What good would it do him / her?

By allowing him to return to his traditional, friendlier, haunts and tout the fact that “yet another liberal fake science site couldn’t counter his arguments so they banned me. They can’t handle the truth”.

A minor issue I realize.

So, is it worth it to give him what he wants (being banned) so he can stick another feather in his cap?

What good would it do him / her?

If the plumage is invisible to the majority of the audience, it doesn’t really matter if it’s there or not.

The flipside of the coin is that permitting misinformers to proliferate unchecked online is dangerous. Bad information when brayed insistently enough, drives out good information.

Since contrarians very rarely observe the conventions of good faith discussion, I have increasingly moved towards the view that they should be excluded from it.

I have a feeling his entire reason for posting in various blogs is to get himself banned, thereby being able to “demonstrate” the “closed-mindedness” of the people here. He’s already succeeded in getting banned at EvolutionBlog, for precisely the same reasons mentioned here: being dishonest, evasive, and not-acknowledging comments.
So, is it worth it to give him what he wants (being banned) so he can stick another feather in his cap?

Honesty, sincerity, curiosity. If a commenter doesn’t show these qualities, s/he should be stopped. This would include those who ignore relevant questions. It would include cases of – not ignorance – but insistent, intractable stupidity, e.g. those who claim “we don’t know” when it’s been clearly shown that we do, those who are wrong and reflexively reject or ignore any evidence that shows this. It would often* include those who attempt to divert the discussion so it comes to focus on their agenda, rather than the topic at hand.

A “ban” of this sort should not be universal. Persons who are destructive and irrational in regard to one subject can have something meaningful to say in regard to another. Meaningful can be something I disagree with, but that makes me consider the validity of my own position. The examples above result in disgust, not reflection.

*I think it’s possible to distinguish between diversions that in some way enrich a discussion, and those that in effect destroy it.

Because I never said a conspiracy existed.

Yes you did. You claimed that NOAA was faking its results. That is a conspiracy. By clear implication if NOAA is faking its results then so are GISS and Hadley/CRU or their temperature reconstructions would differ sufficiently from NOAA’s to reveal the fakery at NOAA.

Then you claimed that there was a conspiracy of silence amongst supposedly liberal scientists to overlook the fakery in order to further a political agenda.

Then, as cosmicomics points out at # 96, you explicitly link the accusations of scientific misconduct to a political agenda of social control:

Ultimately though, it seems to me they are doing this to try to justify greater and greater control over people and economies.

This is conspiracist ideation from start to finish. Yet you would have your cake and eat it: denying your conspiracist nonsense in the same breath that you repeat it.

* * *

@ Greg Laden

Or is there a third option. What do you think?

SN is now lying and simultaneously repeating his / her conspiracy theories. Bad faith commentary should be moderated. I agree in principle with what Marco says just above, but this takes *time* and I suspect you have better things to do. Ultimately, of course, the choice is yours.

Take this one:
“Assuming that scientist was right, any proven explanations for why Scotland 170 million years ago was SO MUCH WARMER THAN TODAY?”

We have here a question that can be answered, but has nothing to do with the comment he responds to. I could provide an answer to the question anyway, but then SN will just go on to the next topic, not acknowledging the answer. He can’t do so, because he’d admit he knows so little and has no basis to place so much doubt on the knowledge of others. In short, he’d admit his questions are those of sheer and utter ignorance, rather than just a form of ‘valid’ skepticism about climate science. After all, everyone knows Scotland was not in its present Northern position during the Jurrasic and that CO2 concentrations during this period were much higher than today. In other words, you’d *expect* Scotland to be much warmer than today (although land mass distribution does have a major influence on climate, so it is not a situation that can be compared 1-to-1 to today).

We all know about Nils-Axel “tilt-the-graph” Mörner. Just the next item in your Gish Gallop.