How can I moderate reader comments?

I need to ban Facebook comments by what I call “religious” asset boosters (gold, bitcoin, Amazon stock) and also “religious” candidate or politician supporters.

In this context, “religious” means faith-based, impervious to facts and logic. With assets, this manifests itself as there is no price too high to ever pay for the asset in question. That is absolute nonsense.

With politicians, it manifests itself as “my guy can do no wrong and yours can do no right.” 

Again, the goal at my Facebook Wall is to figure out what is correct by applying logic to pertinent facts. People who have a “religious” faith in the perfect, wonderfulness of an asset or a politician have no place in a fact-and-logic-based discussion.

I originally thought they were useful for putting forth invalid arguments that I could show the flaws in—sort of training aids. And they are. But letting such people post unmoderated comments endlessly is tedious, repetitive, and boring.

The cumulative effect violates my intellectually-dishonest debate tactic rule #42 badgering. it also violates the objection “Asked and answered” under the Federal Rules of Evidence.

https://www.johntreed.com/…/60887299-intellectually-honest-…

How do I make the comments at my Facebook Wall, or here, not appear until after I approve them? I think that’s called a moderated discussion group. I had it before with another set of web pages that were not Facebook. Actually, what I want is for readers to use messaging or email only to comment on my posts. Then I will add the useful ones to the post.

Before I was on Facebook, I just posted Web articles and got the comments in the form of emails. I can go back to that. Many of my readers who hate Facebook or don’t use it begged me to stay with the old web article format rather than use Facebook. I now think they may have been right.

That old approach was also consistent with my four best friends from high school article policy. I write for people who like what I do. I am not not trying to win over people who do not like me. Waste of time. It happens at times—like with my article saying we should have a military draft.

Fine, but it is “low-grade ore” that I do not pursue.

https://www.johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-blog-about-military-matters/66448067-should-there-be-a-military-draft

https://www.johntreed.com/…/64281731-the-your-four-best-fri…

I will post constructive criticism and corrections of where I got my facts or logic wrong. But instead of pointing out an intellectually-dishonest debate tactic by a reader, I will just exclude it on those grounds. 

Most people cannot handle being told they are wrong publicly and abandon the joint search for truth and just go into an ego rage defending themselves and flailing away at me, typically with a torrent of intellectually-dishonest debate tactics. 

My Facebook Wall or blog needs to operate in such a way that each particular thread becomes more logical and factual as it progresses. When a poster get his ego stung, they almost invariably go intellectually-dishonest nuts in response and the discussion spins off into uselessness.

Experiencing this has been instructive and useful for me, but enough. I am now past the point of diminishing returns—more instruction than we need on the human nature of getting people to admit they’re wrong.

Actually, I learned that in the Dale Carnegie Course and the How to Win Friends and Influence People book by Carnegie when I was in high school and in my 20s. But I like to debate and find it a good way to learn and correct my own wrong thinking.

My email is johnreed@johntreed.com.