David McElroy

Nature doesn’t care who wins the U.S. presidential election Tuesday.

No matter who wins, the sun will rise in the east Wednesday morning. It will sink gloriously to the west that evening.

The earth will keep spinning. Trees will keep growing. Leaves will keep changing in the autumn and returning in the spring. Torrents of water will keep falling from the sky and forming great rivers to rush toward the sea.

Animals will keep reproducing and living the lives they’re designed for. They’ll keep growing and changing and evolving. They’ll continue to roam the earth, sometimes competing and sometimes cooperating.

Humanity will continue, too. The billions of people on this planet are the descendants of people who lived through far worse than what most of us will ever face — or can even imagine. The worst scenarios we can conceive would have been unimaginable fantasies of luxury to them.

Two people are competing Tuesday for a terrifying degree of control over this earth. They are both horribly flawed human beings — far worse than even the average among us. You can make arguments, if you’d like, about which of these terrible people is worse for the immediate future and why.

But it doesn’t matter.

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“Hi,” the woman said to me brightly with a smile. “How are you?”

I looked at her and my eyes met hers. I didn’t recognize this beautiful stranger. I had been lost in my own thoughts as I walked through the store, so I hadn’t even noticed her. I smiled back and returned a friendly greeting and that was it.

There was nothing important about the exchange, but it made me feel good as I realized once again what was going on.

I’ve recently shed 70 pounds. I’m not yet down to the weight I’d like to be, but I look much different from how I looked four or five months ago. I’ve struggled with my weight for years, so I’ve seen this pattern enough to understand what had just happened with the woman in the store, even though she almost certainly didn’t understand it herself.

When I’m as overweight as I was last spring, I become invisible to attractive young women in public. I don’t mean I’m treated badly. I just mean that unless I have reason to initiate contact — and she has reason to respond — I might as well not be there. I’m not someone she wants to talk with.

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Ever since I started this site five and a half years ago, I’ve struggled with the issue of what to do about public comments. I used to allow them — because it seemed like the obvious thing which almost every website does — but I was frustrated with the level of discourse.

I’ve had many interesting and useful comments from people — not all of which I even agree with, but which I found useful to the discussion — but a ridiculous percentage of comments have come from angry people who are simply anonymous cowards causing trouble by screaming at people on the Internet.

Some of the worst offenders have been people I’ve generally liked and even agreed with, but something about anonymous online commenting leads a lot of people to become nasty in ways they’d never be in real life.

For a long time, I put up with that, thinking it was a tradeoff I was willing to make. I slowly became more and more uncomfortable with that tradeoff, though.

Since I’m rarely writing about politics these days, my articles don’t attract the fairly regular vitriol they once did, but I’ve simply reached the point I’m not willing to tolerate any of it. (And, of course, I have also spent a ridiculous amount of time deleting spam comments which you guys have never even seen.)

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