I’m liking this no comments policy. I may leave them off permanently, at least for Jena posts. ER and I had a brief email exchange – she seems to feel unfairly singled out, and honestly, that wasn’t my intent. My intent was to say what I said – that it was the last straw. If I seem a bit thin-skinned about this, you might consider that people have been whipping it off of me for several months now. Since Hurricane Katrina, I’ve seldom worked less than a 60 hour work week, and this blog was something I did for fun. Now, not so much. So since I’m not going to be dealing with comments – including several dozen comments a day that, if I believed in the concept of hate crimes, might actually qualify – I’m going to be posting more.
One last word, for now, about Donald Washington and that article that Jena defenders are so in love with – a snippet from my email to ER about why I feel he has no real credibility:
I dismiss him because I did, in fact, catch him in a lie with regard to prosecuting selective prosecution: “He said he would have to have proof of Walters’ intentions, such as a record of Walters’ spoken words or somewhere that he had written that intention down.” At the forum he said he’d have to “dig in [Reed Walters] head.” This is not true; and in any event, it hasn’t even been investigated, just dismissed out of hand because he says it’s too hard. Selective prosecution could be proved in Jena (if it is happening) the same way it was in Yick Wo v. Hopkins and other cases – statistically and logically. You see no proof that he’s a liar, but then have you looked? Researched other selective prosecution cases? What I am tired of is Jena defenders citing the Gospel of Washington as if he had actually done anything but the most cursory overview of the situation, as if he had been sent to do anything more than smooth it over.
I was lamenting to a good friend that lately I’m prone to swear. She’s very blunt, which is one of the reasons I love her so much: “You’ve got a language problem – better deal with it.” Everyone needs someone who will hold them accountable. But I disagreed with her that the problem was my language. Bad language is the symptom, not the disease, of a Christian who is not where they should be spiritually. So the time I used to spend on comment-herding won’t just be spent on posting; I’ll be enjoying more downtime and spending it on things that are eternal.
So that’s it. I was quite content with my previous traffic levels of 25-30,000 a month, and the extra 10-15k related to Jena, if they leave because I’ve shut down comments, really weren’t worth the time, abuse and stress anyway. If I do restore comments later, they may well be registration only and 100% moderated, the way The Anchoress does it. We’ll see.
Added – I’d also like to restate that a main issue with the comments lately is that they’re too much like an unproductive cough – annoying, painful and tiring. Nothing new, just the same old arguments, sometimes with new people. Why bother, if nothing new is going to come out of it to make it worthwhile?
