To reply or not to reply

I like supportive comments. They give me a warm glow of satisfaction. I also (funnily enough) like good criticism by which I mean comments that correct me on facts, ask pertinent questions or take me to task having first shown that they have understood what I was saying in the first place. (Not, it has to be said, that I get much of this). What I don't like is bad criticism - the stuff that neither agrees with me nor puts up a good counter argument and is often abusive (at least in tone if not content).

The question is should I reply to it or not?

I blog in order to spread libertarian ideas. In doing so I am looking for two sorts of reader. The first is the open-minded reader. The second is the like-minded reader who (hopefully) will read my stuff, be fortified in his beliefs, and then go and spread my ideas around the Blogosphere, where hopefully, they will eventually come into contact with yet more open-minded people.

What I am not looking for is the close-minded anti. There's just no point.

Now, having said that, replying to bad comments could be useful. It could help to convince the open-minded and it could fortify the like-minded. But then again, on the other hand, comments are by their very nature a bit obscure and so not as important in the grand scheme of things as main postings are.

And there are other problems too. Many years ago (about three) before blogging took off I used to regularly participate in newsgroup "discussions" ie slanging matches. What I found was that typically my opponents (when they weren't being abusive) would be illogical, make assertions that couldn't be proved and miss out steps in their logic. And that was when they bothered to answer my points at all. Now, I did find ways of dealing with them which usually involved heavy use of the phrases: "You haven't answered the question" and "So what?" I did find that if I kept on going long enough they would finally start to get discouraged. Indeed, the effects could be quite dramatic. News groups are brutal environments. Once people lost arguments they often disappeared entirely. Now that was all to the good except that it was a lot of hard work and I often found myself wondering just how much good I had actually done.

It must also be said that newsgroups have the massive advantage (over blogs) of having threads - which means that you can reply many times to a comment - each time examining one part of his argument and undermining it in turn. Blogs (generally) don't have these.

Now given that we don't have threads here and given that I am not really prepared to put in the effort to see off my opponents and given that if they are not seen off they have an annoying tendency to reply ad infinitum, I think, as a general policy, that I won't be replying to opposition comments.