In the comments on yesterday’s post that mentioned Voldemort (Erik Loomis at LGM), there was some discussion of the difference in commenting at LGM vs here. I was surprised that some commenters didn’t know that every new commenter’s first comment has to be approved by a front-pager. In addition, the reason there’s not a lot of spam here is that policy, plus our spam filters. Also, I won’t re-hash our commenting policy, but the net of it is that we hardly ever ban a commenter unless they’re spewing hate.
I don’t want to re-hash the LGM stuff, but I did go and read the comments on a couple of Cheryl Rofer’s posts there. I prefer the formatting and style of our comments, but I found it helpful to sort by comment rating, since the commenters there seem to pretty consistently rate comments. I think this is one of the only ways that places with a large number of comments (like Reddit) are usable, since the crowdsourced rating pushes the garbage down. The threads here generally max out at about 250 comments (for a busy post), so thankfully we don’t need to use some of the tools that the commenting system there (Disqus) uses. (All of this is my opinion, not John’s or anyone else who writes here.)
The main point of this post is to let everyone know that we spend a lot of time keeping garbage out of the comments, and if you didn’t know that, it’s worth pointing out that it just doesn’t happen by accident. We also don’t pay writers here, which I think some other blogs do, so we’re able to self-support without ads, which is a major reason this place is usable.
Steve LaBonne
And speaking as a refugee from that other blog, all of the above is greatly appreciated.
trollhattan
They’re different and I could argue for/against either, but it’s the owners’ preference and that’s it. IDK if BJ’s linear commenting works with higher comment #s/post.
Will add LGM has two separate comment tools–WP and Disqus, and the second seems to have a lot of haters when it breaks.
different-church-lady
I am well aware, and I vigorously appreciate and applaud the effort. One of the reasons I don’t blog is because I would never be able to handle that aspect of it.
Baud
Appreciate the effort.
Yet I still see comments by Omnes.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@trollhattan:
Ugh — that’s tempting fate in two ways.
Baud
I haven’t lurked at LGM for years, so I don’t know it it’s changed, but the comment formatting was ugly, in my opinion.
Reddit is better, although that has gotten worse too.
sab
@Baud: FU I Iike Omnes ( and I know this is a running gag between lawyers) . I am some what aware of how much work front pagers do to protect us. Another thing to be thankful for as we head into a new year.
ETA Also too I think our blogmaster has good instincts about what works for having a not awful blog reading experience. Sort of the opposite of click baiting, but much appreciated.
Hunter Gathers
You cannot argue with a white male academic with tenure.
It’s a complete waste of time.
Better off arguing the mysteries of the universe with your goldfish.
Your goldfish will admit fault before the academic with tenure will.
WTFGhost
I remember I once poked my head in here, thought about how it would be nice to join The Front Pagers, until I heard about all the (unpaid) work, and realized how grateful I am that
All of you people care about the community so much, and I wish I could deliver a loaf of fresh sourdough bread and butter or cheese, in gratitude.
Okay, but, now that I’ve spoken the truth, I have to say,
…”that all of you people HAVE NO LIVES!”
… or whatever other “you know we had to say it, because it was funny!” joke you prefer.
Old School
@Baud:
But it seems to be catching Steve in the ATL.
frosty
@Old School: You beat me to it LOL
Baud
@Old School:
I think Steve is still laughing at all the union members who voted for Trump.
WTFGhost
@Hunter Gathers: Um – I do not say you’re wrong, but you’re not including the exceptions.
If you’re another white male academic, then it’s mandatory, and *indescribably* petty. Unless it’s two white male academics pairing up against an OUTSIDER, in which case, indescribably petty gets pointed outward.
(I stopped at a masters’ degree, thank goodness.)
Ohio Mom
@trollhattan: I think that LGM’s nested comments may actually encourage overly long threads. People go down rabbit holes, picking points to death because their contributions are sequestered from other trains of thoughts.
This place in contrast is one big discussion, if I show up in the middle of the comment thread and the discussion is moving away from what I might have added, I just go with it. That’s how group discussions go.
I used to spend more time at LGM but I got tired of all the snideness. I think I’ve told this story before: when efgoldman died, we had a long wake of a comment thread. Several days later on a comment thread at LGM, someone noted that efgoldman seemed to be missing. Someone else (had to be someone who split their time between here and there) said he died, maybe there were one of two comments expressing sadness, and that was that.
We are a much stronger community here. I know I don’t always appreciate the work that goes into maintaining this space and to make up for that a little, I’ll say Thank You, Front Pagers right now.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: And you.
j/k, of course
zhena gogolia
@Ohio Mom: Very true.
I’ve been annoyed since the election, but then everything annoys me since the election. This is my ONLY source of news now, so I feel very dependent.
I signed up for Josh Marshall but once again realized I can’t stand him. Can’t explain it, just can’t stand him. But I’m happy to support him since others seem to like him.
ArchTeryx
And I for one am really grateful you corrected me. If there are folks working hard at the back end trying to keep this place running, I want to know about it so I can thank them properly. Giving credit where credit is due is one of my biggest points of honor.
sab
@sab: I hope we keep on with the ban on nesting comments.
Martin
I would suggest that the moderation policy be expanded somewhat from ‘spewing hate’ to also incorporate anyone trying to fracture the community – particularly anyone bullying people to leave.
That’s ultimately the whole point of moderation, and we don’t always express the kindest opinions of, say, healthcare CEOs, but it’s a generally community held viewpoint that doesn’t seek to exclude.
We’ve have multiple rounds of this and they always peak around the ‘so why don’t you just leave then’ sentiment, which is the line we need to stay well back from. These aren’t generally permaban problems, but maybe a short cooling down period is needed at that point because it’s usually when folks are done listening and are starting to just tell people to shut up.
grumbles
My opinions on this should be afforded all the attention someone who posts here three times a year deserves. That said, the comments here are so very much better than LGM.
As much as I love some of the front pagers there, they don’t have a healthy relationship with the peanut gallery. The strategy over there seems to be randomly applied angry moderation interspersed with long periods of neglect.
There’s a reason this is one of the few places I’ve been reading for 20 years.
OK, two reasons, and the other one is the 10s of thousands of hours of thankless moderation that have gone into the joint.
Martin
@Hunter Gathers: I used to argue with them for sport. The key is to calibrate your goals. Trying to convince them to adopt your viewpoint was usually pointless, but making them look stupid in front of their colleagues would often open them up to being convinced by their colleagues to a similar point of view, or at least to get them off of whatever crusade they were on.
You earn zero credit by this method, but if the goal is to get them to shift their view, it can work.
But you can never argue their field of expertise. That’s flying too close to their source of self-worth.
Matt McIrvin
When I was gone from here, from about a couple of weeks before the election to well after, I was more active on Mastodon. It is or can be a non-puke-funnel.
Same might be true of Bluesky, I’m not really there but some of my Mastodon activity now gets automatically mirrored to there, so people who are there can follow me.
Anyway, I wasn’t here because in the lead-up to the election I was feeling extremely pessimistic about our chances, in a way that turned out to be 100% accurate, but I wasn’t going to yawp about it here because I didn’t feel that that would be in any way helpful; I wanted people who were optimistic to retain that in case it could contribute to us pulling it out. This was a change in my behavior from, say, 2016.
I posted what amounted to a gloomy election post-mortem, privately to Facebook and publicly to Mastodon, but *before* the election and qualified with “if”s, and that was about all I was going to say about it.
Mostly, that I was not interested in talking about what’s wrong with Democrats and I blamed the American people themselves for being a bunch of evil dumbshits this time around, and that’s pretty much how I still feel.
I’ve come to realize that I’m a really bad political activist and a better futile voice crying in the wilderness, so I’m going to keep doing that for now. All I really know how to do is tell the truth as I see it. It *might* be that continuing to speak out puts my family in danger, and then I don’t know what I’m going to do. I worry sometimes that having people you love makes you corruptible in this way. But I do know that being too eager to shut up for that reason without really solid evidence of a concrete threat is the wrong way to go; it’s advance self-censorship.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Handle?
UncleEbeneezer
@Steve LaBonne: Amen! No place can be completely free of trolls and spam etc., but BJ does a good job. And the pie-filter is a great and useful tool.
Matt McIrvin
(that Bluesky mirror has the formidably weird URL of https://bsky.app/profile/mattmcirvin.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy , by the way)
UncleEbeneezer
Come sit by me and welcome back. Sorry your instincts about the election were correct.
Steve LaBonne
@Hunter Gathers: A white male academic with tenure and no kids like Voldemort can also excoriate people who send their kids to suburban public schools as racists, while himself talking about Democrats needing to appeal to the “working class” with no acknowledgement that the Black working class already votes for them. He will never acknowledge the beam in his eye while denouncing the mote in yours.
Matt McIrvin
@UncleEbeneezer: it’s like, yeah, Democrats currently have a real problem connecting to the American people! The problem is that we’re not evil or dumbshit enough.
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
Make room on the love seat for me.
Steve LaBonne
@Matt McIrvin: I’m with you.
Matt McIrvin
@Steve LaBonne: Loomis says a lot of things that are basically correct, but he has a pathological need to pick fights with his own commenters about what he imagines are their failings, and these are people who are mostly not part of the problem in America. You can try to get them to improve in the areas where they’re less than perfect, but life has many constraints and it’s not going to be the big problem.
He also has a bit of the classic Pundit’s Fallacy where you instinctively believe that the things you want are also the things that will win votes. He’s not as bad as ye olde Twitter Marxists in that regard though.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Truth be told, I’ve always had difficulty connecting with people, and even though I’m a pretty committed liberal Democrat, there’s a lot of stuff that happens online and in politics that leaves me cold (as well as a lot of things that I get a kick out of).
I thought Harris and Walz seemed eminently relatable, however, to the extent I can judge. And I can’t relate to anyone who views Trump positively.
Steve LaBonne
@Matt McIrvin: And as I noted, he has some problems of his own but apparently doesn’t own a mirror.
billcoop4
My biggest problem with Voldeloomismort is that he seems utterly joyless. But, yeah, I see, like Wilmer, he’s not at all concerned about other marginalizations.
BC
H.E.Wolf
As others in this comment thread have said more eloquently, I greatly appreciate the (mostly invisible) ongoing work that the front-pagers do in our behalf. Thank you very much!
NotMax
No comment.
:)
dnfree
Way back in time, Ta-Nehisi Coates had a blog at The Atlantic and I followed him. He policed comments strictly, I think by himself, and it made a huge difference but obviously as he became better known it wouldn’t have been doable. The commenters eventually became known as The Horde. I miss that group, but do appreciate the (mostly) camaraderie fostered here, and thank those responsible.
p.a.
https://youtu.be/T575Pbo4eWM?si=U683A7DPubzbH4x6
Poe Larity
If every day is going to be Civility Thursdays, we’re going to need our Two Minutes Of Hate on somebody.
I nominate Baud.
Matt McIrvin
@dnfree: Ta-Nehisi Coates eventually got big mainstream respect as a writer, but a thing I will always appreciate him for is that he was the best discussion-forum moderator I’ve ever seen (he eventually farmed out some of the work to volunteer assistants, but he ran the whole operation well).
And it was in a situation, with subject matter, that was inherently murderously difficult to moderate. I know from personal experience how hard that is, in a not-nearly-so-challenging situation.
Baud
@Poe Larity:
I appreciate your proposal to reduce the time to two minutes!
Barbara
@dnfree: Coates’ blog was really special. There are posts he wrote that I would love to read again, but I have never been able to find an archive.
Suzanne
I can’t stand the way text looks with threaded comments. It hurts me aesthetically. Even if it helped me follow the discussion better — which I don’t reliably find to be true — it looks so visually chaotic that I can’t handle it.
Baud
@Suzanne:
One big problem with threaded comments is that new comments can appear anywhere in the thread. At any level. Hard for me to follow.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Like, I can be a preacher but not an effective sales rep. I think they’re fundamentally different roles.
dc
@Matt McIrvin: I followed you on Mastodon just now.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Martin:
If I see this behavior in the comments, I would like to call the person out and tell them to stop it, and I would invite anyone who sees it in any thread to contact me directly at [email protected] with a link to the comment (or at least the thread and the name of the commenter). I will definitely have words for them.
That said, one of Cole’s most deeply held beliefs is to have a very light hand in moderation. So I don’t think we’ll be changing the comments policy. And I’m OK with that — but I know that Cole is OK with me telling people to cut shit out if they’re out of hand (such as telling other commenters to leave)
narya
@Baud:
@UncleEbeneezer:
@Matt McIrvin:
I’ll bring dessert if you let me come, too.
Doug R
I know our blogfather has said no nested comments ever.
Mostly because you don’t have to wade through a few hundred comments to check if someone bothered to reply.
It just feels a little narcissistic to search by my nym.
Matt McIrvin
I guess I should post a direct link to the Mastodon blog too, which is https://mathstodon.xyz/@mattmcirvin . Sometimes I still make long posts about dumb and inconsequential subjects to the ghost of my old LiveJournal, rehosted on Dreamwidth, at https://mmcirvin.dreamwidth.org/ .
Mr. Bemused Senior
@narya: I would suggest a meet up but I’m guessing it’s impractical.
Baud
@dc:
What’s your handle?
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Suzanne:
I agree with you on the Disqus comments on LGM — there’s something with the formatting (too tight, at a minimum) that’s aesthetically unpleasant.
But, oddly enough, I read a lot of Reddit, mainly using the app Narwhal on my iPad, and I find the threaded comments there quite readable.
So I don’t think it’s something inherent with threading, at least for me.
Matt McIrvin
@Doug R: I like threaded comments, in theory, because I like following discussions that ramify endlessly off in 23 different directions and it helps you follow all the subthreads. Because I’m an old Usenet guy who used to use trn. With that, you could just wander all over the map and it’d show a graphical display of the thread structure that looked like a big tree graph.
But Disqus’s implementation kind of sucks.
Doug R
@Hunter Gathers:
I got threatened with banning when I pushed back on the “Joe must go” push back in July.
WTFGhost
@Suzanne: Back in the days of Usenet, people had the same issue. Usenet was like a billion blogs that no one owned and only a few were moderated.
There were threaded and nonthreaded news readers, and people had some of the same sorts of effects. “I can see why you want this threading thing, but… ouch!”
And in a perfect world, a dead subthread might still yield a gem you’re glad you didn’t miss.
It’s hard to put into words (or data structures) what it is we really want, to organize this sort of thing, and why some of the ways we’ve tried are half-fix-for-some, half-break-for-others.
narya
@Mr. Bemused Senior: where are you?
Mr. Bemused Senior
@narya: SF Bay area.
Mike Molloy
Delurking to make an unsolicited comment about comments. I am a very-rare commenter here. Totally just my own 2 cents, hoping it’s helpful in the area of “Hey what do people think about comments usability here?”
I find the comment-thread style here very good, very usable/readable. Disclosure: I usually do not read the threads here, but that is b/c they grow so quickly and it seems it would take up too much time, and there are other web places I prefer to spend that time. But I’m sure if I spent a while (few weeks) reading threads here regularly, I would get to know who to follow/who to skim, and I would find it a lot more usable, b/c the basic thread usability is good.
Crooked Timber, I find their style of threaded-comment system almost completely unusable. Maybe mr. mix’s suggestion of using the sort-by-ratings would work for me, but when I’ve tried to read one of their threads, I just can’t find anything.
So, love the straightforward style here, of one-comment-after-another, no threading. FWIW
Doug R
@Matt McIrvin:
One problem I find with Disqus is that it’s great at notifications for direct replies to you, but fails to load any replies to them in the “view in discussion” tab.
Matt McIrvin
@Doug R: Yes! You go to the comment in the discussion and you can see the sub-thread UP TO there, but no responses to it, which is upside down and ass-backwards.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Doug R:
I left under similar circumstances when I kept pushing back on Lemieux’s thinly disguised Reaganomic claptrap calling him a “Libertarian in a Trenchcoat”.
I will say this about Lemieux: he wrote a brilliant obit on Lee Atwater that I wish I could find.
Matt McIrvin
@WTFGhost: These days when I’m explaining the olden days to the youngsters I describe Usenet as “sort of like Reddit but without a web browser.” That’s maybe the closest modern equivalent.
RevRick
@Steve LaBonne: Voldemort banned me from his fiefdom, because I had the temerity to question his incessant Puritan bashing. I still check out the original posts, however.
I am agnostic about the pros and cons of LGM nested comments versus what we have here, but I do notice that there’s an awful lot of narcissistic displaying of verbal cleverness over there. I do get lost here sometimes.
This is one of several blogs I check out: Dailykos, LGM, TPM, Digbys Hullabaloo, and, of course, here. I also keep up with Oliver Willis and Heather Cox Richardson.
Nukular Biskits
I guess I should have known that more than one person was moderating and keeping this place semi-respectable. I just had assumed (and you know the old saying about “assume”) Watergirl was doing most of the heavy lifting.
Mea culpa and kudos to all BJ front pagers and their minions.
Kay
LGM is too ugly for me. That’s the reason I could never use Facebook either- busy and garish colors and ugly.
Balloon Juice is the prettiest blog – lots and lots of clean space.
eemom
I’ve had my disagreements with Cole over the years, but imho he gets an A++ for the format and moderating style here, which is absolutely the best I’ve ever seen anywhere. I think he created a sense of community that just doesn’t exist anywhere else in left blogistan, at least from what I can see.
Wonkette for example has first rate writers, but the comments? Meh.
Also, threaded comments are the devil. As in Satan.
Martin
One benefit of threading is that it’s easier to find replies to you. That’s hard here. Adding a JS method that would highlight replies (anything with @[x] which matches your Nym field) which was togglable would be nice. Stick a checkbox under the post comment area, or up in the toolbar.
I could write a client CSS to do that.
Ramalama
Just a general Amen.
FluxAmbassador
I think the tone and subject of the front page sets the stage for what kind of commenters you get more than the comment section format and a little more than moderation policy.
The front pagers here just seems to be more front facing – donate here, annual pet calendars, etc. – and less like analysts and academics who have useful insight but are more interested in theory than in action. It makes sense the commenters here would drift more toward pulling together.
I’m snide and argumentative by nature and upbringing – plus I do prefer the threaded comments model – so LGM is more a natural fit for here.
But I do appreciate all the work the people here do.
dnfree
@RevRick: Consider adding electoral-vote.com to your list. I only found it in recent years. There are two identified authors, one a long-time computer expert who started the blog (Votemaster, or V) and one a history professor (Zenger, or Z). They are adding a third person. They do a good daily rundown of the latest news when it isn’t election season. There are no reader comments except what they curate and print once a week from emails. There are a few long-running in-jokes like portraying Canada as perennially plotting against the US.
frosty
@zhena gogolia: I like Josh and the TPM Editor’s Blog. But I’ve had to bail on Morning Memo before I finished it the last few days. It’s a firehose of terrible news. Which doesn’t mean David Kurtz is doing a bad job, it means I can’t take a firehose of terrible news every day.
eemom
@Martin:
No it’s not. Just do a search for your name.
Matt McIrvin
@FluxAmbassador: One thing I do like about BJ vs. LGM is that BJ’s headliners are far more likely to spur people to take some kind of productive action than to talk about why everything is pointless and you’re stupid for even thinking otherwise. I don’t say I’m good at participating in it, but for that very reason it’s probably a healthier environment for me. But I have to get away sometimes.
kalakal
Loomis’ pretensions as a music critic alone are more than enough to drive me from LGM. I have time for Cheryl Rofer and Farley though
I’m agnostic about threads, what I would appreciate is if the links on replies ran both ways. I.E. I’ll be wombling through a post and see that comment xx will be a reply to a comment by nym y as a link. Can go to the original comment. yay! Now I have to remember where the bloody hell I was in the posts before I went back to the original or if I do remember but there’s a lot of comments have to scroll down a very long way. Can’t think of a simple way to do this and it’s not really that big a deal
RevRick
@dnfree: I do occasionally check out electoral-vote. I believe Taegan Goddard is now there. I also wander over to X to support Dem loyalists over there and troll the Magats.
Matt McIrvin
@kalakal: Cheryl is as great there as she was here; she’s a bona fide expert on some stuff and brings that to bear.
frosty
Not my forte either, so why the hell have I been knocking on doors for ten elections? The more I think about it, the more I’m done with that. This time around I didn’t get any indication that I got any non-voters out or helped anyone make a decision.
I guess I’ll stick to postcards from now on. At least they aren’t as invasive of someone else’s time. Or mine.
frosty
Well done! Spoken like an artist/architect!
kalakal
@eemom:
How does one do this please, I’m on an android phone and can’t see a search function
Martin
@eemom: On long threads you have to constantly cycle over replies you’ve already seen. If I know I’ve read down to 100, it’s easer to quickly scroll from 100 to bottom and just look for a flash of color (for the reply) to go by. I’d highlight the post similar to how Cole’s posts are.
Ohio Mom
@Martin: My phone has a “Find on page” tab and I can type in “Ohio” and all my comments and responses to them are highlighted. It’s a kluge but it works.
Baud
@kalakal:
Whatever browser you’re using has a search feature, probably called find on page.
Hunter Gathers
@Doug R: I thought you had to make fun of his whiter than Wonder Bread taste in music for that.
Ksmiami
@zhena gogolia: met him at a Princeton reunion. He’s actually really nice – a little wordy, but very down to earth.
kalakal
@Baud: Thanks, I was looking for a function within the site. Doh!
frosty
Narcissist!!!
(That’s what I do.)
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: I believe that a lot of Trump supporters are what Paul Campos calls Ariana Grande voters. What he means is they’re like me: I know she’s a pop singer, but I could not name one of her hits if my life depended on it. Many of them are juggling jobs and kids or simply don’t make the connection between politics and their own lives.
Sure there’s plenty of malicious MAGA, but there’s a chunk that is gettable by our side, because they have in the past.
Miss Bianca
@eemom: I agree.
eemom
@frosty:
Yeah, but it doesn’t count if nobody SEES you doing it
eta: also, the drawback is when your search gets 1 hit, which means nobody loves you. :(
frosty
@kalakal: Long time commenter gave me the trick*. Click on the date in the comment you’re leaving. When you hit the back arrow you’ll end up where you started.
Or, when you’re feeling lazy, memorize the comment number before you leave.
* Can’t remember the nym. BillinGlendale??
Steve LaBonne
@RevRick: The problem is, they’re largely thermostatic voters. They’re perennialy disgruntled with how their lives are going under the Ins, so they vote for the Outs. I see little prospect for reaching them with anything we would consider a rational reality-based message.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: I saw a poll that said 48% of the population agree that undocumented immigrants should be rounded up into concentration camps. That’s malice. These are bad people.
CliosFanBoy
I am somewhat amused that the two blogs I read and comment on* seem to heartily dislike one another. And both comment systems seem to work fine. I read more posts there than I do here, but enjoy some of the fun posts here (like Sunday’s Medium Cool) which are lacking at LGM. And LGM doesn’t do pets!!! WTF!!!
I most certainly appreciate how the managers here keep the spam down, and the pie filter is handy.
Captain C
To me he seems more like a snobby Snape.
CliosFanBoy
@Steve LaBonne:
I’m pretty sure he has noted that about the press using “working class” to mean “white & working class.” I could be wrong though (even though I’m a white male academic who had tenure before retirement!) :)
NotMax
@kalakal
I just click Back in Firefox on Windows until am back where I started.
kalakal
@frosty: Thanks, works perfectly! I’ve been doing the memorise bit. Where that becomes awkward is when there’s a lot of posts and it turns into a scrollfest
Steve LaBonne
@CliosFanBoy: He may have “noted” it but his actual political attitudes and hobbyhorses about the “working class” are as clueless as St. Bernard’s. As usual, he can only see the flaws in others.
Kayla Rudbek
@Matt McIrvin: oh yeah, there are those who can hash out the effects of policy and there are those who can communicate that policy, and the two skills are rarely found in the same person.
coin operated
We break now to the latest comment thread in LGM:
Leonidas: “There’s no reason we can’t be civil?”
Artemis, dispatching a Persian soldier…”None, Sire!”
CliosFanBoy
@Steve LaBonne:
Fair enough. It’s the music posts that annoy me.
Melancholy Jaques
@Baud:
I did too. I really thought we had the winning combination with those two. But then, I also thought Joe Biden was a relatable and admirable guy. This is why I can never predict what will work with our voters.
Melancholy Jaques
@CliosFanBoy:
I am old enough to remember when Digby had comments. The early days of blogging were such a blast.
karen marie
@Martin: Maybe I’m just not spending enough time here but I’ve never seen anything like what you’re describing.
divF
@Matt McIrvin:
Story of my life.
sab
@karen marie: As I recall dimly, Martin had a bad experience when a fake Martin (who knows how that person got approved !?!) was spewing bile and got jackals mad at the innocent real Martin who has been here for years.
Matt McIrvin
@Kayla Rudbek: It’s more, I can communicate but I can’t make people believe what they don’t want to hear. If people insist on believing stupid things, you can tell them they’re wrong and they’ll understand, but they’ll hate you. Then to get their vote or their support, you have to lie or obfuscate or leave out parts of the truth, and I can’t do this without feeling so dirty that it keeps me from communicating the rest effectively.
karen marie
@Martin: If I’m looking for any replies to a comment I made, I just use the “find” function on my browser to look for my name.
divF
@Steve LaBonne: His incessant victory laps over Biden’s stepping down really turned my stomach. He was like the rooster who thinks his crowing makes the sun rise.
In general, many of the FPers there remind me a lot of techbros, in the sense that they think being really expert at one thing makes them think that they are really expert at everything. Cheryl Rofer, and possibly Farley, are exceptions.
sab
OT : the alleged shooter of the health k surance CEO had two reading matters. I really wish we had read the backpain one before my husband had his back surgery that almost killed him and did not help.
” Crooked” by Kathryn Ramen
CliosFanBoy
@Melancholy Jaques: Me too. I am a little worried about Digby, though. She recently posted a piece on J. Edgar Hoover and with it a photo of Herbert Hoover. And a few days ago, she called Sen. Ernst, the senator from Nebraska instead of Iowa.
weasel
@billcoop4: His Music Notes posts are usually pretty filled with joy and I’ve found a bunch of good new music I like through those posts. Doesn’t hurt that he is one of the few people that I can get decent free jazz reqs from either :)
That said, agree with pretty much everything everyone else has said about him. Have never created a Disqus account in large part to avoid the temptation of commenting there :)
NotMax
“I have a concept of a comment.”
// :)
Baud
@CliosFanBoy:
Maybe digny incorporated AI into her website.
sab
@sab: Oops. Mispelled both names. Cathryn Ramin. Crooked:Outwitting the Backpain Industry
Martin
@sab: It happened a lot back during the Obama/Clinton primary wars. We had a less intense breakout when the calls for Biden to drop out started. It’s not everywhere, but in certain threads things sometimes get ugly.
We had commenters just in the last week encouraging people to leave.
Yes, the fake Martin situation was kind of an element of that where a number of commentators were very enthusiastic about the idea I might be a piece of shit and should be removed. That’s antithetical to any kind of community building no matter who is involved.
divF
@CliosFanBoy: Those two incidences, by themselves, don’t make me worry so much about Digby than about the creeping infiltration of AI into the web environments. These are just the sort of mistakes you expect an AI to make when “improving” your content.
I see similar things just from autocorrect all over the place, especially if one is using dictation, rather than typing. As thumb-fingered a typist as I am, I still prefer it to dictating, and that is one of the reasons. Another is that dictating math still doesn’t work, at least last time I checked. It probably wouldn’t work for me anyway, because my tendency in mathematics is to use baroque notation. One of my colleagues one commented that I write as if notation is free (well it is, isn’t it?).
ETA: I see Baud got there first at 115. Damn you, Baud !
sab
@Martin: I vividly remember the Obama Clinton wars, which were weird for me because I was firmly on both sides. I honestly did not know who to vote for in the primary and cannot remember who I did vote for. In retrospect I would vote for the guy every time, now that I know how strong American misogyny is.
Kayla Rudbek
@eemom: the only things I would change are: 1) toggle for dark mode so I can read this site in light print on dark background the way that IBM intended computer screens to work 2) have a disemvowelment toggle (removes all vowels from a given comment like they used to do over on Making Light; comment becomes less legible). This would indicate that the front pager is Not Happy with you and that you are skating on very thin ice, as one step before banning commences
sab
@Martin: I hope you never leave because you have so much useful knowledge.
frosty
@sab: Crooked is a great book. I think Raven recommended it and I bought it. First half is everything the author found that doesn’t work for back pain, the second half is what does. It boiled down to posture and exercise, with lots of variations on how to get there.
My most recent PT explained my problem as postural disfunction aka “tech neck”. Quit bending down to read the phone in your recliner!!
That being said, there are worse problems.
Matt McIrvin
@sab: I’m not too much of a purity pony to vote for the least-bad candidate in general elections, but I might be too much of one to spend a lot of time trying to game other people’s bigotry in primary elections.
Baud
@Kayla Rudbek:
Most browsers have a dark mode these days.
Kayla Rudbek
@Matt McIrvin: that’s fair enough. I was thinking in terms of social science being a science, that you have the ones who are experimenting/surveying/theorizing and then you have the ones who go out and talk to the public/laypeople.
Kayla Rudbek
@Baud: so how do I toggle that in Safari, Chrome, and DuckDuckGo (iPad and iPhone)?
sab
@frosty: Thanks for the affirmation. I am thinking of giving my boss a copy at the Christmas party next week.
Actually, there are not a lot of worse problems than my husband’s severe chronic back pain, and he had a lot of other chronic pain before that (cluster headaches before he quit smoking.)
I have technec type problems and I agree mine are minor on the scale of things.
Baud
@Kayla Rudbek:
I’m not familiar with those browsers on iOS.
sab
I miss my dad a lot just because I miss him, but I also miss his insider’s opinion of other medical professionals. He knew who was exemplary and who was a quack. Laymen word of mouth just doesn’t cut it. I would rather have gruff competence than good bedside manner (another name for salesmanship).
Doc Sardonic
@Kayla Rudbek: I just run my iOS devices in dark mode all the time, you can set it in Display & Brightness in settings. Here I seem to always have the white background with black text.
BellyCat
Late to thread but WTF with Uncle Joe commuting the sentence of the PA Judge who took over $2M as bribes to incarcerate juveniles as young as 8?!?!
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@frosty: What ever happened to BillInGlendale? I don’t think I’ve seen him in ages.
sab
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: You are right. He has been missing a lot recently. Maybe working in retail before Christmas?
frosty
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Last I heard he was working shifts when he wouldn’t be around to comment. I haven’t seen any OTR pics in a while, either, though.
sab
@BellyCat: Got a link?
Martin
@sab: Thank you for saying that. I try.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: Everyone who comments on this blog is going to get sideways with the community at some point. I wouldn’t worry too much over it.
Also, as a general comment, a discussion of reformatting this blog is one of the most pointless discussions on the internet. It’s not going to happen.
Martin
@Baud: You have to implement the prefers-color-scheme attribute in CSS to get the page to switch rendering to an alternate scheme, which I haven’t seen this site do.
cain
@Martin: fake martin situation? I’ve been doing more lurking than commenting cuz nobody needs to hear my shit right now
cain
@Omnes Omnibus:
I have not had the ze arrows pointed at me that much over the years.
sab
@Martin: And you succeed. Seriously, you know a lot that the rest of us don’t.
BellyCat
@sab: WTF?!?
https://www.citizensvoice.com/2024/12/12/biden-commutes-sentence-for-kids-for-cash-judge/
Omnes Omnibus
@cain: Keep commenting and you will. There are a couple of people who are probably safe, Subaru Diane and one or two others. But that’s it.
sab
@BellyCat: Yikes!
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: I love eemom lately, but five or so years ago I called her a proctologist when I knew she was a lawyer.
Actually that was twelve years ago, around when my mom died. I was on edge and not a nice person then.
BellyCat
@sab: I’m a huge fan of Uncle Joe, but this one gives me SERIOUS pause.
BellyCat
@sab: And the difference is? //
sab
@BellyCat: I am nicer now. Ask my stepkids or my cats.
sab
@BellyCat: Difference between me then or now, or between proctology and law?
BellyCat
@sab: I like that you believe the answer would be the same. 😇
(Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast recently had a great episode on cats using a language pad and their most frequent word was “Mad”! My cats agree.)
BellyCat
@sab: Proctology and Law.
Omnes Omnibus
@BellyCat:
On average proctologists make more money.
Martin
@cain: Yeah, post Harris entering the race someone came on using my handle and posted some (I took as) deliberately inflammatory stuff about Biden’s age, IIRC. A lot of people got mad at me (understandably) and I wrote to WG and we got it cleaned up along with a FP note that I didn’t say those things. All that is fine, including the anger – shit happens. What I didn’t appreciate were the expressions of delight from some commenters that I was finally being revealed for being the piece of shit they I guess had long believed I was and hoping this would be my comeuppance.
Now, I’m fine if people disagree with me. I disagree with a lot y’all. But I don’t ever wish for anyone to be revealed to be a bad person. That crosses the line into wishing harm to the community.
sab
@BellyCat: I think Wearcat has a post about cats keeping score on interactions with humans. Too many on the negative side and they fear and distrust you. A lot on the positive side and they cut you a lot of slack.
I have always treated stepkids like cats. Try to befriend them and they hiss, scratch and run away. Ignore them and they siddle up and try to befriend you.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
When you say “pick a fight with his own commenters about what he imagines are their feelings,” what I’m pretty sure it really is is “projecting his own inadequacies onto the commenters and then picking fights with them about it.”
At the end of the day (and the beginning too), Loomis is a comfortably privileged upper middle class white dude. Like a long line of politically active upper middle class white dudes going back to George Orwell at least, he hates the fact that he’s an upper middle class white dude instead of something more Authentic and Salt Of The Earth, and worse, that most of the people he can talk to about his obsessions are also upper middle class white dudes. And like far too many of these people, he deals with it by furiously bashing other upper middle class white dudes, largely for being upper middle class white dudes.
BellyCat
@Omnes Omnibus: That tracks.
BellyCat
@sab: That is wisdom, right there!
sab
@BellyCat: The cat part or the stepkid part? I think the cat part is wise. The stepkid part just worked for me.
BellyCat
@Martin: That was some bizarre shit and, seriously, a bit of a gift to separate the wheat from the chaff. As EFGoldman would have said…
BellyCat
@sab: Both.
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: But on average their student loans were higher, so it all works out.
Martin
@cain: In fairness, I challenge people quite a bit, so I expect a certain kind of pushback. I don’t mind that too much. But it’s a political blog – having ideas challenged comes with the territory in those threads.
narya
@Mr. Bemused Senior: then yes, not likely.
TS
@Matt McIrvin:
Don’t lie enough either – republicans never deliver but the media and the great unwashed blame the democrats for that.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@narya: oh well.
Doug R
@BellyCat: He’s served 13 years and was on home confinement.
Not going to get worked up about it.
Another Scott
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: He’s still regularly posting good things on his Patreon. But, yeah, life and all that.
HTH.
Best wishes,
Scott.
NobodySpecial
I’m personally glad as a guy who certain people tried to force off this site during the public option fracas that the moderation policy here has gotten so much better. LGM is basically only useful for Farley and Rofer posts – Loomis is a walking reason why tenure is a terrible idea for political commentators and Campos is his enabler. I prefer it here now.
tl:dr, thanks Cole.
Chris
In case anyone’s still checking this post, this morning’s Campos post about U Michigan is a real gem.
Comments section is already lively.
Dennis Doubleday
The lack of notification for replies really stifles discussion, especially after the first couple of hours after a post is up. If you don’t see the post until the next day, you are commenting into the wind if you have anything to say. LOL I just realized that applies to this comment, too. Oh, well.