We got the best comments! (WOT)

By
Greg Diamond
– May 11, 2018Posted in: Fresh Juice, OC Blogosphere, Orange Juice Blog, Weekend Open Thread

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Kindly acquired though http://www.freakingnews.com/Insect-Fighting-Pictures–1577.asp

Second, and (as is my style) at far greater length:

This blog went through some dark times last fall and winter.  I had had my stroke in late August as was struggling through it.  (I still am, when it comes to typing with my left hand.  Writing takes me longer than it used to because of the increase in typos.  Out of sheer luck, though, my analytical and verbal abilities were left unscathed.)  Vern, meanwhile, was doing “inpatient” rehab due to a “DUI” that didn’t involve his actually driving an inch — one of the nice surprises one gets once one has been processed through the criminal justice system.  Others among our leading writers were generally unavailable for various reasons, so I had to try to gut it through mostly on my own — and judging from readership numbers I did a pretty poor job of it.

There was some sentiment to just let the blog die — maybe to return, maybe not — rather than trying to keep it showing signs of life.

There are various reasons why I kept on banging my head against the wall to keep it going, and the main one is this: we occupy a niche in the OC political blogosphere — or even in the political journalism community (both professional and amateur divisions) — than no one else does.  First, we run the gamut in terms of the political perspectives of those who write here and those who comment here, but that’s not entirely unique.  Our uniqueness is less in the quality and diversity of our stories — I think that Vern and I do produce some good ones, but we’re hardly alone in that — than in another aspect of this blog in which I take particular pride: our comments section, which is terrific.

We simply have the best comments section of any local politics site site around.  (I’m not including national blogs like Vox or state ones like what’s-his-face’s in Irvine that just happen to be located here; I’m talking about locally oriented ones.)  Most comments sections — including the Voice of OC’s and OC Weekly’s and the Register’s — are excruciating.  Some, like Liberal OC’s and others I won’t deign to mention, are worse than excruciating — cesspits of lying an hatred not by mere neglect, but by conscious design.

This blog has that deep in its history, and I recognize that in some ways it was a lot more fun for some people.  But it came at a cost, one that was being imposed perhaps without realizing it.  Bad commenting drives out good.  The sort of people who can offer good, thoughtful, often laboriously crafted commentary don’t want to share the space with pseudonymous drive-bys accusing others (often in bigoted tones) of perfidy and perversion, and they generally don’t want to have their thoughts dragged into the gutter with a “U SUCK, asshole, HAW-HAW lol” or its like.

The difference here — and it takes hours per month to maintain — is simple: as a general rule, we don’t allow anonymous attacks.  We have some commenters for whom we’ll make slight exceptions — we generally know who they are, we can ask them to clean up their act, and the good they provide far outweighs the occasional bad — but by and large if you want to slag someone here you have to be prepared to own it.  Others (Voice of OC comes to mind) SAY that their policy is something like this — but they don’t much enforce it.  We do.  (Generally, I do.  Well, me and the automatic filters that we’ve set up, which root out most of what turn out to be problematic posts and send most of the rest to moderation.)

The benefits become clear when you look at our election coverage.  Take a look, if you haven’t, at our coverage of the CA-39 race.   Forget the story, for these purposes; just read the comments.

Most of the discussion is between me and our new community member Donovan — and I honestly don’t think that you will find a better or more frank discussion of the relative merits of Democratic frontrunners Gil Cisneros and Andy Thorburn anywhere.  Both of of acknowledge weakness of our favored candidates — for him, Cisneros; for me, after much agonizing, Thorburn — and spell out how and why we make our decisions.  Of course I’m biased, but this is the sort of public contribution to discourse of which I’m proud to be a party.  And for both of us — compare this to Liberal OC — we’re at arm’s length from our favored candidates.

Then, you have someone we don’t even know, Paul Martin, coming in to offer perspective that I don’t have (and I doubt any other countywide publication has) on Andrew Sarega and his father and fellow candidate (in SD-32 Ion — that volunteer bloom doesn’t happen unless you prepared your garden for it.  And there’s someone calling himself “No Name” — though I hope he won’t remain that way for long — who just weighed in with a spirited defense of Sam Jammal and measured, intelligent, and fair criticisms of Cisneros and Thorburn.  I hope that others like Vern, Ricardo Toro, Ryan Cantor, David Zenger, Paul Lucas, Cynthia Ward, and Ron Winship will eventually wade into the discussion as well, if they’d like, as one of the main features of this blog’s political coverage is that we don’t just agree to stay out of one another’s business.

That last comment is what prompted this short essay.  This is how it’s supposed to be!  This was worth my trying to rouse my tired body and wrack my stricken brain for things to write about over the past eight months.  I want to read such discussion — and someone that means having to build a home for it, like it you want to see hummingbirds.

This is your Weekend Open Thread.  Talk about whatever, within reasonable limits.

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About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)