The Jury Talks Back now has Recent Comments on the sidebar!

They’re not pretty. I activated a plugin myself — having had some trouble getting in touch with Admin Guy — and so these are not the Recent Comments you are used to at the main site. They’re uglier and contain a lot of text from the recent comment. There aren’t as many of them. They don’t readily tell you which post they apply to.

But they work! No longer do you have to refresh every thread you might be interested in.

In case you are not familiar with The Jury Talks Back, it is an old subdomain I revived for the purpose of having a civil comments section. There is a strict adherence to civil conversation. There are no personal attacks and no strawman arguments. The rule is that you behave the same way you would if I had invited you to my living room.

Sounds kinda nice, doesn’t it?

The comments section there has been less lively than at the main site, which I attribute partly to habit, partly to the extra effort involved in an extra click (you’d be surprised at what a deterrent that can be), but also partly to the lack of Recent Comments section there (until now!). When there is no Recent Comments section, it takes more effort to maintain a conversational flow, as you have to refresh each post you are interested in, and scroll to the bottom to see if there are new comments. Now that there are Recent Comments at the Jury, you can follow the conversation in much the same manner you do here.

After a brief dip into a couple of main site comment threads in the last couple of days, a couple of commenters have resumed the predictable B.S. personal attacks and mischaracterizations that drove me to seek civil conversation to begin with — conversation that focuses on issues and arguments rather than personalities. Any post with the word “Trump” in it inevitably devolves at some point into personal commentary, usually accusing me of bias against Trump. As I have said before, even when this sort of commentary comes from only one or two people, I find it irritating. I don’t need to be irritated on my own blog. I’m not hiding from debate — but I am supremely uninterested in your opinion that any negative comment about Trump by me shows my deep awful anti-Trump bias.

Those interested in civil commentary, please join me at The Jury Talks Back!

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back, where comments are open on the parallel version of this post — but subject to the rules there. (I.e. I do not wish to discuss my alleged anti-Trump bias there . . . and if you bring that discussion there, in comments to any post, knowing I don’t want to engage in that discussion there, you risk getting banned from both blogs.)]