Cleaning the Augean Stables
Cleaned out the Augean Stables which is Bella’s Comments section.
This editor has a lot of patience, but it is not infinite.
People are welcome to come and disagree and argue all day and all night long and share dissenting views and tell me this is all rubbish. I can take a LOT of stick and am very thick-skinned.
What you can’t do is to spread smear and lies or to carry on a sustained attack to bring the site down or ignore any advice to change behaviour.
Trolls will be removed.
If you hate the site go somewhere else.
A reminder of our Comments Policy here.
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I am disgusted with the trolls that have driven you, Mike, to this. What a waste of your time to have to do this. I have been concerned about the comments section for some time on this, my favourite pro-independence site, and I’m glad you have followed good old Hercules not by flushing out the stables with a river but by using the delete button. Being psychotic obsessives, the trolls will be back in which case it might be best to do away with the comments section altogether. That gets rid of the chaff and leaves the gleaming, inspiring and informative wheat of your articles and the guest writers’ comments for us all to enjoy, reflect on and finally act on.
Thanks Duncan. It’s okay, I (we) can handle it, it comes with the territory. Our comments section is one of the best things about Bella and is an integral part of the project, we won’t be dispensing with it. Creating an open forum for discussion and critique is invaluable. It is a shame that people abuse it but it can be better managed, and will be. There needs to be a distinction between honest disagreement (fine and essential) and people who either a) contravene the Comments policy, which I’ll make more prominent and b) people who have no interest in dialogue but whose primary purpose is to undermine the site or express their ongoing and unchanging hatred of it: Trolls. I think this distinction is clear and will be more rigorously enforced as of now. Thanks to everyone for their patience and the 99% of people who comment in good faith.
To clarify, this is not about creating a sanitised space of bland consensus.
Nil Carborundum illegitimi Mike
Keep up the good work
Thanks David! Will try!
I send such solidarity and witness as I can along with every admiring hope that you and Bella may thrive in twenty five, free of the hate filled harassment of libel mongers and calumnisers to speak truth to and about power. Wit, warmth and wisdom will see off the wicked that lack all three. Take a big Buddhist breath and remember that very few hate you while oh so many rate you and that the antipathy of abusive detractors is a badge of honour to be burnished by the brave.
Well said Danny.
Agree with Duncan – yours Mike is one the best sites I have found, with good comment and analysis on both independence and wider political issues
As ever Mike, your Comments Policy, is fair and reasonable. The work you are doing is of the highest standard. More power to your elbow. I sometimes struggle to get the point of your articles and sometimes disagree with some points. However, I would never wish to be without such a well balanced informative and essential forum in this age of disinformation and “free speech”. Please keep up the good work and best wishes.
Bill
The ‘ideal speech situation’, to which any community that aspires to be democratic should seek to approximate its discourse, requires that:
1. The community without exception allows everyone to take part in its discourse.
2. a) The community allows its participants to introduce any assertion whatsoever into its discourse.
2. b) The community allows its participants to question any assertion that another introduces into its discourse.
2. c) The community allows its participants to express their attitudes, desires, and needs without fear or reservation.
3. The community doesn’t allow any of its participants to prevent by internal or external coercion any other from exercising their rights as laid down in 1. and 2.
4. The community excludes from its discourse only those participants who contravene 3.
1. This isn’t an ‘ideal speech situation’ – it’s a real-world forum inhabited by real people and moderated by one person, me.
2. You will, like any other contributor be removed if you don’t abide by the guidelines.
3. The culture and tone of the forum needs to be moderated in order for people to feel free to take part.
4. If you want to set up a forum under your ‘ideal speech’ framework you are free to do so, I guarantee it will be hell.
5. See point 2.
Mike – your site therefore your rules.
Many thanks for the diverse and interesting articles on the site.
1. No; it’s not an ideal speech situation. An ideal speech situation is a piece of utopianism to which ‘real-world’ communities of discourse can aspire. It’s in that respect a bit like ‘justice’ or ‘truth’ or even ‘independence’.
2. I know I’ll be removed if I don’t abide by your guidelines. I’ve been removed several times before (though, on each of those occasions, I’ve never been sure which of the guidelines I’ve transgressed).
3. Communities of discourse like this one do need to be moderated in order to ensure that participants’ rights are protected. That’s implicit in ‘3’ above.
4. I have served communities of discourse as a moderator in both the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ worlds. It’s not ‘hell’, but it is time-consuming if the workload isn’t shared.
Actual freedom of speech doesn’t exist without human duty. As we saw last year, you can get a life-changing imprisonment for writing stuff on the internet.
Yep; if we expect others to respect our democratic rights, we’re obliged to respect the same rights in others. That’s the Golden Rule of reciprocity; rights and duties are two sides of the same coin. (They’re ‘internally related’, as Kant, Hegel, Marx, and those following them used to say.)
Oh, who do you have in mind?
Missing from this list, 250110, is any notion that participants in such a ‘community’ should have any responsibility towards maintaining it.
Thank you Mike, for keeping Bella so interesting, varied, challenging and topical. The work you put in is phenomenal.
Really? Isn’t my ‘list’ precisely a list of responsibilities a community needs to assume in order to maintain itself as a ‘just’ community (i.e. as a community that approximates as closely as it practically can to an ‘ideal speech situation’).
When I see your number in any comments section, I just go elsewhere. I’m probably not alone. Fantastic contribution.
This is no longer a problem.
Keep doing what you do. It is important.
A necessary decision in the interest of healthy debate, I think.
This site is the best there is. Has been for over a decade.
Thanks Wul!