The "Old Gang"

I find that I have got a few idle moments for once so I thought that for the benefit of the newer readers of this blog I might explain who "The old gang" are.

When I took over TT, there were huge amounts of "rubbish" comments being posted -- comments with little or no detectable relevance to the posts they were attached to. I felt that readers of the blog deserved better than having to wade through all that stuff so I deleted such comments whenever I had time.

Some of the deleted comments however came from a group of people -- the old gang -- who were using the blog as a sort of social networking site. They did not take kindly to me disrupting their activities and some of them remain hostile towards me to this day.

I did however in effect say to them that if they did not like the way I ran TT, then they should start their own blog. That they eventually did. Its current incarnation is here. It is quite a reasonable blog though it does amuse me that I still seem to be their demon-figure.

I don't however see why I should host on any of my own blogs comments that are abusive or threatening towards me personally so I do delete such comments. If that's "censorship", then so be it.

Some of the old gang still do comment here, however, and one of them made explicit threats to sabotage this blog -- presumably by flooding it with hostile comments. So that was when I instituted moderation. He posts under the name of "Lemmiwinks" but from a very disgruntled email that I received shortly after I instituted moderation, I gather that he is in fact Steven R. Smith (steve.smith@chartercom.com). There are so many Smiths around, however that he might as well still be anonymous.

I am always a little surprised that on all my blogs a lot of the commenters who disagree with me don't seem to have read what I actually wrote. I usually delete such comments on my other blogs but I let them stand here. Other commenters often put them right.

There are of course plenty of ways in which people might reasonably disagree with what I write as my libertarian inclinations do put me well outside the mainstream. And I do let stand many disagreeing comments of that sort. Regrettably, however, I rarely have the time to reply to such comments. Again, however, other commenters often take up the cudgels fairly effectively. My thanks to them.