I keep stumbling across today's boring competition over which dag commenter can be more offensive, and Georges Monbiot and Barry Eisler have me wondering whether I am reading astroturfers or masturbators, or both.

First Monbiot, in the Guardian:

There's a wider cyberwar being fought, of which you hear much less. And in most cases the landlords, with the help of a mercenary army, are winning. ... I'm talking about the daily attempts to control and influence content in the interests of the state and corporations: attempts in which money talks. ... The weapon used by both state and corporate players is a technique known as astroturfing.

Reading comment threads on the Guardian's sites and elsewhere on the web, two patterns jump out at me. The first is that discussions of issues in which there's little money at stake tend to be a lot more civilised than debates about issues where companies stand to lose or gain billions: such as climate change, public health and corporate tax avoidance. These are often characterised by amazing levels of abuse and disruption.

Articles about the environment are hit harder by such tactics than any others. I love debate, and I often wade into the threads beneath my columns. But it's a depressing experience, as instead of contesting the issues I raise, many of those who disagree bombard me with infantile abuse, or just keep repeating a fiction, however often you discredit it. This ensures that an intelligent discussion is almost impossible – which appears to be the point.

Abuse, disruption ... does any of that sound familiar?

The internet is a remarkable gift, which has granted us one of the greatest democratic opportunities since universal suffrage. We're in danger of losing this global commons as it comes under assault from an army of trolls and flacks, many of them covertly organised or trained. The question for all of us – the Guardian, other websites, and everyone who benefits from this resource – is what we intend to do about it. It's time we fought back and reclaimed the internet for what it does best: exploring issues, testing ideas, opening the debate.

On his own blog, Eisler asserts in How To Argue that even the non-astroturfers are too busy stroking their egos to actually put forth a convincing argument:

I have a feeling most people who suck at argument believe they're actually good at it. They're not, and in fact they're not even arguing -- they're masturbating. Good argument is intended to persuade another. Masturbation is intended to pleasure the self. It's the people who can't tell the difference who mistakenly think they're good at argument. I hope this article will improve the effectiveness of people who are interested in good argument. And I hope it will help people who until now have been masturbating to recognize what they've been doing, and to stop doing it in public.

When someone addresses you with sarcasm, or otherwise insults you, has it ever -- even once -- changed your mind? I doubt it. ... you should be able to realize that an insult is a useless tool of persuasion. In fact, it's been my experience and observation that insults not only fail to persuade, but have the opposite effect, because they engage the recipient's ego and consequently cause him to cling more tightly to his position (see the section below on Your Ego is Your Enemy).

Because even the most elementary common sense demonstrates the futility and counterproductivity of insults as tools of persuasion, we have to ask why so many people choose to employ them. I see two possibilities: (i) the people who are doing so are shockingly stupid; (ii) the people who are doing so aren't actually interested in persuasion, but instead insult others primarily to pleasure themselves. Neither of these possibilities is attractive.

It's a long article, worth reading. And it occurs to me that the techniques of rational argument Eisler recommends are the perfect antidote to the astroturfers that Monbiot complains about. If both sides are engaging in "infantile abuse," the astroturfers have the perfect cover, even justification to derail arguments and draw all attention to themselves, just as is happening on dag today. If we force ourselves to argue rationally, however, then it will be very clear who should be ignored.