Hey, We Keep Exalted R-Rated Company…

Posted on by

Mark Spahn, a regular GoV reader and commenter, told the Baron about the comment rules at one of Biggest of the Bigs (on the right side of the spectrum, anyway).
Powerline’s rules are as follows…

POSTED ON JULY 7, 2016 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN ANNOUNCEMENTS

A NOTE TO COMMENTERS (RATED R)

As I have mentioned a time or two before, we seek to maintain a tone appropriate to civil discourse on this site. It is a tone that comes naturally to most of our readers and commenters.

I review comments for abuse and vulgarity. Most of our commenters have no problem speaking in polite company. However, every day I now moderate comments by commenters who are routinely vulgar. Some commenters appear to be incapable of expressing themselves without recourse to words such as “ass” or “asshole” or “dumbass” or “bastard” or “shit” or “bullshit” or “fuck” or “balls” (of the anatomical variety) or the like and their many colorful variants. One commenter specializes in “libtard,” a word which is not acceptable here.

Our software generally holds such comments and prevents them from appearing without approval, but I am tired of reading them. Those of you who use such language in comments are warned to behave. Those of you who persist in using such language are cordially invited to take your business elsewhere. If you don’t, we will resort to the expedient of banning you from the comments.

We will not always toe the line ourselves. Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.

Personal abuse of fellow commenters or of the proprietors of this site is also discouraged. Even without vulgarity, personal abuse is unwelcome. Commenters who engage in it will be banned summarily.

These are the guidelines we apply:

We prize civil discourse and ask our commenters to observe elementary courtesies.

Exceptions may be made, and the line may be blurry, but vulgarity is prohibited.

Personal abuse of Power Line authors and commenters is prohibited.

Anonymous/pseudonymous comments are discouraged. If you have a good reason for hiding behind a pseudonym, send a message to my attention at our email address and I will entertain it.

These guidelines are not exhaustive. They may be applied inconsistently and their violation may result in the deletion of comments and the banning of commenters.

Thank you for your courtesies and consideration.

Oh, glory: a man after my own heart. I loathe the use of “libtards” and all the other infelicities some feel compelled to share.

But he didn’t mention the one I loathe most of all:

Please do not, under any circumstances, observe that “the old Chinese saying, may you live in interesting times certainly applies to the times we live in now”. It always applies!

Find the online thesaurus; it has more than forty substitutions for “interesting”. And leave out the Chinese part. We’ll all have to learn to speak Mandarin soon enough.

24 thoughts on “Hey, We Keep Exalted R-Rated Company…”

  1. “We’ll all have to learn to speak Mandarin soon enough.”

    Having had extensive contact with this culture, I believe it wouldn’t be the worst of all trade-offs. At first, they are not too proud to learn from us, and are absolutely eager to do so. But they are proud enough to not lose themselves over it. And this is something we can (re-)learn from them, among other things. Getting more familiar with this to us still very alien part of the world will be interesting in the positive sense, intermittent likely clashes of imperialism on both sides notwithstanding. For those who like science fiction, the “Firefly/Serenity” series offers a glimpse into a possible future after that has been overcome (ignore the space stuff if you prefer, watch instead how the culture is portrayed).

  2. We may live in unnecessarily entertaining times…all tedious and predictable. Rendered interesting or dull only in the telling.

  3. A polite word for left/lib/etc-tard is regressive.
    Regressive left, regressive socialism, regressive liberalism, regressive democrats, etc.
    Islamisation will continue until regressive parties (including right-wing) in the West are voted into oblivion.

    Instead of Left/Right I prefer Up/Down (patriot/traitor).
    Patriots serve the people (Up), traitors do the opposite (Down).
    Patriots protect the people against (a million) interlopers, traitors do the opposite.

  4. It may not seem like it, but these are more peaceful times than much of human history!

    • So true, Mark. We are lucky, so far. But it does seem if we are near a dark abyss and our foothold is shaky.

    • In the West, yes. But the non-West (in the form of the Mother of all Others, Islam) is increasingly interpenetrating the West, with an entelechy of supremacist expansionism no less certainly predictable than that of a chemical reaction, whose catastrophic inexorability is disguised only by three factors: its complexity; its protracted time period; and our politically correct multi-culturalist myopia preventing us from seeing it (where “it” means its actual nature & dimensions, rather than the more comfortingly whittled-down holograph of it we continue to construct in our anxious, semi-conscious Denial).

  5. Thank you for all your efforts to keep this a site of thoughtful, considerate, and intelligently written content.
    I follow a number of online groups for those of a similar persuasion. But when I read comments on many of them, my heart sinks at the language, atrocious spelling, grammar, and in many cases unnecessary personal insults that are exchanged.

    The leftist/liberal narrative controls much of the media, academia and the arts, and frequently claims the moral high ground. We have enough trouble convincing people that we are not knuckle-dragging Nazi thugs, or other stereotypes that mask the important topics we would like to discuss openly and intelligently.
    Here in the UK since the Referendum result, we have seen these stereotypes constantly reinforced and applied to those of us who voted in favour of Brexit.

    Whenever I log on to Gates of Vienna, I like to think of the educated founding fathers of the USA, gathering round a table for eloquent and informed discussion of pressing matters. In my mind, that is what I look forward to each day when I read your articles and commentaries.

    • Greetings

      The Nazis (National Socialist Democratic Labour Party) were not necessarily knuckle-dragging thugs. Their salute was based on a Roman salute that meant “I am unarmed and come in peace”. The skull on their hats and uniforms is symbolic of their oath of loyalty unto death – it represents the bearers own skull. Many of the welfare measures that are fundamental to our present society were introduced by the evil Nazis.

      Look at the real Nazis rather than the comic book version.

      TKS

      • Sorry to disabuse you, Rolf, but no-one knows how the Romans saluted. Fascist* writer Gabriele d’Annunzio came up with how he thought they should have; this was adopted by Mussolini and Hitler.

        * From “fasces”, bundles of rods with a projecting axe head, representing the power of a Roman magistrate.

  6. Dymphna, my personal pet hate is the repetitious use of ‘existential’ in cases where ‘exists’ is both clear and correct. ‘Existentialism’ (noun) is a philosophy; ‘existential’ is an adjective relating to existence; ‘exist(s)’** is an intransitive verb that does not take a direct object but only involves it – i.e. as in defining a temporal state.

    **From the Latin ‘exsistere meaning ‘to come into being’.

    • I for one am perturbed by folks who think that ‘irregardless’ is a word. Also annoying is folks who think ‘enormity’ describes something large in size.

      The word ‘regardless’ needs no prefix and ‘enormity’ is used to describe an awful situation.

      Then there are the people who describe a point as ‘mute’.

  7. Dymphna, do you recall the time recently when I wrote that you don’t draw the lines quite as tightly on the content of your own posts as you do the comments made by others? Your reply was a challenge for me to provide an example of any time you might have posted a vulgarity. I think we have that example here. In spades.

  8. I’ve been noticing for the past year or so that, as the totalitarians (both Islamic and Marxist PC) have been weaponizing politeness against us, a certain part of the new right has been using it as an excuse to abandon civility altogether, to fling epithets with abandon, to treat opponents with contempt, and to treat being crude and rude as a badge of honor, as proof that they haven’t been converged or turned into dhimmis. And in doing so, forget that civility is the social grease that enables a civil society to function. That we need to be able to disagree without being disagreeable, to discuss differences instead of humiliating opponents into silence, and not become what we fight.

    Thank you for helping to hold the line and resist the race to the bottom.

  9. There’s a chat room owner at Paltalk Chat (see my
    invitation
    to my readers, which I extend more Blogospherically here) who mans a chat room there called “Respectful Open Dialogue Social Experiment” where they strictly enforce all language to “train” people to be more civil in their discussions, especially of hot potato political and religious topics.

    That owner I think gets carried away, because he won’t even allow euphemisms like “Golly” and “Gee whiz” and “Darn” (I asked him once if “consarn it” would be okay, and that prompted him to receive a new revelation by which he enunciated the principle: “If you have any question or doubt in your mind about a word or phrase, don’t use it!”

  10. Supposedly, Winston Churchill said “Just because you are about to hang a man doesn’t mean you can’t be polite.”

    I have spent hours looking and cannot find any attribution. At this point my suspicion is that it is not an actual quote – at least not by Churchill. Still, I agree with the sentiment.

  11. My usage of a certain verboten term is a compound word (of sorts) that tries to express how Leftist thought retards common sense. But I guess that’s just in my mind.

    • Gee, occupant, I wish I’d thought of that! Clever.

      Is that rather lo key word really verboten here, Dymphna?

      I do well like polite, dispassionate and astute discourse of gentle nature, and the policy, (it is a clean relief in a disgusting reality of little and no respect out there) but that succinct little descriptive reference, admittedly at the edge of undesirable rhetoric,(albeit to me this side of the edge I think), that succinctly describes those of the left, the liberals even, who work very hard at “political correctness’ and other limiting setting terms, procedures and intentions , to assist in the endeavor to retard the highest and best discussions of reality and all that is good, as those types, are wont to do. Is that not so? Huh, did I just write the sound and the fury, over a simple little ol’ word?

  12. Or one could simply say, such a right and proper policy inures a site to a fine je ne sais quoi! It’s professional, actually!

Comments are closed.