Moderate Doses

why has Digby never been promoted to the big leagues, despite her obvious rightness and acerbic wit?

No RSS feed?

I can’t be the only one who would read her if she had one, but since she doesn’t, don’t.

Digby does have an RSS feed, it’s just not so easy to find (at least, Google Reader doesn’t seem to automatically detect it). Try http://feeds.feedburner.com/Hullabaloo .

Re trolling, Mark Thoma posted on a similar subject this week. I’ll repeat what I offered him previously: if any center-left bloggers want to let an unknown schmoe like me take a peek at their logs to see if we can find patterns among trolls, I’ve got lots of time on my hands.

*sea of, *than is normal

Try http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default for Digby’s blog.

Biggest blog with readable comments is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog at the Atlantic and I think he spends hours gardening them. Certainly trolls are banned almost before you notice them. Making Light is also a wonderful and enormous commenting community, and I think Teresa N-H has written the first-and-last word on moderating and communities. As communities get larger though, you have to put more time in on reading and keeping up, and as a result I comment less often — if the thread already has 400 comments by the time I see it first, it’s hardly likely I can add to it.

IMhighlyintemperateO, “Making Light” often demonstrates that there is more than one way for a comments section to be unreadable, and that trolls are not necessarily the worst thing that can befall you. I think there ought to be a rule regarding haiku competitions similar to the “mullet rule” which was the social norm in the Seattle subculture in the 1990s.

(the “mullet rule” was simple – if anyone with a mullet liked your band you had to kill yourself).

But I’ve found (I don’t know how to say this without sounding condescending, so I won’t try) that as blogs have gotten vastly larger audiences, the average commenter has gotten much stupider, so now (on almost every interesting blog) the comments are a rolling sea passionate arguments between morons.

The picture of the future is…morons arguing with each other, on blogs, FOREVER!

For the connoisseur, the idiots come in two chief varietals, neither of which are premier cru. The first is the Public Option-Dolchstoss-Korps, the second is the Ron Paul sans-culottes storming the…Eccles Building. The former is more unpleasant, and the latter more competent at approximating postmodernist performance art. Together they produce an exquisite varietal of fourth-rate Californian fruit-bombs, with notes of…..uhhh……..

Also, my last comment is currently in the digestive tracts of the moderating system. Is the system a, uh, cow? Because if it is then my comment is gonna be spending a lotta time in that stomach.

Klein is on WaPo these days, so he probably picks up all sorts of semi-house-trained polecats who read that paper on line; Yglesias attracts links, because he’s become an institution. Very Serious People don’t in general throw their readers to Digby or CT, let alone Unfogged or Making Light.

Another thing which probably helps all but Digby among those discussed above is the sheer self-regarding intellectualism of the core commenters on those sites (obviously here, because it’s run by professional clever buggers, but also on the boutique blogs mentioned where that’s less true). The key dozen or so at each place create an atmosphere which isn’t likely to induce your bog standard troll to hang around after their first couple of drive-bys. The equivalent trick is probably managed chez Digby by the concentration of passionate intensity, which is certainly missing at Yglesias.

The worst comments in the world are usually on newspaper sites. Now why is that?

Obsidian Wings has nothing like the traffic of the big leagues, but has an excellent commenting community.

You just have to accept that the hoi polloi(or #15’s people with mullets) ruin everything they touch.

(They don’t mean to but they do…)

Take away their broadband and the golden age of usenet would be restored.

Final note: why has Digby never been promoted to the big leagues, despite her obvious rightness and acerbic wit? Sexism, or a lust for mindless contrarianism that she will never satisfy?

Something I’ve long wondered, although I find her writing a bit less strong than I used to. There was a time when I was sending friends Hullabaloo links every day. Still a must read, though.

On a similar note, I’ve often wondered why Spencer Ackerman’s blogs are always comment wastelands, despite high quality posts and being best mates with and frequently linked by high trafficked bloggers.

Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little – or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions – for then the fool dominates conversations.)

So the garden is tainted now, and it is less fun to play in; the old inhabitants, already invested there, will stay, but they are that much less likely to attract new blood. Or if there are new members, their quality also has gone down.

Then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other, and at that point some of the old members, those with the highest standards and the best opportunities elsewhere, leave…

– Yudkowsky, Less Wrong.

So suppose that it is possible to clean up trolls, but doing so takes up time and attention and is hence costly – then if, from the start, trolls are not immediately set upon with a banhammer, it may only get worse and worse, until it is so bad that there is nothing worth the effort to save, and therefore nothing is done regardless. So there may be two equilibria in the long run – a low-trolling one and a high-trolling one.

The influx of trolls is presumably related to prominence to laymen, too – a sort of Eternal September effect. If Yglesias got links from more prominent authors too early, that may have harmed his comments more than helped.

Yes, I figure if we could see a Google map view of where Yglesias commenters are coming from, a surprising number of them would turn out to originate at the bottom of Lake Mono. NASA should investigate.

Mark Kleiman’s site isn’t bad for comments.

Digby, also, writes about politics yet has no connection to anything East Coast or Ivy League or otherwise approval-making for people who work in politics. I think having a readership in DC is part of what makes Klein, Yglesias, etc. relevant. Marshall too, though he has smartly grown beyond being just a blogger.

Also, calling racism racism is unpopular.

On Making Light, there are even villanelle and clerihew competitions.

The influence of Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s moderation policy can’t be overstated, but it sure does require a lot of work from the site owners.

The Unfogged crowd scares me sometimes. Be careful in there.

Also, Fred Clark’s Slacktivist is a great blog with a lively and usually worthwhile conversation in the comments.

I gave up on Yglesias’ blog a while a go because the comments section is such a lost cause.

Like others I’m amazed at the consistently high quality of the comments at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s place. It must be a huge chore monitoring them.

Interestingly, it seems that a certain level of mild libertarian trolling is part of what keeps CT alive and well while many blogs that I discovered around the same time (~2005 or so) are now dead or on life support.

As for Digby, she consistently gets it right on major issues of the day. That alone is enough to guarantee that she’ll never be considered a Serious Person.

Oh hell.

Pandagon is ok.

It is not necessarily always the blogger’s job to separate wheat from chaff. If I want wheat, I sometimes glean. I don’t know why Yglesias attracts disputatious types who hang out there and engage everyone. But most blog comment sections are like that.

Look, it’s a question of taste and communities isn’t it? If Calculated Risk consistently runs threads with 200-500 comments, that means a significant number of people are reading those threads. They are unlikely to be the same people or kind of people, or with the same purposes, as those who enjoy Unfogged or Crooked Timber. If you don’t like the long FDL or Making Light threads, that is your problem, not theirs.

Big Blogs? Scott Sumner, David Beckwith, Nick Rowe, Steve Randy Waldmann, and the rest of that community comment on each other’s posts. 10-20 comments of that quality is a lot. Would I really want 50 commenters of that quality running up 500 comment threads? Good god, that would be a CT Holbo thread.

Crikey, I’m a guy who reads the IMDB message boards, including the threads that start “Ozu is the worst director ever!” Michael Kerpan hangs out there, and is solid gold on Japanese cinema. I’ve learned more from him than from Bordwell or Richie.

Where is the Symposium? Where the Algonquin Table? I don’t care. There are a lot of very smart informed people on the Internets, if you look for them.

Slacktivist is unique in my experience for having a pretty healthy, enjoyable commenter community with zero blogger input. They’ve really made a community ethos work.

“They’ve really made a community ethos work.”

It is a community to your taste.

They are good I suppose, but I find the threads at Pandagon and Coates pretty boring.

My impression is the same as LizardBreath’s — Digby was more influential when her gender was secret.

I stopped reading Digby because she/he/it was always depressingly right. Reading the blog made me weep for the republic.

@praisegod barebones:

(Hey there.)

…it’s my impression that the poetry at Making Light is not so much a failure of the moderating policy, but part of the moderating policy.

Close. Poetry is part of the conversation on Making Light (though there are plenty of people who skip it, just as there are plenty who skip the knitting, or the fandom, or the politics). And most of the moderation on Making Light is also conversation: talking about what is being said and how, asking people to not take a particular tack on a conversation because we think it’ll end badly, throwing new ideas or angles in when discussions are getting stale.

It is, as has been noted, an intensive and time-consuming way of doing things. And the site it produces isn’t for everyone. But I consider the comment threads to be as important a part of the blog as the front-page posts. The time I spend moderating them (if people don’t know: I’m one of the five mods on Making Light) is legitimate blogging time, just like time spent composing the text that starts them off.

Balloon Juice does pretty well.

I still check Atrios every day, even though all the posts are one-liners based on inside jokes from 2003. I can’t imagine how horrible his comments must be.

I don’t think this is fair. Atrios is better than anyone in summing up key features of the political situation in just a sentence or two. Agreed about the comments, tho.

I don’t think this is fair. Atrios is better than anyone in summing up key features of the political situation in just a sentence or two.

I’m with Lemuel. Atrios is a must-read. Once in a while I’ll make a comment to drop off a link or something, but I don’t really read them.

I’m not sure Yglesias hasn’t actually started weeding his comments, as many of the regular annoyances, such as Mixner/Wendell and Lonewacko, haven’t appeared in the last few weeks. (Al himself hasn’t been seen for months.)

While I agree in principle that Coates’s moderation is admirable, I have to admit that I sometimes feel bored by the resulting level of sweetness and light. Whereas the reaction to, say, Bob Roddis when he shows up on Yglesias (as he still does) is always entertaining.

fwiw, I got called a concern troll on Coates’ blog once. I more or less deserved it.

Moderation is hard work, and he puts in the work.

Ginger Yellow @ 25: my personal theory about the lack of comments on Ackerman’s blog is that Firedoglake’s commenting system is just monumentally annoying. Registration is required, it enforces dumb and arbitrary restrictions on usernames (no spaces!), and the cookie times out constantly, forcing you to log back in every time you might have felt like commenting. If he replaced it with disqus, I suspect he’d get a lot more chatter — and it’s entirely possible that ‘a lot more chatter’ is the last thing he wants.

I have a lot of problem with calling someone a troll just for expressing a divergent opinion. This idea that noncongruent opinions must be moderated out or discussion will be disrupted seems to lead to a chorus of people who are mainly reinforcing each other’s views. While that may be enjoyable for those commenting, it doesn’t further other goals. I was struck by the analysis a few years back that showed that conservatives read only conservative authors and liberals read only liberal authors and there is almost no cross-over. There is very little value to comments as an echo chamber, in my opinion.

Digby is not always right (read Bob Somerby at Daily Howler for examples). She is frequently annoying in her views on tasers (where she has no understanding of the problems of law enforcement). She lost credibility during the Obama/Clinton wars because she propagated the same campaign talking points as everyone else and gave free rein to Tristero who was ruthless in attacking Clinton supporters in the comments. You cannot stifle opinion that way and drive out opposing views and maintain that your comment community has value as a place to discuss ideas, in my opinion. It undoubtedly feels good to be there because of the reinforcement of consensual views, but is that why we are all here — to have our opinions reinforced?

I’m not sure Yglesias hasn’t actually started weeding his comments, as many of the regular annoyances, such as Mixner/Wendell and Lonewacko, haven’t appeared in the last few weeks.

Think Progress implemented Disqus which, for a while, let a sufficiently dedicated coterie of commenters to “flag” a poster into automated annihilation. It no longer seems to work. [Morgan claims to have haxx0r3d the Disqus system or something.] Given that it’s possible to minimize comments and their replies as you scroll down by clicking a button, it’s not too much hassle, though MW and DW sometimes clog up a thread. Threaded minimizeable comments are a form of implicit moderation, because individuals disinterested in a given conversation or back-and-forth can minimize the entire subthread in one click and skip over it.

Agreed about the comments, tho.

Really? Atrios’ comments section is almost exclusively the chat-room chit-chat of one big happy close social community, talking about dinner and how the kids are doing. It’s not like his one-liners leave much to be discussed or analyzed, and, uhh, the folks there don’t bite. It’s one of the more positive and energizing and comfortable online communities for progressive-minded folks precisely because it’s treated as a social hub, not as comment-on-the-posts.

This is a great post. I still peruse MY’s comment section because there are some good ones in there. Plus you can pretty easily skip all the Worstler posts and responses with the hierarchy system. But I don’t post there anymore because the system is just too annoying to use. It seems to me that just a few trolls contribute 90% of the material, though, so I think that the problem could probably be dealt with as long as you don’t have a professional level commitment from your trolls. Which would be an important difference between Yglesias and CT if Yglesias actually cared.

Actually, the one complaint I have about Coates is that he frequently gives two or three of his fellow Atlantic bloggers way more respect than they deserve. But that’s understandable given the situation.

My impression is there is a point at which a liberal blog becomes influential and Koch-bots are dispatched. The result is either the blog author spends time in troll control or the commentary is derailed.

LB, I read the blog of clarity all the time, and think there are a lot of lurkers who appreciate your wit and that of the commentariat.

As for other places: the blog run by Krugthulu (along with, I’m guessing, his éminence grise, Dr. Wells – how else can he be so peripatetic?) has some good stuff, and there’s not a lot of back and forth, i.e., fools arguing with each other. There is a resident troll – Sean/Sam from Florida – but the responses can be sorted into those recommended by other readers, so the most cogent comments rise to the top. Then you can just skip right past Sean/Sam Fred/Doug or whatever the Koch-bot is calling himself.

I’m surprised that people are so enamored of TNC’s comment section. TNC himself is astonishing but I don’t find the comments enlightening. (A long comment thread on Hobbes a while back pops to mind.) Tender loving care can prevent a huge mob of commenters from calling each other obscene names, but it can’t magically whip up clear, convincing, inspired comments.

I’m also a little surprised that people love Digby so. I didn’t realize until now that she was female, so sexism can’t explain my reaction. My reaction to her has always been the same as my reaction towards Atrios… her writing isn’t particularly gripping or informative, and there’s something choppy and breathless about the style. (Atrios is a guy, right?) But a new theory has occurred to me: when the name of a blog and the blogger’s pseudonym are two different, uninformative words (Digby/Hullabaloo, Atrios/Eschaton), I forget why I opened a page and I’m more confused than I would be. Or maybe it’s the non-white backgrounds.

19: “The worst comments in the world are generally at newspaper sites.” If we go with my theory, it’s because they have the largest and most representative readership.

23: No one said anything about taking away anyone’s internet connection. I’m sure the people who get into huge “You’re a cocksucker!” “No, you are!” fights on Matt Y.’s blog have a ton of fun with it. That doesn’t give me an obligation to read their drivel.

Ezra Klein’s commenters seem consistently awful now that he’s bedded in at the WaPo, because they’re 80% frothing wingnuts who despise him and want him fired. Matt Y’s mostly disengaged from his comments, apart from when picks the weakest criticisms of his posts (or the “trust fund scumbag” snarkers) to dive in and respond.

I suspect Digby wasn’t willing to sacrifice her privacy for the trappings of blogdom; now she just sacrifices her sanity by continuing to watch cable news.

Uncle Kvetch –

Yeah, that’s the somewhat bewildering thing to me; Al just sort of trolled in a trollish way, and was often genial about it, but there’s been a shift to where a significant number of the commenters just HATE Matt. I think the tenor shifted when “Petey” morphed from a regular commenter into a troll during the democratic primary; it seemed like something in his brain just cracked open when Edwards was squeezed out of the race. That’s more or less the moment that he started the “trustfund scumbag” meme, and was the first commenter who I remember thinking was spending most of his time just insulting Yglesias. Of course, there were the two guys who I intentionally never learned to keep straight who are on opposite militant wings of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and will in the same comment thread accuse Yglesias of, respectively, advocating the destruction of Israel and advocating the eradication of the Palestinian people.

Compared to all that, Hector was a brilliant and idiosyncratic breath of fresh air. At the end of the day, it’s sort of charming to get into a fight with someone who thinks Michel Foucault poses a substantive threat to the survival of Western Civilization.

At the end of the day, it’s sort of charming to get into a fight with someone who thinks Michel Foucault poses a substantive threat to the survival of Western Civilization.

Exactly. And he kept calling MY a “hipster” as if it were the most stinging epithet he could deploy.

Yglesias might have a bad comment section, but it’s really no worse than his own posts. His failure rate is so high, that you need the comments to get it straight. Though you’ll obviously need to wade through the trolling as well. And the reason he get much criticism in the comments – could it be that he deserves it? It’s certainly not only wingnuts that dislike much of his writing.

And while the comments on newspapers are probably always worse than on blogs, I’m actually surprised and impressed by the quality of comments found on many American and British papers. The comments on Norwegian newspaper articles are probably 90% far right wingers, and you don’t have to look long to find a decent dose of racism, even on moderated sites.

So more sensible people tend to ignore the comments. Which also means that they continue being populated almost solely by wingnuts. And the few that are trying to argue against them, are usually not especially well-articulated and good at it.

Totally agree about Shakesville — it’s like a cult in there. Although, if I ever feel uncomfortable about being such a TNC fan, I go and refresh myself by seeing what real fans look like at Shakesville. I love Alicublog and LGM comments too, and read them for the giggles.

The comments on Paul Krugman’s blog are pretty horrifying, being as bad as any newspaper despite the effort and time that Krugman puts into moderating. Can the NYT have that many bitterly right wing and stupid readers? Or does Krugman attract them?

Emma in Sydney:
TNC?
Thanks
Mitch

Best commenter community? Roy Edroso’s crew at Alicublog, without question. Bitter, snarky, and funny as hell, much like the host himself.

I second this, for reasons that may be obvious to Kvetch.

At the end of the day, it’s sort of charming to get into a fight with someone who thinks Michel Foucault poses a substantive threat to the survival of Western Civilization.

Not to mention someone who, if he’s for real, is an extremely traditionalist Christian who nevertheless isn’t a kneejerk right-winger on economic issues. Which is pretty rare in the USian blogosystem. I’d certainly take him over Warstler any day, even with the tirades about sexual decadence and hipsters.

norwegian guy @84: uh, no, Hector’s a little more of a unique snowflake than that. His ethos, as far as I could ever make it out, was a weird combination of Christian millenarianism, Pol Pot-style agrarian supremacism, Russian self-pity and quasi-environmental crackpot doomsaying. Basically, after peak oil, the meek shall inherit the earth, not because they’re blessed, but because only hardy Russian peasants have the capacity for stoic suffering necessary to survive the econolypse. (The meek, of course, to be firmly guided by a church authority: I could never quite tell if he intended for it to be Rome or one of the Orthodox hierarchies, not that it matters much.)

Why did slashdot-style moderation never make it out onto the wordpress world? I’ve seen insightful (if limited) comments on politics there.

I think Atrios is the funniest blogger out there, apart perhaps from The Medium Lobster at Fafblog.

Yglesias on his commenters.

My impression is the same as LizardBreath’s—Digby was more influential when her gender was secret.

Digby was always underrated as a blogger. I don’t see any falloff in her influence. Greenwald – himself a deservedly influential blogger – links her not-infrequently. What A-list blogger periodically linked her in the old days? (That’s a non-rhetorical question. I can’t remember.)

@ MPAVictoria: TNC is Ta-Nehisi Coates. You can find him at the Atlantic.

Back in the day, both The Poorman and SadlyNo had brilliant commentariats.

Yeah, the Poorman was the bestest. Unfortunately, Northrup posts there now like twice a year, and the guys who keep his seat warm — well, they’re no The Editors.

I occasionally comment on Matt’s blog, and, unfortunately, it tends to be to criticize him—unless it is to let the Gold Bugs have it. The problem is that I’ve read him so long I’m in the habit of doing so. I still think he has interesting insights into politics, but his glib liberaltarian posts on economics drive me crazy, and when this conscious liberaltarian turn of his first started in earnest (hating on Hacker’s book, hoping to export Wal Mart to Europe, deliberately talking about manufacturing exports without mentioning jobs) I joined a group of commenters who, I think, actually made some good critiques—which he characteristically annoyed. Since he added Disqus and banned Paulie Carbone and others seemed to have drifted away, I’ve kind of lost interest in commenting, though I couldn’t help at least making my displeasure known today, for example: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/12/jobs-and-trade/

Can anyone here defend that? I certainly think it explains some of the non-rightwing vitriol.

“I’m not sure Yglesias hasn’t actually started weeding his comments, as many of the regular annoyances, such as Mixner/Wendell and Lonewacko, haven’t appeared in the last few weeks. (Al himself hasn’t been seen for months.)”

Lonewacko is there all the time; he’s been on a few posts today. He calls himself 24AheadDotCom and posts a weird disclaimer after each post about how everyone hates him.

Someone was saying that Mixner is Frank Youell. I think Mixner is Wendell Cox, and Frank Youell is a new, weird, racist.

Hector is not a Christian Democrat. His ideal society is one that forces hipsters to be yam farmers, and Bolivian public whippings give him orgasms. He’s not smart, and he’s really not interesting.

My profound thanks to Belle and all the above commenters for a most enlightening post. You see, I was once upon a time, a very regular participant in the Fidonet echo LTUAE (yes, folks, Fidonet – one of the most amazing achievements of all times by the human ‘communitarian spirit’).

Any’ow, LTUAE (Life, The Universe And Everything for the Adams benighted) was an Aussie-only Fidonet echo (way too strong-worded for you delicate souls, though Prof Quiggin might remember it through his brother’s participation). I sorta miss LTUAE (aka Latooie or L2ae) and now, thanks to this post, I know I can get a near fix from Yglesias.

But just for the Making Light fans, here’s an example of the depths to which LTUAE could sink. You won’t get all the references, but never mind the content, fell the rhythm and rhyme ! Otherwise, Belle, by all means just kill this intrusion.

LTUAE ————————————————————————
Date: 09-25-93 13:53

Subj: ………….
Stat: Rcvd
——————————————————————————
Hi Graeme. Sheer bandwidth may yet bring us undone. :)

So> Ho ho ho. Let’s try again…. Presto! – the versed thread.

GR> Oh To Be In La2e, Now That Moanicka’s Here
GR> ___________________________________________

GR> When I was young, I do confess,
GR> I, of my life, did make great mess.
GR> But now that I am old and grey,
GR> I want for everyone to live that way.

So> The wine of youth runs dry ere long,
So> sad sediments remaining.
So> Impertinence, that youthful song,
So> replaced by dull complaining.

GR> The fire of youth was burning high
GR> The glint of passion was in my eye;
GR> I, frail vessel, scarce contained
GR> The wonderment of things explained.

The newly sage of middle age
cast off the chafing fetter
of wonderment, their view is bent
to faster, smarter, better.

GR> So I did to latooie come,
GR> Of all perversity, I found me some;
GR> Full of evil, and all that’s wrong,
GR> So here I stayed, to sing my song.

So> Let’s groan and moan and point the bone,
So> then dump it in Latooie.
So> Enduring strife. The pulse of life
So> descends unto ennui.

GR> Strong heart, and spirit bold,
GR> Heeded all that I was told;
GR> Until at last, all passion spent,
GR> I wondered how to pay the rent.

To get the loot we prostitute
our principles and talent.
We work and strive just to survive
a living, found repellent.

GR> I sing my song, I sing it well,
GR> And all you sophists can go to hell;
GR> Save for two, who walk in beauty,
GR> Gorgeous Gerry, and his Me-bie cutie.

So> The slurs and lies will polarise
So> a like on like attraction.
So> The slagger, like Mick Jagger,
So> just can’t get no satisfaction.

GR> So they went, the days of yore,
GR> And quoth the Grimmer, Nevermore!
GR> The time has come to be forgetting
GR> Juvenile ways and childish fretting.

There’s better ways to spend our days.
The pleasures of creation
can oft be found Latooie bound.
The psyche’s recreation.

So> And yet I swear there’s talent there
So> beneath the disillusion.
So> Come, light the flame or play the game….

So> …..(Forgive my wry intrusion).

GR> Wouldst slyly tweak the dragon’s tail
GR> Just to test your suit of mail?
GR> Pardon me sir, this fey allusion,
GR> Your motive power is cold confusion?

Breathe fire and smoke, but still invoke
the Master’s teaching power.
The Victim burns, The Pupil learns,
The Fool alone should cower.

GR> For you have scarcely yet begun
GR> Your glorious hour in life’s warm sun.
GR> And though, no doubt, your mojo’s workin’
GR> You’re several pottles short the firkin.

Such fiery breath. Like solar death.
I’m Icarus in waiting?
It’s far too late to coruscate.
Verse on with the debating.

The Muse awaits our rhyming fates.
The winner, “Top gun poet”
Let Elk decide! (and, on the side,
What say a jug of Moet?)

I read Digby religiously for years. I stopped after she brought on co-bloggers but just recently started reading again. She’s on target as much as she ever was (depressingly so), but I have to say that her comment section is much worse than it used to be. I’m happy she’s getting a fair amount of linkage again; perhaps she’ll attract more thoughtful commenters now. The last few times I peeked it was worse than Yglesias’s. I don’t get the sense that it is moderated at all.

I find Atrios’s comment section nearly content-free. It’s voluminous, but it’s mostly banter among the regulars. Obsidian Wings has been good (though I’ve been reading it a lot less since Hilzoy left); it has a pretty strict mutual-respect policy that has worked well. The late Steve Gilliard had one of the better comment sections, in part because he interacted with it nearly continuously and did not treat trolls at all kindly.

I’d have to go with other commenters and put Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog at the top for readable and thoughtful comments, and I think that it is his personal and frequent interaction with it that makes it so. In fact, I think this is almost a truism: comment quality reflects the careful tending of their host. I can’t think of any other factor as significant.

I never followed Drum and Klein over to their MSM digs because they were both so “serious” and “measured” about the invasion of Iraq (i.e., WRONG, WRONG, WRONG), that I never felt obliged to follow their MSM careers.

The real question is, why do I enjoy ersatz, satirical pop music so much, when I can’t stand the real thing?

The real question is, why do I enjoy ersatz, satirical pop music so much, when I can’t stand the real thing?

You can imagine they’re much smarter than what they’re doingand you can laugh in knowing comfort rather than with bitter cruelty. Right? RIGHT?

Another sadly missed blogger is Jill Psmith, aka Twisty Faster, at I Blame the Patriarchy, currently on furlough. Some of her commenters are hilarious and brilliant, and the community ethos is very strong. Too strong for some, but I love it.

Henry @114

Delicious, both of them. Why, oh why, isn’t there more of this ?

“Regret, by definition, comes too late”

and: “Things past redress are now with me past care” [WS, Richard II]

The comments there are closer to a chat room among friends than a discussion about the topic at hand.

There’s a lot to be said for that kind of community, especially one so willing to accept and interact with new left-of-center folks. (Disclaimer: I was especially grateful for that in 2003-2005, when it was much harder to find online.)

Out of curiosity, what’s the current concern from “some” people regarding CT? Is it 1. trolls in the Morgan/Lonewacko sense, or 2. long tedious and sometimes increasingly hostile back-and-forths between presumably more-or-less well-meaning people,* or 3. annoyingly frequent regulars,* or 4. that CT is too much like a pub / social hub with lots of off-topic or tangential chatter,* or 5. that too many commenters are replying to comments instead of the original post, or 6. too. much. crazy., or… what?

For easy management of [2.], threaded minimizeable comments (with subthreads set to be minimized by default) could be a good solution. Only interested parties would click to expand the subthread. Troll clogging aside, this is actually doing wonders for Yglesias’ comments section (though one needs a scriptmonkey script to auto-minimize subthreads by default).

*(If so: insert apologetic puppy eyes here.)

(altho Salient’s hypotheses are good and I in particular am probably often guilty of his 2 in particular. So if I’m part of the problem then I’ll resolve to stop picking at the fellow commenters who, with respect to me, are scabs. Or bedbug bites, or something.)

@122 Paul Krugman, famous reactionary, has been pointing out for two decades that the number of jobs available in the US has to do with monetary and fiscal policy, and nothing to do with trade policy…

Right, new grocery-bagger positions open every day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/opinion/28krugman.html
But I am arguing for an end to the finger-wagging, the accusation either of not understanding economics or of kowtowing to special interests that tends to be the editorial response to politicians who express skepticism about the benefits of free-trade agreements.

It should also be noted that Don Williams has pretty much ruined Yglesias’s comments. At least theAmericanist is funny when he gets into a huff.

@122 “On issues related to trade and occupational licensing, he has irritated progressives who have a very knee jerk reaction to certain empirical hypotheses.”

Right, but that was never my problem. I read some of those threads and there some knee-jerk reactions as well as some reasonable critiques. He might have engaged with the latter. I’m actually fine with deregulating some of this stuff.

“That is to say, unemployment is not a reason to oppose trade treaties.”

But that is something of a straw man, no? Are people worried about unemployment or worried that unskilled workers or workers who have specialized manufacturing skills will get worse jobs? One might think a progressive—and Krugman is not guilty of this—might at least be concerned about the distributional consequences. That is what bothers me with his new tack; he is concerned with employment in general, which I agree is a worthy cause and his monetary policy posts have some real value to that conversation, but he pretty much given up thinking about inequality and the distributional consequences of free-market policies in many cases. (In the past he at least favored some sort of redistribution based on progressive taxation—a policy he hardly mentions anymore.)

Moreover, in learning about economics, he seems to have forgotten what he knew about power, which I think explains his tepid reaction to the Hacker book. Another related issue is his enthusiasm for increased immigration. Now, to be clear, I support higher levels of legal immigration but cracking down on employers for hiring illegal immigrants—and in any case I support humane treatment of everyone. But he really does support the libertarian fantasy of open borders, why? Because he is only looking at the narrow economic effects and not the societal or cultural effects, forgetting about the irrational and rational fears immigration elicits among the working and middle classes. In essence he supports a kind of cosmopolitan utilitarianism and has a real blind spot for the American middle class. I’m a social democrat so this really bothers me. We don’t have a world demos, so we can’t build a humane, somewhat equitable society at the world level. I therefore think an American progressive, while wanting to improve circumstances around the world, still needs to think about inequality and the standing of America’s working and middle class. He was never the best at doing this, but he has given up this strand of thinking almost completely and it is this element of his turn toward libertarianism that annoys me—and other commenters. But as I said earlier, I have pretty much given up making this point on his blog because he has almost no interaction with his commenters and because, yes, there are some really annoying trolls that have stakes out the comment section.

The problem with Yglesias on things like licensing is that he sounds like someone who’s just read a book on Econ 101, and is now condescending to share the incredibly profound insights he’s picked up in there. Whether or not barbers should be licensed is not any way an important progressive issue. It’s a pure utilitarian calculation: there’s arguments for (quality control), and arguments against (oligopoly), and you would have to actually know something about the barbering industry to know which is more important. It’s not a question that philosopher-kings can answer, and the condescendingly explain to us in terms of first principles.

I like the TNC comments, but he gets so many comments that it’s hard to keep up and I rarely chime in because I feel like my thoughts will just get lost in the traffic. Disqus is nice, but it breaks down a bit if you have to load more than a couple pages worth of comments.

In my opinion, any type of threaded comment section is difficult to follow if there’s any kind of traffic unless there’s some way to keep track of which comments are new since your last visit. I used to really like the idea of threaded comments, but I think that a flat comment section probably works better for most applications.

It’s hard to know what to say about the Shakesville comment section. Yes it’s overmoderated, but that doesn’t go halfway far enough. Apart from the ridiculous language policing, there’s pretty much zero tolerance for any kind of dissent from party line.

I find the most rewarding comment threads to be the ones on Brian Leiter’s blog. The posts are open for comments only when one can reasonably expect people to have something useful to say about the topic, people posting under their own name are given preference, and the trolls and dullards never get to see the light of day (the elimination of the latter being particularly important and neglected even on many blogs with heavy moderation, like Shakesville or Feministe, with intellectually baleful consequences). I fancy other people’s ideas of what constitutes a productive discussion may well be less exacting, but I find that at most blogs that are worth reading in the first place, even if the comments have something of substance to add, the good bits are buried in so much pablum that I rarely have the time and patience to get to them.

Roy Edroso’s crew at Alicublog, without question. Bitter, snarky, and funny as hell, much like the host himself. This.

Thanks to everyone who has mentioned our comments, which (at much less volume than in the old Halocan days) have both attracted a gratifying number of smart people and remained pretty troll-free, although we’ve never reached a tipping point in terms of readership. (We also haven’t had a real conservative legal/anti-abortion regular since the great Niels Jackson, who was sort of a primodrial Hector.)

If you want a nice garden, you have to spend a lot of time weeding it. Not difficult to understand.

The problem with Yglesias on things like licensing is that he sounds like someone who’s just read a book on Econ 101, and is now condescending to share the incredibly profound insights he’s picked up in there.

I think this is wrong in important ways. We don’t and never will live in a technocracy, and all political decisions reflect some sort of balance between pragmatic consideration and ideology. Matt is a progressive who is trying to elevate the visibility and relevance of economic principles to progressive ideals, and I think this is an incredibly valuable thing to do. It’s fine to snark about Econ 101, but what I wouldn’t give for more voters and legislators — liberal and conservative — to actually understand introductory economics.

Back to the topic at hand. I think a key determinant of the comment quality is the level of specialization of the blog. Blogs with good comments tend to be at least somewhat specialized. Yglesias and Drum are very much generalists. TNC, by contrast, although also writing on social issues from a liberal perspective, has a very defined focus.

There are also personality issues at work. Matt is generally unapologetic about his viewpoint, regardless of the target of the critique, and that’s bound to stir up a certain element. I happen to really enjoy that quality of Matt’s writing, but I also am broadly sympathetic to his arguments. If you happen to disagree with him, I imagine his tone is about as soothing as a dentist’s drill.

Castorp @ 127
Good points on Krugman. In his defense, as an academic, his job is to do one thing well, not to do everything. There’s a division of labor and all that. (Yes, this sounds like something Stanley Fish would say, but AFAICT Fish is channeling the liberal and left-liberal professoriate on that point.) Maybe NYT readers aren’t well served by arguments so one-sided, but the moral may be just that MSM gigs are corrupting (I could put the same idea in a less cynical way but you get the idea–anyway, surely we need more than one kind of writer).

But in the end, he is an economist. Is it really implausible that he might believe that, if there is a niche he points to as being unfilled, the market will provide and fill it?

I think you’re misunderstanding Castorp, he didn’t really accuse Krugman of overusing economics :) — it’s all Yglesias in #127

Interesting points in @138 bianca, but VV is correct, I intended my critque to be of Yglesias. I only mentioned Krugman becasue the post I was responding to did.

@ 127 ; if you reread the post you linked to, Castorp, I think you’ll see that the point was to distinguish between (i) the effects of trade pacts on employment and (ii) their effect on standard of living. I didn’t see the Yggler offering a specific opinion that a specific trade pact would have good consequence on the incomes of American workers; rather, he said that he should object to these pacts only if they have welfare impacts, not because steelworkers will lose their jobs or something. —— But I don’t think you misunderstood that: you specifically said in your original comment that what irritated you was that he didn’t talk about jobs. Worrying about people losing jobs is the same as worrying about unemployment; worrying about people getting worse jobs is the same as worrying about about welfare.

Now, if Y’s embrace of immigration is glib liberaltarianism and Ec 101-speak, then I guess I’m a glib liberaltarian too. Is it so hard to understand that letting someone move from an impoverished country to the United States makes someone vastly better off? Is it so hard to remember that in 1910 our great grandparents were largely immigrants, and that “middle-class American culture” was far more “threatened” in 1910 than in 2010? What Y. adds to the basic, sensible case for vastly more immigration is various reminders that immigration would solve lots of other problems, too. If very serious people claim that these other problems (urban blight, Social Security) are urgent crises, then they ought to get on the immigration bandwagon, since there are solutions to their “crises” that are also morally compelling.

“Now, if Y’s embrace of immigration is glib liberaltarianism and Ec 101-speak, then I guess I’m a glib liberaltarian too. ”

I’m actually divided on the immigration argument and his and your stance is not per se glib liberaltarianism, but he never addresses the problems it does pose to a progressive. (The simplified problem being that it can hurt the cohesion necessary to build a proper welfare state. See Putnam for example on what I am talking about.) This is a pretty consistent tic of his. For example he had great fun pointing out that manufacturing exports as a share of GDP have been relatively steady for a while now and that just shows those people worrying about manufacturing are a bunch of people who can’t read statistics. Haha. This of course ignored the fact that most of those hand wringers were worried about manufacturing jobs. If he had addressed that question and explained what he thought was wrong with it, I wouldn’t have agreed, but I wouldn’t have been as irritated or likely to post a biting response.

Is it so hard to understand that letting someone move from an impoverished country to the United States makes someone vastly better off?

Let me guess: is the second someone the guy whose strawberries the first someone is picking 12 hrs/day for $3/hr?

An irregular verb for andthenyoufall @147:

I aim, however imperfectly, to impose minimum standards of training and competence;
you artificially constrict the supply of doctors;
he/she/it extracts oligopoly rents.

Sure anybody willing to have a go should be allowed to attempt heart transplants in their garage, anybody who can scrawl an illegible signature should be permitted to prescribe anything they’ve ever heard of, anybody who wants to call himself an ophthalmologist should be able to board-certify himself by the bootstraps. Why, it’s progressive and libertarian! I smell greatness! And nobody will benefit more than the poor.

Try looking at the comments section at Calculated Risk, Hoocouldanode. It has an ignore function that allows the reader to select who to read. It also has a function to restore commenters.
I like it.

Userscripts.org has a bunch of things that’ll probably work here to filter comments, though you might have to ignore comment numbering.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?page=2&q=wordpress&x=0&y=0

I think M.Y. comments are a mess because he ignores them even when he’s demonstrably wrong, and he’s wrong a lot, and he posts as if his emanations are for consumption not discussion. He will engage other bloggers but not his own commenters, as they are beneath him. If he posted corrections or opposing views from his comments he would immediately have better comments. He comes across as a giant cobag.

Kevid Drum is a little different- again it is because he doesn’t interact. He just today posted that we have to empathize better with popular responses to terrorism, acknowledging for the first time in my memory that he might be a little empathy minus on some issues, yet he’s been hearing that criticism non-stop of his own posts in comments for years. He is casually dismissive of TSA pushback because it isn’t his issue. He is dismissive of other issues people claim are important for reasons that understandable even if not in agreement, and constantly plays the “why do people worry about this when there is this OTHER really important thing that I WORRY about that is more IMPORTANT” argument.

Again, the comments get bad because there is no engagement, and the posts read like years of comments are never even read.

Shorter Pinko Punko: argument from outlier blog commenter is bunk, a reading of the average Yglesias or Drum comment (over years of comments) suggests that each of those bloggers is at bet tin-eared (Kevin) or more likely (Yglesias) a self-absorbed evolving ne0-gliberal chundermuffin.

atyf @156,

Do you need 7 years of education to draw up a basic divorce contract?

Divorce contract?

I don’t know. Far from my field, and I’ve never been divorced. Quite possibly such things exist, though one had thought that was one of the things the courts hadn’t yet outsourced.

Anyway. Do you need seven years’ education [FN1] to do many things that lawyers do? No. To do some of those things, though, seven isn’t remotely near enough. I despair, on a nearly daily basis, of many of my colleagues, many of whom have been practising a decade or more.

Your brush is miles too broad. Look. There are things, for example, in the medical world that really don’t need to be done by a physician. They can be done just as well — indeed, are often done better — by, say, a nurse or a PA or a midwife or what have you. But these too are highly trained professionals performing tasks that one can’t just waltz in off the street and do. Maybe they don’t need quite so many years of training to qualify. But so what? The important thing is the training, not the weight of the stack of calendars you’d need to record it.

[FN1] By “7 years of education” I assume you mean the standard US model of four years’ undergraduate study of whatever followed by three years of law school. But in that case, why speak of seven years? If anything more than those three last years spent highlighting casebooks counts, then why not claim that one needs 19 years’ training to become a lawyer? (I believe that kindergarten is optional.) But once you admit that three years is the correct timeline, you also have to admit that American lawyers are thrown into the deep end in record time. If you include not just an academic law course but post-academic trainee period as well, I am not aware of any faster path than the American to qualification for practise (not least because US lawyers have no such traineeship).

Yggles thread is up to 255 comments now. Can we get off licensing and libertarians and back to Belle Waring acting as discourse policewoman and protecting her privileged clique? I have seen this before. Somewhere. We should take this to a thousand.

Now, what Belle Waring is doing demonstrates the massive problem with the establishment blogosphere– you all circle the wagons for each other. She is protecting you because you are a part of the Club. It doesn’t matter what the content is. If you are part of the Club, other people in the Club will jump up and defend you. Belle Waring doesn’t care about the quality of your posts; she just cares that you have a big name on the (supposedly) left-of-center blogosphere, and so she must defend you against the leftist Huns who dare to want more from the state than the Earned Income Tax credit. This has everything to do with blogospheric celebrity, and a bit to do with the never-ending discourse policing that the establishmentarian liberals do to eliminate genuinely leftist voices.

…Freddie DeBoer at Yglesias

Adam at 128: It’s insane to think that any major liberal blog has been lacking in commenters willing to call others out on “form.” Liberals’ civility fixation is what allows conservatives to troll them so effectively.

I take your point in general. I was actually thinking at the time of a place like Balloon Juice, where commenters not infrequently work themselves into a frenzy of hyperbolic vitriol in two seconds flat. They may actually have some point or other in any given attack on another’s comment or perspective, but interesting and constructive conversations are more often lost than found. Not everyone agrees with me on this.

164:Now that he’s gone to flack for the folks who run CAP and raise their money by obstructing progressives, he has a dysfunctional comment section. This makes perfect sense to me.

AFAIC, “dysfunctional” is pretty much what is needed in the mainstream blogosphere. I mean, look at the politics and economics, and 8+ years of anything approaching civility has gotten us a Democratic President who…need I list the horrors? Billionaire tax cuts while cutting foodstamps in a recession is enough.

We need to primary Obama, if not impeach him, in order to save what’s left of the Democratic Party, if anything is left. Any blogger who supports DC and the establishment needs as much shrill Cthulhu trolling as it is possible to muster. Matt and Ezra flat out sold the country down the river for thirty pieces of silver. It was, horribly, entirely predictable.

And now Lady Waring sniffs, and wonders if we get “those kind of people” out of our newly gentrified neighborhood.

“Matt and Ezra flat out sold the country down the river for thirty pieces of silver. It was, horribly, entirely predictable.”

Not entirely predictable. Spencer Ackerman did the exact reverse. And did it with quite a bit of panache.

Imagine if Spencer had done his freelance work for years, and then gone to work for Marty Peretz to flack Marty’s line. That’s what happened to Matt’s blog since he went to work as a CAP flack. Of course the comments on his blog are going to go to hell. There’s no way they can’t.

We need to primary Obama, if not impeach him, in order to save what’s left of the Democratic Party, if anything is left.

Strangely enough, thing like that don’t count as mediocre jokes at unfogged, but 44 is still true.

@163: The FreddiedeBoer comments on that post are perfectly symptomatic of what’s wrong with MY’s comment section. His old blog is still up; go back, browse through some comments. The volume of stupid comments was simply lower back then.

@162: I will concede that you have better fashion sense than I do. But in some cases we know that a less-highly trained professional will do a fine job. For example, most of us already have our teeth cleaned by dental hygienists; but the powerful, prestigious dentists’ lobby wills that hygienists only work as serfs under the watchful eye of a dentist. Perhaps you are right, though; if those cretinous hygienists were allowed to get out from under the thumb of the wise, avuncular dentists, surely an epidemic of tooth rot would result. ——– And again, some of these changes (making it easier to be a doctor, for example) would only move the US to parity with the rest of the world. As you probably learned during the health care debate, despite the snake oil salesmen who run European hospitals, their health outcomes are better than ours.

@161: So because your colleagues are already too incompetent to practice law, we can’t lower the bar any further (so to speak!), because the new lawyers would be at least as incompetent? Well, if you’re a lawyer then you must be right. I apologize for challenging your profession’s benevolent cartel. ————– But I really must protest your indifference to the length of the education of a medical professional. More hours of education makes that education more costly both in tuition and in foregone work and leisure. Usually, the skills acquired with more hours of education are more valuable. Why are you pretending that everyone with a professional certificate is exactly the same? (I have no idea why you are quibbling over the length of a professional’s education. In all countries I know of, professionals have graduated from secondary school. It is post-secondary where things differ from country to country. Surely you know this.)

What’s wrong, or what’s right?

Can we get off licensing and libertarians and back to Belle Waring acting as discourse policewoman and protecting her privileged clique? I have seen this before. Somewhere. We should take this to a thousand.

Is this part of the revolution? Cause I am so totally opposed to Belle Waring acting as discourse policewoman. Down with Belle Waring and her corporatist liberal discursive policewomaning of this very thread! To the thousand, comrades!

The true quality-killer in commenting is length. People like Warster or DxW drag down threads because the comments are so long and then 1/2 the thread is unreadable. Unfogged commenting still lives (altho that’s in dispute) because the comments are short.

Big Bill Haywood:”A liberal is the guy who leaves the room when a fight starts.”

“The true quality-killer in commenting is length. People like Warster or DxW drag down threads because the comments are so long and then 1/2 the thread is unreadable. Unfogged commenting still lives (altho that’s in dispute) because the comments are short.”

As a long-winded commenter, I naturally will disagree with your assertion.

The length of the comment does not inherently affect quality, but I think there’s a correlation opposite to what you describe. The true enemy of comment threads is mindless, reflexive, combative hyperbole and insults. There’s no need for length to accomplish these things, shorter comments suffice, and people often compete with each other to produce the most pithy and effective insults. Longer comments, even when dull, and even when incoherent, are usually attempts to make an argument or otherwise offer something relevant and not merely troll or insult other people.

Additionally, it’s not difficult to scroll past long comments while, in contrast, it is difficult to avoid reading short comments. I’ve never understood why anyone finds long comments objectionable when there’s no obligation to read them and they’re so easily skipped.

I’m not so bothered by long comments as much as by longwinded posters: both Greenwald and Marcotte would be more readable (or, more read by me) if they could edit down their posts a little. On the other hand, Bérubé could be longwinded too–and Yglesias’s posts sometimes err a little too much on the brief side.

atyf @173,

Why are you pretending that everyone with a professional certificate is exactly the same?

I’m not. I’m saying that your observations are neither very interesting, nor very insightful, not very intelligent.

Your command of parataxis, on the other hand, is a light unto the nations. I thank you for that, and I will repeat your mantra “surgeon, nurse, midwife? They’re all highly trained professionals” before bedtime every night until the United States no longer has socioeconomic stratification.

173 — You know, it may be true that somebody might be just fine with a contract they get from the internet. Or that a nurse might well know the exact right medication for your condition. Then again, maybe they get it wrong, and maybe there’s a complication that they didn’t understand, and you didn’t know to tell them about. But, if things go wrong, they have insurance right?

I think law school is too long — and that two years (as the last two of undergrad) is probably sufficient. With a practical part. But I can see that it’s really important not to be putting people who are under 25 out there is a position to exercise judgment. Sure, some few are fine. Plenty more, though, shouldn’t have others’ fates in their hands.

I have observed a change in the character of comments right here on CT. It used to be that articles on economics would get 100s of comments arguing back and forth whether or not mainstream or neoclassical or econ 101 was correct. It seems to me that many that used to comment on that topic seem to abandoned commenting here, even as the topic became more salient in the wider world.

I find it hard to manage to respond to even the few comments I get.

Law school is certainly too long, as every third-year law student knows. It was two years until sometime in the first quarter of the 20th century; the third year was added for the sole and explicit reason of impressing the public. Justice Cardozo was in school at Columbia when they switched. He refused to come back for the third year.

To go on stating the obvious, the law is so large a field that you can’t learn it in school; you learn how to look it up, and how to think about it, and how to talk and write about it in a way that will make other lawyers and judges take you seriously. What makes old lawyers worth more money than young lawyers is that they have learned how to read people and to infer what they really want, which is ofter not what they say they want. There seems to be no way to acquire this skill without putting in the time: Compare the relative frequency of child-prodigy musicians and mathematicians and chess player with the great rarity of child-prodigy novelists.

(IIRC MY’s father published a novel as a teenager. I never read it. I can say, however, that Jane Austen’s juvenilia are very funny.)

I was a regular for a long time, then basically quit commenting on Yglesias. I took a pause mostly because of the technology issues, but then found I didn’t really want to come back. I recall it being better at some point in the past (maybe I am fooling myself), but for me it had essentially become all error correction, all the time, and usually the same errors over and over again, and that gets boring. And I do think not just the lack of moderation but also the nature of Yglesias’s posts contribute to all that.

Incidentally, I was also a big fan of the comments at Volokh, right up until Orin Kerr banned me.

Btw, since there continue to be various mentions of particular blogs, I want to add one that I don’t think has been mentioned: R.P. Wolff’s blog, The Philosopher’s Stone, is worth an occasional quick look, I find, if you’re interested in his topics, which is not to say I necessarily agree with him or his commenters (or necessarily know enough about the question at hand to have an opinion). In a recent post he was critical, in passing, of G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History, and on seeing that I said to myself: Now that would raise some eyebrows (or hackles, or whatever) at CT. Apart from one or two people, however, there doesn’t seem to be much overlap between his readership and CT’s. Just an impression; could be wrong.