That explains why Gruber’s response seemed perhaps overly-defensive at DF this week. To allow comments or to not allow comments is one of the oldest in the blogosphere, one going all the way back to the first half of the last decade, but it’s been awhile since I’ve seen the issue raised in any kind of prominent way. Certainly I have not seen it since the rise of social media in the second half of the last decade, prior to the advent of Facebook and Twitter.

Quoting at some length, here’s Gruber reply:

You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response. I don’t use comments on Wilcox’s site to respond publicly to his pieces, but somehow it’s unfair that he can’t use comments on my site to respond to mine? What kind of sense is that even supposed to make? And if there aren’t any comments on DF, how are DF readers “adding to the noise”? (I realize, alas, that DF readers do sometimes leave noisy comments on sites to which I link. But how is that an argument for allowing comments on DF itself?)

What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.

Is my soapbox bigger than Joe Wilcox’s? Yes it is. But that’s fair, because I built this soapbox myself. It’s my firm belief that all websites eventually attract the attention and respect that they deserve. The hard work is in the “eventually” part.

Used to be, back in the early days of DF, that those complaining about the lack of comments simply were under the impression that a site without comments was not truly a “weblog”. (My stock answer at the time: “OK, then it’s not a weblog.”) Typically these weren’t even complaints, per se, but rather simply queries: Why not?

Now that DF has achieved a modicum of popularity, however, what I tend to get instead aren’t queries or complaints about the lack of comments, but rather demands that I add them — demands from entitled people who see that I’ve built something very nice that draws much attention, and who believe they have a right to share in it.

They don’t.

The “it’s not a blog without comments” argument is one that was once frequently lobbed at righty bloggers, such as Instapundit’s one man band, Glenn Reynolds, from lefty bloggers on community, or “diary” sites such as Daily Kos and MyDD. In January 2006, when I was writing The Blogometer for The Hotline at National Journal, I offered some unsolicited commentary on the subject:

This certainly isn’t the case for all or perhaps even most right-leaning blogs, but there’s more than a strain of truth to this. Liberal blogs are on the whole more likely to enable comment boards than conservative blogs. … Liberal blog readers expect that a blogger make space available on their site to facilitate discussion, whereas conservative argue that anyone can start a blog and it’s not the responsibility of the blogger to give others a soapbox. It’s their soapbox, of course. The difference here is one of conservatives touting the virtue of ownership and individual initiative vs. liberals expressing a desire for community.

As lefty blog analyst Chris Bowers has observed, that there are more conservative blogs in the upper tiers, although the liberal blogs have in that range attract more overall traffic. Though there are doubtless multiple factors, one reason is because many liberals have gravitated toward these community sites. All those diaries on Daily Kos are people who otherwise might have signed up for a Blogger account and struck out on their own in the blogosphere.

So the online left and the online right tend to have slightly different ideas about what a blog is for, and on this point they’re talking past each other.

This is a little ironic, considering that Gruber’s political politics (as opposed to tech politics) are clearly left-liberal, as anyone who reads his site with some regularity has surely noticed. (Though he is surely an “Appublican” in the phrase of one clever comment, speaking of irony, here.) (And did I mention that The Blogometer was recently retired? For another discussion.)

Interestingly, Wilcox has now rescinded his previous challenge, and taken up Gruber’s not-actually-implied one, as he wrote (on his own blog, of course) in response afterward:

I argued that comments add to the narrative. Fine, I’ll try it John’s way. Most Oddly Together comments are missing anyway, following a blog transition that broke the links … As an experiment, as of today, I’ve removed the Disqus commenting system from this blog for two weeks. If I decide to permanently turn off comments, I’ll write a mea culpa post and apology to John Gruber.

So the game is afoot, though I think Wilcox will prefer his own blogging style, and Gruber will probably give at most five words to it.

Meanwhile, fellow thinking Apple supporter MG Siegler has weighed in to say his views on comments have changed over the years, and he no longer has them on his personal site:

I suppose my time at TechCrunch (and VentureBeat before that) changed my opinion. I came to realize that the vast majority of comments on popular sites are useless — or worse.

Like Gruber, I much prefer when people use their own sites to respond to something. That small barrier to entry seems to ensure that the quality of the discussion will be higher.

There are exceptions, of course, but they’re few and far between. And I feel like the comment problem on the Internet is getting worse, not better.

It may seem like everyone has a blog, but that isn’t truly the case. What is one to do? CK Sample III concludes in a post on his own blog:

Anyone who wants to talk to me can do so via Twitter.

I think that’s the right conclusion. Blog P.I. does have comments, but the only reason it still does at this late date is because I haven’t taken the time to close them (you may note that I haven’t taken the time to do much writing at Blog P.I. lately, either). When this site launched in 2006 and through the next couple years as I wrote alongside a couple of talented co-bloggers, this site did begin to develop a small commenting community (including Jim Treacher, now of Daily Caller fame).

But then two things happened: The first has to do with social networking: In late 2006 I joined Facebook and early 2007 I joined Twitter, and most everyone who writes about technology and politics did so about the same time or not long after. With only anecdotal and in absolutely no way empirical basis for the claim, I would say this happened to many other bloggers, those writing about technology and politics and those writing about other subjects. In fact, a general decline in blogging has been the subject of some discussion in recent years. I can’t say that I have seen that, but I also can’t say that claim is based in empiricism, either.

A second effect is probably much more specific to this site: in 2007 I started writing about comment spam, political comment spam, Twitter spam and even political Twitter spam. Guess what happens when you start writing about spam? That’s right: you become a target of spam. I had to rachet the controls on my spam filters up so high it began to block legitimate commenters, Treacher included.

Will I turn off comments here? Not unless I return to blogging here on a more regular-type basis, and I don’t have any immediate plans to do that. Let’s say I do pick up the pace at Blog P.I., how would I like to incorporate feedback? The answer, I think, is some combination of integration with Facebook and Twitter. Facebook’s Open Graph (and before it Facebook Connect) is the most attractive option, provided I can find someone to plug it in at a reasonable price. In this way, people can comment on this site while friends of that individual may see the fact of their comment here back on Facebook. Twitter does not yet support such a service, but they’re working on one, and as Twitter tends to be more germane to political communications (at least among those I follow) I definitely want relevant tweets here.

John Gruber may not want that, and that’s fine. His soapbox is indeed far bigger than mine, so he needs to think about managing his online presence whereas I would still be trying to promote mine (if I was actually doing that). There are probably many today who would still insist he is not writing a blog. That’s a matter of perspective, which says more about the wide range of opinion about what blogging is good for and supposed to be about. Some might even say that my own dearth of posts in 2010 has rendered it “not a weblog.” To which I would probably say: OK, then it’s not a blog. It’s still social media, albeit a relatively primitive form. Blog P.I. was state-of-the-art in 2006 but is behind the times today. (MyBlogLog in the sidebar, anyone?) I’d like to fix that, and maybe someday I will. In the meantime, I’ll be talking about politics and technology on Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s one from today, noticed first by a colleague and concerning the Twitter account @speakerpelosi. Check out these two screen shots:

Whoops! The two posts went up within minutes of each other, which you can’t tell on account of Twitter’s imprecise time stamping (instead it just says both went up 2 hours ago). The tweet is still available on David All’s account, but is now gone from the fake Pelosi account. I suppose that’s about all the proof we need.

Is this just a cheap gotcha? If you think he’s done anything wrong, then perhaps so. I’ve been following the Twitter debate over this, and I think it’s been overdone: I don’t see how it is a TOS violation, and calling it sock puppetry is defining socks down.

I think the only thing necessarily wrong here is carelessness. Fake websites and joke accounts are fun, but they require a degree of caution that not everyone is up for.

If there is one other thing that’s wrong here, it’s the violation of Egon Spengler’s good advice: don’t cross the streams.

Update: It appears that David is now turning into the skid — probably a better way to handle it.

Regrettably, I was born with no mouth.

He was very understanding, writing back the next day:

thank you sir thank for your mail all is understood well i can question you just of the condition you gave any please kindly make a way we can both talk

At least I think he understood. In any case, this is the long way around getting to my real point.

As you may know, I run a blog here. As you can probably guess, I get my share of spam comments; most are caught by the Akismet plug-in for WordPress. But then, most are fully automated and advertise prescription drugs, gambling websites or sex acts that would probably boost my unique visitor counts if I mentioned them, but I don’t need that kind of traffic.

However, a small percentage of it manages to evade Akismet’s filters and find its way into my moderation queue. In some cases, they are only barely distinguishable from real comments. In some cases not listed here, I’ve approved comments that I am sure were intended only to improve the SEO of the website linked, but were interesting enough to allow through on their own merits.

Most are not, but this doesn’t mean they’re entirely without value. Some of them are clever, some are just amusing. I’ve been holding onto a few of them to discuss here, so let’s open up the queue, if for no other reason than now I can finally delete them:

Here, somebody is pushing what appears to be a YouTube clone, even using a joking nickname YouTube acquired once the site itself was acquired by Google. In fact, the site turns out to be a combination of Google’s input forms. Though the IP address indeed traces back to the United Kingdom, the author is not especially concerned with proper English spelling or punctuation. They also have no system for keeping track of which websites they have already hit, or they just don’t care. I’m leaning toward the latter.

Here is one that, at first glance, looks like a genuine comment: This was intended for a post that mentioned Ron Paul, just as the one above tried attaching itself to a post discussing Google and YouTube. But if you follow the link, it goes to a blog whose posts consist of only of one YouTube video and sometimes-relevant text copied from other websites — “scraped” as it’s called. And there’s a good reason why it sounds like a real comment: It was scraped from another comment from the same thread.

This one promotes yet another inscrutable blog, this time in a foreign language that I presume to be Turkish. I guess this because the IP address resolves to Izmir, Turkey. The one above resolves to Istanbul, Turkey. The two cities are not close by, so they are probably not the same person. But if Turkey is a hotbed of comment spam, that’s news to me.

Undoubtedly, this one is my favorite. Like the Wikipedia vandal whose edit summary consisted of “Blanked the page” or the panhandler who admits he needs the money for booze, “Sohbet” is admirably honest about his intentions. I might even consider throwing him a link, except that the website no longer exists — less than a month after he was trying to extract Google juice/build traffic for it. Also of note: the IP address resolves to Antalya, Turkey. Still, if Turkish comment spam is a known phenomenon, I can’t find any discussion about it.

Funny at first, but tedious. I get a lot of these, and it’s kind of similar to another common tactic I’ll get to in just a bit. Flattery will get you everywhere with some people, but not me. Also, the linked site is in Russian. Russian spam at least I am familiar with.

Better than YouTube! Quite a claim. Surprisingly, the website is well-designed, coherent and legitimate. For someone who just wanted to find videos related to a presidential or prospective VP candidate, it might actually be better than YouTube. So here we can start to draw a clear distinction: Some spam comment campaigns aim to promote fake websites that seek ad revenue or to promote another website. Others are spammy promotions for real websites; it’s very possible the creators of this website don’t know exactly what their SEO is up to. But I’m not particularly offended by this comment. It doesn’t add to the conversation so I won’t approve it, but it got the general subject matter of this website correct, it’s vaguely conversational, and it doesn’t represent itself as anything other than what it is: a pitch.

Lastly, this one I’m including not because it’s compelling, but because it’s so common. Also, because it represents the dishonest counterpoint to the previous example. Here, the commenter announces enthusiasm for the targeted website (in this case mine), then immediately starts pitching another website. Notice that his subject matter is completely off-base with what Blog P.I. is about. The targeted post — which I wrote in July, 2006 — included exactly one use of the word “wedding,” in a throwaway reference to New York Times announcements page thereof.

Predictably, the website being promoted is commercial in nature, but doesn’t offer anything for sale itself. What it does, though, is link to pages on a real wedding supply website, which presumably hired the spammer to boost their search engine ranking. A bit of rudimentary sleuthing reveals the SEO’s identity and company; he’s using his real name (which is something, I guess) and he didn’t even register the URL anonymously.

But I’m not going to single him out with a link or textual mention that could turn up in a search engine. He’s not doing anything illegal and, as noted above, similar practices are exceedingly common. I’ve been a critic of certain SEO practices, but I’m fascinated by also them, and clearly I think some tactics are better than others. The way I see it, if you’re going to do black hat SEO, why not do it with some style?

Also, the joke is on them: Every link in my comment section is automatically assigned a nofollow attribute.

I promised then to look a little closer at the identity of this dedicated anti-Fredhead, and while I later thought I had thought the better of it, Christopher Caldwell’s piece in the most recent New York Times Magazine afforded me the opportunity to re-rethink that decision.

And so this post exists… in three interminable parts. I don’t often use the below-the-fold feature on WordPress, but this post won’t appeal to everyone, and I don’t want it to get in everyone’s way. But if you’re game, then follow me…

I. Lucky Jim

Let’s start at the beginning. The post mentioned above dared The Artist Sometimes Known as Jim Robinson to post on this site, and to his credit (I suppose) he did:

Jim Robinson
Jul 11th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

Y’all (thats “you all” dumbed down for FRaudheads) flatter me. I guess if Fred actually had credentials you wouldnt be sitting here worrying about what Im posting on blogs.

DOH!
Posted Jul 11, 2:14 PM

I went on vacation a few days later, and apparently “Jim” missed the flattery enough to come back and beg for some more:

RepublicanWomenAgainstFredThompson
Jul 20th, 2007 at 3:55 pm

I thought y’all were gonna do something about me???? What happened? ROFLAMO! losers.

Taunted into submission, eventually I decided to go ahead and see where his IP address was located:

The IP address traces to Bell, California, a nothing city located in Los Angeles County. According to Wikipedia, its most famous native is bandleader Stan Kenton, and was last heard from in 2000, when USPS misplaced some Oscar statuettes and this was inaccurately reported as a stolen shipment. For what it’s worth, this IP address is the same one supplied to me by another blogger hit with similar absurdities from our friend “Jim.”

Next I tried contacting the person at the Yahoo address listed for multiple handles, s1nderella@yahoo.com. I was even going to offer an e-mail interview, if he or she was so willing. Alas, it bounced back immediately.

So I Googled s1nderella, which seems to be a named used by a handful of young female social networkers. I suppose this could lend credence to the idea our “Jim Robinson” is actually a woman in drag. Or maybe not. Perhaps our political prankster is just a little more planned-ahead than usual, and is reasonably sure the IP address will not connect him to his or her job, nor any candidate.

And that’s just as well. It’s not as if these attacks are having any impact besides annoying the Fredheads (I’m sure some will read the very existence of this post as evidence that Fred supporters are “afraid” of such attacks, but I’ll just point again to the title and mission statement of this blog). Meanwhile, “Jim” had struck again (and probably again and again), even getting called out at Sean Hackbarth’s site, where a contributor linked back to my original post.

II. Basil the Great

So “Jim Robinson” continues to hide in plain sight. But what is his agenda, if he has one beyond making a scene? Let’s now look at his actual words. Here’s one of the more peculiar (not to mention widely-distributed) phrases from his oeurve:

One right-wing critic in a widely circulated internet column called Thompson a “neocon globalist” for his immigration, free trade, and foreign policy positions.

I joked at the time that the source must have been left unidentified because he was so obscure as to induce, at best, confusion. Seems I was more right than I knew. The “right-wing critic” appears to be someone named Basil Harrington, who sometimes describes himself as “a retired businessman, poet, and resident of Chapel Hill, North Carolina” and sometimes merely as “a scholar, writer and gentleman.”

Mr. Harrington appears to be nobody of any repute, and if he wrote anything prior to March of this year, it’s not easy to find. He is considered a self-promoting crackpot at Free Republic, a website that knows from self-promoting crackpots. In fact, it appears that Mr. Harrington’s limited output as an essayist has been posted to just about any website accepting unpaid conservative commentary: at Liberty Post, Men’s News Daily, Enter Stage Right, ChronWatch, SmallGovTimes (which claims Bill Frist, Dick Morris and others as contributors (i.e. it has copied their words from the Senate floor and The Hill)), and NewsBull to list a few. He is “widely-circulated” all right — apparently all by himself.

NewsBull is (at least one) home to the rant that inspired “Jim Robinson.” It begins:

Fred Thompson: Neocon Globalist

By Basil Harrington

For the past few days movement “conservatives” and GOP cheerleaders have been ecstatic that Fred Thompson, former Senator from Tennessee, may form an exploratory committee to seek the GOP nomination for president. “Now we’ll have a conservative in there,” said one person, who, I assume, has no idea what a real conservative is.

There already are two fine conservative candidates seeking the nomination: Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo. And Fred Thompson does not even come close measuring up to them.

Fred Thompson is a neocon globalist.

It’s also funny, and possibly telling, that in this brief article Harrington uses the same “one person said” trick often employed by “Jim.” More than once, actually:

As one commentator notes: “Overall, Americans for Better Immigration gives [Thompson] a career grade of C…”

As a rhetorical strategy it subtracts the need to name sources, but it also subtracts credibility. I hesitate to suggest that Basil Harrington doesn’t exist — that he could simply be another invention of “Jim Robinson” — but I suppose I just did. They certainly both have a habit of posting their writings to as many websites as possible, and “Robinson” sure does like to quote “Harrington.”

I have sent Mr. Harrington an e-mail, which at least hasn’t bounced back. But even if he does reply, what would that prove? (Although to be fair, I’m not sure what it would disprove, either.)

III. Keeping Up With The Joneses

The epithet “neocon globalist,” as wielded by “Jim Robinson,” is often accompanied by a mention that Fred is a member of that venerable magnet for conspiracy nuts, the Council on Foreign Relations. Sometimes “Jim” (and possibly other anti-Fredheads) shortens this to “CFRed,” which I must concede is at least sort of clever.

But really, who cares about the CFR? Who actually thinks this book club for the political elite is some kind of, ahem, global conspiracy? Well, just plug CFR, neocon and globalist into Google and it doesn’t take long before you’ll find Infowars, the conspiracy site run by fringe online radio host Alex Jones.

It may be worth pointing out — and I swear, I’ve avoided using this name for as long as I could — that Ron Paul is now a repeat guest on Jones’ online radio show. And while the last time on he didn’t actually say that the U.S. government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks (a favorite theory of Jones’) he certainly did court the support of that theory’s most high-profile proponents. This connection between simultaneous support for Ron Paul, fear of globalism, hatred of neocons, and interest in the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, among other conspiracies (ice hockey and Alanis Morrisette (there’s that Canadian thing again…)) can be found on this YouTube account, and this one and this one. And this one.

So at long last, let’s go back to Caldwell’s fascinating piece for the NYT. Caldwell does not mention Alex Jones and he doesn’t invoke the hoary threat of “neocon globalism,” but he does invoke another name which is better known to conservatives: John Birch.

Paul never deals in disavowals or renunciations or distancings, as other politicians do. In his office one afternoon in June, I asked about his connections to the John Birch Society. “Oh, my goodness, the John Birch Society!” he said in mock horror. “Is that bad? I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution. I don’t know how many positions they would have that I don’t agree with. Because they’re real strict constitutionalists, they don’t like the war, they’re hard-money people. . . . ”

Paul’s ideological easygoingness is like a black hole that attracts the whole universe of individuals and groups who don’t recognize themselves in the politics they see on TV. To hang around with his impressively large crowd of supporters before and after the CNN debate in Manchester, N.H., in June, was to be showered with privately printed newsletters full of exclamation points and capital letters, scribbled-down U.R.L.’s for Web sites about the Free State Project, which aims to turn New Hampshire into a libertarian enclave, and copies of the cult DVD “America: Freedom to Fascism.”

But the truth is, and here I hope the Ronulans will give me a break (even if I did just call them Ronulans), these people are not all supporters of Ron Paul. They stand along the fringe with him, and include many who are not Republican Party members. Some of them can be found in the Constitution Party, one example being “Unfit for Command” co-author Jerome Corsi, who reportedly

also wonders when people will realize that Thompson, who is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a globalist who would push for open borders.

Corsi is also known for promoting the theory that President Bush is pushing for a single North American state much like the one imagined in David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” (albeit with fewer Quebecois wheelchair assassins, one presumes.) As PostPolitical puts it,

Of course, why these absolutists suspect they’ll get a better society from the empowerment of the advocates of open borders, atheism and bureaucratic statism, is anyone’s guess. … This one has been sneaking up on us for awhile. It’s increasingly difficult to distinguish the rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Michael Badnarik, Lou Dobbs and Ron Paul from each other, as representing different schools of political philosophy. That’s a very recent phenomenon and it bodes ill for the GOP.

So, this much we know about their leanings:

• They don’t like Fred Thompson
• They don’t appear to like many Republican politicians
• Only Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo (and sometimes Duncan Hunter) pass muster
• They conflate globalization with immigration
• They make little distinction between legal and illegal immigration
• They fear the Council on Foreign Relations
• They hate “neocons”
• Some of them think the U.S. government may be behind 9/11

This fear of a unified world government is like nothing so much as the conspiracy-minded views of the old John Birch Society, a group evicted from the GOP by one William F. Buckley Jr. nearly 50 years ago. Though the Birchers oppose government-backed wealth redistribution, they also (in its current, withered form) oppose government-backed free trade agreements. And they are, to put it mildly, weird people.

Like the Birchers, who at least managed to correctly identify international communism as an existential threat, Ron Paul is not wrong to maintain healthy fear of government encroachment on individual liberty. But one need not be a Bircher to fear communism, and one need not be a Truther to distrust the government.

Unfortunately for Ron Paul, he has cast his lot with them, and with that, has cast himself out of today’s mainstream Republican Party.

P.S. It should be said, our Basil is not this Basil (as far as I know).

This time the target here is not a congressman, but the blogger who first published e-mails exposing the poor judgment (and spelling) of now-ex-Rep. Mark Foley. TPMmuckraker headlines it:

Final Foley E-Mail Mystery Solved (Sorta)

“Sorta” is right, as the blogger behind the original Stop Sex Predators has not been publicly named (though the “final” part remains to be seen). The SSP blogger apparently is — to the satisfaction of Republican Washington — until just now an employee at left-leaning gay rights outfit Human Rights Campaign, and prior to that a Democratic campaign staffer.

Credit goes to the NYT for giving this space in their pages, but of course they don’t credit the blogger who actually uncovered the facts, the pseudonymous GTL of Stop October Surprises.

Until just today, SOS (as we must call it) was linked by and interacting with only a few conservative blogs.

SOS’s first substantive entry, posted nearly two weeks ago, explains quite simply how the anonyblogger was caught:

how to catch an idiot?

Start with something simple…

Send the moron an email using a tracing tool like ReadNotify, wait until the email is read.

This little adventure all started with a simple email sent from an account ‘dcguy191@yahoo.com’. One of the persons behind StopSexPredators, using the email address ’stopsexpredators@gmail.com’, read this email from several network locations. (Don’t think physical location, think network location.)

Contrary to what New Yorker cartoons would have you believe, these days on the Internet people sometimes do know that you’re a dog (provided they sign up for a free trial with ReadNotify). A subsequent post included screen shots from ReadNotify’s tracking history, demonstrating that SSP had read the tracked e-mail from a network address assigned to none other than the Human Rights Campaign.

Before long the HRC was issuing statements, and as the MSM coverage was being readied for publication yesterday, SOS’s GTL added:

I know who this employee is, and have for some time, but I cannot prove that he has been fired. I will let others go after that for now. There is more to this story… It seems to me that the HRC has more work to do in this matter, and I communicated that message to Brad Luna.

SOS has been left out of most MSM and blog coverage up to this point, but blogger Joe. My. God. has a brief e-mail interview with GTL (Mike Rogers makes a special appearance in an update, giving his take on the matter). The transcript includes this possibly meaningful exchange:

JMG: Isn’t it possible that the IMs were leaked internally at HRC without the knowledge of top management?

SOS: no comment.

Hmm. Needless to say, HRC may have a PR problem on their hands. At the very least they should release the staffer’s name; if these episodes have taught us anything, it’s that such information is going to come out anyway [Update: Yep. See update below].

Before you’re done with this, make sure you look at these two blogs back to back, Stop Sex Predators and Stop October Surprises. Even a cursory glance reveals that they are identical in almost every meaningful way: Similar titles, subject matter, short duration (though SOS wisely dispensed with the fake history), fraternal twins down to their Blogger accounts — SSP uses the black Minima template; SOS chose white Minima.

So there is at least one more Foley e-mail mystery to be solved: Who is behind Stop October Surprises?

P.S. Looks like Mickey Kaus blogged too soon:

Foley? That rings a bell. I remember there was something about a guy named Foley a while back.

The Kaus Faster Theory (as I call it, considering I’ve never once heard Bruce Feiler weigh in on the subject) may well have a wide range of applications, but there’s still that one thing which can render it inapplicable to an ongoing story — new developments.

Update: There you are, Radar, I knew you couldn’t not follow this one up. At least this time, you’ve actually contributed to the conversation. SSP turns out to be one Lane Hudson. Ace has more.

Of course, did Radar Online mention Stop October Surprises? No, no it did not. No points for you.

Since Labor Day alone, the 2006 campaign season has witnessed a flurry of mini-scandals wherein a federal campaign has gotten in over its head with some online activity or another involving political blogs, usually with the intent of doing a little friendly harm to their opponents’ image — but invariably the whole thing blows up in their face.

As we’ve seen here previously, the Internet has tempted campaigns (and journalists) to do things that might initially seem in their best interest, but really aren’t. Beltway-based brick and mortar campaign operatives often disdain the blogosphere, where they think think “anything goes.” and so when the time comes they decide they want to leverage the blogopshere, they think anything goes. They’re wrong, of course. It would behoove political operatives to respect the medium and try to understand it before they try to engage it (let alone try to exploit it).

Until they do, here’s a handy chart comparing the various players, circumstances and issues surrounding the latest campaign blog scandals:

And after the jump, some additional thoughts:

• In late ‘04 and early ‘05, then-aide to Gov. Bob Ehrlich (R-MD), Joseph Steffen was caught spreading rumors about Baltimore Mayor O’Malley (the (correctly) presumed ‘06 Democratic nominee for governor), and was dismissed. The difference with Ms. Gruber is that she was fired for spreading the truth — and much faster.
• You know, that Persuasionatrix blog was really pretty good, if you can put aside the epithets. Alas, the lack of self-censorship that made it so compelling is also what ended up bringing it down.
• The IP addressed used by the Bass office to troll the NH liberal blogs is the exact same shared IP address other House offices have used to vandalize/edit Wikipedia. The most recent example (and perhaps the most amusing) being Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R-MN).
• So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the IP address associated with the Kean campaign has also been flagged for making unhelpful edits to Wikipedia, especially to the page for Sen. Menendez.
• Unlike the concern troll sock puppets (concern puppets?) at Blue Jersey, IndieNH appeared on the Internets long before the current scandal — in fact, long before one of the bloggers who ended up catching him (or her).

Did you feel that you were doing something ethically questionable when you posted, for instance, a comment by Sprezzatura that carried the headline ‘Siegel Is My Hero’?

Every man is a hero to his alias. No, it never occurred to me at the time that I was doing something wrong. There are other people who appear anonymously on Web sites; they do battle with their detractors. Anonymity is a universal convention of the blogosphere, and the wicked expedience is that you can speak without consequences. What was wrong about it is that I did it under the aegis of The New Republic, as a senior editor of the magazine.

As I have written before, what he did wrong was blending multiple online personalities — one identifiably Siegel and one claimedly not-Siegel, and had the latter defend the former as if they were distinct individuals. This would have been equally wrong had he done so under the aegis of a free Blogspot account.

Moreover, it’s not just the ethics of the ’sphere that confounds Mr. Siegel, but the wisdom one needs in order to make sense of it. Consider:

[Siegel:] Obscurity is the new poverty. People don’t seem able to bear being unknown. But obscurity and struggle are the artists’ Harvard and Yale.

Anonymous bloggers are also saddled with obscurity, which I doubt you would similarly glorify.

That’s right. In their case, anonymity is obscurity’s rash. At least for those who practice incessant character assassination, which represents a good portion of the blogosphere, they vent out of the pain of being unacknowledged.

Leaving aside the fact that it’s probably more correct to say obscurity is anonymity’s rash — if it even it makes sense to say such a thing — let’s ask whether or not “incessant character assassination” constitutes a “good portion of the blogosphere.” But what’s a good portion? Is it bigger than a breadbox?

If you spend your time wading through the comment section vitriol at Eschaton or LGF, you don’t really have the right to complain about it afterward — that’s what they’re like. But if you choose your bloggers wisely — the folks at Volokh Conspiracy, Obsidian Wings, The Corner and Tapped are just a few of many who fight fairly — the chances are much better you’ll decide the blogosphere has something to offer. Evidently, Siegel prefers denunciation to conversation.

Even if we grant him this assessment, it must be said, the blogosphere is what you make of it.

As covered extensively in the last post, last week TNR joined the Washington Post in the ranks of prominent political paper-based periodicals to get burned by its comment section; writer Lee Siegel’s blog was pulled after the editors discovered he had been posting as his own biggest fan, the artlessly arftful “Sprezzatura.”

Earlier this afternoon, TNR’s Foer went up with an editor’s note/meditation on the future of TNR’s comment section. Unable to arrive at a conclusion, Foer instead settles on drastically overthinking it:

A few months back, The New Republic actually considered requiring Talkback bylines. Our logic went like this: We would never publish an anonymous letter to the editor in the print magazine; in fact, we never publish a letter to the editor without checking the missive’s facts and authenticity. So why should we hold reader opinion on the web to a different standard?

Absent other perfectly good reasons not occurring to me just now, I’ll point out that the two are just not the same, and never have been. Comment sections are moderated, letters pages are edited. Magazines must be forgiven for being choosy, as they have very little space to work with; assuming a comment is on-topic, non-abusive and somewhere in the ballpark of substantive or amusing, it should be allowed. And it goes on like this:

The proposal wasn’t meant to demean TNR’s Talkback section, which has a far higher quality than almost any other example of the genre. Yet, scattered among Talkbalk’s thoughtful posts, you could still find examples of ad hominem attacks and argument that degenerated into taunting. (Some of which, it turned out, were produced by one of our own.)

Unlike the Post at the time of the Deborah Howell controversy, TNR already has comment registration — so that fix is out. But if one apple is bad, should the whole cart be overturned? Unfortunately, in this case the apple is from their own tree (all right, enough with that metaphor) and Foer sounds determined to let that fact ruin everything.

Later in the note, he acknowledges that many potential commenters will drop out before revealing their names. So Foer has just walked into a debate he already seems to have decided he can’t answer: Whether the honesty conferred by anonymity is productive or disruptive. Frankly, the blogosphere itself cannot really answer this question. Some have comments and some do not. Some are attacked for what their commenters say, others are attacked because they didn’t give anyone the chance to say it.

Also, curiously unmentioned in Foer’s meditation: Lee Siegel’s blog is back. All the posts have been returned, even the controversial ones about pedophilia, even the comments by Sprezzatura. I take this to mean that Siegel is not only not fired, he’s cleared to blog again. That’s fine, it’s their call to make. But shouldn’t Foer have included at least a sentence addressing this development?

Update: It’s worth noting that the return of Siegel’s blog seems to fly in the face of the New York Observer’s report, which quotes Foer as saying Siegel’s suspension is “indefinite.” Are some suspensions more indefinite than others? Or is it more likely he actually hasn’t been reinstated, and that the blog’s return is an accident; after all, the last post is dated 8/31, shortly before it was replaced by Foer’s apology. And that apology is pretty firm about Siegel’s blog no longer being published there. What we may have instead is the temporary (?) return of Siegel’s blog as an orphan page, not linked to by any other page on the site. But if you have the URL handy, “Lee Siegel on Culture” is yours for the reading.

Updated again: I am informed by Tyler Green of Arts Journal that Siegel’s blog is not actually back — just the archives. That’s actually what I’d asked for in the previous post; it sounds like they took so much heat for closing off the archives that they decided to open them back up. Good. And so I’ll conclude by going back to how I concluded this post in the first place — Foer’s note is more than annoying, more crucially, it lacks transparency. And in the end, it adds nothing.

Updated one more time: The first and last lines of that Observer piece, the first quoting Siegel, the last quoting TNR literary editor (and onetime Sopranos guest star) Leon Wieseltier, are expecially [Update: This should be a word] telling. Siegel first:

I made a dumb mistake, and I’m very sorry I did it. I took the blogosphere’s bait, and I stooped to the level of these people who were commenting on my pieces, and I shouldn’t have.

If you’re wondering how Mr. Siegel got off on such a bad foot with the blogosphere, look no further. One wonders why he stooped to the level of writing a blog in the first place. Now Wieseltier:

I don’t like the blogosphere for many reasons; one of them is its assumption that a person’s first thoughts are his best thoughts, which is quite obviously false.

I would say this very post is evidence of that. Lee Siegel had no business writing a blog in the first place, but Wieseltier sounds like he’d do just fine. Mr. Foer?

To recap: During the Armstrong/Townhouse/Kos/Zengerle knockdown in June, Siegel stepped in, univited, to unleash an overheated rejoinder to the bloggers, including the spasmodic coinage of a frivolous term, “blogofascism.” Flash forward to two weeks ago, where Siegel took after English professor and, ah, pedophile expert James Kincaid, who had analyzed the national JonBenet Ramsey obsession for Slate earlier in the week. Siegel’s argument, if that’s what you could call it, was that Kincaid was a pedophile himself:

What a shame that editors still publish his disingenuous screeds against the media’s sexualization of children. They really just seem like ways for Kincaid to hide his own appetite for children behind his indictment of all of us hypocritical “voyeurs” out there.

Among the lefty bloggers who tuned in first, his attacks were deemed so incomprehensible and so unfair that it was beneath even TNR. Marty Peretz and Peter Beinart may offend them politically, but Siegel offended their sensibilities. Within days, a decade-old Siegel column more or less about having the opportunity to sleep with a flirtatious, 16-year-old Uma Thurman surfaced, and brought further ridicule. Ezra Klein suggested it was a case of projection, and though Siegel’s ancient TNR piece seemed to be about not wanting to to do so, it was too on-topic not to become an issue.

And then, without fanfare, Siegel’s blog disappeared from the site, and in its place appeared a mea culpa from editor Franklin Foer:

Unless you’d been reading the comments to these posts, you would have missed the exchange that brought it all down:

One wonders if Siegel or his accomplice meant for the handle to be quite so apropos — “sprezzatura” refers to artwork produced from a genteel, aristocratic point of view, a reaction against the more spontaneous work of rising young artists. Sound like an ongoing feud that you know of?

It’s unfortunate that TNR has removed his blog in toto, as we bloggers would really like the chance to go back through and dig for more

Not that it deterred the swarm, of course. At this point, the rightosphere jumped in as well: John Podhoretz dubbed him “perhaps the single most pretentious person in America today,” and Ann Althouse rediscovered just how little she’d liked his writing. The fact that Siegel/Sprezzatura was convinced jhschwartz was Mark Greif from the literary journal n+1 was almost an afterthought, as was the identity of Sprezzatura’s other master — if indeed such a person exists. To date, the kerfuffle has inspired not just a parody post by Michael Bérubé, but also a parody blog by person(s) unknown.

As Blog P.I. has noted before, it’s been a banner year for sock puppets already — Michael “Mikekoshi” Hitzlik, Glenn “Ellison” Greenwald, even Jason “George Gooding” Leopold. As in the case of Greenwald, hubris played a big factor in this un-socking. For both writers, the temptation to praise oneself in a manner even one’s biggest fans are unlikely to do was insurmountable; this hubris [in part] drives the similar impulse to pour self-generated adulation into one’s own Wikipedia entry. Had Siegel (or his rumored accomplice) just toned it down, Sprezzatura might still be antagonizing Siegel’s antagonists. And whereas the semi-retired Greenwald is unfireable, Siegel like Hitzlik before him is (or was) eminently vulnerable.

Another interesting aspect is just how muted the swarm has been. Possible reasons include the fact that Siegel did himself in, as well as the possibility that Greenwald’s allies are unwilling to make themselves hypocrites. A typical half-hearted criticism comes from Gavin M. at Sadly, No!:

[S]ock-puppetry is bad and embarrassing, but on the scale of human folly, it must rate somewhere near swiping parking spots or soaping postage stamps — a meniality for which one’s own conscience ought to be the thing most permanently troubled.

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money offers some good thoughts, but still downplays the charge:

It seems to me that most incidences of sock puppetry come from writers who are moving to the blogosphere from another medium, and who are unused to a) the immediate feedback, b) the vitriol, and c) the freedom to be whatever or whoever you want to be. I also, like Gavin, think that sock puppetry is a relatively mild crime as blogospheric sins go. Siegel’s examples were particularly pompous and mean-spirited, but I still suspect that sock puppetry is the excuse more than the cause for his suspension, and that the real reason is that his blog proved to be an embarassment (and perhaps even legal liability) for TNR.

Needless to say, I can’t agree, at least not entirely. Besides plagiarism, what could be worse? (The pedophilia accusation was likely a factor, though legally speaking, Siegel never outright accused Kincaid of being an active pedophile; he merely (if that’s the word for it) suggested Kincaid had the inclination). Sock puppetry is no different from astroturfing, which bloggers usually despise, only it’s done by an individual or two in service of ego rather than many individuals in service of an outside interest. In the blogosphere you have little more than your integrity to go on, and when that’s shot, well, at least your friends will (probably) still link to you. Atrios, incidentally the object of scorn in Olly’s post preceding this one, gets it right:

Simply having an alternate identity online is fine. What isn’t fine is when there’s implicit deception involved which is almost automatic if you’re assuming a new identity to defend yourself. There’s no reason I have to be “Atrios” everywhere on the internets, but if I assume the name “Atrios Rulezzzz!” and run around the internets talking about how Atrios is human perfection defined then I will have succeeded in making a supreme ass out of myself. And if one, Mary Rosh-like, starts inventing tales (I was in John Lott’s class and he was the best professor ever!) then you’ve moved into the realm of explicit deception…”

I’m reminded of the advice Ray Stantz gave to Peter Venkman early in a classic film of the 1980s:

Don’t cross the streams.

Why? It would be bad. You can have as many online identities as you see fit, and they can say whatever you’d like, just so long as they don’t interact as if they were different people (the number of longtime Internet users still using the handle they first logged on with is vanishingly small). True, the Ghostbusters got away with it at the end of the movie, just as as many (perhaps most) sock puppeteers escape undetected. But as web literacy rises, it’s easier and easier to root out the cheaters. When called out, the consequences can be dire. Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light — or at least losing your job and reputation.

P.S. The first half of this post’s headline was borrowed from S,N!

P.P.S. As far as I am aware, this post has the most 80s-centric header yet.

The saga of Deborah Frisch, longtime comment troll and all-around kook, took another troubling, if not exactly unforeseeable turn in the last 48 hours. As far as we know, she is now the first troll of the political blogosphere to face criminal charges relating to such activity. On August 21 she was arraigned in an Oregon courtroom on charges of stalking and telephone harassment (PDF). The docket can be found at the link preceding, but is captured below for your viewing pleasure:

According to Don’t Hire Deb, a blog devoted to documenting Frisch’s outrageous behavior while depriving her own site of traffic, Frisch posted either $4,000 bail or $400 to a bondsman, and must reappear in court on September 25th. As is speculated in DHD comments and elsewhere, this likely stems not from Frisch’s well-publicized Jeff Goldstein-related misadventures (to the best of our knowledge she’s never called him) but rather similar interactions with former colleagues at University of Oregon (where she was denied tenure in 1994 and served as an adjunct until July 2001) including calling, emailing, and a quickly-removed post to her blog. 

Just a few months ago, Frisch was an obscurity known only to the blogs she trolled, such as our own Oregon Commentator and Steve Verdon’s Deinonychus Antirrhopus. But at this point, she is undergoing the most severe public self-destruction we’ve seen yet. And when you consider that includes Jason Leopold and other, better-known individuals, that’s saying something. Academic John Lott and attorney Glenn Greenwald may be guilty of sock-puppetry, but that’s bush-league compared to Deb’s prolonged breakdown. Michael A. Bellesiles? A liar and a hack, but so far as we know he never ended up in jail for his antics. And no, having his Bancroft Prize revoked is not the same thing. Hell, Jayson Blair managed to spin his utter fecklessness into a book deal, as did “fabulist” Stephen Glass. Frisch, though, is in a class of her own: a vitriolic sociopath whose delusion knows almost no bounds.

For those of you just tuning in, Deb made a name for herself in the rightosphere by making altogether disturbing, one might say John Mark Karr-esque comments about Goldstein’s family. Within hours of Goldstein having publicized her identity being called out by Goldstein’s readers, Frisch resigned from a Univ. of Ariz. teaching job, thereby pre-empting a probable termination. The story got some press play in the Tucson Citizen, Eugene Register-Guard and Inside Higher Ed. Goldstein sought and obtained a restraining order against her, and that might have been the end of it.

Instead, her online behavior became even more erratic: Posting fake suicide notes, angering colleagues on an academic listserv, claiming to pursue legal action against Goldstein, Ace of Spades HQ and Matthew Heidt of Blackfive. And most strangely, attacking the folks at lefty satire blog Sadly, No!, well known for its disdain of Goldstein, and which had previously belittled the Frisch controversy. More recently she has gone so far as to heckle Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (whom she had claimed an interest in working for) and, apparently, now managed to stalk and harass former colleagues in Oregon.

Commenters at DHD, Patterico’s Pontifications and Ace of Spades HQ have posited that the cyclical nature of Deb’s “teh crazy” implies a drinking problem. Whether a joke or conventional wisdom, the notion has has gotten so much play that after the first of Deb’s bizarre attacks, the S,N! regulars mentioned her drinking whilst tearing her a new one:

Three days later, Frisch was in a Lane County courthouse.

Over the course of a few short weeks Frisch has gone from employed university adjunct to unemployable Internet sociopath with a rap sheet. It’s one thing to troll a few right-wing sites for fun and attention, but another matter entirely to make thinly veiled threats about a man’s child, imply that he’s a pedophile, and then proceed to alienate essentially everyone in the blogosphere and more than a few in what we might call “meatspace.”

If we didn’t know any better, we’d call the whole thing unbelievable. But having followed the unfolding Frisch fiasco, it’s more than believable. It was an inevitability.

Update: Kevin Hayden from The American Street, in the comments:

As a Eugene liberal, I’m not surprised at this latest development. While many in the blogofear postulated that she’s some hero of the left for her claims to represent us, she’s actually been pretty abusive to people all over the political spectrum, online and off. … The blog that seeks to keep people from hiring her is superfluous to the reality that her rep precedes her like the trail of a slug moving backwards.

My sources indicate her long and continuing pattern of trashing professional associates, many of them highly esteemed scientists and scholars, makes it unlikely that she will attain any position of note.

This sounds right to us; far from being her only target, Goldstein was just the one with the biggest soapbox. We won’t join in the clinical depression/alcoholism debate, and we certainly hope we don’t give the impression of gleefully piling on. Fortunately, the only person likely to be hurt in all this is Frisch herself — alas, not so fortunate for her.

Update 2: An interesting possibility raised in a non-political message board, found via our referrer logs:

The phone law they cited her under may not mean she used a phone. In 2006 stalking laws were amended to include posting anonymously on the internet. We’ve had trolls here who could be cited under that same law.

The poster is based in Kentucky, while Frisch was charged under Oregon laws, so we’re not sure if this is applicable or not. We haven’t had a chance to look into Oregon’s cyber-stalking laws, so we don’t know whether this is the case in California’s Canada. If anybody knows the answer, please let us know.

Update 3: Having perused Oregon’s H.B. 2918, a cyberstalking law passed in 2001 and a (perhaps too) brief summary of S.B. 1067 relating to “telephonic harrassment,” it’s our guess that this charge actually does pertain to actual use of telephones. On the other hand, IANAL, and neither is Tim.

Update 4: John Dunshee, a self-described Poor Schmuck, offers a clarification of Oregon bail procedure in the comments:

Oregon does not have bail bondsmen. The State itself takes that role. You only need to provide 10% to the jail to be released, and the truth of the matter is that in Oregon even if you have a bail amount specified, the jail can still release you on a “matrix release” without you putting up a dime. It is not at all unusual for someone to be released on a “matrix” be given a court date, fail to appear and have a warrant issued for that, be arrested again and released again. It’s all a jobs program for cops, lawyers, and social workers.

This is news to me, having never been arrested and only going through Lane County’s court system after getting caught at a university neighborhood bar with a fake ID. But I can affirm that Oregon does like its jobs programs: For a whole summer during college, I pumped gas at a Portland-area Chevron. At most gas stations in Oregon and New Jersey and nowhere else, self-service is illegal.