Category: Blogs

So apparently the inability of some of you to read who authors posts means no more guest posting for me.  No, this isn’t coming down as a request, but I’m appalled at how some of you are so ready to personally insult people that you can’t take the time to read an entire post in it’s context, including the author.  So bye.

Orin Kerr has an interesting post on how good comment cultures develop on blogs, based on a post here about comment sections at Concurring Opinions:

I’ve always believed that the comment sections of blog posts shouldn’t be wild west free speech zones. Ideally, the comments provide an interesting and thoughtful discussion, even where commenters strongly disagree with a post. Comments that are rude, off-topic, uncivil, and unnecessarily snarky or nasty don’t have much value in my opinion. It appears as though more and more bloggers are starting to get fed up with obnoxious comments. A few years ago, it seemed to me that the blogosphere had a much more permissive view toward comments than it does now.

I’ve noticed too that comment threads on blogs have gone downhill a good bit in the past few years as well.  I think Professor Kerr is correct in his assessment of the reason:

I suspect the explanation rests largely on the different moderation practices at different blogs. If a blogger doesn’t moderate comment threads at all on a widely read blog, people who want to be shocking, mean, or just irrelevant realize they can do their thing and reach a decent-sized audience. 

I’ve thought more often lately of moderating comments here, and deleting the really nasty, irrelevant or nutty stuff.  When I say nutty, I mean incoherent more than extreme.  I have no problem with extreme viewpoints, as long as people can make a case for them without devolving into nastiness (I should note I consider blatant racism nastiness).  But the real risk that I think you run with moderation is chilling discussion, because everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing, or taking a strong stance for or against something.

I think moderating individual comments probably makes more sense than banning users from commenting.  The worst a commenter need worry about is that his particular comment will get moderated.  I think that probably has a far less chilling effect, and the lack of nastiness will probably encourage more thoughtful comments.  If I do decide to implement moderation, I will do my best to post guidelines in the comment section, much like The Volokh Conspiracy does.

Glad to see he’s started a blog.  We need more of our Second Amendment scholars blogging.

You can now follow this blog on Facebook.  I was reluctant to bring the blog onto Facebook, since I have coworkers and other folks I’m friends with there who do not know of my efforts here, but Facebook doesn’t seem to make a strong association.  If someone looks, they can find it, but they have to look.  I think I’m OK with that.

But now that you know who I am on Facebook, feel free to friend me.

When it comes to threepers and the prags, the reason peace between our peoples is not likely is because so many folks are flaming douchenozzles:

“Bitter and I are in Arlington. NRA Board Meeting are going on right now. We don’t have much of an agenda, except for discussing some details of the Second Amendment Blog Bash.”

Yeah,no agenda you say? You have a chance to do something big with the Holder Debacle while you’re THERE,and show your leadership abilities.

And all you care about is the “blog Bash” later in the year.

I would never call you a coward because I don’t know you,but man,you sure do know how to disappoint..

Personally,you showed your true colors to me when you disarmed to be in the same room with McCain at the “NRA Convention.”

Be well…..

I would never call you a coward, Sebastian, so I’ll just all but imply it, and imply you aren’t doing anything for gun rights while I’m at it.  No, that’s not weasley at all!  There are plenty of threepers that I merely disagree with, but otherwise think are decent people.  But the reason you guys have no place at the table is because it’s intolerable to even be in the same room as a lot of you, even if it’s a virtual room, such as the one we all occupy here on the blogosphere.  I would propose from this point out, we agree to adhere to dinner party rules.  What do I mean by dinner party rules?  Dave Barry has a good idea:

You know what I miss? I miss 1960. Not the part about my face turning overnight into the world’s most productive zit farm. What I miss is the way the grown-ups acted about the Kennedy-Nixon race. Like the McCain-Obama race, that was a big historic deal that aroused strong feelings in the voters. This included my parents and their friends, who were fairly evenly divided, and very passionate. They’d have these major honking arguments at their cocktail parties. But unlike today, when people wear out their upper lips sneering at those who disagree with them, the 1960s grown-ups of my memory, whoever they voted for, continued to respect each other and remain good friends.

What was their secret? Gin. On any given Saturday night they consumed enough martinis to fuel an assault helicopter. But also they were capable of understanding a concept that we seem to have lost, which is that people who disagree with you politically are not necessarily evil or stupid. My parents and their friends took it for granted that most people were fundamentally decent and wanted the best for the country. So they argued by sincerely (if loudly) trying to persuade each other. They did not argue by calling each other names, which is pointless and childish, and which constitutes I would estimate 97 percent of what passes for political debate today.

So what I’m appealing for, on both sides, is that we follow dinner party rules.  I think, for the most part, the last disagreement over NRA’s proper role, has been passionate, but civil.  No matter what has happened in the past, and it’s been on both sides, let’s treat this like a dinner party.  This is the standard I’m going to be enforcing from here on out, because I pay for this forum, and I’m not going to tolerate assholes anymore.  Disagreement is fine, but it’s a dinner party from here on out.  You can assault people’s ideas all you want, but that’s as far as it goes.

January 6th, 2007 is when I penned my inaugural post:

This is the inaugural post of this blog, because I think that one of the greatest things we shooters can do for ourselves is to introduce new people to our community. My friend Loretta, who came to visit over the holidays, did not have any existing prejudice towards guns, but I have taken people shooting for the first time who have. There’s nothing that quite opens people’s minds like seeing firearms as the tools that they are, and shooters for the ordinary people that they are, than a trip to the range.

I still think that.  I started gun blogging when things were pretty good for us.  Now, things aren’t looking as good.  I’m expecting that year three is going to be a lot more interesting, and I mean that in the old Chinese sense, than the first two years.

In the past year, Heller is the big news, and probably our greatest card to play moving forward.  But while Heller was a great achievement, because it answered the big question, we now will be stuck arguing the scope of the Second Amendment in front of an increasingly unfavorable panel of federal judges appointed by Obama.  There will be many challenges, and I’m sure more than a few setbacks and losses, but I am an optimist by nature, and believe we’ll get through them, and start making progress again.

Marko seems to have the worst luck with people plagarizing his writing.  I’d have mixed feelings about it, personally.   On the one hand, I’d be awfully pissy that someone is taking credit for my writing.  On the other hand, someone apparently thought my writing was good enough to pilfer.  Marko makes money off writing, though, so not at least offering attribution is pretty low.

I have ordered a new server to run the blog, and a few other things I also run on the side.  The new machine will also be rather small.  It’s a 1.6GHz Intel Atom based machine with 2GB RAM, a 7200RPM 500GB SATA hard disk and DVD-ROM.  The little provisional server I’m on right now isn’t quite quick enough to handle my traffic peaks, but hopefully we’ll get past that.  The cool thing about the new machine is it cost me about $250 bucks to put together, and consumes power like a laptop.

With luck, the new server will arrive tomorrow, and be ready for operation by Wednesday.

I’ve moved the blog to a new server.  If any of you were noticing an outage, that is why.  Unfortunately, it’s actually not as fast as our previous server, which sucks, but if I’m going to replace it, I’ll need to the blog running on something else so I’m not having to deal with a lot of downtime for the blog while I get the new digs up and running.  If you want to see what I’m running on, take a look here.  Makarov provided for scale:

It’s a pretty old box.  1.2GHz Celeron, 256MB PC100 RAM, old laptop hard drive, running Ubuntu 8.10 Server.  My eventual goal is to have a server that can handle a full on, no-holds, Instalanche.  This little guy isn’t up to the task, at least not without a gig or so more RAM.  In the past, links from Instapundit have melted my box, so I’m going to provision a new box that can handle Glenn’s traffic.  So enjoy running on this small box for a bit, folks.  Hopefully it won’t be too painfully slow.