Reviewing Comments

I've long taken the position that my preference was to leave comments unreviewed. They get up faster and take less of my time. That policy fits my general sense of free and open debate. However, I reserved the right to turn on 'review comments' if people violated my trust that they would post civil and respectful comments.

Well, yesterday I turned on the review comment feature. Anonymous (there appear to be at least two and maybe more - but one in particular I think that has led to this) has been posting long, rambling comments. OK, some people are better speaking than writing. I give people slack on that. I was more concerned about the tone when the comments first started appearing about a week ago, but they seemed to have some substance that was of relevance, though it was hard to be sure. They also made blatant, but unsubstantiated, allegations and characterizations about people that had a tone of self-righteousnous that bothered me. And they were repetitive. But I was hoping that they would evolve into more civil and informative comments.

One goal of this blog is to have a civil discussion. By this I mean that people are respectful of each other and the people they write about. That people present evidence for their allegations. They don't call each other names. They read what others write and respond directly to the parts they disagree with and explain why.

Yesterday there was another blizzard of comments that didn't meet any of those criteria. There are much worse comments on other blogs and this commenter does have something in mind. I was hoping he would reveal that with enough time. But I've had enough. Any single comment hasn't been that far over the line and I've left them up - about fifteen posted comments so far. But cumulatively they change the tone of this blog. I've criticized the ADN for not moderating their blogs and so I just decided the time I hoped wouldn't arrive, had arrived.

There are about ten comments awaiting approval now. I've discovered that Blogger gives me the choice of accepting or rejecting each comment. I can't even use the select and copy and paste feature.

Here's a part of a comment that is waiting for me to accept or reject. There are five or six more separate comments that appear to be from the same anonymous commenter awaiting approval:

Why should any ANON trust you, some have seen how the truth can be twisted when Ted is involved, and the raw power, for all most know you are just another in the TANK FINK for Ted, you showed your true colors, you think people are so gullible to trust you, & you think any are going to come to some sucker like you, as you delete this and other posts to slant things…
Like why would any even come to your and spill the whole thing. . .who in the hell are you, you proved you can’t be trusted, have some agenda. (LIKE CLUB TED, CLUB WEV)

Some bon Vo play boy with rich travel Money, you don’t mean shit to most hard working Americans, they see you as the reason why Alaska is seen as a big sucking machine to leave the US taxpayers the tab. SEF tax slaves.

One could argue that the commenter has some legitimate points and I shouldn't be picky about style. But the style here is a not-listening style. This person has lots to say, but doesn't seem ready to listen. The comments jump to conclusions without telling us how he got there. In the passage above he suggests he's talking for people other than himself ("most hard working Americans.") I've chosen this part because I'm the subject of the commenter's attack. So I'm posting those comments for all to see what he said. (There's more like that in other comments in the queue.) I'm not rejecting these because he is critizing me, but because of how he is talking about me and others. Being the subject of his ire also gives me more perspective on what he's saying about others.

So, I'm going to invite all posters to do a few things if they want me to push the accept button:

1. Be respectful of others. If you think they've done something wrong, identify the specific act that was wrong and point to specific evidence. If there is no specific evidence, point out the circumstantial evidence that leads you to your conclusion. For example in the second part of the snippet above, I think that you are saying something like, "Steve, your traveling suggests to me that you're rich. That reinforces people's image of Alaskans as sucking up all their tax dollars." Then I could ask in response:

• How do you define rich? How much money does one have to have to be rich? $1,000, $10,000, $100,000, $1,000,000? A billion?
  
• Is being rich bad? Don't most Americans strive to be, if not rich, at least comfortable? Don't they continue to vote for rich politicians?
• Do you differentiate between people who got their money from corruption and scam and those who worked for it and made good decisions about how to use it? Or whether they spend it for luxuries for themselves or to help others?
  
• And by the way, it costs a lot less to live three months in Thailand than it does to live three months in Anchorage. And if you read the blog carefully, you'd know our lifestyle there was pretty modest - bikes and walking were our main form of transportation and we were in a modest two room apartment which cost less than $10 a day. And those certainly weren't pictures of first class in the plane.
  

I'm not saying you have to write the way I write, but that you present your points rather than making slurs so that people can respond sensibly.


2. If you make allegations about others, present evidence.


3. Try not to repeat yourself too much.

This is not hard. The only comments I've deleted over the last two and a half years were spam and other ads that had nothing to do with the post.

Now let me address a reasonable challenge: Don't you believe in free speech? Why are you for censorship?

First, I'm a private citizen writing a blog. I'm not the government. The First Amendment protections of free speech are about the US government abridging free speech. It doesn't say that every private citizen who writes something has to also publish everything anyone else wants to say. If you need to tell the world your story, start your own blog. You already have access to a computer and setting one up is free on blogspot.

Second, the point of free speech and debate is for people to listen to different points of view, different facts, and to have conversations so that people from different perspectives can gain insight. After reading your posts for almost a week now, it's my sense that you are interested in the giving part of debate but not the listening part.

If you have something to say to me personally, email me. There's a link in my profile. Show me that I'm wrong and that you are reasonable and listen and adjust your perspective when warranted. Show me you can talk to someone without either buttering them up with compliments or slamming them with insults. That you can find a place somewhere in between - like polite normal conversation. Hotmail and others offer free email accounts that are reasonably untraceable. Certainly I couldn't trace them.

Since blogger makes it extremely difficult to edit comments, and since people would probably accuse me of distorting their comments if I did, I'll just make a judgment on all the incoming posts to either allow or delete. That's just the way it is. I'd rather have the comments go up right away. As I say, you can start your own blog if you don't want to conform to the standards I'm setting for my blog. I appreciate your visits here because they have pushed me to think through this more than I have before.

[I would note that I did accept a comment in the previous post on anonymous commenters that speculated that someone had skipped his meds. I thought about it before pushing accept. I think that mental illness is a serious and poorly understood issue everywhere. And medical science doesn't know that much and treatments can sometimes be worse than the original problem. ]