The comment of the month award goes to Andrew Norton on Richard’s latest post (which is excellent by the way).
“The 1980s reform period was very controversial until about 10 years ago, when the argument that free markets aren’t working w1
erereplaced with the argument that prosperity is bad for you.”
With the Troppo Mercedes at the smash repairers, Andrew will have the use of a Google self-driving car for the weekend which is currently being flown from California in the belly of a Boieng 787 ‘Dreamliner’ on its second trip round the world. (Those 787s look very nice.)
- as[↩]
Apologies for the grammatical lapse!
Actually I’m sorry to have been so pedantic. I make the kind of errors you made there all the time (at least I didn’t use “sic”. I sd hv just corrected the grammar. I’m actually starting to adopt the practice in quoting people that if I’m simply adjusting punctuation etc, I won’t put things in square brackets. The level of literalism that we’ve reached annoys me. And it infects academic discourse terribly. There you can have a wholly unobjectionable statement, indeed a statement that is bordering on empty cliche, but if has some hint of citing some fact about the world, it will be accompanied by a footnote to some source.
So a paragraph might start “Ideas governing environmental policy are hotly contested”. Then you’ll get some footnote to some article which talks about hotly contested ideas in environmental policy. Thanks guys, but I think we can move on.
Now you can fix the Boing ;)
I thought it was a cyber-nerd pun, you know Slashdot, Boing Boing etc.
Where there is clearly a mistake I think it is usually better just to correct it. For the reader nothing turns on whether or not the quote is a precise copy of the original. Both the mistake and the correction distract from the point being made.
I agree with Andrew (#5), and am glad that Nicholas had the decency to apologise (#2). This sort of thing is very prevalent in the media these days. It’s what the Left uses to prove its intellectual (and hence moral) superiority over the hoi polloi of the “uneducated” Right. You see the technique used all the time in the SMH.
Damn – forgot to untick that bloody notify box. I sure wish the hosters would do something about getting rid of it altogether.
“I sure wish the hosters would do something about getting rid of it altogether.” Second that remark.
We implemented the “opt-out” model for comment notification here at Troppo quite deliberately. Its aim is to foster deliberative conversations over a period of time on topics, rather than just a flurry of “shoot from the hip” and mostly ill-considered initial responses from readers over about 24 hours after which the topic dies. That’s the way MSM “blogs” work and anyone who has read or participated in one would be aware that they are invariably pointless exercises where opinionated people howl past each other in the dark but seldom engage in anything even remotely resembling civil, productive, mutually respectful conversation. We’re not interested in running that sort of forum.
Implementation of the “opt out” commenting notification has worked very well in my assessment. Comment box discussions DO often extend over much longer periods and the conversation is usually fairly civil and not infrequently produces a real and interesting conversation between several contributors. The approach flows from notions of deliberative democracy, “agonism” and the like that we occasionally discuss here.
To be blunt, we’re not very interested in facilitating people who just want to make a “hit and run” gratuitous comment giving the world the benefit of their opinion but don’t wish to engage in conversation/deliberation about it. If you want to do that then go to one of those moronic MSM “blogs” or start your own blog.
That said, there are some comment threads that linger on endlessly with lots of comments between a small number of obsessives who love arguing among themselves for reasons I’ve never really understood. If you’ve made a comment on one of those and you’re getting endless and rather pointless comments from Fyodor, Homer et al landing in your in-box, you have my sympathies. But it isn’t difficult to go in and tick the boxes to unsubscribe from that thread nor does it take more than a few seconds to delete those emails from your inbox.
Andrew @5 – Agreed, and again, apologies. I was just going through the usual academic motions – not, trying to be a smartarse. If I was trying to be a smartarse I certainly managed to blow myself up with a mistake of my own!
#9. Fair enough it’s your blog. But when I’ve made comment/s on a thread I revisit it regularly to gauge reactions (if any). I reckon most commenters do the same. As you say, many threads go on forever (even here, despite your sense of superiority). Of course it’s my fault that I forgot to untick the box, and the effort I’m forced to go through to delete emails scattered throughout my inbox is my punishment. I’ll just add this sender to the “unwanted” list and hope they’re collected in the spam folder, just in case I forget opting out in future.
I wouldn’t mind a notification system that wasn’t triggered by Homer or responses to him ;)
Patrick took the words right out of my mouth. The notification system was alright until I started getting 50 emails a day of mis-spelt, ungrammatical balderdash by Homer
The last two email notifications re this thread were delivered to my new Junk Emails folder thanks to Microsoft Outlook. Nuisance dealt with satisfactorily.