Lately I’ve been getting comments on my posts that seem to be generated by AI. One made it past Akismet, and I had to reject it manually. It’s worth looking at where they are and where they’re headed. Here’s a comment which I just rejected for one of my recent posts:
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It’s unusual for me to write on this blog about a local politician, but I want this on the record so that people doing searches for information on Rockingham County Commissioner Steven Goddu will find this and know why they should never vote for him for anything.
Rockingham County, New Hampshire, has been negotiating with ICE to hold abductees and get money for it. County government in New Hampshire (which handles only a few functions) is headed by commissioners. Rockingham has three of them: Kathryn Coyle, Steven Goddu, and Thomas Tombarello. I was able to find contact information only for Goddu, so I wrote an email to him urging that the county not collaborate with ICE. His reply shows he is a dishonest person and should not be elected to any public office.
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This is a post about word usage, not about the murder of Charlie Kirk, but it started from seeing a lot of online rage about a statement of his. According to Snopes, he once said:
I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage. But, it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy, I prefer more than empathy. That’s a separate topic for a different time.
It’s strange that of all the things he said, this should draw so much anger. If I were cynical, I’d say it’s because people saw an opportunity to pull the first sentence out of context and create a deceptive impression. In this case, cynicism is fully justified.
How much difference is there between sympathy and empathy, anyway?
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Murder is wrong.
Advocating or applauding murder is wrong.
Criticizing a person, even harshly, is not advocating or applauding murder.
There’s no inconsistency in condemning a person’s ideas and condemning his murder.
Misrepresenting a person’s ideas is not a valid way to make a point.
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Ilya Somin has written an in-depth analysis of Judge Kavanaugh’s opinion in the Supreme Court’s decision to lift the injunction against racial profiling by ICE. I can’t claim anything close to Somin’s expertise, but I want to call attention to an alarming point in Kavanaugh’s statement. Somin writes:
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There’s no hope for a near-term turnaround in the US. If there were any decency left in America, Trump, Rubio, Homan, Leavitt, and the rest of the crowd would be climbing out of the Potomac, covered with tar and feathers. I’ve done what I can, pointing out one outrageous act after another. Nothing helps. The United States is a nation of cowards with a large minority that favors thuggish central rule and controls Congress.
Concentrating only on the short term leads to despair. Avoiding tyranny in the US — or recovering from it — requires understanding its causes and changing the intellectual climate. There can be a resurgence of the liberal ideal in America, but it will take time.
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As I’ve noted in previous posts, it’s easy to get videos taken down on YouTube, harder to challenge the takedown. An FDA official may have taken advantage of this to censor videos he doesn’t want seen.
A Guardian article says:
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In my post on tech buzzword panic, I briefly mentioned a situation where Dragon Con bizarrely called the police to expel an exhibitor. Bleeding Cool mentions this situation and a somewhat similar one at Fan Expo Canada:
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EFF has run a valuable campaign on the risks of leaking metadata to third parties. If you upload a photo to a public website, for instance, the file might contain information on exactly when and where you took the picture. A stalker can make use of the information, especially if you upload photographs wherever you go. If you make a phone call or text message, the associated metadata may get less privacy protection than the what you said or typed. The US government has claimed that warrantless searches of communication metadata, which might identify the sender, receiver, and time of a message, are OK. Unfortunately, this has led some people to think that metadata themselves (I’m standing by “data” as a plural) are evil.
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A recent news article reports on a case where a woman acted like a scumbag but was apparently within her First Amendment rights. Everything about it is strange, and everyone seems to be wrong in important ways.
The article says: “Minnesota prosecutors filed misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges Tuesday against a woman accused of using a racist slur against a Black child at a playground — an incident the woman has since used to raise more than $800,000 after she appealed for help with relocating.” The article doesn’t give her exact words, but the linked official document says she used “the N-word” more than once. The charge is engaging “offensive, obscene, abusive, boisterous, or noisy conduct, or in offensive, obscene, or abusive language that would reasonably tend to arouse alarm, anger or resentment in others.”
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