The Rules
Well, Jason Cherniak (with whom, incidentally, I went to school and who I think is a pretty nice guy) really brought the $h1t storm down with his post this morning: Cherniak on Politics: I'm sick of the insults
Firstly, I want to say that any forum where anyone can comment is bound to have idiots in it. Before I started this blog I regularly surfed the Globe and Mail's comments pages, and I was constantly shocked and saddened by the level of debate - probably less than one in ten comments contained anything worth reading. I think the discourse is of a much higher level on most of the liblogs (and tory blogs, for that matter). Anyway, whatever else you might want to say about Jason, you have to respect that he's willing to put his real name up there and stand by his opinions, flamers be damned.
A lot of the discussion that follows the post indicate that he should just get a thicker skin, which is probably true but also more than a little trite. I myself have decided to figure out how to assign categories to my posts; once that's done I will maintain a little blacklist of people whose opinions I just don't care about. Right now I am envisioning a two tier system:
1) people who post hate propaganda - those comments will be removed and the poster blacklisted immediately.
2) people who post personal attacks, people who knowingly post false information as true, or people whose contributions are just too inane or stupid to handle. I figure those people will get one strike before I can them.
Does this seem too harsh? Being able to post comments here is not much of a privilege, so it doesn't seem too harsh to me, and besides anyone is welcome to contact me and justify themselves -- I'm not a patient man, but I am a reasonable one.
Firstly, I want to say that any forum where anyone can comment is bound to have idiots in it. Before I started this blog I regularly surfed the Globe and Mail's comments pages, and I was constantly shocked and saddened by the level of debate - probably less than one in ten comments contained anything worth reading. I think the discourse is of a much higher level on most of the liblogs (and tory blogs, for that matter). Anyway, whatever else you might want to say about Jason, you have to respect that he's willing to put his real name up there and stand by his opinions, flamers be damned.
A lot of the discussion that follows the post indicate that he should just get a thicker skin, which is probably true but also more than a little trite. I myself have decided to figure out how to assign categories to my posts; once that's done I will maintain a little blacklist of people whose opinions I just don't care about. Right now I am envisioning a two tier system:
1) people who post hate propaganda - those comments will be removed and the poster blacklisted immediately.
2) people who post personal attacks, people who knowingly post false information as true, or people whose contributions are just too inane or stupid to handle. I figure those people will get one strike before I can them.
Does this seem too harsh? Being able to post comments here is not much of a privilege, so it doesn't seem too harsh to me, and besides anyone is welcome to contact me and justify themselves -- I'm not a patient man, but I am a reasonable one.
posted by Gavin Magrath at 9/07/2006 12:04:00 PM
1 Comments:
Well, you can lie as much as you want on your own blog, I suppose. I can't really count strikes behind another umpire's plate. Also don't forget I'm a lawyer - I use words like 'knowingly' very deliberately, so you don't get the boot for claiming there are WMD's in Iraq as long as I really think you're dumb enough to buy that propaganda (well, if you claimed it today, you would definitely gety one stupid strike).
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