George Rebane

Been doing more noodling on how to keep the comment threads more relevant to my posted commentaries.  I appreciate very much that RR has come to serve as an open forum for whatever readers wish to discuss or cuss.  Yet at the same time I’d like to start constraining the comments to expansions, critiques, and ideas that are related to the subject at hand.  An approach to providing a venue for reader selected topics or pointed communications with each other is to feature a regular posting such as a ‘Weekly Sandbox’ under which all manner of comments and conversations can take place that may or not be offshoots of what I have posted.  These sandboxes would be posted regularly and dated – e.g. today’s would be ‘Sandbox – 9jun14’ – so that past comments could be more precisely referenced.

Launching this convention would make it much easier for me to ‘unpublish’ or move off topic comments, and not be concerned with sandbox comments that would have no such topical restrictions.  I believe that this would make reading topical comments much easier without readers having to wade through itinerant mudball fights and off-the-wall subjects of interest.  And it would provide a ready forum for those who enjoy mining the sandbox for random yet cleverly posited observations, or just watching the mudballs fly.  Thoughts on this?

While I’m in administrivia mode, I’d like to again express appreciation for the thoughtful (if not forceful and contentious) comments RR gets from its more liberal readers.  RR was launched with the idea that it would not become an echo chamber for ideas and opinions that fly in some prescribed and tight ideological formation.  And happily that most certainly has not been the case over these past seven years.  I believe that all of our ideas contend here for the benefit of those who are ‘not declared’, or those who consider themselves to be in the mid-regions of socio-political beliefs, or those whose beliefs in some area are not complete.  Those dedicated from the Left and the Right are the gladiators in the arena, neither expecting to convert the other, but only to show the power of their thoughts through the prowess of their arguments.  Again I thank all serious thinkers whose comments decorate these pages.