I saw responses to unwelcome opinions

Context
Today I saw two similar things in different places. First on PUBLIB, an e-mail list for public librarians, I saw a series of inflammatory posts (one example here, but you can find others if you browse the February entries by the same author, Matthew Price), followed by some equally inflammatory responses and several well-considered ones, including this one by Robert Baillot. Then on Slashdot, I saw another discussion initiated by quoting Glenn Beck in one of his more outrageous moods and evolving into a metadiscussion of how to respond to outrageous opinions. By the way, that last link is a little tricky. You may have to do some collapsing and expanding of comments to see what I'm talking about.

Commentary
Almost since the inception of the internet, people have been using it to exchange opinions. And almost since the start of that activity, there have been trolls, which are defined as people who take an inflammatory stand just for the sake of being inflammatory, not because they actually believe it. The perception is that trolls get off on attention or on getting people upset because they think it makes them superior.

The conventional wisdom about this phenomenon is "Don't feed the trolls," i.e. don't encourage their bad behavior by responding, but I was intrigued by the two responses I saw that seemed to fly in the face of that. "Ephemeriis" takes a civic responsibility approach, saying that since Glenn Beck is taken seriously in some quarters, the opposition is obligated to craft a serious rebuttal. Robert Balliot goes him one better by quoting Aristotle to make the point that every idea deserves consideration, even the rantings of a troll.

These responses are challenging to me. I often believe in operant conditioning, or at least the principle I learned from my mother: "If you ignore someone, he'll go away." But is getting someone to go away really my goal? Or is it engagement, where I continue to grapple with the people who drive me crazy in the belief that the God who loves all of us might be trying to tell me something?

What did you see today?