The Comment Policy, Revisited

I'm starting to get some traffic here (thanks, @girlarchaeo!), but the number of comments remains at zero. I'd been wondering lately if (and now I'm pretty sure that it's the case that) I may have worded the comments policy in my first post a little too stridently. So let me rephrase here in a way that will, I hope, open up a little discussion:

I'm blogging under my own name and on topics that bear very directly on a professional life I value more than rubies. Before I started blogging, I read a variety of academic blogs, first out of interest and more lately to get a better sense of the genre. I observed that some of the bloggers from the field of Hispanic Studies* tend to get into ugly flame wars, and I wanted to avoid that happening in my space. Even if they're not made by me, I don't want a pile of ad hominem attacks sitting on my blog and associated with my name and my professional life. Hence the slightly overdetermined comment policy.

But with that said, it really just boils down to this: I''ve enabled comment moderation in order to be able to keep some control over the pertinence and tone of discussions as they develop. Comment like the literate and decent person you undoubtedly are, and I will allow (and indeed welcome) your comments.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to have a chance to talk about the profession with a broader range of people than I otherwise might. I'm looking forward to the conversation starting.


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*I work on medieval Spain, so even as an Arabist by training, I consider myself to be a Hispanist; and I consider Hispanists and Arabists of the traditionally-defined sort to be my colleagues in equal measures. But that is all a subject for another post.