There’s a good reason we screen comments in advance on our blogs, and on our YouTube channel. In the early days, before we carried out such screening, feminists wasted our time by posting comments containing one or more of the following:
- conspiracy theories
- fantasies
- lies
- delusions
- myths
There weren’t the hours in the day to deal with the derailing that resulted, so we introduced screening, and saved ourselves a great deal of time. Feminists – not the fastest of learners, obviously – eventually learned there was no point in submitting feminist views, because we wouldn’t publish them (unless they were particularly ludicrous or hilarious).
Other bloggers take a different approach. Ally Fogg doesn’t screen comments in advance, and while he clearly doesn’t welcome my comments, he doesn’t remove them.
Glen Poole takes a third approach, historical revisionism, as favoured by Guardian moderators – I’m told all comments which mention MGM in response to Guardian articles are removed very swiftly – reminiscent of Winston Smith’s work in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Poole removes unwanted comments – or at least unwanted comments from me, if his actions this evening are anything to go by. Most of the comments following his latest piece on InsideMAN have been deeply critical of the thesis he put forward in the piece. He’s removed all my comments, but I took a screensave of three of them within the comments stream, here. If Poole had left them in place, I should have had no need to write this piece. I return to my point about feminists wasting our time.
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