Comments on: Tact in bloggage

By: john b

john b — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 05:02:00 +0000

There’s a dilemma there – on the one hand yes, on the other hand it is doing the same thing (speculation about why what happened happened before the bodies are even buried) that people tried to avoid doing in Beslan.

I’d argue that talking about Darfur in this way is in poor taste but necessary; I’d also argue the same was true for Beslan.

By: nick

nick — Tue, 07 Sep 2004 20:57:00 +0000

I don’t understand the passing statement about Darfur. Don’t you have to talk about things like that to raise awareness?

By: Jimmy Doyle

Jimmy Doyle — Mon, 06 Sep 2004 11:27:00 +0000

Michael:

Banning a comment on the grounds that it tries to justify the deliberate murder of innocent people does not involve a "subjective judgement of taste."

By: john b

john b — Sun, 05 Sep 2004 18:01:00 +0000

John, if what is bothering you is the fact that you personally commented before I closed down the comments then be assured that my decision was not a reaction to your points.

Don't worry, I wasn't worried about that.

I'm now not quite sure whether your reasoning was general taste and decency ('how can we talk about the causes when children are dying?'), which seems a little self-indulgent to me; or to stop specific horrible people from being horrible. Earlier I'd forgotten the extent to which the latter happens on your site, so had assumed the first.

By: Harry

Harry — Sat, 04 Sep 2004 07:22:00 +0000

John, if what is bothering you is the fact that you personally commented before I closed down the comments then be assured that my decision was not a reaction to your points.

I think it is fairly obvious why comments were turned off and it is also obvious, to me, why most of the British blogosphere has been very quiet for the past 24 hours.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 04 Sep 2004 03:38:00 +0000

It’s a tricky one – while Dave’s comment was undoubtedly stupid, insensitive and offensive in the extreme, it was nonetheless rather more directly on-topic than quite a few others, and so there’s no obvious reason for banning it except on the grounds of taste (which I think is a dreadful reason for imposing bans, as it involves subjective value judgements). This is quite apart from the fact that I completely agree with your "insight" reason!

So I think Harry’s decision to suspend all comments for the moment is the most practical one – there’s no finger-pointing or accusations of trollery, and we all get a chance to actually think about what we’re going to write for when the comments get switched back on. Or at least I imagine that’s the theory…