Dear patient readers,
I hope you are having a wonderful holiday season, either via enjoying Christmas festivities, or if you do not observe Christmas, by taking advantage of the typical year-end activity break.
We will be on a lighter posting schedule, with only Links and two other daily posts through and including New Year’s Day. I believe Lambert will keep up Water Cooler most days but he really should take a break too.
We will give our moderator a break, which means I will be the only one moderating comments, so it could be quite a while before they are freed, particularly ones posted in the afternoon US time. Keep in mind we are being nicer than in the past, when we had comments holidays, of turning comments off entirely to give the mods a break.
Regarding moderation, we are now critically short-handed. One of our moderators quit over the summer to take up better money-making opportunities. Moderator katiebird was able to take up his hours. However, our longest-standing moderator Jules just resigned over finding the comments to be so toxic that it was affecting her health.
We have two resulting problems. First is that Jules was volunteering her time, so it is not as if her having resigned frees up budget to pay for another moderator. The second is that WordPress is set up so that only administrators can moderate comments. This is perverse because it has a “Editor” role which can edit any post, but an editor cannot moderate comments.
So not only do we have a budget issue, we also have the problem that we have to really know and trust anyone who might act as a moderator.
Anyway, please be patient. We are doing the best we can.
P.S. The photo is from mgl, who adds: “Spotted this in my neighborhood of Bootlegger Cove in Anchorage AK a few years back.”
53 comments
Comments are closed.
In the spirit of the season I sent a small gift.
I hope Jules recovers and at least continues learning as we all do, daily.
Blessings to Everyone who participates…and indeed All.
Peace On Earth will Reign Some Day Soon.
tawal
Happy holidays Yves, Lambert and all others at NC. Hope you rest and recover.
Thanks again to all of NC. Be assured that you’re a valued and respected part of our lives.
Please take some time to recharge, it’ll do you good.
I am about to take my own advice, which is very uncharacteristic of me. Today, I plan to be a vegetative, irresponsible, aimless sort of boat-anchor fetched up in the corner with a contented smile adorning my crusty old countenance.
To the rest of the NC commentariat, I say “Happy Holidays!”. Don’t let nothin’ get you down.
Pardon the grammar.
Yves wrote that only administrators can moderate comments.
My impression is that editors also can moderate comments.
See for instance, https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/wordpress-user-roles-and-permissions/
There is no WordPress role for editing only comments, which is what we want.
There seems to be a plugin for that.
More importantly, thanks to all of you for the work you do for all of us. I wish your holiday season is peaceful and restful.
It says it hasn’t been tested with the last 3 major releases. Not a big deal?
Merry Christmas to all. Buon Natale.
This light-hearted carol contains the immortal Christmas-y lyrics:
Christmas with the yours, Easter what you want;
Don’t throw atomic bombs because it’s Christmas time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y6gdRGmCiM
And yesterday I bopped over to Via Po, named after the Mighty Po that crosses the Chocolate City, to see the mechanical presepio:
gallery:
http://www.presepiomeccanico.com/fotoalbum/Pagine/Immagini_del_Presepio.html
In Italy, a “true” presepio has to have many artisans, personages, merchants, and mythical beings crowding the barn where Gesù lies with the donkey and the ox. It didn’t take me long to figure out why everything in Italy is a potential super-spreader event, given that Italians don’t have a need for personal space, either.
This presepio, natch, has all kinds of events: There’s a snake charmer. There is an elephant. There are plenty of sheep. It’s Christmas.
Praise to Jules for wading through the comments. Working as a stage manager (and a volunteer to boot) is not easy. All the best.
WordPress User Roles plugin, you can specify what a use, editor, or someone else can do. Seems quite granular.
https://blog.hubspot.com/website/wordpress-user-roles
Seems like you can allow an editor (for example) to only moderate comments.
And Happy Holidays to everyone at NC
Just realised the previous comment mentioned this. Might be worth reviewing it.
No, that plugin hasn’t been mentioned and looks like a good bet. It has been recently updated, unlike the others. Here is the direct link
Sorry that Jules experienced such toxicity. Thank you for all you efforts Jules, and thank you to katiebird, Yves, Lambert, and everyone else who helps bring the site to us everyday.
As is typical nowadays I am late to the news–but not too late to echo your exact comment:
Sorry that Jules experienced such toxicity. Thank you for all you efforts Jules, and thank you to katiebird, Yves, Lambert, and everyone else who helps bring the site to us everyday.
stay safe and sound in this Season and beyond.
Merry Christmas everyone and hope that you are all looking forward to the big day. Christmas Eve where I am and the big fella is going to be here pretty soon now. So season’s greeting to Yves, Lambert and the crew at NC. Sorry to hear about Jules and can only imagine some of the stuff that she was reading. She will be sorely missed. Maybe in the meantime it would be best to go easy on comments to create less work for moderation.
Now how about a Golden Oldie-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3ZC45Q82pg (2:39 mins)
Thank you, Jules. I shudder to contemplate the comments we never see. Nevertheless, the merriest of modern saturnalia to all!
Glad you’re taking a break. Sad that even here, at what I like to think of as the Last Stand of Civilized Discourse, there are commenters who cannot, so to speak, keep a civil tongue in their heads. Here are portions of the Bach Christmas Oratorio to soothe fevered brains. Happy Holidays!
On the long list of all the many people and things I am grateful for in this life, Naked Capitalism comes very close to the top. To Yves, Lambert, and all the rest of the crew, good health and happiness now and in the new year.
Adding my voice to the chorus of thanks and well wishes. What you offer here is far beyond what any of us could imagine separately.
+++
X 100
^e
Ditto, that. Y’all do God’s work. Thank you so much.
I’ll echo Carla in saying that Naked Capitalism is among the most prized parts of my world and I can’t imagine my life or my mind without it. The comments are a key part of the value of NC. Much gratitude to those who toil behind the scenes to keep the comment section flourishing. I am in your debt, Jules, and wish you a peaceful, joyous, and healing new year.
The fact that Jules “burned out” is a sign of the times. [I do hope she regains her peace of mind soon. Psychological wounding takes just as long to heal as does physical.] I take this to be also a sign that the world does not run on purely Neo-liberal lines. Not all ‘costs’ can be quantified. There is not “a price for everything.” Contra today’s Neo-liberal ideology, human beings show disconcerting tendencies to ‘transcend’ the mundane.
As I have queried elsewhere; “If we knew everything, would that make us gods?”
Thank the deities, we will never “know everything.”
Regain your balance Jules. Thank you for having volunteered to do the hard job for us.
Stay safe all during this Superspreader Season.
Please take a break,all concerned.
While you feel the role of the fourth estate has been forced upon you, there is no gain of function if you exhaust yourselves.
Do the best you need to.
Thank you Yves, Lambert, katiebird, Jules, and all the NC team and contributors for all your efforts. Best wishes to Jules that she will soon feel refreshed. To me, as someone without subject matter expertise in…well, most subjects, the comments are such a helpful and interesting addition to the content in the posts and links. The effort that goes into moderating the discussion is very much appreciated. Please take any breaks that you need.
Marym has expressed my thoughts and wishes exactly. I will add that Yves’ revelation about Jules, having to wallow in a toxic sludge of ‘comments we never see,’ really opened my eyes to the role of NC moderators. I am both appalled and thankful.
Marym sums up my feeling as well. Many thanks to the hard work of the moderators, it isn’t commented on enough, but the work you do to keep things of high quality is definitely noticed!
Best wishes to everyone!
ditto and to all peace and goodwill
Merry Christmas and a blessed Solstice season to everyone. I wish Jules peace and healing and thank him for his service to NC.
Yves, Lambert, and team, I appreciate everything you do and I hope you all get a break and some rest. 2024 is likely to be exhausting so let us all grab what peace and joy we can, when we can.
Best wishes to everyone in the NC Community.
Jules, by standing between us and those comments you helped protect our sanity. It is so easy for our own minds to become deranged when confronted with vicious speech. Thank you for that!!!
Thanks and Merry Christmas to the moderators still on the job, to Yves, Lambert, other staff and the commentariat for making this a special place.
Have a good week and Merry Christmas and Good Holidays for all. You all need a good break from what is one of the best sites available on the ‘net.
So, the big sites are not the only ones to sort comments. The difference between “comment moderation” and “censorship” is not always clear. I do sometimes see that someone gets scolded, or even threatened with being exiled from comment country. Most of what I read among comments is civil and on-target. Does NC have standards/regulations for comments? Should I know them? Or just wait for a moderator to do the moderating thing?
Our Policies page (also linked in the menu above) has an extensive explanation of our comment policies.
Thanks! I’ll chk it out.
Thanks for sharing that information, Yves.
If you compare other, much larger websites, there seems be some lax conditions in what is stated. It doesn’t disturb us, because we simply ignore what the wastrals says, and move on to more worthy posts.
When you work in public institutions, you take into considerations those who criticize your status. While agreeing with a part of the criticism, you use diplomacy to make your assertions known. Kind of like a “Gentleman’s Agreement. But, perhaps in the financial world, this kind of policy is not used.
We do not have the resources to address comments on a consistent basis. I wish we did. But many of the comments that lead to the commenter being put in moderation are by people who are losing arguments with other readers and won’t give up. They wind up resorting to bad faith tactics or just getting nasty. They then tell themselves we moderated them based on the substance of their comment, as opposed to their conduct when facing a sustained challenge.
It is censorship. Unfortunately it’s necessary because people can’t, or won’t behave. I follow a particular sports forum. All of the commenters root for the same team, so they should all be on the same side, so to speak. It’s unmoderated. It gets absolutely nasty sometimes with vitriol over some minor disagreement. I continue to follow because some very knowledgeable ex-players post there. I learn things about my sport I wouldn’t have otherwise known. But if I had to sort through all the posts where people are just telling each other off in some completely uncivil, unseemly fashion, it would get pretty depressing. Instead, I just ignore that rotten-spirited thread that goes on for a page about once a week. Meanwhile, valuable posters have just disappeared.
So yeah, again moderation is censorship, and it’s, unfortunately, necessary. I give kudos to Yves, Lambert, and all their crew for all they do here.
For me, the State does censorship, not a private entity. I looked up the definition of censorship in my OED:
What then is a censor?
We see “official,” “official,” “officially.”
Then again…. Certainly the Censorship Industrial Complex is not composed entirely of “officials”; it’s a network of public-private partnerships that also includes purely private entities. So that’s one grey area, or an area deliberately made grey. Another grey area would be a mall cop, say, preventing a political protest (malls having become quasi-public spaces, public spaces themselves having been destroyed).
In the site Policies, we conceive of the comments section as a cocktail party, and we forbid “throwing your drink in your host’s face” (surely not censorship), and give various operational definitions for that.
So while I welcome the forthrightness of “moderation is censorship,” I don’t agree. We’re not a public space (though we are “more” public than a site that requires log-ins), and we moderate for behavior not views (although there are some views that are “peformative” in that they consitute behavior, much like insulting your host, instead of throwing your drink).
I second these comments.
Thank you all for your hard work, and the great project that is NC.
Merry Xmas!
As this annus horribilis of 2023 comes to an end, I am humbled and more than a little ashamed to learn that our Jules has had to endure suffering for all our sakes in order to maintain the illusion of civility here in NC Comments. I hope that Jules comes to a place of peace and healing. I self-moderate my comments and they’re always freed from purgatory, but I’ve resolved to shut-up until after New Year’s — barring nuclear war. We live in heartbreaking times.
#Ditto on “annus horribilis” and “ashamed to learn that our Jules has had to endure suffering for all our sakes in order to maintain the illusion of civility here in NC Comments”.
Thanks to you all, again and again. I hope Jules is able to have a happy holiday season and heal from the emotional strain.
Thank you!
Sorry you’re stuck moderating the crazy. But having a little piece of sanity here is priceless. Thank you for this gift.
Merry Xmas, and happy New Year!
Wishing for us all Peace on Earth.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e6HVCqQStRE
(Amfortas, this is especially for you, out under the stars.)
Happy Christmas to everyone in the commentariat. Here’s hoping our hosts have a chance to take a good winter’s nap :)
Wishing everyone (especially the NC staff) a very happy holiday time and a much needed break..
Happy X-Mass from inundated Queensland … where today should be epic …
https://www.windy.com/-Thunderstorms-thunder?thunder,2023122502,-27.962,151.677,9
Having a similar rain shield effect here in the North American Deep South.
Welcome to the New World Climate Order!
Here’s hoping the water ends up where it is needed.
Wellie for myself I am doing a cape grim 4 bone prime rib in Weber slow cooked and smoked after being marinated in Lea&Perrins,Tabasco, garlic, S&P, and embedded with silvers of garlic, in fridge for two days to age.
Potato salad from scratch and Mexican salad. Eldest son is doing his classic Oz roast veg and man he is becoming a good cook, just did a red wine beef stew from scratch … so good … want to share it all …
Happy holidays and thank you for everything you all do, Yves and Lambert, Jules and the moderators.
If a comment of mine gets held for moderation I resolve to delete it unless I am commenting with the secret of life.
No no! We like comments. We just need you to be a bit more patient with us!
Funny you should mention moderation. Over the past few weeks I’ve realized that the quality of the Comments is one of the things I like the most about NC. The Mods never came to mind, but THEY [along with the many good comments] are the reason for the high and enjoyable comment section!
Best wishes to all the Mods!
Many thanks and happy holidays to the entire team at Naked Capitalism for making this site a singular oasis of truth and informed comment.