{"id":6549,"date":"2006-08-11T16:46:21","date_gmt":"2006-08-11T16:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/apropos-of-nothing.html"},"modified":"2006-08-11T16:46:21","modified_gmt":"2006-08-11T16:46:21","slug":"apropos-of-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/apropos-of-nothing.html","title":{"rendered":"Apropos of nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just a reminder&#8230;posters who post totally anonymously have absolutely no rights, okay? That means if you post under a fake name with a fake email (the first is hard to detect, unless it&#8217;s like &quot;Anonymous&quot; or George Washington&quot; &#8211; although I suppose there <em>are <\/em>plenty of the latter actually running around &#8211; but the latter is very easy to detect.), you had best watch what you post. If it&#8217;s mean, snarky, personal towards anyone, implies anything. it will probably be gone soon, as well as any comments that respond to it. So that means:<\/p>\n<p>1) Have the courage of people who actually use their real names and real emails. They&#8217;re role models for you, you see.<\/p>\n<p>2) Those who are tempted to respond to a &quot;troll&quot; &#8211; don&#8217;t. Your efforts will be wasted because I will probably delete them.<\/p>\n<p>3) I can trace IP&#8217;s &#8211; the Typepad software allows the blog owner to &quot;find all comments from this IP&quot; for example &#8211;&nbsp; and that has often yielded fascinating results &#8211; in the cases, for example, when something exeptionally obnoxious is posted and I find it&#8217;s been posted by someone who&#8217;s a regular. Usually a mildly hostile regular, who I guess just can&#8217;t take it any more. Busted. <\/p>\n<p>I tend to shut down threads that turn into arguments between 2 people. I am also going to shut down discussion threads that start reaching 150 or so. There is definitely a sense of diminishing returns in those threads. The exceptions would be threads in which I ask you to relate an experience or something. Those threads can be long, long, long. <\/p>\n<p>As I said, apropos of nothing, but just a reminder for anyone new! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just a reminder&#8230;posters who post totally anonymously have absolutely no rights, okay? That means if you post under a fake name with a fake email (the first is hard to detect, unless it&#8217;s like &quot;Anonymous&quot; or George Washington&quot; &#8211; although I suppose there are plenty of the latter actually running around &#8211; but the latter&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Apropos of nothing - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/apropos-of-nothing.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Apropos of nothing - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Just a reminder&#8230;posters who post totally anonymously have absolutely no rights, okay? That means if you post under a fake name with a fake email (the first is hard to detect, unless it&#8217;s like &quot;Anonymous&quot; or George Washington&quot; &#8211; although I suppose there are plenty of the latter actually running around &#8211; but the latter&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/apropos-of-nothing.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-08-11T16:46:21+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Apropos of nothing - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/apropos-of-nothing.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Apropos of nothing - Via Media","og_description":"Just a reminder&#8230;posters who post totally anonymously have absolutely no rights, okay? That means if you post under a fake name with a fake email (the first is hard to detect, unless it&#8217;s like &quot;Anonymous&quot; or George Washington&quot; &#8211; although I suppose there are plenty of the latter actually running around &#8211; but the latter&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/apropos-of-nothing.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2006-08-11T16:46:21+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/apropos-of-nothing.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/apropos-of-nothing.html","name":"Apropos of nothing - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2006-08-11T16:46:21+00:00","dateModified":"2006-08-11T16:46:21+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/apropos-of-nothing.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/apropos-of-nothing.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/apropos-of-nothing.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Apropos of nothing"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}