Andrew Ian Dodge adds a further gloss in a comment on my posting below:

Yep, its me. One hopes that no one would fake being me.

I understand your point of view and needless to say respect it as its private "property". In any case your policy needs to be posted on your blog so people know

Fair enough. The Terms and Conditions of this site are already there, tucked away at the bottom of the front page and maybe should be made more prominent.

And his email makes another useful point indirectly – you really do not know who is actually doing the commenting on your site.

It would not be too difficult for anyone to crank up a plausible email address sounding like one belonging to someone else and then to start posting all sorts of disobliging things here and there, polluting the sites used to do so and creating problems for the person being ‘impersonated’. Another reason why keeping an eye on comments is no more than common sense, and in any case not ‘censorship’.

But there is also the ‘let it rip’ school of thought – allow a comment free-for-all (perhaps deleting obvious spam rubbish). This of course is maybe not a bad idea in legal defence terms – to let such a torrent of random noisy inchoate obscenity and even racism flow that no-one credibly can claim to take anything written there seriously, hence no law suits.

Reader Julian Dobson:

The sad fact is that the most offensive blogs, like the most offensive newspapers, appear to attract the most readers. That doesn’t mean you have to join in

Quite so. And I don’t.

But there is something in the sheer energy and stamina of the best swear-blogs, who just don’t live in my world of nuance and a certain quizzical circumspection. See eg Devil’s Kitchen on the Lockerbie bomber episode:

Well, might I suggest, Shane, that instead of taking this shit at face value, you go and do some research into the evidence—or lack of it—and the conduct of the trial—which was condemned by independent UN observer as bringing "the entire Scottish legal system into disrepute".

There is, you see, a very simple reason why al-Megrahi should be released:

HE DIDN’T FUCKING DO IT.

Well, that’s clear then.