Comment Linearization
August 8, 2012 § 3 Comments
I turned off comment nesting, because I despise it. Unfortunately, when you do that WordPress (which I am just getting to know) apparently ‘flattens’ out preexisting comment threads which were nested. The comments in the last several posts are affected, which may make things look a bit more disjointed than the commenters intended. Sorry about that.
I prefer linear comments because they make it easier to follow a thread over time. I also prefer them because they encourage us to directly quote the part of someone else’s post to which we are responding. This has lots of benefits, not least of which is that it makes it a bit harder (though of course not impossible) to pretend someone said something he didn’t say. Bad paraphrase (“Bob said he wants to pitchfork children!”) is one of my pet peeves, though I know I’m not completely immune myself. I consider it a vicious form of calumny when it is done on purpose; so lets never do it on purpose and try hard not to do it on accident.
I ran into a problem a few comments ago. Are we able here to use standard html tags like <i>? I have seen it in some of your comments but did not have success with my own.
I did edit one of your comments to fix a tag. (One nice thing about WordPress is that I can edit comments).
[...] Yet with all of this I’ve held my tongue and elected to let it slide, because I still hoped to profit from an exchange of ideas. Yet in your Cynicism post you now declare that Lydia was right in her marathon slander of me on your blog, and both of your last two posts amount to what you yourself define as the sin of calumny: [...]