Quick Take: How to Argue in any Comments Section

Tricks that I learned the hard way

As long-time readers will know, I spent twenty years researching before I even started writing my History of Mankind project. During that time, I was a pretty successful, but definitely not celebrity-level, reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News. That was my day-job.

This meant that I was, throughout, a guy who knew quite a lot about history, in fact, often more than historians who are used to write and opine about fields where they have no real expertise. This caused me some frustration, because I sometimes wanted to comment on pieces that I came across, to explain how I thought the author was full of shit wrong on a specific point, but I couldn’t really bring any authority to bear on the subject.

This was a problem particularly with the Times Literary Supplement. A London-based wonderful magazine for decades (it has wokified recently, hard) that is not really a supplement of the Times, or exclusively Literary, this was a publication I was a subscriber of for most of those twenty years. I learned much from its contributors, and I also got very pretty upset with some and fired many letters to the editor.

Over the years, I learned how to finetune my letters to improve their chance of publication, to the point that in the end I managed to get most of them published. This may sound like a pretty modest achievement because it is, but I really wanted to make my voice heard by the toffs at the TLS, so it gave me great satisfaction when I did it, and when such toffs answered back in the unmistakably condescending tone that British public school children¹ practice since a very young age.

These lessons I think can be very useful for my readers here in Substack and everyone else. Being a good commenter is a practical skill, if at least to make your voice heard and make your arguments carry weight. I don’t claim that I’m an expert and I’m sure I have left asinine comments here and there in the Internet; still, as a person who sometimes engages with random commenters, I think my hits with the TLS may be of use for both of us: for potential commenters, so you can finetune your points and thus be likelier to kickstart a valuable argument; and for me so I don’t have to read poor comments.

OK, so now let me show you the trick. It’s a simple trick. What I noticed when firing emails to the people filtering for the TLS comments section is that my chances of success skyrocketed when emails were shorter and to the point and with no ad hominem cracks; and when, IN ADDITION, I was able to point to a factual mistake in a piece, or at least what certainly looked like an omission or blunder. If I got the mistake in the first graph, then I learned that even I, essentially a nobody in the gilded world of the TLS, could get a three- or even a four-paragraph letter published. So, the model for the perfect TLS letter to the editor was:

Dear Sir

In piece XX, the esteemed scholar/academic XXX wrote that “[some shit that is clearly wrong here],” but the reality is that [shit that is right here] as one can read in [insert valued source here].

Moreover, [now that I have your attention and you have to publish my letter because I pointed to what you agree with me is wrong or at least clearly debatable, let me rant for a paragraph, come on, I deserve it].

In closing, [any random opinion I want to state about the toff who wrote the piece, or the world’ s ills or whatever catches my fancy, snappily written].

Thank you.

I don’t think I was ever able to improve on this template. I can show you some exceptions, because I keep copies of the emails I sent for the TLS. This one from 2009, for example, got me in trouble with several important British dons, who fired back with great alacrity. The TLS didn’t publish my counter-response, but I don’t care; this email did get published:

Sir,

 Ronald Fraser's review of Paul Preston's "We Saw Spain Die" (TLS, Feb 27) is surprisingly misinformed for a historian of such high standing.

 Most blatantly mistaken is his assertion that Hitler provided the Spanish Francoist army with a free supply of armaments - in fact, the Nationalists bought weapons and ammunition both from Germany and Italy mostly on credit, and paid the amounts agreed on purchase. According to Stanley G. Payne's estimates ("The Franco Regime," 1987), they paid $215 million to Germany and $355 million to Italy. In the case of the latter, the Francoist regime was fastidious enough to maintain payments for some twenty years after World War II ended, "until the last lira had been returned."

 Also, Fraser is remarkably naive when commenting on the "scoops" and successes of left-leaning war correspondents like The Times' George Steer and Chicago Tribune's Jay Allen. In fact, Steer's reporting on the Guernica bombing, far from having withstood the test of time as Fraser implies, is now widely considered an unreliable piece of propaganda that overstates the number of victims and distorts facts to cast the Nationalists in the worst possible light. Likewise, Jay Allen's reporting on the alleged Badajoz bullring massacre (for which no other evidence exists) is shaky at best, with few facts confirmed: one of those is that he did not witness the events he reported, since he wasn't in Badajoz at the time; just like Steer was not in Guernica during the bombing.

 People were killed both in Guernica and Badajoz, many of them murdered on scant evidence. Many more were killed by the Spanish Republicans in Paracuellos del Jarama, just outside Madrid, in the biggest single atrocity of the war, while the city was choked full of foreign correspondents, most of whom chose to ignore the fact, so inconvenient for the image of the Republican cause. Ronald Fraser believes that history proved the likes of Steer and Allen right "long ago." But it didn't.

 Best regards,

This model works. At the time I was a Singapore-based currency columnist, specialized in exotic East Asian currencies like the Thai baht. Certainly not sterling credentials to comment on the hugely divisive issue of Spanish Civil War scholarship; and yet I did, and I know it stung. Another example, from 2016:

Sir, – In an excellent series of reviews about Mao Zedong and early Communist China (January 15, 2016) Jeremy Brown notes that Mao's doctor was surprised by Mao's dislike for taking baths. This is correct, but one must add that Mao did like using the pool he had built inside his official residence at Zhongnanhai in central Beijing, and he often spent days in the pool, doing nothing but swimming and reading books in a robe; because, in addition to the rest, Mao was very lazy. This is according to the same doctor Mr. Brown cites, Li Zhisui, in his blood-curdling memoir The Private Life of Chairman Mao. So, yes, Mao may have been a mass-murdering psychopath, but he wasn't always filthy.

Take that, Chairman Mao. 2016 was a good year for my career as Pest of the TLS Toffs, as you can see here:

Sir, – In a review of military history books (TLS 4.3.16), Victor Davis Hanson states that the battle of Gallipoli was “nearly as costly as the Somme, but more traumatizing.” It's hard to find an accepted measure for the comparable trauma for events that took place a hundred years ago, but there's very good data to compare the cost: during the Gallipoli campaign between April 1915 and January 1916, the Allied armies lost less than 60,000 dead and over 120,000 wounded. In the subsequent battle of the Somme, between July and December 1916, the British alone had over 400,000 casualties and over 90,000 dead, with more British casualties in July than those for the whole Allied army in the entire Gallipoli campaign. All for the gain of six miles in the Somme front. Mr. Davis Hanson may think this is “nearly” the same, but I beg to disagree.

 In addition, the overarching strategic objectives in the Somme were extremely modest. On the other hand, a victory in Gallipoli would have certainly led to the taking of Istanbul and the opening of a deadly, possibly war-ending fourth front for the German-Austrian effort. One doesn't need to be a Churchill fan (which I'm not) to suspect that political bickering and finger-pointing have a lot to do with the widespread, if misleading, idea that Gallipoli was uniquely disastrous, in a war that left 22 million dead.

 I've always been struck by these words written by Churchill in a memorandum to Asquith dated Dec 27, 1914, which I think explain much: "Are there no other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?... No doubt several hundred thousand men will be spent to satisfy the military mind on this point."

Later in the same year, I struck on very familiar territory: bond markets, one of the banes of my existence as a financial affairs correspondent. Here:

-Sir, - In his excellent review of the book The Panama Papers (Aug 19 & 26), Edward N. Luttwak correctly notes that Paul Singer managed to impound an Argentine naval vessel (“Libertad,”  in 2012) due to a dispute over bond payments. I remember the incident well, because a colleague of mine at the Wall Street Journal, who wrote about international bonds, described it then as the “most exciting story ever in this history of bond markets,” which tend to be a bit dull. It must be said that Singer failed in his ultimate goal of having the ship turned over to him as payment for monies owed: the authorities of Ghana, who were holding the ship at the billionaires's request, let it go in December that year after an international ruling against Singer—in what may be the most successful action in the history of the Argentine navy.

(Please note that all these letters are as published, sometimes after small corrections for British spelling and the like: I hate, hate that “billionaires’s.”)

I think you’re getting the gist. Just try and be short and to the point, use your expertise, provide not just arguments but examples, facts and figures. That kind of thing. Don’t go “well you don’t know what you’re taking about, you should read such and such book by Adam Tooze.” Please tell me the chapter, tell me the exact quotation, the piece of data that allegedly proves me wrong; if possible (I know it’s hard or even impossible with e-books) give me the page.

Don’t tell me “listen to such and such podcast” or “watch such and such video” as a retort. As a recommendation, yes, by all means. As a counter-argument, no! Am I supposed to listen for three hours to some people talking just so that I can get in the frame of mind you did to deny the footnoted evidence I just gave you? On my part, I promise not to tell you “read the full Marx-Engels correspondence” (which is many volumes) every time I defend a point I make about Marxism.

This kind of comment also goes nowhere:

When you come across a long post that gives you arguments and quotations and footnotes giving you the sources, don’t go “I still don’t think you’re right” or “It’s clear you have no idea what you’re talking about.” You may be right that that person is wrong, but that kind of comment is a dead end, doesn’t incite any debate. What is the right response? “Yes, I know what I’m taking about”?

An important note here: besides posting praise (which I love and welcome!) one doesn’t need to find anything necessarily wrong in a piece to post a comment about it: take the bit about the Argentine boat, for example.

You may feel (like I often do) the need to point out that such and such claim lacks context, that the author hasn’t considered such and such alternative explanation, that such and such thing should have been considered in a particular discussion or as part of a particular claim. That here’s my ideas on this topic. That’s still perfectly good grounds for a solid, thought-intriguing comment.

I may be wrong or lacking in the stuff I write here. I’ve been wrong before. I’ve had corrections in my life as a journalist, not many, not many serious, but I’ve had them. For crying out loud, I thought that invading Iraq in 2003 was a good idea! Don’t hesitate to let me know when you think I’m wrong, because you may be right and you may teach me something.

And that’s the point: if you tell me that such and such thing I stated is wrong, that it lacks such and such context or that I should have considered an alternative explanation, my work — the History of Mankind project — will be better thanks to you.

So, again, thank you for your comments, and keep them coming. Please.

1. In England, land of contradictions, “public schools” are private schools.