A note on commentaries

One thing my reading blog roll has not typically emphasized from me is strolling into the seething red maw that is the comment section on other blogs. With a few exceptions (typically well "policed" commenting threads), it tends to get ugly, off-topic, and annoying very fast. Commenting on an internet thread lends itself to pillorying the "other side" (who is often remarkably absent from appearing in their own defence of course), and to ranting unproductively about things, including things like "I hate the fucker who posted this".

The downside of roughly ignoring these is that there are gems of commentary on regular blogs who have informative things to say, sometimes constructive critiques of the opinions of opinion "making" people such as myself, and it also, given my relative political proclivity for mostly apolitical, or at worst strongly libertarian sites, keeps me out of the harsh reality that is liberal blogosphere commentaries and thus projects the comfortable attitude that only those crazy right-wingers who get their information from Faux and World Net Daily or Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh deserve my scorn. This is incorrect and a problem I occasionally make pains to arrest myself from committing to creating. Crazy left-wingers or even political moderates can be assholes just as easily. The difference is largely that most so called liberals pay no attention to the actual liberals within their institutions of support, and don't have to in order to maintain their political power or prestige. Conservative, right-wing, politicians actually have to debase themselves before their base of support. It thus matters what Rush says a lot more than what Daily Kos writes, and it matters just as much what Rush's commenters and supporters do/say over and above what those wacky comment threads at Huffington Post say, because the numbers are so much more meaningful in a political and electoral calculus. There are however, no shortage of useless idiots living among us who believe things like "9-11 was an inside job", "Obama was born in Kenya and is a secret Muslim", or who painted Hitler mustaches on either pictures of Obama or Bush (or both). So the upside of not commenting much is that you get to ignore most of these people. To be honest, this does not seem like a new problem anyway. The Internet has removed some cultural isolationism. Legions of people in London or NYC or Boston or San Francisco can find the latest outrage published by a conservative wingbat or a facebook group dedicated to some immodest bigotry related to gays and comment on it. But so far as I can tell, a partisan nature to our politics and media is no modern invention, and carries with it the same patterns of different sets of facts with a limited exposure and/or denial of opposing facts, isolated intellectual havens, and scathing personal attacks denigrating the character of opposing political factions as "un-American", "unpatriotic", or whatever the calumnies of the day would have been. It's merely gone more global and uniform in its practices than was possible when news traveled at the speed of a horse or boat.

Since few people stop by here to see what the echo chamber of my mind is doing with any regularity, and even fewer bother to comment on it either to persuade or inform it of anything, I'm not sure I can help the situation elsewhere in terms of the conversational politeness and/or high-mindedness. I try to make posts, when I do so, with an idea toward inspiring such things from any potential readers/commenters in mind, and also to make comments on other blogs, when I do so, with the same idea of requiring something like a rational discourse to resolve the issue according to our mutually agreed facts, when they can be shown to be factual. It becomes obvious that repeated replies to the same topic and people are often pointless. Even so, I still make the attempt for the reason of attempting to persuade any random and middle ground readers who may be weighing their options before forming an opinion.

Naturally my attitude on free speech is such that only spam related comments should be suffered as necessarily deleted (and these do get deleted here, they are rare and usually get caught in the comment moderated world of my older postings). But I'm not at a point where I might have to consider moderation over a flood of idiotic ranting, other than my own, either. It leads me to wonder what criteria are being used by others on these types of forums, because comments (including my own) are often deleted, or at best ignored, in the heat of argument without explanation or apparent cause and commenters are banned or excised from the rowdy dinner table that is the internet without warning (an experience I have not yet had, officially anyway). One basis for policing such things with effective moderation is that the quality of comments can reflect poorly on the site itself (an important reason I never wade into Reason or Volokh's comment threads, which are often terrible, and a big reason I don't go to HuffPo at all, before even considering that the quality of editorializing there is terrible). It's not clear to me how to accomplish this with an expansive definition of free speech protection that includes the right of people to be assholes or idiots and which does not protect them from retribution for these flaws by removing the ability for offensive retort or extensive factual debunking efforts.