Comment Policy

Those of you familiar with Cate Speaks may experience a sense of recognition reading this, as we have adopted the comments policy basically wholesale.

We want to balance two things on this blog. On the one hand, we want this blog to be as informative as possible, and as accurate as possible. One way to do this is to always link back to the site from which we obtained the information we are analysing. Another way is to allow for the possibility of rebuttals. This means that if we’ve written about you or your party and you think we’ve got things wrong, you are welcome to comment in reply and make corrections. When this happens, we will generally edit the post to point people to the comment section – and if we’ve been wildly factually inaccurate and have time, we will also edit the offending section to fix the problem.

What we will not tolerate on this blog is abuse of other commenters – and we’re not especially fond of being abused ourselves. We’re also not going to tolerate racist, sexist, or other unpleasant and demeaning statements about particular groups within the population. The other part of making this blog as useful and informative as possible is making it a place where people are not going to be attacked for commenting, and where people are not going to be triggered by things in the comment thread. Arguments and policies are fair game – people are not.

Who decides what is racist, sexist, etc?

That would be us.

In practice, what this means is that provided you remain reasonably polite and attack the argument rather than the person, your comments will be approved (incidentally, all comments are currently going directly to moderation, regardless of who they are from – we apologise for the resulting delay, but it is unfortunately very necessary on the modern internet). However, if you start abusing people, or making nasty and unsubstantiated blanket statements about large segments of the population, your comment is not going to be approved. And if you keep on commenting in this vein for long enough that we get tired of deleting your comments from my inbox, you will be added to the blocked list, never to be seen again. (And seriously, if you have *that* much to say, why not get a blog of your own? The internet is a big place, and there is room for all of us.)

Incidentally, there is one exception to the rules above. On occasion, people leave obnoxious or offensive comments on this blog that make our arguments better than we ever could. Those, we let through. Because in addition to allowing rebuttals on this blog, we are very much inclined to give people enough rope to hang themselves…

You might want to consider this before you leave a comment.