In brief if you’re the sort of person who looks at this kind of page before commenting you don’t need to. If you’re the sort of person who’s planning to scour this for a loophole so that you can DEMAND I allow your comments even if you’re making stuff up or citing cranks, then you’re wasting your time too. This is purely a friendly notice to huge majority of people that if you see an idiot making a comment there’s no need to get dragged down to his level, he’s probably wing his way to the spam bin when I noticed / can be bothered to do so. Besides none of my regular readers are idiots, so they’d get beaten by experience.
The reason is this isn’t really a serious publication. It’s a conversation, quite often with myself. It’s a place for kicking around ideas and seeing which ones kick back. I could be wrong. I often am and if you think you can see where I’m wrong you’re welcome to say so. A lot of people do and very politely too.
Occasionally someone will come who doesn’t think common courtesy applies to them. Imagine you have a party and someone from the office brings along another guy you don’t know. If his first words when entering the house are “Only a left/right-wing idiot would have this wallpaper!” You’re not likely to think ‘My goodness, he’s right! I really need to re-think my policies regarding interior decoration.’ Generally I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t feel under any obligation to pander to the delusions of the occasional troll.
If you believe people must know THE TRUTH and to hell with politeness or reality then I invite you to let the world know, on your own weblog. WordPress.com would be a good place for that.
If a troll does really annoy you, rather than stirring him up you could post a link to a picture of a kitten. Cute Overload and Kittenwar are good sites for these, but I’m happy to see others. It’s an effective way of registering your disapproval without wasting your talent on him. It also looks better if/when I delete a racist / sexist / staggeringly impolite / battily off-topc comment from the blog.
The world has an ample supply of cranks, it’s not your job or my job to cure them one-by-one - or to give them an audience any more than I have to allow comments from commercial spammers.
