Sunday, January 14, 2024

Testing New Comment System

The Disqus commenting system, which I began using in 2012, has grown more and more annoying over the last several years, so I am experimenting with new commenting systems. Currently I am trying out Commento. It's fairly stripped down, so we'll see how moderating it goes. It is also a subscription commenting system; I have stubbornly refused to use a paid commenting system since the beginning of this blog, and was willing to tolerate restricted functionality, some minor advertising, and the like as a cost, but the advertisements for all the non-subscription commenting systems have become so utterly obnoxious and intrusive that it's a lost cause. It's either the Blogger comments, which I have never liked, or paying. Alas for the ancient days of Haloscan. But I figure that this weblog is about two decades old, so it's perhaps time just to grit my teeth and power through the inevitable pain it causes the sense of thrift I have inherited from my Scottish ancestors. Disqus actually lasted on the blog much longer than I expected when I first tried it; it wasn't very impressive to begin with, but then went through a period where it was actually fairly good, but over the past several years has been rather poor but without any obvious alternative. We'll see if this one even gets out of the trial phase and, if it does, how long it lasts.

The markup guide for styling comments is as follows (and is accessible by a little link under the comments box saying, Markdown):

italicssurround text with 
*asterisks*
boldsurround text with 
**two asterisks**
hyperlink
[hyperlink](https://example.com)
 or just a bare URL
code
surround text with 
`backticks`
strikethroughsurround text with 
~~two tilde characters~~
quote
prefix with 
>

Commento has upvotes/downvotes integrated into it, which is a con; I find the whole idea of voting comments up or down somewhat repulsive. Discussion is not a popularity contest, and unlike a very large website, I have no use for voting as a crude way to offload moderation onto commenters. So I'll just ask people to ignore the voting system as much as possible.

Disqus comments were imported over. I'm still fiddling with settings. At some point I will have a # of comments indicator for each post on the main page, but I have to insert it manually in the right place in the HTML, so that will happen only whenever I get around to it. Until then, nobody, including myself, will be able to see whether a post has comments except by clicking on the post itself. 
 
One very big advantage of Commento is that, since it is more stripped-down than Disqus, it loads much, much faster; I've already noticed it myself, so that's nice -- one of the ways Disqus had grown annoying was its increasingly weird loading behavior.

In any case, feel free to try it out and let me know what you think. Google, Twitter, and email address all work for login. At present, you can comment anonymously, but anonymous comments currently require manual approval. If you do comment anonymously, please do so with a 'distinguishing mark', like a signature or initials or a pseudonym, even if just made up for a given thread; one my pet peeves with regard to commenting is a bunch of anonymous commenters failing to distinguish themselves from other anonymous commenters.

ADDED LATER (for mobile device users): At the bottom of each mobile version of a post, you should see a link for 'View Web Version'; that will switch it to the web version, where the comments display. I could simply change the settings so that only the web version is visible, but the mobile version seems more readable on mobile devices, so I haven't yet decided to do that.
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Anonymous
0 points
14 years ago

I have a hard time buying this sentiment as authentically Ryle's (and Google doesn't show anything substantiating it). Ryle wrote a generally positive review of "Being and Time", and when asked about SuZ later he didn't have much to say other than "Oh, yeah, I read that a long time ago and wrote a book review, which I worked hard on but no one ever asked me about. Haven't really thought of it since. Dunno whether it influenced me or not. I liked logical positivism more, at the time, but I might've found appealing anti-Cartesian/proto-behaviorist stuff in SuZ." (I paraphrase; the full quote is in the appendix on p. 290 of Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, which also reprints Ryle's book review from Mind.)

I also don't see what's wrong with the sentiment Ryle genuinely had about SuZ: There're helpful things to be gleaned from it, but the project as a whole isn't the way to go.

I don't know what his character has to do with whether, say, his criticisms of Husserl hit their mark, despite the fact that Being is all over the place in a lot of those; the fact that a Nazi says that everything he's done with his work had to do with his Nazism doesn't make it so. I've never seen a defense of Husserl which takes the form "But this criticism only holds water if you're a Nazi, ergo Husserl escapes the charge."

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Anonymous
0 points
14 years ago

I doubt it's Ryle's, as well; it's a Rylean-like summation, though, even if it's not Ryle's own opinion. But Polt doesn't get into questions of provenance.

Since Ryle's sentiment in the comment really doesn't tell us anything about how to handle the question of Heidegger's Nazism, I'm not sure how it's relevant. Likewise, whether or not Heidegger's criticisms of Husserl are untowardly connected is something that has to be determined, not assumed. The fact that a Nazi says something doesn't make it false, true, but it also doesn't make it non-Nazi in attitude, formulation, or substance; given that we are quite literally talking about a Nazi, that there is nothing about it that is Nazi has to be shown, not insisted upon a priori. As I say, it has to be unwound and then rewound in such a way as to show that there is no Nazi distortion in it. If we can do that, fine and dandy; before we do it, though, we have no license to pretend that all is obviously safe.

Much of the problem lies precisely in reasoning by analogy here, which generally involves merely fooling ourselves by glossing over obviously significant differences. Nazism isn't a limited foible like drinking too much or sexual perversion, that might affect some philosophical fringes here and there but no more. It is a large-scale commitment; and, contrary to the tendency to insist on it as 'politics', it's not a merely political commitment like deciding one will support the Green Party in local elections. It carries a vision of technology, society, humanity. And this is undeniably so in Heidegger's case; Heidegger's own characterizations of his involvement, vague and weasely though they often are, links it with some of this major philosophical concerns. We should not fall into the hubris of pretending to know prior to all evidence what distortions such a commitment may or may not introduce into a philosophical approach, method, position, or system.