Friday, February 26, 2010

From Prof Friedman on Why He Closed the Comments on His Blog

"The purpose of Religion Clause blog is to keep those interested in church-state and religious liberty developments up to date on legal developments and trends in a neutral manner and with extensive links to primary source materials. The comments in recent months have become lengthy debates on broad underlying issues-- along with increasing personal attacks among commenters. That kind of debate may be useful, but it is not the purpose of my blog. I have also been receiving increasing numbers of spam postings promoting sex sites and other commercial ventures. All of this meant that I was required to read 60 or more postings daily and make judgments on which ones were in such bad taste, or sufficiently defamatory, that they should be rejected. That detracts from the time I can spend locating and summarizing legal development.
_____________________

Obviously, the person who made the most personal attacks, helping to shut down the blog comments, is the one Mudrake who appeared there ONLY to make personal attacks against fundamentalist Christians, me in particular, and all the Anonymous Christian bloggers whom he insisted were me --but were not. It wasn't long after he found me posting there, that the undignified kids' stuff started. I had previously praised this blog for the ability of most all of its commenters to discuss controversy without ad hominem attacks --and then came Mudrake.

I'm told that there is a character in Pilgrim's Progress who is so busy scratching at the ground and through the cares of life with his MUDRAKE, that he fails to look up and see that someone is offering him a crown (The Crown of Life?) from above. How apt --and truly sad!



"God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and have eternal life."--the Bible

9 comments:

Jeanette said...

Hi, Barb. I saw your comments on PP and wanted to drop by and make a comment to let you know I still visit here every day.

I have stayed away from commenting because you-know-who has been stinking up the place and I didn't want to feed him anymore.

If you don't give him the attention he craves he will leave. It's hard to keep dropping stink bombs when the other people ignore them.

オテモヤン said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Barb said...

I see you are consoling Philippe again --not a bad thing.

Barb said...

Jeanette --I wish you would tell Philippe that he DOES need consolation and does get it from you --that you DID tell Stiletto on his blog to call him ( I see consolation as the purpose, comfort, befriending, commiserating, encouraging --whatever he wants to call it.)

I consider that you consoled me after my surgery.

What's his beef?

Barb said...

Also, everytime Philippe insults me, he gives aid and comfort to the meanest blog personality, Mudrake. I wish he would refrain.

barbara rochelle said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Linda S. Garrison said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Andrew said...

That is really too bad that he had to close comments down. I enjoyed the discussion but I can relate to his problems, at one point another blog I ran was getting 10+ spam comments a day. It was just to time consuming to go through and weed out the bad for the good!

Barb said...

No question about it --the fairly high-toned discussions plummeted to the muck, when mudraker came over to talk about me.