I, like many other people gave up on comments, but I kept missing them, and decided to try a new approach. Set up some guidelines and impassionately delete the ones that don't conform.

As a result, comments here are for briefly stating a point of view, with some justification, or providing an additional fact or link to an idea that is on-topic for the post.

If it's not responsive, or just an uttering, indulges in name-calling, or is blog-post length, I sometimes will comment so the person gets an email explaining what happened, and then I delete both the comment and my response.

This makes comments here more like a Letter to the Editor, but saves me the trouble of having to copy an email into a web page and edit it.

As a result our discussions here may be brief or even non-existent, but they are interesting and respectful of everyone. And I don't worry about provoking shitstorms with my posts, the controllers don't get a foothold here. They are welcome to complain about me at length in their own space. (They seem to never do that, I wonder why.)

Here's an example of a good set of comments on a recent post.