People who write articles have the right to decide who can participate in the subsequent discussions.

Based on your previous responses, you are what we would call a "Semantics Debater".  That is, rather than debate a particular issue, you tend to debate the meaning of specific words.  Simply put, I don't have time to waste on that kind of user and don't want them muddying my articles with discussions arguing the meanings of specific words.

For example, you hijacked one of Little_Whip's discussion to debate the meaning of "attack".  Little_Whip had written that Germany had not attacked the United States.  It was a minor point in her article and most people understood what she meant. But instead you hijacked the thread to discuss what constitutes attacking (such as the Atlantic naval engagements in the Atlantic Ocean prior to December 7 between the US Navy and German Submarines).

Similarly, you hijacked a discussion about whether welfare recipients would vote for Kerry into a semantical discussion over what exactly is welfare where you insisted that even tax cuts were welfare.  Most people know what welfare is. Hijacking her main discussion to try to argue your particular definition of welfare was rude and inconsiderate of the rights of others.

And finally, you tried to hijack a discussion on labor for the government (another way to look at taxes) into a quibbling over percentages of income (one which you were unwilling to provide any evidence to support and was irrelevant to the discussion anyway).

If you wanted to start your OWN semantical debates you were free to do that. But time and time again you demonstrated that you have no respect for the rights of the person who writes the article to discuss the issues and ideas of the article and instead try to turn it into a semantics discussion.

Semantics debaters are not very common on the Internet but they do pop up from time to time. I simply don't wish my discussions to get polluted with off-topic segways into what specific words mean. So I prevented you from participating in my articles.

Your rights end where the rights of others begin.

That's why I black list people. People think this is some sort of terrible thing but people need to ask themselves this question: Which would you rather have? The people who take the time to write insightful articles giving up on writing due to having their articles hijacked by trolls and semantics weenies or to give those people the ability to eject the trolls and semantics weenies?

I'm not a professional writer. I don't get paid to do it. So I can honestly say that if every time I wrote an article I was going to have to deal with people nit-picking the meaning of words that are commonly understood or outright trolling I just wouldn't let people respond at all.

That's what OTHER blog sites do btw.  Bloggers like Steven Den Beste actually removed his forum that he once had because he got fed up with people hijacking threads.  When we designed JoeUser, we were determined not to let those kinds of people do the same here.

Sometimes your choices are between a bad and worse solution. We have to deal with the world as it actually is, not as we wish it was.