[pg]

You know, I was just guilty of doing what I always make fun of trolls for doing: commenting based on the title without reading the article first. But I've just read it and I see that I've also done the second thing I make fun of trolls for doing: attacking something other than what the author said. So I take back what I said. It's true, but beside the point.

I do still disagree with him slightly. It's not hard to imagine things one might want to tell about themselves only off the record. Especially about one's health: there are lots of medical conditions someone might be embarrassed to have other people know about.

But I was wrong to suggest that he distrusted off the record statements generally. It should have set off warning signals that I was accusing an experienced reporter of making such an elementary mistake.

One reason I didn't read the article was that it was so long. That's probably one reason people so often do this to me.

[Alex3917]

"That's probably one reason people so often do this to me."

It seems like a lot of the time when people do this to you it's because they've skipped over one of the qualifiers to your argument, especially when the qualifier comes a couple paragraphs before the actual anecdote or metaphor.

[anewaccountname]

I think the most disturbing thing is that your original post was immediately modded up very high in spite of the reality of the article.

[mattmaroon]

It's PG, on PG's site, being voted on by PG fans who probably also didn't read the article. Disturbing, perhaps, but not shocking.

[Hexstream]

Yeah, I'd really need an undo-upmod feature right now. When you upmod something the down arrow could stay and become very pale.

[pg]

Well, this happens with the sort of troll posts I mentioned too.

[rw]

> That's probably one reason people so often do this to me.

You're probably the only author that gets them to read at all.