U R A…

If you have no stomach for criticism, some warranted and some not warranted, don’t put pen to paper. Or if you do, don’t ever show your work to anyone. What I hope for when authoring a blog piece is to engage in civil dialogue, which hopefully leads to a further exploration of the subject matter. Sometimes that does not happen, and you get written vomit as comments with no discourse value.

I have a comment section policy that I will permit any on-topic civil discourse as long as there is no profanity and no egregious insulting language. It’s desirable that the comments be intellectually honest. I am looking for clarity, not agreement. If a writer violates the rules, I simply delete the comment and don’t waste time responding. My blog on tattoos and piercings got a non-compliant comment right out-of-the-box. The reader wrote, “u r a…” (fill-in a slang word for the male sexual appendage.)

I don’t delete many comments, unlike the big-time bloggers. Conservative Michele Malkin has received some of the vilest personal, racial and sexual comments imaginable. The anger and the venom of the inarticulate are incredible. I have witnessed some of those comments directed to Malkin on liberal/leftist blogs.

I have heard conservative Dennis Prager discuss the vile e-mail that he continually receives. Prager has noticed, and wonders if other conservative talk show hosts also identified, that the majority of the offending comments come from what appear to be liberals.

It will be interesting to see if liberal bloggers experience the same phenomena and attribute their vile received comments as coming from conservatives.