Modified On August 8, 2012
We took down a posting. We got tired of having our inbox clogged with comments. And having to administer the comments.
We have our WordPress dashboard configured so that we either have to approve, deny, edit, trash or label each comment spam. It’s extra work, but it’s our preferred way of doing things. The alternative is to allow comments from anyone who wants to. This opens up the comments to advertisements or vicious personal attacks or self-promotion or all manner of worthless, boring stuff.
One thing folks lose sight of is that this website is not a “forum” or a “chat room” or a “bulletin board.” It’s our website, our blog. We could, if we wanted to, disallow comments totally. (Preemptive strike: I you’re firing up the keyboard to crank out some sort of 1,200-word opus on just how “ironic” or “hypocritical” that is in light of our defense of free speech, you can save yourself the trouble. It is neither hypocritical nor ironic– not even using the loose, Alanis Morissette criteria that Ed Byrne so definitively skewered a while back.)
We aren’t obligated to run each and every comment. Especially when some comments are rambling or somewhat incoherent or boring or slightly off the topic or containing insults to us personally. Or followed up by emails that say, basically, “Fuck you.” Or augmented by disgruntled posts on our Facebook page!
We often tell people that this magazine is a “dictatorship.” We follow that up with the (only slightly) tongue-in-cheek advice to “start your own blog” if you’re not totally pleased with what’s transpiring on this one. That’s the beauty of the WWW. There’s plenty of real estate out there and the barriers to entry are astonishingly low.
After a while, it gets tiresome re-stating and re-re-stating our position. And it’s especially frustrating when our original position gets twisted, or folks read into a posting what clearly isn’t there. There are only so many hours in the day and, in case our readers have forgotten, we’re real, working comics who… work. And, in addition to curating this magazine and the comments thereon, we have other projects that require our attention.
We’re not saying that we’re shutting off all future comments. But we are saying that we’re shutting it down on this particular controversy, at least for the time being. Unless something new happens, we’ve said all we’re going to say about it.
We called a comic here or there a “nitwit” or an “alleged comedian.” We referred to some of their quotes in the press as “claptrap” or “profound ignorance” or “gross stupidity.” We avoided generalizations. We tried to keep our analysis as intelligent as we could. We were often passionate. We referenced Louis Brandeis, Friedrich Niemoller, the Canadian Charter and Ezra Levant, but we were assailed as “childish bullies” and told to calm down, wait, “come back in a year and let’s see what happened.” After THREE YEARS of this nonsense. So, you might be able to see why we felt a little bit like Kevin McCarthy in the final scene from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
And our talents as comedians and writers were called into question by more than one commenter. Not sure why, as we were careful to keep our criticism focused on the issue at hand– that of free speech.
We’re somewhat taken aback at the thin skin of some of our comedy colleagues. Comic after comic (on both sides of the border) effortlessly heaped insult after insult on Guy Earle. And questioned his credentials. And called him the worst thing you could call a comedian– “unfunny.” For those same comics to take umbrage at the relatively mild criticism we offered (which was, we point out, not focused on their relative talents but on their lack of critical thinking and commentary on the issue of free speech) is breathtaking.
But when we commented on the whole sorry situation, the response was not to debate the specific issue but to defend Canada or question our credentials or tell us to “STAY IN JERSEY FAGGOTS.” When we tried to re-focus the debate on the larger issue of free expression, many comments swerved back into the minutiae of the Tribunal or tedious nonsense about “hate speech” or needless assaults on Guy Earle… and on us.
Throughout the past three years of this trainwreck, reading comprehension on the part of some of the commenters has been dismal. (One reader even thought that we flew to Vancouver to cover the Tribunal!)
We’re shutting the debate down for now– at least on this site.
In the month of April, we had exactly six nights off. On our only days off, we were busy tying up the loose ends on our book. And we flew to Houston and back for an eleven-day road trip in the middle of the month. We enumerate these items not to garner sympathy but to demonstrate that the magazine is but one of our projects and that, in the interest of managing our time, we often are forced to allocate resources elsewhere.