Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for February 10, 2006

Blog Update, Comments and Rules

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I began this blog in April last year. More and more people are visiting the site. I was surprised to see that there were 7,458 unique visitors to the site last month (January 2006), they came a total of 20,677 times and looked at 59,939 pages generating 97,378 hits.

Last month the most popular posts were on whaling and of course climate change. I thank those who contributed to both discussions.

This blog is a forum that encourages diverse opinion. There is some truth in the comment by Walter Lippman, “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”

Interestingly very few of the people who visit this site ever make comment. Some readers tell me they enjoy reading the comments from others and learn from the debates. Others tell me they never read the comments because they are too often “ugly”, “ignorant” and “defamatory”.

Properly monitoring comments would be a full time job – a job for which I have neither the time, nor inclination. But given the growing readership and concern from some readers, I am going to start deleting more comments. It won’t always be fair – because properly monitoring comments would be a fulltime job. I may delete comments that are spam, abusive, defamatory, off-topic or repetitive.

I have looked at the rules at Online Opinion and there are some that are perhaps relevant to this blog including limiting the number of comments per person. At Online Opinion readers are allowed a maximum of five comments in any given 24 hour period and no more than two comments per thread in any given 24 hour period.

Now such rules could really limit debate and discussion at this blog!

So I don’t intend to implement them. However, if you want to make more than five posts in any given 24 hour period, it would be great if you really had something new, important and informative to say that sixth, seventh and eighth time.

On the issue of names, Ian Castles and Roger Kalla are real people who use their real names to comment at this blog. They have families and reputations. I know some people will insist on using a nom de plume – and perhaps for good reason – but they shouldn’t necessarily expect the same level of respect, at least not from me.

It is obviously much easier to be flippant when you have nothing, or very little, at risk. The person commenting anonymously can easily dismiss and discard any mistake or misleading comment – along with ‘the name’ they were using and email address they were using.

In closing, thanks for visiting this blog and for being apart of the information exchange. Do come back and please leave a comment.

Coffee Banned in 1777, GM Food Banned in 2006

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Banning genetically modified (GM) food is just another example of promoters of “incumbent products” seeking to restrict competition argues Calestous Juma in yesterday’s Financial Times:

Take coffee: in the 1500s Catholic bishops demonised coffee as “Satan’s drink” and urged a ban. It was competing with wine. In its defence, Pope Clement VIII proclaimed: “Why, this ‘Satan’s drink’ is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptising it and making it a truly Christian beverage.”

More than a century later, coffee was pitted against tea as the incumbent English drink. To defeat the competition, King Charles II decreed the banning of coffeehouses in 1675 only to revoke the decision two days before it came into effect.

In Germany, coffee was outlawed or its sale severely restricted for economic reasons. “It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the like amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were his ancestors,” declared Frederick the Great in 1777.

Historical cases of technological competition were limited in their reach. Today’s global economy demands that governments find ways to ensure that the benefits of new technologies are widely shared. Judicial rulings will safeguard the integrity of international trading rules. But they will not guarantee consumer enthusiasm for products that threaten their settled ways.

Calestous Juma was writting about a WTO finding, published earlier this week, that the current European Union moratorium on GM food crops breaches trade rules, click here for earlier post.