A sad Best Defense precedent is set

Longtime
grasshoppers know that I am a First Amendment fundamentalist. That's the ideological
reason I've been extremely reluctant to censor any comments. The other, more
practical reason is that selectively censoring a nasty commenter only makes him
look better. Why help a jerk stay just inside the lines?

I
mention this because over the last week, one commenter clearly was going out of
his way to be provocative and insulting. He was eroding the civility of the
continuing discussion. One soldier wrote to ask that the commenter be banned
for fear that the tone and type of comments would get Best Defense blocked on military computers.

Still, I
didn't take action, and instead just asked him to tone it down. (I am not going
to name him because I think that just would give him more of the attention he
seems to crave.) 

Then he
made a crack along the lines of where is Lee Harvey Oswald when we need him. My
stomach turned. I made a decision I had resisted for years. But instead of
going to censoring, I asked FP's
technicians to block his comments altogether.

This is,
of course, just a short-term solution, because he can always comment under
another name. This is where you all come in. The real  long-term solution is for all of us to ignore
those who degrade the discussions on this site. Resist temptation, and ignore
his provocations. So I am thinking that in the future I might I post an
occasional flag, along the lines of "Troll
alert: Please do not respond to this person's comments." Do you think that
would work?