A lot of people write me and say, "Hey, I really like your blog, but you need to open up your comments." I address it again because many people bring this up. Against my better judgment, I opened up comments for one week in 2002. Big mistake. A lot of people like to criticize, compliment, and debate using comments, and that's all great. However, the lunatics are drawn to comments and, like Gresham's Law, the bad tends to drive out the good. And for those of you who are too clueless to think that a female libertarian blogger doesn't get any worse crap than a male libertarian blogger, you need to be on the receiving end of my email for about one week. During that one week that my comments were open, hell broke out. It was lunacy, and it surely wasn't worth it. The stalkers, misogynists, anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists, and other undesirables were all over it. I don't have the time to police comments, nor do I have the need/desire to drive traffic to my blog by making it an open bulletin board for discussion. So I have no plans, at this time, to open up comments.

Note that the LewRockwell.com blog does not open up for comments. If that were to happen, the blog would become unreadable.

Hate mail. I respond about 1% of the time anymore. I have little time to respond to the great mail, let alone the hate mail. Once again, the typical scenario is that I get a note of disagreement from an angry reader. Disagreement is great; your hate is not welcome. So I ignore. The reader re-sends the same email or writes another one. They get pissed because I don't respond. I am told that, because I do not respond to their baiting, I "can't handle disagreement" or I am "unable to take them on." So if I write them back in the exact same tone and words, I hear this back: "I can't handle disagreement," or I am "angry" or have "no social skills." Honestly, people like this are lunatics. I do not write them, they write me. I almost never seek people (writers) out to write them, whether I agree or disagree with what they have written/blogged. Once you seek me out to write me, you have entered my private property. And that's fine, but if you decide to berate me, call me names, or get hateful, you have become angry with me - not the other way around. Then you get pissed if I ignore you, you get pissed if I engage you in response. Thus the angry one is you, for writing me. This is so obviously clear, yet people cannot stand that I should say "boo" back to them for their slashing anger directed against me.

The latest involved some dimwit who kept writing me (when I ignored her) because her kid is a cop and she doesn't like my blogs on LewRockwell.com arguing against the police state. Why her boy is perfect and caring, you see, and thus I should never comment on all the bad cops and police state tactics because then I somehow diss her wonderful kid. She repeatedly wrote me, and when I finally wrote back and told her I don't care that she's related to a cop and will never back down on that issue, she went off.

So it goes. She hushed up when I told her to find someone else on the LRC blog to stalk.