With the leadership race in full swing and the American election winding down we've seen a lot swiping and over the top smears, much of it anonymous, some of it very personal, on Liberal blogs these past few days. Let me propose a solution, albeit an imperfect one for the months ahead. I propose that ALL Liberal blogs cease to alllow anonymous comments on their blogs. If someone wants to launch outlandish accusations/smears then I think they should do so under their own name or at least have to have a google/wordpress account to do so. Here I made that decision after an anonymous personal attack on a friend of mine was posted as a comment for a post I did this past summer. I also took the extra step of returning to moderating comments because of that. I am not suggesting anyone to take that extra step, but to instead at least try to minimize the possibilty of people hiding behind pseudonymns.
Yes I know people can still invent fake blogger accounts or wordpress ones, but think of this as being like child safety lids on Tylenol, sure the child may still bust it open, but we shouldn't make it so easy for them to do so.
Now I realize this may mean less comments on your blogs, but I happen to believe that we can't complain about anonymous smears of Liberals appearing in Jane Taber columns and then allow those anonymous smears on our blogs ourselves. If you write an interesting post, I'm sure you'll still get lots of comments.
But as the title states, this is just a modest proposal to improve the discourse around here just a little. If you personally disagree with it, or it might prove impractical depending on your blogging sofware, so be it. But it is my hope that at least a few more bloggers do go along. I fear that as the leadership race carries on, the anonymous comments will be flooding in otherwise.
Let's just do our part to keep it civil, and for those who choose to launch outlandish smears, then hopefully at least we will know who it is actually coming from.
So who will join the campaign for civility?
Recommend this Post
