Coarse Comments

Sometimes I wonder whether to turn comments off, as some bloggers have already done. Google feeds visitors to just a handful of pages on this blog, for the most part, and those posts tend to concern narrow, technical topics of limited interest to me, such as Blexbot scrapers, or my method for cheating in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, or Kubuntu 13.04. I wrote them, true, but they are not subjects that I find to be of great or abiding interest. The popularity of these posts reflects what people tend to search for on Google and also the stringent competition on Google for philosophical topics. Whenever I write on philosophy, I can almost guarantee no one will ever comment on the post. My site finds a little niche in the search engine database only where narrow, obscure and complicated technical topics are concerned, because there are not enough writers in the world on these topics.

The quality of comments is occasionally deplorable. Recently, someone commented that Blexbot programmers "should be hung from a tree," which I deleted, because that is a horrible thing to say, for many reasons. Such sentiments, common though they may be, will not be published on my watch. I do believe in censorship, where threats and insults are concerned, and this was a key matter of disagreement between myself and a former friend of mine. Some words are precursors to (s)words. That swords not be drawn, let such provocations remain unsaid.

Another person commented that "lol cheating is fun," in reply to a hack for a game, which struck me as ungrammatical, evoking the image of the writer sitting by his computer with a long silvery thread of drool hanging from his open mouth and a dozen empty beer cans by his feet. I invest time and thought into my posts, and if a commenter lacks the ability to do the same, then their comment does not need to live.

I've had worse comments, too, like the one from the meth fan who cursed me in several comments, for no apparent reason, until he revealed the irritant by arguing "some people can handle their meth," which may be up for debate, but foul and abusive language curtails all debate and cedes the field to the other side, me. Former meth users, such as musician Rufus Wainwright and comedian Margaret Cho, two prominent celebrities, have come forward and revealed that meth caused them pain and suffering, along with disturbances in their relationships with other people. Although the same can be said for alcohol, this is not quite the case with a substance like marijuana, which is non-toxic and does not harm the human body. Margaret Cho called marijuana "a vegetable, not a drug," an assertion that I think has some merit, because it is certainly not harmful in the same way that other drugs are harmful. One can use too much marijuana, just as one can eat too much asparagus, but the effects are not as serious as using too much alcohol. Alcohol can and does kill its users in a variety of ways, whereas marijuana does not. On the other hand, I do not believe meth is safe for humans, and have said so here, although I allow a possible exception during battlefield tactics, for which meth has a certain historical basis deriving from WW2. For civilians, I find it difficult to imagine any scenario where meth would be useful medicine, although along with other substances, it could possibly enhance the end-of-life experience for those about to die. I dislike advocating blanket rules that cover all situations, because as an engineer, I know that the devil is in the details. There will be cases that are unforeseen, because who among us sees all?