Civility

I am planning in the future on deleting comments whose style falls short of academic standards of civility due to such things as sarcasm, insults, ungrounded accusations, or a general failure of a measured, calm and respectful tone. I would probably have already done so if other people than I were the targets of the violations of civility, but in the future I plan to do so even when I am the target, in the interests of discouraging uncivil discourse. Moreover, commenters should count on a high likelihood of being banned after about three violations, and earlier if the violations are more egregious. If your comment is deleted, feel free to re-post in better style. If you've been banned and want to be reinstated, email me.

Annoyances

A week or two ago, Google stopped supporting the authentication protocol used by my commandline tool for posting posts to my blog. I downloaded a new set of commandline tools for posting to blogger and integrated it into my script. Turns out the new tools used OATH, which Google coincidentally phased out in favor of OATH2 a few days later. :-( I still need to find the right tools. The problem is that (a) I prefer editing my posts from the commandline with vim than typing them into Blogger's web interface, and (b) I had a lot of simplified TeX-like math processing in my posting script as well as other conveniences, say for numbered propositions. I considered switching to MathJAX, but MathJAX is annoyingly slow--it first shows the web page with the TeX codes, and then redraws. Moreover, the font doesn't match most of my text. So I reverted from MathJAX. I am hoping I can adapt the b.sh package to do the job--from its source code it looks like it does OATH2.

Internet Explorer 8 problems

One or two users reported problems accessing my blog with Internet Explorer 8.  I use Google Chrome (highly recommend!) or Firefox on all the x86 systems I use regularly, so I wasn't seeing any problems.  IE 7 is also fine.  I downloaded IE 8, and the problem was with the tag cloud.  So I had to replace it with a list, not wanting to learn javascript to debug it.  But it should be fine.  I've also decreased the number of posts that show up when you just go to alexanderpruss.blogspot.com.  This might be helpful with respect to decreasing load time for users who are viewing with phones.  Please comment with any other usability changes you'd like.

Conversations, anonymity and pseudonymity

A central feature of normal human conversations is the re-identification of individuals. It would not be a normal human conversation if a bunch of blindfolded people sat around wearing headphones and microphones, with the speech from the microphones being fed into a voice disguiser which reduced all the voices to one, and with no one identifying herself. A normal conversation requires constancy of interlocutors. The re-identification of individuals is what makes dialectical accountability possible. Moreover, through conversation, one ideally becomes friends. But friendship requires individuation.

Consequently, I am disallowing anonymous comments on this blog as of immediately. I might reconsider given good reason.

I should note that I have benefited significantly in the past from anonymous comments, and I hoping that persons now commenting anonymously will post under their real names or, at least, under a nom de plume.

I do, in fact, also believe pseudonymity is something unfortunate. Our actions and words express us: it is unfortunate if we do not openly stand behind them. I think there is a strong presumption against pseudonymity (cf. this post of mine). If you feel that the alternative to participating pseudonymously is not participating at all, I ask that you examine carefully why it is that you are unwilling to stand publicly behind one's views. This examination might yield one of three conclusions: (a) one should speak publicly in one's own name; (b) one should be silent; or (c) genuine prudence forces one into psuedonymity. I fully understand that, for instance, persons living in totalitarian regimes, graduate students and untenured faculty, etc. can have very good prudential reasons for participating only pseudonymously in discussion, and so I am not banning pseudonymous participation.

In fact, I strongly advise graduate students and untenured faculty to post only pseudonymously, unless they have good reason to believe the prudential concerns do not apply to them. (I should also note that if one is in a category where one's life or liberty depends on not being identified, it might be wiser not to post even pseudonymously unless you use appropriate independent encryption-based services to access the Internet, since there may still be ways of being tracked down.)

Whether one falls in a category where pseudonymity is justified is a judgment one must leave to the individual prudence of the phronimos.

Nonetheless, I do ask that if you use a pseudonym, you try to stick to one pseudonym. This will make possible the re-identification of conversation partners. I can, however, understand that you might on rare occasions switch to a new pseudonym (e.g., if one's cover has been blown, or one has lost access to an account).

Possible slowdown in responding to comments

I've been appreciating a lot of the comments, and am grateful for all the interest in my half-formed ideas. However, this is a very busy summer for me. I need to finish my book One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (Notre Dame University Press). So while I will try to continue to blog (except maybe while traveling for a certain 1.5 week period), I may have to go light on responding to comments. Please don't think your comments are being ignored if I do not respond to your comment.