Vox Day On Blog Comments

I get a kick out of Vox Day. Viz:

Now, I'm not terribly concerned about the blog numbers here, but I'll admit that when I first considered a request to add comments to this blog, I was somewhat skeptical about the concept. Being fully aware that most people are idiots, I correctly anticipated that most comments posted would be idiotic. This has certainly proved to be the case. If anyone happen to find that statement insulting, so be it, feelings can't change the observable fact that most of the comments here are juvenile, off-topic, illogical demonstrations of self-obsession when they are not feeble, illogical, and error-prone attempts at criticism of one sort or another. And then there's those that somehow manage to combine both....

The fact that the discussion in the comments here is nevertheless of a higher intellectual quality than can one usually find elsewhere is a potent practical argument against democracy.

What people often forget is that the commenters on a blog make up a small fraction of the readers of that same blog. A few people may read blogs for their comments, but the vast majority do not, the self-inflated fantasies of some blog commenters notwithstanding. Moreoever, a blog's commenters tend to be the most outspoken, fractious, and emotionally troubled portion of its readership. They inevitably cause problems; the notorious trolls are actually much less irritating than the revenant-stalkers who are so socially inept that they cannot refrain from showing up where they know they are not wanted. Add to this the emotionally incontinent fanboys who respond inappropriately to everything from criticism of the blogger to criticism from the blogger and you've basically got a worthless morass of wasted time in the making. It doesn't help when people feed the trolls and revenants by responding to them either.

This is a real problem for many bloggers and I don't blame those, like Ross Douthat, who have decided that it's simply not worth the trouble trying to manage the unmanageable. Fortunately, it's not a problem for me, for three reasons. First, as I have repeatedly stated, most people are idiots - functionally if not literally - and that applies to most commenters here. Until you demonstrate otherwise, rest assured that I hold you in all the intellectual regard you have merited to date, which is to say none. I therefore need not concern myself with your ramblings. Second, while I definitely do care what some people think, you almost certainly aren't on that particular list. I might like you, I might find you amusing, I might even regard you as a positive mutation and a distinct step forward in the evolution of Man... but that doesn't mean that I care what you think. Third, as a libertarian down to the bone, I don't believe that it is possible to manage people for an extended period of time, so I'm not inclined to waste my time trying.

So, no one need be concerned that I'm going to ditch the comments. They are often useful, occasionally amusing, and always completely avoidable...