Meet the new boss, same as the old boss only moreso

No, this isn't about Stephen Harper. This is blog business.

Regular readers will recall that some months ago I got clobbered in a fairly serious auto accident. I'm only now getting back to semi-regular blogging. I might not have done it this quickly but Harper annoys me (so I guess it is about him in a way).

We probably have a stricter commenting policy than many blogs. It's not all that difficult to get yourself barred from our comment box. If anyone wonders whether surviving that accident and getting back to a pretty good state of health — there's some work to do on my left shoulder but it's coming along — has left me filled with the milk of human kindness and the patience of a saint, not hardly. If anything, I find I have less patience with certain things than ever. Life is too short to waste it having the same discussions about first principles over and over again. And it's too short to bother rebutting what passes for debate in some circles or even allowing it to be published here.

To pull an example out of the current news, do you want to have a debate about whether a method of interrogation that was invented and became popular during the Spanish Inquisition is really torture? Do it somewhere else. It's torture and the only issue worth debating is the best way to stop it from happening. And to take an example from this blog in just the last couple of hours: if you want to claim that when Jack Layton is quoted as saying that potential violations of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan is a very serious issue it means that he's defending the Taliban, you won't get an argument from me. You'll just get banned at light speed or something pretty close to it. My shoulder's well enough for that. Differences of opinion are one thing. Bullshit is quite another. If that means I'm not popular with the folks on the far right side of the aisle, I can live with it.

(You'll notice I didn't use the word "conservative." Hell, a couple of our authors regard themselves as conservatives and I know what they mean when they do. Unfortunately, what passes for conservative in some other places has really become extreme and my attitude is that I don't troll their threads so I don't see why I should tolerate them trolling mine.)

I haven't had a formal conversation with the rest of the authors on this issue recently so this really applies to the threads attached to my own posts. But I thought I'd pass this along while it was fresh in my mind. And as always, some forms of trolling and spamming are so obvious that I'll continue to deal with it no matter whose thread it shows up in. That's not a change.

I'll be back later with some blues.