Comments Archives - Granite Grok

ANNOUNCEMENT: We Turned Guest Commenting Off (Again!)

February 21, 2026 Steve MacDonald

I’d like to invite past commenters who were driven off by trolling to come back into the ‘Grok Comment ‘ pool. I turned guest commenting off (again). I wanted it to work. Let more people have the opportunity to remark. But all it did was collect shit and flies. Not every guest commenter was an … Read more

Promoted from Comments: “For a long time, parents have treated ‘public schools’ like some kind of birthright, to be funded at everyone else’s expense.”

April 29, 2024 Steve MacDonald

We’ve been talking (in comments) about Ian’s great comments (Ian Underwood). They are almost always thought-provoking, which is the point of comments. Yeah, we like the sark, snide, and sarcasm, too, but the intellectual journey demands people be willing to get pushed out of their comfort zones.

Our Next Comment of the Week Winner Is…?

January 15, 2024 Steve MacDonald

I remember way back in the early 2000s when I was exploring my politics. After 9/11, I wanted to know how that might happen and realized years of disinterest left me unprepared to discuss it. Politics. Some might argue I still am. But I tried to learn. I started with the Founding documents and kept going.

Our First “Comment” of the Week Winner!

January 8, 2024 Steve MacDonald

Let me begin by saying this was not easy. There were many excellent comments on a wide range of topics across nearly every piece of content we published last week. But as they say in the Movie Highlander. There can be only one.

New Year, New ‘Grok, Commenters Can Win Free Stuff – Every Week!

January 3, 2024January 1, 2024 Steve MacDonald

As we stumble into the year of our lord, Two Thousand Twenty-Four, I feel compelled to give thanks to commenters. Yes, the people who are not just fans of our authors but feel the uncontrollable urge to add their input and encourage debate.

Maintenance: Guest Disqus Comments Have Been Turned Off – For Now

December 12, 2022December 11, 2022 Skip

You can thank someone acting trollish. After warning about the behavior, I had to delete comments and accounts. Since the troll decided to rotate through guest accounts, I’ve turned off that privilege. To re-acquaint people with our few rules: As LaShawn Barber says, “On this blog, your speech is a privilege. On your blog, your speech is … Read more

DISQUS Shows Its Leftism – Comments are Getting Blocked for Moderation for NO Apparent Reason

November 20, 2021 Skip

This is getting well past Stupid.

For a few months now, Commenters on our posts have been complaining that WE (or me) have been moderating their comments left on various posts that we put up. These fall into two categories:

ICYMI – Right Wing Staffers are Building Social Media Dossiers on Left-Wing Reporters

August 27, 2019 Steve MacDonald

The media does this thing where they get some intern to scour your internet history for two words placed in the wrong order. Proof you are a [bigot, racist, xenophobe, etc.] which then becomes breaking news. The media can now expect similar treatment.

Concord Monitor: Skip subscribes, starts commenting again; Monitor shuts down commenting

April 7, 2019April 6, 2019 Skip

The alternative title was “Concord Monitor: taking cues from Twitter, set up their own comment jail?” The Concord Monitor on Friday afternoon suspended the commenting section on all articles following continued abuses. The Monitor will explore alternatives that facilitate civil dialogue and allow a better ability to ban fake accounts. Not just mine – everyone! … Read more

Housekeeping – Update to How Disqus Shows Comment Threads

April 2, 2019 Steve MacDonald

If you comment on GraniteGrok.com, you use Disqus. Well, they’ve announced a change to the default viewing of replies to upper-level comments. When a comment has a lot of responses, Disqus will roll them up and provide a ‘read more replies link’ under the top level comment.

Rand Paul in yesterday’s Washington Post:

September 26, 2018March 9, 2013

At “Sen. Rand Paul: My filibuster was just the beginning,” he describes the filibuster and why he did it. As usual, the comments shed as much light as the column itself, the number of which has just gone over 3,000 and is steadily climbing. They are fascinating (especially in view of the fact that so many are unconcerned … Read more

Granite Grok’s Top Twenty Posts For 2012

September 26, 2018December 31, 2012 Steve MacDonald

Hot Air does this every year, so I figured I’d give it a shot. It is a compilation of the posts that got the most comments in 2012. That’s right, this is comment based.

And I can tell you, since I have a few posts on this list, that how well you write, or how clever you are, is not nearly as important as hitting the right note at just the right time. That or some much more interesting tangents pop up in comments and then take on a life of their own.

However they got there, here are the twenty most commented on Grok posts of 2012 whether the comments are related to the post or not!

20.) So, gay activists, where do you think this will end up? We’ve all asked the question…if two men getting married is a right, why not three? Skip provides a cartoon and some comments, and attracts all the right kind of attention for his effort.

19.) Oh, so THAT’s what they look like! Susan Olsen shares with us the ‘Journalists Guide to Firearms identification. Proof that a picture is worth a thousand words, or at least a bunch of comments.

18.) Meet Another State Employee Wasting Taxpayer Time Online Dick de Seve wasn’t the only state employee with way too much free time on their hands, and open access to the Internet. In this post we meet Gaia, who made deSeve look like an armature.

I Tried It At Home

September 26, 2018December 31, 2010 Steve MacDonald

I%20tried%20it%20at%20home.jpg Fergus Cullen has some advice in his Union Leader column this morning.(print or e-edition) Resolutions that do not include exercise or dieting, to quote the author. They are all of course political, the most entertaining of which is a suggestion that Carol Shea-Porter run for President.

But my favorite was this one.

For bloggers and online posters, man up and identify yourselves when you comment. There are too many anonymous cowards in the online world. Civility is more persuasive than angry rant. If you don’t have the courage to say who you are when taking a shot at someone, you probably shouldn’t say it.

I agree, mostly.