The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by strasmangelo jones:

Boing-Boing is not Making Light; apples and howler monkeys indeed. There is a pressure there to stay on-topic; here, topic drift is expected, welcomed, even cultivated.

Again, the problem here is that the commenters in question did not actually go off-topic. The thread was about a half-million dollar watch; the disemvoweled comments were about the possible immorality of spending half a million dollars on a watch. How is that unrelated to the topic at hand?

Why wouldn't this sort of comment be equally appropriate for every topic not focused on feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, etc?

Because not every other topic is about someone spending half a million dollars on a watch?

@35: But it's not off-topic. And the watch isn't just a watch; it's a watch that costs more than most people's houses, a watch whose cost could go towards feeding many, many people for a very long time. It is relevant, indeed "on-topic," that such a display of conspicuous consumption comes at the grotesque cost of opting not to help many, many people much less fortunate than those who can afford to spend half a million dollars on a watch.

If the post had been about a Hummer stretch limo, it would've been on-topic to mention peak oil or global warming. You don't spend half a million dollars on a wristwatch in isolation from the rest of the world.

Thread topic: Hey! Cool watch!
HuronBob: Lets discuss the work of Thorstein Veblen.
Thread: Did he have a cool watch?
HuronBob: Children are starving in Africa!

This does not seem an especially fair summation of the linked thread.

Guy links to half-a-million-dollar watch. Is the only acceptable response to this half-million-dollar watch to say "Cool!"? Are we not allowed to marvel in disgust, even for a moment, at the culture that would produce such a monument to excess?

And really, "starving kids in Africa" isn't some kind of non sequitur here. There are, in fact, lots of people who are starving in Africa, to say nothing of those dying of preventable diseases. Half a million dollars isn't nothing to those people. Hell, a hundred dollars can buy a lot of food and mosquito netting. That there's a market for a tacky half-million-dollar wristwatch at a time of mass food shortages throughout the third world is grotesque, and the existence of extreme poverty isn't unrelated or "off-topic" at all to products marketed to the super-rich.

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