
This week's crop of deleted comments made us feel a bit nostalgic, since a couple of them employ a rightwing rhetorical trope that we first noticed when we still read the local news-paper while listening to Fleetwood Mac on the Victrola. It's the simplest possible sort of non sequitur: just take any current event and point out that the Scourge Of Abortion is far worse. "I don't see why the plane crash in ____ is news when hundreds of babies are slaughtered daily..." "Your article on the Armenian Genocide reminded me that Americans are happy to deny their own genocide, legal since 1973..." "How can your reviewer complain about Ishtar when a true abomination takes place in Planned parenthood clinics every day?" So yeah, we got a couple of those this week.
Someone with the inevitable username "RealityObserver" wanted to know why we were so goshdarn upset about the flaky California lawyer who filed a ballot initiative that would require execution for all suspected homosexual persons, when there are in fact far worse things in the world? Apparently replying to someone who'd suggested that the lawyer be disbarred, RealityObserver wanted us to think long and hard about what's really important:
Ah, yes. May I ask where the tidal wave of ethics complaints is for those attorneys who have advocated laws (and have actually litigated) for abortion at any time, any place, for anyone? Laws permitting assisted suicide? Laws favoring particular racial groups over others? Laws denying psychological treatment to those who wish to voluntarily undergo it?
So that happened. Someone actually said that the very idea of affirmative action is just as bad, and maybe worse, than an open license for any citizen to execute people who love each other with the wrong combination of genitals.
Moving along, our more recent piece on an Arizona bill that would require doctors to lie to women about the alleged "reversibility" of abortions induced by medication brought a couple of comments from "relic5150," who is either from 3135 years in the future, a serious Sammy Hagar fan, or has inadvisably included their birthdate in their username. Or maybe they chose "relic" as a username since they've written a veritable museum piece of a comment, a single run-on sentence of a comment that's worthy of display in the National Gallery of Derp:
So you libtards are moronic enough to claim guns are bad yet see nothing wrong with millions of unborn helpless babies being slaughtered without any consequences,or the many instances of physicians murdering babies that didnt die in abortions through drowning them or other horrible stories,and those are just the ones that we know about,when in reality its like any other murder where the killer takes the secret to the grave,and for the record i hate both neocons and libtards,i believe anyone with rigid moronic ideology like democrips and rebloodlicans are scum who care more about towing the line for their "team" than actual common sense,this site is full of all you vile individuals.
We're not a medical Doktor, but we're guessing relic5150 must suffer from a terrible case of oligomenorrhea, since they almost never have a period. And we like the "many instances" of 'bortion doctors drowning live babbies after unsuccessful 'bortions, which has to be common because we know about them from people in internet comment threads -- probably happens at least twenty times a day. Still, thank you for establishing your nonideological credentials there.
Relic5150 had another eccentrically punctuated comment about the Type Of Woman who has an abortion, too. Would you believe they are all dumb sluts?
Heres a thought,why didnt that tramp use the many health departments throughout every state that hands out contraceptives for free instead of the many places that hand out abortions,or why didnt she just not have sex without birth control pills,and if she did she should be a woman and deal with it,theres literally millions of people that arent eligible for adoption because thier not in a gay or straight relationship,and literally every hospital or fire station will take them no questions asked,yet liberals would rather convince themselves that scrambling thier helpless brains is better,I wish theyd have done that to those same people like you.if a mother kills her child liberals would crucify her for murdering her child(as they should) but if that same child is not yet born somehow its not murder.
We're not sure who the "tramp" is that he's referring to, since neither the article nor the comment (which we do not allow) he was replying to mentioned an individual woman, although it did link to a political cartoon -- so we guess the woman in the cartoon is the tramp. Seems like an awful lot of vitriol to aim at a purely notional person. Still, lesson learned: Don't be a tramp, and if you have a babby, don't expect MY tax dollars to feed the little Taker.
We did get one genuine old-fashioned wingnut troll who felt compelled to post a reply to virtually every comment in the thread on Ted Cruz's apparently nonexistent campaign website. "FeralPundit," whose Disqus profile proclaims him (we assume) to be "Honest and fed up with Communists calling themselves 'Progressives'," wrote a ton of really dumb comments, almost none of which were memorable, but since he went to the trouble of writing them, we should at least return the favor and mock him mercilessly. A sampling:
you guys are really hanging on to nothing. Give it up already you failed over the last 6 years and you will fail in 2016 you won't get Warren or Killary and all your anti Constitution and Anti American policies will be shit on when we get Cruz in office for President.
Are you going to bash women? Why do you continue your war on women? Palin for VP 2016 AND the 2A stands LOL
You are no better then the KKK
Do you think a communist should be President? Oh yes you, obviously do
wouldn't you just crap yourself if Cruz selected Palin for VP? after he is elected ? HA HA HA
We liberals are so stupid that we think VP candidates are nominated before the general election. Gosh, why don't we get out of the way and let some SMRT people run things for a change? Or maybe FeralPundit had some kind of House of Cards scenario in mind whereby the Mad Albertan would knock off his elected veep (Carly Fiorina, why not?) and then select Palin as a replacement.
And finally, in response to our story about the Clear and Present danger of transgender people using the wrong locker rooms, we got these Science Facts from "Jenny Green" to help women know when they need to call security on some sneaky tranny:
All a woman has to do to tell if there is a (born) male in the locker room with her is to look at people's faces. Their temples/eyes specifically. A male can take hormones and have surgeries and have on an amazing amount of cosmetics, etc but 99.9% of the time I can still tell they were not born female and it's something about their eyes. Or perhaps it is something to do with skull formation? Definitely something about the temples and eyes (for me anyways) are the trigger to how I can tell. However, I've also noticed that some human beings are more sensitive to this than others.
And even if her lessons on physiognomy aren't altogether accurate for identifying transwomyn, we imagine that staring at the eyes of other women in locker rooms is bound to lead to hot girl-on-girl action, at least according to all the documentaries we've seen.
Yes, you do need to lighten up.
Deleting comments has nothing to do with intolerance and everything to do with keeping our pages from becoming the cesspool that open comments so often lead to.
So yes, I delete comments. I delete comments that are just invective, I delete comments that appear to be trolling or concern trolling, I delete comments that attempt to start or re-kindle flame wars, and I delete comments that are screedy.
Do we have a set of rules deciding what stays and goes? No.
Our goal is too keep the comments fun, funny, and reasonably safe for our regulars. I delete anything that I feel works against those goals.
And your being stuck on this one issue, and posting repeatedly about it two days later, means you are very close to appearing to be working against those goals.
So yes, lighten up, move on, and everybody is happy.
Wrong. Men have different superciliary arches, orbits, temporal lines, larger mastoid process, and larger & rounded tympanic plates. All of these things are located on a human skull.