A Comment on Comments

Last week we started allowing people to post comments on this Blog and the response has already been strong, with a flurry of postings from left and right. A couple of notes on our new comments feature. First, while I try to glance at the comments occasionally I am not going to take time to respond to them. If I did then I wouldn’t have time to do my job. Second, despite a recent, mistaken suggestion otherwise, we don’t “censor” any commentary. There isn't even a human in the loop on this, a computer somewhere posts the comments.

Lastly, in contradiction to my note above that I do not comment on comments I will say this to the guest who attacked me for my “lack of support for the revolutionary surge of the Bolivian masses” and other assorted offenses. There are indeed people out there who troll the world (and apparently the Internet) looking for people who don’t come up to their standards of leftist purity. I gave that up around my junior year in college. It didn’t seem all that useful then and seems less so now. I also don’t share the romatic love that some outsiders to Bolivia have with violence for the cause. I have spent too many hours with the mothers of dead young people.