilly, a publisher and activist for open Web standards, the last blogospheric straw involved a friend whose suggestion that it was OK to delete offensive comments from Web sites earned her a backlash of vitriol on several sites, with one posting a photo of her alongside a drawing of a noose.

It is appropriate that this line should be drawn in the ether of the World Wide Web, whose controlling ethos up to now has been that speech and expression should remain free, unfettered and--the totemic word that ends all argument--"democratic." As it developed, too many of the Web's democrats, for reasons that have provided much new work for clinical psychologists, tend to write in a vocabulary of rage and aggression.  ...

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What Happened To The 'Invisible Hand'?
Ed Morrissey

Daniel Henninger lends his normally rational, free-market voice to the matter of blogger civility in today's Opinion Journal -- and opts for the communal approach. Henninger wants a code of conduct imposed on the blogosphere, even voluntarily, to reverse the tide of uncivility in modern discourse:

And so it came to pass in the year 2007 ...

It is appropriate that this line should be drawn in the ether of the World Wide Web, ...

Henninger is wrong. It is convenient that the line should be drawn in the blogosphere. Otherwise, people might be tempted to draw lines in the press. Would Henninger agree to a speech code for his newspaper in order to restore civility, if tempers flare and people acted less than politely on the opinion pages? How about on television, where Geraldo Rivera and Bill O'Reilly acted mightily uncivil last week? Keith Olbermann on MS-NBC's Countdown? Jack Cafferty on CNN?

Speech codes don't work, especially voluntary speech codes. ...

Maybe I'm missing something here, but the situation just doesn't seem all that complicated. My blog is my online castle. In my castle I shall say anything I &^(%# well please, and I shall allow or disallow the speech of others as I &^(%# well see fit. Don't like it? There's another castle right down the road; maybe you'd be happier there.