I like my commenters and readers. There’s virtually no one who comments here regularly I don’t think I’d like in person. I have continued blogging out of a sense of obligation to people who have read me for years. I would personally greatly appreciate it if folks would stop the personal attacks. If necessary I will start deleting comments or shutting down comment threads. But I really want to avoid the irritation, both to you and me, of either mandatory registration or author approval comments, or a combination of both.
And I don’t think there’s any commenter here who can’t look at what they write and know themselves if it’s a personal attack or trolling.
Not everyone here likes each other, not everyone here agrees with each other and that’s fine: we discuss important issues and people should be passionate. When that passion starts driving people away, when it starts turning personal amongst people who are basically on the same side, it becomes a problem. So, please, if you disagree with another commenter, by all means say so politely, but no more personal attacks. As for trolling, you know it when you see it, please refrain.
Oh, and if your comment doesn’t show up, it’s almost certainly due to the automatic spam filter, not due to anything manual. At this point I haven’t manually added anyone to the spam filter. I often am offline or don’t check the spam filter for some time, so don’t take it personally. You can contact me at admin-at-ianwelsh-dot-net if you think you’re caught in the spam filter. Again, I may not see your email for some time depending on what’s going on in my life, so if you don’t get an immediate reply, it’s almost certainly not that I’m deliberately ignoring you.
Oscar Leroy
Yes, let’s not have this turn into one of those blogs where people just spew vitriol at each other in lieu of substantive arguments. Too many blogs I used to read have gone that route. I, and probably you, feel better about what I say or write if it’s something that adds to rather than distracts from the discussion.
chicago dyke
spam at a blog like this is almost certainly one thing. and you know what it is. damn, i’ll avoid an annoying cultural reference right now. spam and scroll, brothers from the womb, yo. information: struggling to be free.
rumor
” I have continued blogging out of a sense of obligation to people who have read me for years.”
I understand what kind of burden that kind be, that sense of obligation, and for what it’s worth, although you don’t ever *have* to keep doing it, thank you. Yours was one of the few works that introduced me to the world of finance (such as it is) and energy, knowledge for which I’m forever grateful. I always appreciate reading your take on things. I can’t really comment much on the old internets, for work-related reasons, but I’m a-watching.
Sean Paul Kelley
Did you mean to say that there is no one here you would like personally? 😉 That’s how it reads to me, although I am inclined to believe the opposite.
John
Thank you for the time and effort you spend on making this blog what it is. I appreciate your consistent voice of sanity and reason.
S Brennan
One thing I can say for you Ian, unlike other blogs, you don’t scrub your comments of people who disagree with you. Those blogs who’s proprietor suffers from Obama is God syndrome are pretty ruthless in scrubing comments when they start bashing Clinton or Carter to try to make Obama look good. The Obamanation can’t seem to offer good policy, all they can do is repeat right wing themes that trash other democrats who actually did a better job than Obama.
selise
“I have continued blogging out of a sense of obligation to people who have read me for years.”
in my case, i think it’s been 7 or 8 years…. which makes the following long overdue:
thank you ian.
Mandos
I agree with S Brennan’s sentiment that one of the biggest values this blog brings is the diversity of its commentariat, though I’m not sure I agree that it is simply pro-Obama blogs that wall out opposition particularly more than any other type of blogs. Rather, the blogosphere has become a collection of increasingly sectarian silos, and places where a diversity of dissent can be found have become rather rare.
I (and some of you may) remember the bad old days of USENET, which reached the point where political discussions invariably and predictably devolved into screaming matches between the disproportionately-sized Randroid-libertarian contingent and everyone else. Yes, if the people newer to the web can believe it, Randroids were even louder back then, much louder, and it became impossible to move the discussion away from the moral-axiomatic basis of inalienable property rights.
Then when the web came along, we could all build our own discussion boards. I thought it provided a good compromise. You could police the recurrent arguments over axioms and still allow a controlled population of dissenters and opponents to prevent ideological stagnation. I remember it as an intellectually productive time for the political internet.
The blogosphere started out with a lot of promise for media democratization—but instead it made the pendulum swing too far. It turned out to be too susceptible to fractal schisms and little emperors, and now from the cacophany of USENET we have an endless series of monotones, with the Judean People’s Liberation Front banning all the members of the People’s Liberation Front of Judea or whatever. The creativity engendered clashing ideologies and interpretive frameworks has been largely lost, even within the left side of the blogosphere. So places like Ian’s blog are concomitantly rare.
S Brennan
Mandos,
I don’t want to get into a long conversation with you, as I have in the past found your belief systems in-congruent with factual data [example: dutifully voting for the lessor of two evils produces a less evil outcome].
I have found right wing blogs try to scream you down and Obamanation blogs simply scrub your comments off. Now to be truthfull, I don’t comment on right wing blogs anymore, but I do periodically reconnoiter them for useful info…and yes they do have info. My biggest disapoint with blogs is how easily cheaply people of the left were bought once it came to the attention of the ruling class what useful tools they could be.
Josh Marshall, Ezra Klien, Kevin Drum, Juan Cole, Matt Yglesias…all big supporters of the Iraq Invasion, all supporters of the Obamanation…all big sellouts, all succeeded in spite of being regularly wrong.
Mandos
How is it incongruent with factual data? Do you have an example of a general election at a national level in which Democratic defeat produced a left-wing policy turn at any time scale? Voting for Democrats. on the other hand, produces a noticeably slower slide to the right—still further right, of course, but noticeably slower. I have many examples of the opposite being true.
There used to be—yep—some Randroid blogs that weren’t completely closed to civil dissent, as long as you were willing to go round and round in circles on the moral axioms underlying property rights. Also, ironically, now that he’s been run off the reservation for a time, David Frum’s place is relatively tolerant. But of course the frequency at which right-wing arguments are trounced in the comments section there (or used to be, haven’t participated in a few months) lead to right-wing grumbling that it is not really a conservative site…
Rob Keogh
I would humbly suggest the “play the ball, not the man” rule promulgated by sluggerotoole.com as an easy, concise and consistent way to police comments.
If the comment is tackling the messenger instead of the message it is automatically considered out of bounds. The only caveat I would suggest is the Tom Friedman exception where the messenger is a malignant water carrier and is always suspect but even then I would try to lean towards focusing on attacking the message and not the messenger.
Zach
Thank you for your consistently complex, rigorous and thoughtful work Ian. It makes my life better. Thanks for keeping the faith.