Okay, so I'm going to go a little bit meta here, just for a minute, and address a problem I've been tracking in comments for a couple of months. I think my feelings on the subject can best be summed up thusly:
Don't be a douche, y'all.
I'll expound. Some amount of good-natured back-and-forth is to be expected on a political blog. Sometimes, ill-natured back-and-forth can be expected; politics, after all, tends to be polarizing, and people tend to be passionate about their polarized political viewpoints. And that's not a bad thing. Passionate debate is what keeps things interesting around here.
Immature and imbecilic slap-fighting, however, is not interesting in the least. It is, in fact, very, very, very very veryvery boring. And when a reasoned debate devolves into "Well, my facts are right, and yours are completely wrong" and "No, my facts are right, and yours are wrong, and you're a poop-head for believing such wrong facts," and further devolves into, "Well, you're just a stupid LIEberal!" and "Well, you're a Repukelican and you smell bad!" and "HAHAHA you can't spell!" and "You never answered my question you must be stupid LOL!!!11!!!one!" it gets so very boring so very quickly that I can't even stand it a little bit.
So please, please try to keep it civil. And if you absolutely can't keep it civil, at least try to keep it vaguely intelligent. You know who I'm talking about - and if you think I'm not talking about you, think again, because you're probably exactly who I'm talking about.
For the two-years-and-change that I've had this blog going, I've never once banned a commenter, because I'm all about the free flow of ideas (even - nay, especially - the ones I disagree with). And I still don't intend to ban anyone for expressing ideas with which I disagree or ideas that make me uncomfortable or angry. I will, however, overcome my distaste for banning if commenters persist in making me bored. Please don't let it come to that. Let's all be grownups.
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