You guys need to decide what you want your comments to be, a very clear and specific vision. You can choose whatever you think represents Salon (an academic seminar, a series of inane personal attacks, a bunch of friends chatting, a newspaper letters-to-the-editor section, a forum for advocacy, any number of other options). Put in the work up-front of creating a vision, compare it to your values, decide something and tell your letters section how it is going to be. That is why you are paid, to add value.

Once you have decided something, then choose the rules and system that will support that; there are lots of them described in different letters above. Do not back into it by eliminating different pieces until all that is left is something tolerable. Create something affirmative and know why you are doing it.

If you do not choose something different, you will get the internet default. The internet default is a wide initial range that narrows to nasty attacks, usually along sexist, racist and personal themes, when anonymity and the lack of social cues and immediate feedback lead to escalating bullshit. Decent people will leave in disgust; uncertain people will leave in fear; marginalized people will leave hurt. If you do not choose something different, you choose this.

Creating a vision, building the system that supports that vision (which probably means both software and personal training) and enforcing it will be a lot of work. Commit to that, too. Endless tweaking will only draw out the process, and still not get you a letters section you are proud of.

You've noticed a correlation between anonymous commenting and personal attacks or off-topic comments. You are trying to decide whether to get rid of the anonymous option as a way to address personal attacks or off-topic comments. Anonymity may be a decent proxy, but you've got everyone here arguing about the pros and cons of anonymity when that is not your problem. Do not decide on that basis. Address your real problem, personal attacks and off-topic comments, and then decide whether anonymity has value to the commenting community here.

You're trying to take a shortcut away from the work of moderation, but if you want an interesting civil discussion, you can't escape that work.

Has anyone done an academic family tree for the people who are insiders in the foreign policy community? In my field, there are only a handful of academic advisors and two or three academic grand-advisors. Might be interesting to see if their orthodoxy starts in grad school.

Oh, that was beautifully done. Thanks.

That $3T debt has to be paid just as our climate is shifting. It would have been handy to have that kind of money to pay for adapting our forty year old infrastructure.

The thing is, last time we came out of a Depression, we had huge stocks of national wealth that we've depleted since then. Big timber, salmon runs, ocean fish, oil, coal, groundwater. We had a lot of sink capacity too, like the air and water's ability to absorb pollutants. Those low-entropy stocks and readily available sinks aren't available to us this time around. I worry.

A nice side effect of an Obama victory would be that he is campaigning on the premise that Americans are adults who are interested in policy detail and can be trusted to do sophisticated analysis. If Sen. Obama wins, it would discount the entire media premise that Americans are only interested in the superficial.

I particularly love going to talks by retirees in my field. The good ones have a career's worth of stifled political observations. Now that they're secure, they'll say the stuff that is too contentious for people who still want jobs.

Three million acres of Russian dandelion? That's a lot of land. By reference, California farms about a million acres of land and provides half the country's fruits and vegetables.

The floods taking 200,000 acres of corn out of production in the Midwest will have an appreciable impact on grain prices. You could convert three million acres to dandelion to get rubber, but those are some pretty big trade-offs you're talking about.

No, forgive me. I was wrong. California farms about 10 million acres, not one million. Switching 3 millions acres to dandelions would still be a chunk, but not as dramatic as my first comment sounds.