Comments on the Commentariat
As some of you know, I have eliminated the comments page Off Times Square. I will leave it up for several weeks or a month to allow any of you who want to save your previous comments to retrieve them.
First, I am extremely grateful for the kind notes so many of you wrote over the past few days. As I indicated, I'm not certain how much longer I will maintain Reality Chex. After all, my original intention was to take it down in November 2008!
Quite a few people wrote to ask if they could help financially. I thank them for that, but my out-of-pocket expenses are minimal. They come due in September, so I will have to decide by then whether or not I want to invest in this effort for another year. Right now I cannot see that happening, but circumstances can change.
In the meantime, because of demands made by some commenters, Off Times Square was just too time-consuming -- and sometimes too annoying -- for me to maintain, even until such time as I might wind down Reality Chex altogether. However, in the past week, at least two different individuals (perhaps more) made attempts to hijack or sabotage Off Times Square. And that rather irritated me.
So -- as a bit of an in-your-face response to the would-be hijackers -- we'll try another experiment. I've opened up the Commentariat to comments. The usual rules apply: disagree with the commenter; do not disparage her or him personally. Make your comments substantive. ("Newt Gingrich makes me sick" may be accurate, but it is not particularly substantive. Do not describe the contents of your vomit, interesting as they seem to you. We want to know why you barfed, not what you barfed.)
I will not spend much of my own time or energy on the comments, but I will read them from time to time and check them for ad hominem attacks or spam. Both will go. I also will delete comments that are blatantly fact-challenged. (If you argue that Mitt Romney created 100,000 jobs at Bain Capital, cite the evidence. Despite his jobs-creation claims, Mitt can't seem to find that evidence, so you'd be a big help to him.) I will no longer respond to requests from commenters that I do their "homework" for them; that is, answer questions commenters are just as capable of researching as am I.
I'd like to see more readers participate. Quite a number of people wrote over the past few days that they read the comments but have never commented. Those readers sound darned articulate, so I'd like to hear from them -- and others -- in the new comments section. It makes most sense to discuss the issues of the day, but you need not limit yourself to what's on the Commentariat menu on a particular day. Just click on the day's (blue) header or on the words "Post a Comment" or "# Comments" at the bottom of the post.
We'll see how this goes. It is entirely up to you. Entirely.