The part about comments? Right on. Don't let the abscess of humanity troll against everything they dislike on your own website. Anyone who thinks you must have comments to be legitimate is under a false sense of entitlement.
Seriously. Just write. Comments in general are a distraction to productivity; comments on blogs are no exception.
With one caveat: blogs with the stated intention of creating community/being a community gathering point has to have comments. I run a blog that helps independent writers publish their work online. I tried Gruber's advice, once - and it backfired, badly.
So, in a nutshell: soapboxes are good, but not when you want to create community.
Comments on a blog do not a community make. I run a news site about a band, and I've never allowed comments. However, the site is closely affiliated with an entirely separate message board, which our staff are regular contributors to.
I see it in kind of the same way Gruber sees it, but without nearly as much hubris and ego. To me, it's my website, and I prefer it to be an editorial publication. I select who writes for the site, because I want a higher quality end result.
That said, some sites benefit from public comment. I remember being ticked off when News.com got bought out by CNet because they eventually turned off comments, and often times the comments helped balance out the ridiculous spin in the articles posted to the site.
Agreed. Perhaps a better generalizing statement to make would be: community cannot exist where there is no channel for user feedback. You have a forum, I have comments. Both are mediums for reader expression.
It depends on your writing style: some people naturally write in ways that encourage good discussion about the topic. Write in a tone and on subjects that encourage good discussion rather than polemic arguments, and moderate the comments that are crap. Suddenly, abusive comments aren't as much of an issue. Look at Hacker News. Generally, it avoids subjects that lead to ugly flamewars (save this Apple/Google spat generally turning ugly), and discussion here is generally of decent quality.
Comments can be a distraction, but they can also be a source of good material and feedback. I read a number of blogs that have had excellent posts that began in the comments on another article but blossomed into full fledged posts in themselves.
As for Gruber's site, I agree that his adding comments would be a bad idea. He writes about a highly polarizing subject in a manner that can seem condescending and arrogant. I don't think he's going to get good discussion, at least not on the recent articles he writes.
Seriously. Just write. Comments in general are a distraction to productivity; comments on blogs are no exception.