Our Policy on Comments

We love to get comments on our posts. We particularly like comments that engage in constructive conversation.

Comments on this blog are, however, moderated, mostly to keep out irrelevant and annoying spam. Your comment may take several hours to pass moderation. There are two of us who moderate comments, but we do have lives, and sometimes we're both off line at the same time. (And we also live in the same time zone.) If after twelve hours your comment does not appear, other possible reasons are:

(1) The blog software has swallowed it. This has happened several times that we know of. So it's not all that unlikely. If you think there's no reason we might have rejected it (see below), please try again.

(2) Your comment was not in a language we are familiar with, written in characters we cannot read. We reject such comments with apologies.

(3) Your comment was a total non-sequitur of the sort one might find in a personals ad in an old thriller, placed by one spy to signal to another. It looks like a mistake, something intended for another post on another blog, somehow strayed here by chance. Our assumptions is that it's the internet equivalent of a wrong number, and so we reject it as such.

(4) Your comment is malicious in tone or likely to provoke an argument that will conveniently divert attention from the subject under discussion. Trolls aren't welcome here. We have no intention of providing an opportunity for hate wars, whether directed against a particular person or an entire group. And so we reject comments from trolls as a matter of course.