Over the years I’ve developed a set of posting guidelines, affectionately known as “Da Roolz” in Chicagospeak. You can find them on the left sidebar, or by clicking here. If you’re new here, or haven’t yet read them, I urge you to do so, as it will facilitate discussion as well as making my job easier. I’ll just point out three of them that are particularly important these days.

a) f you’re a first-time poster, I have to approve your initial comment. This won’t necessarily be immediate, as it depends on my checking email.  After that, posting is automatic unless you become moderated for some reason.

Sometimes first-time posters assume that their comment was fouled up because it didn’t appear. And that could lead to them trying to make the same comment several times.  Not necessary: first comments need to be approved and thereafter, if you’re not moderated (some people are), your comments should appear automatically. I do appreciate people using their real names, but understand if you have good reasons not to do so.

b) Try not to dominate threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. I’ve found that those are rarely informative, and the participants never reach agreement. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.

This guidelines is often violated, and I vary in how much I feel like enforcing it. If there’s a good back and forth going on, I am not strict about it. But some persons feel that they have to respond to every comment, and in that case I will warn people. I almost never remove comments when they’re posted.

c.)  Be judicious about posting videos and very long comments.  I like good discussion, but essays are not on, particularly if you have your own website where you can post it.  Embedded videos are okay, but please think before posting: do they add to the discussion? If your comment is longer than, say, 400 words, it is probably too long. If you want to write stuff longer than that, please get your own website!

This guideline I do try to enforce, either by emailing the person with logorrhea or by adding a “reply” saying that “this comment is over the word limit; please try to post shorter comments”.  Comments are just that—comments and not essays.  Also, please try to keep your comments in line with what the post is about, though sometimes readers can introduce a diversion if it’s timely or important.

Several readers noted a glitch in the Jordan Peterson post, which involved the text running in a narrow column way down the page, making a mess of the whole thing.

Fortunately, Greg found the cause: some bad code that somehow got inserted into that post. He spent a fair amount of time fixing it, and now I think things are okay.

Many, many thanks to Greg for taking the time to do this. I hope we’ll be okay from now on.

Oh, and if you left a comment on the Jordan Peterson post that disappeared in the fix, please make it again. Thanks!

About half a dozen readers have reported that since yesterday they haven’t received their emails of posts on this site. (I think they’re all Gmail users.)  I have no idea what’s going on, and have called the problem to the attention of my web tech person.  I’m not sure if anything can be done about this, but I’m trying.

To judge the nature of the problem, simply put a comment below if you’ve stopped getting emails rather than emailing me about it.

In the meantime, if you have another email account I would suggest using that one, or, as in the good old days, just look at the site itself online once a day (there are rarely any posts after 2 pm Chicago time, and each day begins with a Hili Dialogue post).

I hope this is a temporary inconvenience, and I’m doing my best to get it fixed. Thanks.

Here’s a dilemma I face constantly. A lot of material on this site is devoted to opposing “progressive liberal” (i.e., “woke”) initiatives, particularly in science. And I’m pretty much of an absolutist when it comes to freedom of speech on campus, which isn’t exactly an attitude that’s au courant or ubiquitous among progressives.

Whenever another site links to a post on WEIT, which is fairly often, I get a “pingback” that lets me know that someplace has put up a link. Very often I go to see how my posts are being used, and very often—in fact at least 90% of the time—it’s a right-wing site like The College Fix, or The American Conservative, or someone like that, all of them decrying wokeness. Likewise, you’ll never see my criticisms of the incursion of wokeness into science appear in science journals—or in any left-wing media. In other words, my words are being uses to attack the Left, which happens to be the end of the political spectrum I’m on.

Now I could look at this situation in two ways.

1.) Since I go after what I see as irrational or harmful behaviors of “progressives”—and I do that to try to show that even liberals can call out their own, as well as to help purge the authoritarian and reflexively irrational elements on my own side of the aisle—I could regard these pingbacks as helping me in those efforts.

BUT

2.) The audience for these right-wing websites isn’t just interested in getting rid of “progressivism” or authoritarianism in the Left: they want to get rid of the entire Left. To the extent that my words are being construed as tarring the entire Left, I could be seen as hurting my own cause. Or even as helping the most dire Republicans around—the people like Trump who call out wokeness to go after Democrats in general.

Each time I see a pingback from one of these conservative sites, then, I am ambivalent. Am I helping or hurting my own cause? Like all people who take my point of view, I have of course been called “alt-right,” “racist”, and even a white supremacist. I brush off those names because they’re just slurs that progressives who lack arguments use to tar their opponents.

Now I’ve already my decision: I’m going to keep doing what I do (alternative 1) for several reasons. My motivations in calling out woke craziness is not to go after the Left as a whole, and thus I may, as someone with Leftist beliefs and a fairly activist track record, have more credibility than the right-wing sites who call out the same stuff. Further, I cannot bear it when the Left is associated with performative nonsense and general insanity. It’s like when someone in your family is acting badly: you call them out before others do, because, after all, they’re family. Finally, I still think that purging progressives from the Democratic side, or at least letting others know that we recognize the Follies of the Woke, will keep centrists from moving toward the Right. So long as people think all Leftists are “progressive”, they will shy away from the Left, and that would not be good.

I just wanted to air these thoughts. Readers are welcome to react, and you can tell me to dial down my criticisms of “progressivism,” but I’m not going to do it.  Oh, and please don’t lecture me about using the word “woke”. I have not found a good substitute and I’ve gotten plenty of blowback about that, which I’ve also rejected.