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I’m back from Seattle, after a week of blog abstinence broken only by some very minor comment maintenance. Thanks very much to Charli Carpenter, who filled in very capably. My Google Reader account currently has 917 new items…

Two points on comments: First, I’m a bit befuddled by the apparent influx of an army of trolls in my absence; I’ll be culling a bit when I have some time. Second, I was extremely disappointed by this comment thread, and in particular that one of my favorite regular commenters saw fit to mount his high horse and dismiss Charli as “a technician of empire” for making a set of entirely reasonable claims about airstrikes in Afghanistan. A blog is a community, and the well-being of the community depends on something like a contract between the bloggers, the regular commenters, and the occasional commenters/lurkers. Regular commenters incur some responsibility for civility, but more importantly they have a responsibility to behave as if the bloggers and the other regular commenters are acting in good faith. This means that you can’t simply denounce a blogger as “a technician of empire,” and thus unworthy of engagement, after a single post. At LGM we ban people because of arbitrary drunken whim; no one is safe. That said, consistenly treating the bloggers and other commenters as idiots who act in bad faith (and to be sure, I don’t think that the commenter in question has established such a pattern of behavior; far from it) is, in the fullness of time, likely to get you banned. This is what happened to The Fool, and what happened to Dr. Zen.

On a final note, I want to apologize in advance for *not* wading into comment threads as much in the future as I have in the past. Going forward, I simply won’t have the time to devote an entire afternoon/evening to having a long argument/discussion in comments. I’ve noticed that the need to fight the good fight in the comments has made me considerably more skittish about posting on a variety of topics; I’ve caught myself thinking a few times “I could post on that, but then I’ll have to spend all day and most of tomorrow on the comment thread.” This is unfortunate, because I think there’s considerable value to a good, long comment thread discussion. However, given that a) I simply can’t devote the same amount of time to the threads that I have in the past, and b) the belief that I need to intervene in comments is resulting in fewer posts, and in posts less worthy of serious comment, I think that I have to step back a bit. What this means is that, in the future, I’ll be less likely to defend my baseless assertions and faulty logic in the comment threads. Again, my apologies…

…Spencer has some further thoughts on the relationship between bloggers and commenters.