Bob Wright proposes a "competition to see who can be more civil and at the same time be more disagreeing in a substantively contentious way."

It's supposed to be a competition between "my" commenters and the Bloggingheads commenters:



How could this competition could take place? Which post(s) of mine would be the venue? And who could ever judge whether a group of persons over a series of statements is "more civil and at the same time ... more disagreeing in a substantively contentious way"? How do you even know who counts as the real Althouse commenters and the real Bloggingheads commenters? Some of my commenters are people who would want my side to lose, and they will have an incentive to say really uncivil and unsubstantive things. And some of my best commenters are people who don't engage substantively but do idiosyncratic off-subject things.

But if any Bloggingheads commenters want to drop in over here, on one of the posts that sets up a substantive topic, and try to interact within this community, they can see what it's like here and how it compares to the Bloggingheads comments section. They can write down theirobservations about the experience on this post.

By the same token, I invite my commenters to go to some recent Bloggingheads diavlogs — you don't need to identify yourself as an Althouse commenter when you do that — and experience life as a commenter in that environment. Then come back to this post and talk about it.

So let this be the post where we talk about — and judge! — the competition Bob proposes. But please, don't change the way you comment to try to win (or lose) the competition. If Bob thinks some of what we do is too unsubstantive to be good as he defines good, that's his problem. We should not be shaken away from our right to define our own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of blogging comments.

(Here's the earlier post of mine that Bob refers to at the beginning of the clip.)