Commenting on news and opinion websites and blogs

  

Hal Brown's Blog

This is a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and other subjects. My posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky. I'm a retired MSW clinical social worker/psychotherapist and mental health center director who was also a cranberry farmer. Scroll archives on bottom of page to see previous blog stories. There are new ones added almost every day, although if I don't have anything original to say I try not to say anything at all.

If you don't see the Disqus comment section on this page click here and scroll down.

A version of this that is readable is down the page

Please try out the new comment feature on my blog. If it doesn't open here click this link. Let me know what you think about any of the blog stories or the blog in general. 

Disqus is the best and most feature loaded commenting platform I have seen. You can upload images, links, and use some basic formatting like bold, italics, and put excerpts in quotes. 

From Wikipedia:

Disqus (/dɪsˈkʌs/) is an American blog comment hosting service for web sites and online communities that use a networked platform. The company's platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and mobile commenting. It was founded in 2007 by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan as a Y Combinator startup.

In 2011, Disqus ranked No. 2 in Quantcast's U.S. networks with 151 million monthly unique U.S. visits.^[2] Disqus was featured on CNN, The Daily Telegraph, and IGN, and about 750,000 blogs and web sites.^[3]

There's nothing on the Wikipedia page about where how the company came up with the name though it could be a version of disquisition which means a long or elaborate essay or discussion on a particular subject:

Of course if you comment on my blog or any other websites, please keep your comments respectful. I find it interesting that a fair number of people who pay to subscribe to The Washington Post and The New York Times express far-right sometimes paranoid MAGA opinions and often demonstrate so much ignorance. There are more posts like this on HUFFPOST but that is a free website. For some reason MAGA posts on Raw Story are few and far between. This may be because they are flagged by readers and quickly removed.

If you don't see the Disqus comment section click here and scroll down.

Addendum:

You can see the differences in the comments sections in the image above (click to enlarge):

You can see that The NY Times, Wash. Post, and HUFFPOST have internal comment sections. The Post offers some formatting, all you can post on The NY Times is text and links. NY Times reviews comments and send you and email when your comment is published. On HUFFPOST you can include formatting, an emoji, and an image as well as links. Raw Story uses Disqus as does its sister website AlterNet.

The New York Times and The Washington Post do not allow comments on all stories or opinion pieces. I haven't been able to figure how this determination is made although after they received some complaints about this in 2017 they responded as follows in this article:

Why didn’t The Times’s community desk allow comments on a Sept. 23 article about men who believe the push for gender equality in technology has gone too far?

The answer, I’m afraid, is rather dull: Our moderation resources are limited on weekends, which means fewer stories are opened for comment.

And given the volume of news over the weekend — including President Trump’s continued criticism of N.F.L. players who are protesting the United States criminal justice system, and the declining fortunes of the Republican health care bill — many worthy news items had to forgo comments.

One benefit of the collaboration between Salon and Raw Story is that the former doesn't allow comments on any stories but many of them  are republished on Raw Story where you are able to comment.

In 2015 the website of Neiman Lab published an article about what happened when seven major news websites stopped allowing comments (here).

Of course if anyone wants to comment on a story which is published on a website that doesn't allow comments they can express their opinion or reaction on social media websites. This is a far cry from being able to comment where people who read the article are most likely to read what one has to say.

Popular articles published in both the Times and Post can have 7,000 or more comments. If you want your comment to be seen and replied to the earlier you post the better. Your comment will generally lead to more replies if you post it on a less popular article.

Since I am now putting Disqus on my blog how about commenting and sharing whether you are a frequent, occasional, or infrequent commenter on websites and what your experience has been.

Addendum: Disqus was not without its share of controversy: 

Disqus facing $3M fine in Norway for tracking users without consent

Thanks for reading. The archives and tags are on the bottom. 

International readers, please tell me what brought you to this blog and what you thing of it in my new Disqus comment section.

 

Currently Russia is the primary international country from which readers follow my blog, followed by Germany, India, and the U.K. There have been times when hundreds of people logged on from China, Ukraine, and other countries.

Now that I have been able to put Diqus comments on my blog posts I'd like to hear from people in other countries about how they came across the blog and what they think of it.

From Wikipedia:

Disqus (/dɪsˈkʌs/) is an American blog comment hosting service for web sites and online communities that use a networked platform. The company's platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and mobile commenting. It was founded in 2007 by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan as a Y Combinator startup.

In 2011, Disqus ranked No. 2 in Quantcast's U.S. networks with 151 million monthly unique U.S. visits.^[2] Disqus was featured on CNN, The Daily Telegraph, and IGN, and about 750,000 blogs and web sites.^[3]

The comments section that Google Blogger, the platform I have used since 2012, never led to many comments. For one thing it is hard to see on the bottom of the page. It also has nothing but the ability to write text. In Disquis you can add images, links, and some basic formatting like bold, italics, and quotes.

If this works here you should be able to easily make comments.

Whether from the United States or another country please give it a try if only to let me know you're reading this.

If you don't see the Disqus comment section click here and scroll down.

Thanks,

Hal

Have a comment about any of the blog stories or the blog in general? Here's a new Disqus comment section...

 

Please try out the new comment feature. Let me know what you think about any of the blog stories or the blog in general.

Disqus is the best and most feature loaded commenting platform I have seen. You can upload images, links, and use some basic formatting like bold, italics, and put excerpts in quotes.

From Wikipedia:

Disqus (/dɪsˈkʌs/) is an American blog comment hosting service for web sites and online communities that use a networked platform. The company's platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and mobile commenting. It was founded in 2007 by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan as a Y Combinator startup.

In 2011, Disqus ranked No. 2 in Quantcast's U.S. networks with 151 million monthly unique U.S. visits.^[2] Disqus was featured on CNN, The Daily Telegraph, and IGN, and about 750,000 blogs and web sites.^[3]

Of course, please keep your comments respectful. 

Thanks,

Hal

If you don't see the Disqus comment section click here and scroll down.

Addendum:

You can see the differences in the comments sections in the image above (click to enlarge):

You can see that The NY Times, Wash. Post, and HUFFPOST have internal comment sections. The Post offers some formatting, all you can post on The NY Times is text and links. NY Times reviews comments and send you and email when your comment is published. On HUFFPOST you can include formatting, an emoji, and an image as well as links. Raw Story uses Disqus as does its sister website AlterNet.

One benefit of the collaboration between Salon and Raw Story is that the former doesn't allow comments on any stories but many of them  are republished on Raw Story where you are able to comment.

In 2015 the website of Neiman Lab published an article about what happened when seven major news websites stopped allowing comments (here).

Of course if anyone wants to comment of a story which is published on a website that doesn't allow comments they can express their opinion or reaction on social media websites. This is a far cry from being able to comment where people who read the article are most likely to read what one has to say.

He's a Republican, a vet who was a flight surgeon, is the chair of the House Security Committee and he shot Marjorie Taylor Greene down.

 By Hal Brown

This is a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and other subjects. My posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky. I'm a retired MSW clinical social worker/psychotherapist and mental health center director who was also a cranberry farmer. Scroll archives on bottom of page to see previous blog stories. There are new ones added almost every day, although if I don't have anything original to say I try not to say anything at all.

If this is difficult to read on your device because of margins click here to read.

Former Flight Surgeon Cut Marjorie Tayler Greene Off

I thought it fitting that Raw Story used a photo of Marjorie Taylor Green holding a big gun to illustrate the article 

GOP enraged over Marjorie Taylor Greene's committee outburst — and are threatening to boot her: report 

I added the subtitle and the airplane going down in flames.

The article describes how the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, a West Point Graduate, war vet, and former flight surgeon, shot her down.

Excerpt:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) blew up a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday when she called Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas a "liar" and blaming him for fentanyl deaths around the country — an outburst that violates House rules about impugning the character of a witness. The tirade forced Chairman Mark Green, a Republican of Tennessee, to shut down her questioning and bar her from speaking for the rest of the hearing.

According to CNN reporter Melanie Zanona, Republicans behind the scenes are furious with her, and are considering punishments — even including a threat of booting her off the committee for future disruptions.

"GOP tensions flaring over MTG's committee hearing outburst today," tweeted Zanona. "Source close to Chairman Mark Green said he was furious w/ MTG's behavior and planned to privately reprimand her, and also said he'd encourage McCarthy to remove her from the committee if she did that again. But MTG doubled down on her rhetoric, accusing her GOP colleagues of 'doing the bidding' of Dems. She told me went to [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy’s office to talk about it & said to him: 'I don’t know how we’re ever going to accomplish anything when we can’t call people a liar when they’re lying.

You may not have heard of Mark Green prior to this incident. I hadn't. Unlike the politicians who get lots of media coverage, my bet is that most news junkies couldn't pick him out of a lineup.

I knew nothing about him until now. He's no shining light for liberals. For one example, this is what a brief web search of his name came up with from 2017 when Trump floated his name to be Secretary of the Army: 

Excerpt: Army secretary nominee Mark Green's past statements and legislative record make him "a danger to every LGBTQ soldier," human rights groups claim.

LGBT advocates decried President Trump's Friday announcement floating the Army surgeon turned Tennessee state senator — who has called being transgender a "disease" and supported what critics branded a "license to discriminate" bill — to succeed the country's first openly gay Army secretary, Eric Fanning.

Green is "one of most extreme anti-LGBT politicians in the country," Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Stephen Peters, a former Marine discharged under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law, told reporters in a call on Monday.

His politics are about as far-right as those of Rep. Greene's (from Wikipedia):

Abortion

Green opposes abortion. In a 2019 op-ed, he wrote, "modern science has revealed that mother and baby are, in fact, two separate persons—long before the baby is born" and argued that "a child becomes a child at conception".

Climate change

Green rejects the scientific consensus that human activity plays a key role in climate change.

Creationism

Green rejects the theory of evolution, which is consensus in biology; in a 2015 lecture he used creationist reasoning such as "irreducible complexity".

2020 election

In December 2019, Green voted against the articles of impeachment in the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

In December 2020, Green was one of 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives to sign an amicus brief in support of Texas v. Pennsylvania, a lawsuit filed at the United States Supreme Court contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Vaccines

In 2018, as a congressman-elect, Green said at a constituent meeting, "there is some concern that the rise in autism is the result of the preservatives that are in our vaccines", a claim that has been repeatedly debunked by scientific studies and rejected by medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics.

I can imagine that someone who was an Army major who graduated from West Point and was a flight surgeon would be a stickler for following the rules and wouldn't tolerate the behavior demonstrated by Marjorie Taylor Greene coming from one of the soldiers under him.

Considering his politics, I think it is particularly significant that he shot Marjorie Taylor Greene down. In the military you could describe this as an officer dressing someone down. If she was a soldier such behavior could get her demoted. 

It is typical of Greene that she doesn't care and is doubling down. That someone would dare to diss her obviously was beyond the pale for her. She apparently hustled off to complain her House husband, Kevin McCarthy, about not being able to call a liar a liar when she thinks they're lying.

It represents cockeyed optimism to think that Kevin's House honey is going to face any consequences for this behavior.

Update: This moved up to be the No. 1 trending story on Raw Story.

 

Thanks for reading. If you are reading this on halbrown.org scroll down to make comments and share on social media. The archives and tags are on the bottom. If you are reading on Booksie or Medium or SubStack or a social media platform click below to go to the blog web page. All my blog articles are listed on the bottom of the page on the Google Blogger website where I began to post in 2012 along with every tag I ever used.

I don't make a money from these blogs. However, I do like people to read what I write and who appreciate my hopefully original perspectives.

Click above to enlarge image

If I was a gutsy journalist I might have interviewed these next door neighbors.

By Hal Brown, MSW

This is a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and other subjects. My posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky. I'm a retired MSW clinical social worker/psychotherapist and mental health center director who was also a cranberry farmer. Scroll archives on bottom of page to see previous blog stories. There are new ones added almost every day, although if I don't have anything original to say I try not to say anything at all.

Click below images to enlarge them.

I frequently drive by a corner where there are two houses next to each other. One always has a Trump flag flying on a pole and the other has two Pride flag on the side. I've always wondered about how these neighbors get along with each other. I've thought that if I was a real journalist I'd interview the residents of both houses and find out more about them, what they feel about living next some someone with opposite political views, and whether they ever interact with each other.

I could even set up a meeting where they could talk together about how they felt. After all it's not like I haven't sat with people who were very angry with each other. I have done marriage counseling with lots of couples who had all kinds of conflicts. 

On the other hand, having had husbands drop out of marriage counseling feeling very angry with me for not taking their side and sometimes having their wives divorce them I've told friends and colleagues that I wouldn't be surprised if the way I met my end was having one of these men shoot me.

Yesterday I was driving in the rain and noticed that the Trumper house had a new flag. It was one I had never seen. I managed to take the photo below before the traffic light changed. You can see the rain on the window.  The insert is from Amazon where the flag can be had for $17.99.

If I was both gutsy and reckless and wanted to risk getting beat up or worse I could have snuck onto his video surveilled property, lowered the flag, and written my opinion to it.

Here's my version of the flag:

When I decided to write this I thought I could drive back there, park, and take some better photos. Then I realized I could get my photos from Google Earth's street view feature.

The houses above and below are next to each other

There are warning signs about 24 hour video surveillance by the Trumper's driveway and one that says "Mercury Parking Only" since from what I can tell this person specializes in working on Mercury cars:

I hadn't seen the LGBTQ+ Pride flag with the clenched fist before so I looked it up here and learned what it symbolized:

As a representation of Queer People of Color, it's not known who the original creator of the flag was(opens in new tab) but represents solidarity with the BLM movement as well as the intersection of the queer and Black communities (including the importance of figures like Marsha P. Johnson(opens in new tab), the Black drag queen who may have thrown the first brick(opens in new tab) at the Stonewall Inn riots) to the movements. No surprise, the flag has become more popular in 2020 and beyond. The raised fist is a sign of unity and support as well as defiance and resistance, and the various colors on the fist represent diversity. Sometimes called the Resistance Flag(opens in new tab), according to Them writer Matt Baume: "The modern LGBTQ+ liberation movement was touched off by queer and trans people of color and their struggle continues to this day, with both communities seeking justice, equality, and freedom from oppression. And because many people belong to both communities, they’re not two distinct causes but instead overlap."

The flag with the pale pink and blue colors seems to be version of this:

I think it's a faded one of of these:

About the transgender flags.

In the window there's a video surveillance warning sign next to a Black Lives Matter poster, below:

This is the second time I've written about neighbors who have opposite political views, and even had two or three chances to talk to the pro-Trump residents. I wrote about this here:

While walking around the lovely historic town of Aurora we actually saw and waved to a couple of men who were in front of the Trumper house. I could have gone and chatted with them and then knocked on the door of the historic home owned by liberals to talk to them. What can I say? I chickened out.

Related: These are from Facebook from the Methodist  church and the school in the the Oak Grove community where these people and I live:

Thanks for reading. If you are reading this on halbrown.org scroll down to make comments and share on social media. The archives and tags are on the bottom. If you are reading on Booksie or Medium click below to go to the blog web page.