Having dealt with a relentless stream of feedback from deranged right wingers since back before most people had ever heard of this thing called the internet, I’ve always been ambivalent at best about opening this site up to comments. Still, a lot of you non-deranged-right-wing types keep bringing the possibility up. I remain of two minds — my suspicion is that it could easily be way more trouble than it’s worth, that riding herd on trolls and spam and the rest of it might just end up being one more tedious chore in my life, serving only to increase the psychic weight of this website, which already feels like an anchor around my neck a lot of the time.

Nonetheless, I guess it’s time for a little experiment. So I’m going to open up a comments thread for this post only, to see what you all think. Convince me I’m wrong. Or right. Or whatever. Go to town.

… wow, that’s quite the outpouring of responses, and I thank you. I’ll need to take some time to digest it all. Not this morning, unfortunately — I’ve got a somewhat tight deadline today. But I want to leave this thread open a bit longer here and throw out a specific question. At least one commenter suggests that allowing comments increases traffic, which brings us to the eternal mystery of site stats. According to Site Meter, which seems to be pretty much the general standard to which we all synchronize, this site seems to hold steady at about 12,000-15,000 visits a day (with a sharp dropoff on the weekends, which leads me to suspect that many of you naughty boys and girls are reading this site during the workweek when you’re supposed to be doing something else entirely.) So — do comments really increase traffic, and if so why? I mean, do you really get more new readers, or do you just get the same readers checking in more times throughout the day? If Blog X, with comments, has 50,000 readers a day, does it really have 50,000 unique readers a day, or 25,000 readers checking in twice a day? Or 5,000 readers checking in ten times a day to see what’s being said in the comments section? (Or one really obsessive reader checking in 50,000 times a day?) A blogger with much higher traffic than mine once admitted to me, somewhat furtively, that any visitor who waits at least an hour between visits counts as a new unique visitor. Any tech-savvy types out there who can confirm or deny or elaborate?

Update — closing comments now. I think there’s plenty of food for thought for now. Thanks all.

Via atrios, I see that CNN has hired the man who once “jokingly” said:

“Hang on, let me just tell you what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out — is this wrong?”

You can let CNN know what you think here. Be polite.

Something else in that fake-future-history piece from a few posts back caught my eye:

This tendency was especially pronounced in Iran, where the social conservatism of the 1979 Revolution - which had lowered the age of marriage and prohibited contraception - combined with the high mortality of the Iran-Iraq War and the subsequent baby boom to produce, by the first decade of the new century, a quite extraordinary surplus of young men. More than two fifths of the population of Iran in 1995 had been aged 14 or younger. This was the generation that was ready to fight in 2007.

This not only gave Islamic societies a youthful energy that contrasted markedly with the slothful senescence of Europe. It also signified a profound shift in the balance of world population. In 1950, there had three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. By 1995, the population of Iran had overtaken that of Britain and was forecast to be 50 per cent higher by 2050.

You see this theme popping up a lot on right these days — the fear of an exploding Muslim population outstripping a declining Western birth rate. I wonder if the writers even realize the extent to which they are echoing century-old fears that the “advanced” races would be outbred:

AT THE TURN of the 20th century, infertility became an obsession for the eugenics movement. The growing scientific field of genetics led some political leaders to embrace the notion of controlled breeding to favor “advanced” races. White Americans feared an “infertility crisis” in their neighborhoods. President Theodore Roosevelt warned in 1903 that immigrants and minorities were too fertile, and that Anglo-Saxons risked committing “race suicide” by using birth control and failing to keep up baby-for-baby.

In one speech, Roosevelt said: “The chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. The greatest of all curses is sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility.”

The notion of breeding as an act of national service would reappear during World War II.

Andrew Sullivan, over at his new paid perch as a Time Magazine blogger, links to that peculiar “America We Stand as One” video that was making the blog rounds, oh gosh, almost a year ago.

I guess that’s why Andrew makes the big bucks.

Tip jar’s over to your left, folks.

In his widely-quoted speech yesterday*, Al Gore ripped into the bedwetter’s fantasy that the dangers we face today are worse than any human being in history has ever faced before:

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment’s notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when our fathers fought and won two World Wars?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

I’m glad to see this idea gaining currency. It’s something I’ve been trying to point out for quite awhile, as in this cartoon from early last year:

*Widely quoted on the blogs, that is. The news media pretty much ignored the fact of a former vice president accusing the sitting president of impeachable offenses. Go figure.