Last week, we published an article about acclaimed (by the sort of people who acclaim such things) Holocaust denier Arthur R. Butz, a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University.
Yesterday, I put together a blog post featuring some of the emails I received in response to that article, all of them from members of Butz’s fan club.
There are also a number of comments on the original article and yesterday’s post. At New Voices, comments by someone who has never commented before must be approved, usually by me. In response to one comment that asked why a previous comment had been deleted, I thought I’d share a couple of rules to help you make sure your comment get approved:
- No death threats. I don’t care how tongue-in-cheek it is. I don’t care how clever it is, or how thinly veiled it is. If your comment includes a clever way to kill the subject of the article or blog post you’re commenting on, it’s not gonna get approved.
- Use a real email address. If you make a death threat in the last line of your otherwise acceptable comment (I’m looking at you, Guy-Using-A-Clever-Mob-Like-Name-While-Cracking-Wise-About-Offing-Someone), I’ll try to email you and ask if you don’t mind me removing that bit of it before I post it. But it the email address you gave me doesn’t work, I can’t email you. And if you leave a follow-up comment asking why your comment didn’t appear, providing the same email address, I still can’t address your problem.
- Be funny. One comment was so outrageously inflammatory that it almost didn’t get approved. But its author was just linguistically innovative enough that I approved it. In it, he goes on and on about all the terrible things the “Jooz” have done. And his comment left me with this question: What did Judy Joo (of “Iron Chef UK” and “Next Iron Chef”) ever do to deserve being called a cockroach?
