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Announcement: I Am Now Implementing an Official Policy on Comments

I have an additional announcement, which is that, as of today, 3 January 2022, I am implementing an official policy on comments. For the first few years of this blog’s existence, my policy on comments was basically that I would approve any comments anyone made that were not obviously spam. By summer 2020, though, it had become apparent to me that this policy was a disaster. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say that I had some comments sections that were real dumpster fires.

Over the course of the past year and a half or so, I have slowly developed an informal policy on comments. Now, it is a new year and I just announced in my previous post that I have started a Patreon. I therefore think that this is a good time for me to post my policy on comments publicly in a formalized manner. Because I know that old posts have a tendency to get buried, I have also posted the following policy as a separate page, which is accessible via a link underneath the “Pages” sign along the right side of the website.

Announcement: I Now Have a Patreon!

Hello, everyone! I have an important announcement, which is that I have now created a Patreon page. If you would like to support me and my blog, you can become a patron. I only have one tier for now, which is for a regular donation of three dollars a month. I do not currently offer any benefits for becoming a patron. I may decide to offer some benefits of some kind at some point in the future, but, for now at least, I’m still trying to figure out how this whole system works, and I still don’t really know what kinds of benefits for patrons would be simultaneously practical for me to offer and desirable for patrons.

You can become a patron if you want to, but don’t feel like you have to. I plan to continue posting articles on this blog that everyone can read for free, exactly as I have been doing for the past five years. It is very important to me that my writing is accessible to as many people as possible, so I am not going to put any of my articles behind a paywall.

May Not Be Able to Publish as Frequently in Coming Months, 21 August 2021

I am writing this note to let all my frequent readers and email subscribers know that my courses for this semester are set to begin on Monday, 23 August 2021 and they will last until mid-December. I will be taking some extremely difficult courses and I will almost certainly be extremely busy. I will try to continue posting as often as I can, but I will most likely not have enough time this semester to post anywhere close to as frequently as I have over the summer.

It is likely that I will only be able to post maybe one article each week at the very most and there will probably be some weeks when I will not have time to post anything at all. My articles may also need to be shorter because I won’t be able to spend as much time working on individual articles.

New YouTube Video for ‘The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages’, 19 August 2021

I’ve previously mentioned on this blog that I’ve done a couple interviews with Nick Barksdale for his YouTube channel “The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages.” Today, Nick released a video of an interview with me in which we discuss the question of whether it is fair to judge historical figures by so-called “contemporary standards.” My argument in this interview is loosely based on an argument I made in an article I wrote back in November 2019 titled “Should We Judge Historical Figures by Contemporary Standards.” Here is the video itself:

The article about Persephone that I mention in the interview is one that I was working on about a month ago in response to Overly Sarcastic Productions’ video on the subject. I haven’t finished it and I’ve set it aside for the moment in order to work on other things.

YouTube Videos for ‘The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages’, 3 July 2021

Hello everyone! I just thought I would let you all know that I’ve done two interview videos for Nick Barksdale’s YouTube channel “The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages.” Nick posted the first video on his channel a while ago, but I forgot to announce it on here when he did and, since he posted the second one today, I thought I would bring both of them to my readers’ attention.

Article Deleted and Restored, 28 May 2021

Earlier today, I published an article titled “Why Laws Banning Transgender Athletes Are Bad.” Within only a few hours, at least three different people who are on my mailing list left comments objecting to this post, insisting to varying degrees that they are sick of my political opinions, that they didn’t sign up for “Tales of the Woke,” and that this blog should be reserved exclusively for content that is immediately relevant to pre-modern history.

I initially decided that these commenters have a point and deleted the post, thinking that those who want to read it could still read it on Quora, where I have published it as an answer. After some more thought, though, I decided that, since I already published the article here, I would restore it.

I have, of course, written about politics on this blog ever since the beginning. One of the very first articles I ever published on this website nearly five years ago in November 2016, when I was much younger and much more naïve, was partially a commentary on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In the past, however, I have generally kept my commentary on this blog relevant to pre-modern history in some fashion and reserved my less historically relevant commentary for Quora alone. By double-posting my not-at-all-historically-relevant commentary on trans athletes to this blog, some readers evidently felt I crossed a serious line.

My Most Controversial Articles So Far, As of April 2020

People who have been reading my website for a while are probably aware that, at the end of 2019, I wrote a list of my articles that were most popular over the course of that year. At that time, I only had 185 article published. As of today, 25 April 2020, I now have 247 articles published on this website, counting this one.

Since I recently published an article about the ancient Egyptians that has received considerable negative backlash, I’ve decided to give a short list of some of my most controversial articles of all time. These articles are included here based on the number of angry comments that I have received pertaining to them. There are many other articles that I expected to be controversial that have not received many negative comments and are therefore not listed here.

I have included on this list a number of excerpts from various negative comments that have been left on my articles. I have, in some cases, excerpted the passages quoted below from longer comments, but I have not edited any of these passages for spelling, grammar, or punctuation, nor have I removed any kind of offensive language. These passages are completely uncensored.