All human utterances are subject to question. All communications are subject to measurement against a standard that may not have been on the mind of the speaker. ... There is a place where combative communication is favored, revered, honed and practiced, and imposed by force of will and repetition on those who do not come to the table armed with snark and clothed in oppositional affect.
That place is known ... as ... the blogosphere.
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The long repetitive whinging about civility (on the internet) shows that people are not what some people ( a good many) deluded themselves that other people are like. We are not close enough to punch anyone out and we don't want any sex or money from them, and as a result people show themselves for what they are. These are advantages, included along with they cannot ask you to lend them money. : )
And seriously, as you probably prefer, the problem arrives that people are not what they have pretended to be, not even to themselves. They, now adults, knew that once for years and somewhere around the ages of twelve to fifteen (for boys) they began to forget, and for years the girls may have been more realistic. And now adults they all can tell themselves all kinds of things about other people, and themselves, and be just as deluded as ... But whoops, the internet can change that. They can even pick a new personality. And they do.
This posit applies I think to both bloggers and commenters. If I am right and the problem is one of human nature, nothing will change. Frank speech is a good thing, rejoice in it, wallow in it.
Second salient, what is it with the "watch your language" objection? Do they not show evidence of a narrow, provincial mind? Suppose we were to fill the blogs with curse words from Quebec, where the big curse words are like hostie (stie), temple, and ciborium and used abundantly on stumping a toe. In that little experiment we could see more easily what language is and that curse words are, and that's all, a type of emphasis.
The world of communication has changed, for good, it appears, and we (more than one) are looking to science bloggers to tell us how it has changed, as they see it. and not bellyache on and on about civility as seen from the narrow confines of the post-adolescent brain.
Third salient, and it's something I would spare them in person and spare names now, many bloggers cannot write worth a root-toot-toot, and when it comes to arguing they are like children. And about that they don't have a clue. As the touted Harvard study found, if we are incompetent we don't know it. So where do these writers get off by preaching to others about civility? when it is they who could use mental adjustment? But.... let them have at it, first do no harm, just don't expect some, me anyway, to keep reading that stuff.
This sort of self-flagellation on the way to Mecca exercise on civility gets old, though fleetingly interesting as spectacle, and the harm and help if any are only for the flagellant. Meanwhile, the world is so full of a number of things...However, the internet is vacuous, unreal. The science topic, it seems to me, is the new ways of existence, not internet civility, an old way.
Well, David's comment was a little to long to read, but the post at Quiche Moraine is inspiring and thoughtful.