Sorry about the disruption, but you can now (once again) navigate quite a bit through the comments on the right of the home page. I use a pretty cool plug-in, but the upgrade was conflicting with my Wordpress setup. The solution was to bring back the "old" version!
I attended Catholic grade school, so I was highly trained to diagram sentences. Truly, at least six years of spending an hour each day to diagram sentences. A very sophisticated method of warehousing students, I now realize. The silver lining is that this ground-in urge to create diagrams has spilled over into many other areas of my life. For instance, I was thinking about those un-curious website commenters who so often frustrate me with their entirely predictable thought processes. How would that thought process look on a diagram? Would it look as simple as it so often sounds?
Most of us seek a mutual exchange of ideas in our conversations, but not all of us. Most of us are open to the possibility of intellectual change, but not all of us. We get many comments at this site, most of them thoughtful, many of them really challenging to my pre-conceived beliefs. I revel in those challenging comments. In the past few months, though, I have struggled with how much leash to give to several visitors to this blog even though they tried to A) monopolize the conversation, B) preach, C) impose their favorite two issues upon every post, and D) ignore clearly-stated bona fide points made by others. In addition to using these ignorant and aggressive tactics many of these comments clearly have their facts wrong (some claimed that Obama is a terrorist; others claimed that God Himself wrote the Bible in King James English). When these sorts of people join in-person real-time conversations, almost all of us employ similar strategies. We extricate ourselves from those conversations so that we can join some other conversation. We also take steps to avoid spending time in the same room with those sorts of people on future occasions. A blog is not exactly a conversation, but it is a lot LIKE a conversation. What, then, should a moderator do when conversation-killers attempt to roost at a blog? For many months, I've struggled with this question.
The Onion is at it again, with this detailed account about an idiot who is planning to post an Internet comment. I also enjoyed this Onion offering: Mob Not Angry At Monster, Just Disappointed.
Consider this comment regarding Barack Obama by Joan Walsh of Salon.com: The only downside I can see right now is Obama being depicted as enjoying the adulation a little too much. After the speech, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell that he spoke with Obama this morning, and that…