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[ # ] Captain Capitalism and Blog Comment Policies
April 3rd, 2007 under Blogging, Comments


[Update (Wednesday): Captain Capitalism has now posted my comment, so the example no longer hold, but the rant outside of the example is still valid.]

Here’s something that bugs me about issues bloggers. You know, people who have a blog where they take a stance - political, economic, religious, etc. - and consistently publish information on that topic. So far, no problem. People can blog about whatever they want. What I have a problem with is the comment policies of some blogs in this category.

Here’s my take: If you’re going to host an issue blog, and if you’re going to allow comments on said blog, you should allow comments from anyone who’s willing to contribute an on-topic comment.

The incident that’s managed to get me worked up happened at a local blog called Captain Capitalism. The blogger is a fundamentalist capitalist who publishes commentary on the news of the day through his fundamentalist view. On a recent post, found here, he posted a graph from the Economist that shows Columbia’s economy improving over the time with the commentary:

“Again, it’s amazing what happens when adults take over.”

Captain Capitalism is clearly pleased with Uribe’s policies.

I decided to drop an on-topic comment mentioning that one of the “adult” decisions made by Uribe was to impose a 1.2% tax on the liquid wealth of higher income Columbians, and how different that is from the “sacrifices” George W. Bush has asked of America’s higher income citizens in a time of war - tax cuts.

My comment was moderated and never published by Captain Capitalism. It’s been two days, and he’s since posted another post to his site, so I don’t believe it’s a case of not getting to it yet.

In my opinion, Captain Capitalism and other bloggers like him/her should:

1. Remove the comments feature from their blog if they’re not going to allow them.

2. Or have a clear comments policy that says, “comments from people who don’t share my fundamentalist world view will not be posted.”

That way, people will know what they’re getting: rebuttle-less fundamentalist commentary. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just a little disclosure would be nice.


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    Read the Comments

    [ # 1077 ] Comment from Bill Roehl [April 4, 2007, 6:05 am]

    I have pissed off several commenters on my site by not publishing their “opinions”. I usually ignore off-topic comments or comments that are full of pointless Bill-hatred speech. When the comment is full of Bill-hatred, I don’t feel comfortable editing out that stuff and then replying. I usually just summarize their complaint and post my reply in a new comment.

    It’s not that I don’t want dissenting viewpoints on my site, it’s that I don’t want to encourage other people to tell me to go F myself.

    In the case you mentioned, it sounds lame but it is his site — glad you pointed it out to the rest of us so we don’t go there and waste our time :)

    [ # 2052 ] Comment from Capt. Capitalism [May 9, 2007, 4:07 pm]

    I thought I did post it!

    Sorry, sometimes I get behind on the postings.

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