• On comment moderation

    Spoiler: I might swear.

    I have a fairly liberal attitude to commenting here, and I don’t particularly police it that much. Dissenting views are utterly vital to being sure that you are warranted in your own beliefs and views.

    Well, I got involved in a comment thread on the Possible Worlds blog of Randy Everist. My goodness. I have never seen such comment nazism. I was warned by the Thinker. It’s intellectually disgusting. I posted a really good-natured couple of posts, he posted something in response (a little snarky but generally fine) and I responded with a really normal post about realism vs nominalism, about William Lane Craig and the problem with circularity in the Kalam Cosmological Argument, undefended premises, causality, induction, Dennett and so on, and he came back with this:

    Sorry, Jonathan, I don’t allow non-substantive rhetoric on my blog–that’s why the comment was not approved. :)

    Oh the hell dear. I am genuinely so pissed off I am going to rant. Because I can’t even rant to him or complain since he moderates every comment officiously. Yes, people can do what they like on their own blogs. But if you are going to tagline your blog with:

    Exploring issues in Christian philosophy, theology, apologetics, and life in general.

    and refuse to genuinely explore issues, then you are wasting your time and, in this case, mine. Your whole effort at blogging is to reassure your own beliefs. Well, get the fuck off the net and massage your own beliefs in private. Because refusing to even engage with comments because you disagree with their content or don’t get them or love WLC too much is a waste of my time. That comment took me some 20 minutes to write (not that it was any great shakes, just pointing out a number of issues with the Kalam Cosmological Argument), time I’ll never get back because some dufus is too cognitively biased to understand how such dialectic works. Basically, Randy Everist, you can fuck off, and take your biases with you.

    Mainly because you put a stupid fucking smiley on the end of your big brother comment. Dick.

    I hereby renounce the Possible Worlds Blog. Do not go there.

    [admission: this is me at my most rabid]

    Category: Blogging

    Article by: Jonathan MS Pearce