Shan’t

Okay, I give up, you win.

For months (months? weeks? years? I forget) I’ve been kind of defending CT to my colleague. Kind of – which means admitting they have a tendency to groupthink, to call people trolls just because they disagree with them, but still thinking they (CT, that is) have their good points. But I give it up.

Everyone knows that comments can get out of hand. A lot of blogs don’t have them; a lot have them only for some threads; a lot have them intermittently, disabling them when things get tiresome. It is also sometimes possible to keep things civil by asking people to be civil, and/or by deleting comments when they’re not. I’ve only deleted comments here once – but then that’s not surprising: the people who read B&W are a civil, polite, rational crowd.

So that’s one way to keep things civil. Another way is just to tell people to go fuck themselves – which seems like a fairly oxymoronic method, frankly. Seems to defeat the purpose. Also it seems ill-advised to resort to it just because you disagree with what a commenter has said, as opposed to because the commenter has gotten out of hand. Well – you know what I’m going to say. No, you don’t, quite, because I didn’t actually get sworn at – I got threatened with being sworn at. But I’m afraid I just don’t find that kind of thing conducive to interesting or rewarding discussion. I can get plenty of that kind of thing in my own living room, thank you very much, I don’t need to go elsewhere for it.

But more to the point, I find it too symptomatic of what Jerry S is talking about – too indicative of what he’s been saying all along. Too groupthinky, too orthodoxy-enforcing. So. I’ll just do my talking here, where men are men and the beer is flat.

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