currentcommentpolicy

My current comment policy is that I am extremely busy.

I ask my friends, foes, people who write to commend, correct, and  even to rant against my posts to understand. 

Especially friendly or even any honest, non troll, commenters.

Since the paid internet trolls have so much time and are so happy to lie, responding to messages takes an inordinate amount of a bloggers existence.  When I have been able to accept and of course monitor and respond to such comments (and once even tracked down that one was working out of an office that had a monetary interest in negating my post) I have had to parse out my commenting efforts to fit what little time I can spare.

The only other plan could be to allow only those who agree with me to comment, which is what so many right wing bloggers do or to let the paid trolls hijack my blog which is the intent of the right wing and business groups that hire them.

That is why your fine and well done comment may not appear on my blog. 

I feel to be balanced I would have to approve both positive and negative comments, but the negative comments are so often filled with lies that they take hours to respond to as I search for some linkable information to back up or negate their charges.  And, of course, as the trolls assume, it is usually impossible to track down whether a commenter is a brain surgeon, high official with the Justice Department, or structural engineer with degrees covering one wall as the some of the most abusive commenters often claim to be (though interestingly, they sound like someone who couldn't keep a job at McDonalds). 

For that reason, it has been pretty hard for me to approve comments in the past few months.  I hope that will improve soon.  I thank you for trying. 

When I do have get a reasonable amount of time to accept and respond to comments which may happen in a few weeks, I will put up a widget they offer here at blog-city that will show the latest comments right on the side of the blog so your comment won't be lost immediately as I post more stuff.  You can see this widget at work at Ed Strong's Blog-City blog .  (The latest comments list is in the right sidebar under his Linkblog.  It is somewhat misnamed as "Latest Entries with Comments" as it actually features the comments themselves.")

BTW, here is an example of a caught troll, and really the only one I have checked out at this blog. I prefer to let my commenters have their privacy. Though I did not request it (IIRC), the blog-city comment design offers up the IP with  a comment when I see it in my personal space. The comment by the "Structural Engineer" #3 turns out to have come from Parsons/Binkerhoff themselves, and though the ranter shoots off some unfindable reports the tone says he wasn't a normal person working there or they have real attitude problems in their engineering department. Most importantly, though, the comment came from their offices,  and they didn't bother bother to even acknowledge it as their own.  Bloggers (as a whole) get thousands of self serving comments from interested businesses each day which, again since they 'are paid for' are a little unfair to the unpaid blogger, but usually such comments are, at the least, identified honestly.  

Political trolls are more difficult to prove, but my experience in other venues has given me all the evidence I need to know that there are tens of thousands of paid right wing trolls working at hijacking blogs with the help of "researchers" who specialize in creating arguments and asserting such and such evidence (mostly not available on the web, and unlinked if it is available) proves that everything anyone they don't like says is wrong.  There is much EST to the troll posting and EST is dependent on the worst of brainwashing techniques, not reason or real information.

I will get back to it if I can find the time.  Most trolls find that I'm a worse monster than themselves.  One of those kinds that roots out the truth and confronts them with it.