The caliber of discourse has degenerated at Naked Capitalism in the wake of Trump taking office and his multi-front attack on government operations and legal agreements, from trade pacts to requirements for firing Federal employees.
I am disabling comments on all live posts.
There’s been a marked coarsening, with nastiness, celebration of cruelty, unsubstantiated personal opinion, too-evident need to win arguments, bad faith, sophistry, and other abuses becoming common.
One of many examples: there has been a continuation of the discourtesy I have called our repeatedly, of readers speculating on factual matters they could have easily cleared up via spending 30 seconds on a search engine and finding a Wikipedia entry or similar source with solid commentary and its own links. But it then takes me a bare minimum of ten minutes to read it and its evidence carefully and then pen a properly argued and supported repsonse that clears up the precipitating fabrication. I am not your fact checker. I resent being asked to perform that role after numerous warnings to cut that out.
I am not going to allow readers to turn the comments section into a cesspool. The mods do not have authority and in cases, the subject matter knowledge to tell misbehaving readers off. It’s emotionally draining and a time sink for me to do it. It is simply not worth the effort to clean up the tribalism, disinformation and rhetorical bogosity, particularly when the many of the perps are regulars who ought to know better by now.
I have really had it. We have never had to blacklist and moderate so many people in such a short period of time. And the time it takes to wipe off the bile means I am not getting high quality posts done, let alone press on with the important critically important task of vetting possible replacements for Lambert and making sure we are on the same page about their responsibilities. They are far more important than riding herd on out of control comments.
I am further concerned that the level of rancor and low value remarks will lead the new writers quitting because they similarly find contributing for the site to be emotionally punishing. Readers succeeded in driving off our most seasoned moderator, Jules, via the toxicity of the comments (there are plenty we see that you don’t, on top of those who get get abusive with me by e-mail, so what appears does not come close to a full picture of what the admins and moderators see). And Jules was thick-skinned, having moderated some ugly fights at other sites.
Even the comments we do allow approve are more and more often emotionally exhausting. The big reason is too many readers persisting in arguments where they continue to offer mere opinion or at best evidence that has been debunked or won’t consider (and at least try to correct for) the limits of their knowledge.
So the exchange is low/negative value added to our collective knowledge and a time waster for me.
Consistent with this view, some established readers have told me they’ve noticed the decay in tone and substance in comments in the last few weeks to the degree they’ve stopped reading the comments altogether. The mods independently confirm the decline in quality.
I must also admit to being disgusted. While our overarching mission is to promote critical thinking, there are some issue on which there is no other side. Israel’s genocide is one of them. I am therefore truly appalled that some of you support the Trump ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza. Israel’s atrocities are far and away the biggest human rights abuse of the last eighty years. I am ashamed that my country is fully backing it and I am powerless to stop it. And the efforts to justify the Trump scheme are morally bankrupt. If there were any way I could bar Zionism defenders from reading the site, I would.
Don’t try discussing this action on any of the open comments sections. Those comments will be deleted.
We have been at this juncture before. I am well aware of the options, like implementing a fully registered comments section. So don’t e-mail me. Our site Policies state we don’t engage with readers privately about comments. If you try to, it will only harden my view about how common the lack of respect for boundaries has become.
I called Jules about the latest decline. He reads a lot of other sites along with NC. He believes the Internet environment has become too polarized for even a moderated comments section to be net value added. You are in the process of proving him right. Please don’t.
