Enough: I’ve said before that I don’t intend my comment sections to be a free-fire zone for posters to abuse one another, and I meant it. I also said that I would delete posts that seemed to me to go over the line, and that my decisions in this regard would be idiosyncratic, capricious, possibly unfair, and very definitely not subject to appeal.

Yesterday I removed a couple of posts by one Philip Shropshire that seemed to me to go over the line into namecalling. (To my mind, there’s a difference between saying “conservatism is stupid” and suggesting that a particular individual’s conservative views come from being personally stupid.) When Mr. Shropshire responded with further truculence, I deleted that post as well, and used Moveable Type’s “IP banning” feature to block further posts from his IP. Mr. Shropshire’s response has been to use a different IP to spam multiple Electrolite threads with reposts of the same material—posted under names like “Isaac Asimov,” “Avram Davidson”, “Repent Harlequin”, and “Freddy Pohl.” (Oh, the wit, my aching sides.)

We won’t be having any more of that. The ability to post further comments to Electrolite has been disabled. Existing comment threads can be read, for now, although I don’t guarantee that they will stay up forever — so if there’s something you’ve written in one of my comment spaces that you want to save a copy of, I suggest you grab it now.

Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and Electrolite was young, readers used to send me interesting email and I used to post selections from it. For the moment, at least, that arrangement is what’s on offer. Life is too short. [10:53 AM]