Catching up on comment moderation.

If you comment on an older post — over 2 weeks old — or if Blogger thinks it's seeing spam, your comment won't go up until I moderate it. I need to do that every day, at least once, and it had slipped my mind. Sorry. Keep commenting. And feel free to prompt me by email if something seems to have fallen through the cracks. The moderation I'm doing is solely about blocking spam.

"As sunbeams stream through liberal space/And nothing jostle or displace..."

"So waved the pine tree through my thought/And fanned the dreams it never brought."

Who wrote that? I asked aloud. Meade guessed the name of one of our regular commenters.

I laughed. "Emerson! You know why I'm reading that? I'm reading this letter to the editor of the New York Times from 1853, and the reason I'm reading it is that I did an archive search — you can go back to 1851 in the archives — for 'facetious' and 'bowers,' because I was looking for that quote in the law case Bowers v. Hardwick that uses the word 'facetious,' which is something I wanted for that post about argument by laughter."

Thereupon, I read the verbose and goofily palpitating paean to nature that begins "I have a penchant for grass and trees. A facetious friend intimates, it is on account of some natural affinity — mentioning a certain color by way of illustration." And so forth. The word "bowers" is in there:

Oh! happy is the man that has many of these spots to dream over, when the real of existence becomes too real! I have a few, and they are bowered with holy feeling — as beautiful and beloved as nests of singing larks in bowers of roses.

Oh, well, okay... I think I know what you're saying in that crazy-ass pre-Civil War way. The temperature has shot up to 10° here in the northland. I don't know if the real of existence becomes too real here at my desk with my computer-screen view of the internet and my peripheral view of a wall of windows looking out onto the "liberal space" of Madison, Wisconsin. I don't think it will be such a dreamy escape from the real to go out there, but we will. It's time for that. When I'm trying to write about law and sodomy and laughing and I tumble back into 1853, the pine trees are waving to us.

Joe Blow wins the thread!

Do you like it when a commenter says that so-and-so "wins the thread"?
	Yes, it's snappy and adorable. If you disagree, disagree!
	No. It's irritating to appoint oneself as the arbiter of the quality of comments!
	No. It annoys me to have the thread characterized as a competition.
	Yes. Other commenters will up their game if they get the feeling it's a competition.
pollcode.com free polls

How did Althouse get to be #1 on the ranking of law prof blogs?

(Here are the rankings.)

So, then, how did this happen? Instapundit would unquestionably be #1, but Glenn had to take his public Site Meter down because it was interfering with ads. If you look at my Site Meter, Instapundit boosts my traffic. The other thing is that the first chart ranks by the number of page views, but if you scroll down, there is a second ranking by the number of visitors. On that second chart, I'm second (to The Volokh Conspiracy ). That has something to do with clicking into the comments threads. Not that the comments at Volokh aren't good, but there's a bit more action in the comments here, so a special thanks to the commenters here — along with all the readers who don't comment. You make blogging great fun for me.

"Also I don't want to be on television. It's become boring, arse-paralysingly brain crippling."

Says Elton John, explaining why he didn't want the job of "American Idol" judge. He kind of indicates that if he'd gone on he too would have been arse-paralysingly boring.

(Please make an extra effort to write high-quality comments. I can picture some really stupid wisecracks. I'm going to set up a special comments policy for this post: If you say anything predictable, I will delete. Let's see if anything survives.)

The comments are back!

The comments are back!

I missed you guys. I used to revel in my solitude, but then you showed up and when you went away....

The Blogger comments problem is sapping my strength.

I used to blog without comments. I used to like it like that:

What has been your worst blogging experience?

My brief experience with the comments function, which a couple of nasty people ruined for everybody.

Ha! How much thinner my skin was in 2004!

Since late last night, Blogger has had a problem displaying comments, and I'm being forced back into the old experience of blogging without comments. (I do see them in the email, but it's not the same when they aren't here and when the readers aren't talking to each other.)

I used to prefer writing without comments, but over the years, I've gotten so accustomed to the familiar environment of comments that writing without the prospect of comments feels like speaking out loud when there's no one else in the room. I can do it, but it doesn't feel that different from thinking.

I know you're still there. I need to overcome this absurd block. I seem to need displayed comments, but think of the people who spend years writing books with little assurance that they will be read at all. You have to find a different attitude toward writing. I was going to say that the book-writer writes more for himself, for the intrinsic reward of writing, but in fact, the book-writer needs to obsess more about who will read this. The blogger can see that people are reading and really is more free to write for the intrinsic reward. I'm so into that immediate reward that I'm greedy for more of it — in the form of displayed comments.

But the display will go up, eventually, and you will see what you and others have been writing, in this unusual context of not seeing what others are saying. In the meantime, you can display opinion now, thusly:

With this temporary failure to display comments...
	I'm enjoying the refreshingly uncluttered look of things here.
	I feel frustrated that others cannot see what I think.
	I'm wondering what the usual commenters have to say.
	Althouse feels less provocative because I can't see the provokees.
pollcode.com free polls

Who are the Mobys?

I think that lately the comments section of this blog has been attracting a lot Mobys. Yesterday, I called attention to a commenter who wrote something outrageous (and actually funny, if you recognize it as fake). A very high-traffic blog had exposed me to criticism for having that in my comments, and a commenter over there suggested it was a "false flag operation," and linked to a post by SEK over at Lawyers, Guns, & Money, that begins: "I went over to Althouse’s and wrote a number of insanely offensive comments, but everyone started agreeing with me before I could declare 'April Fools'!" Now, I already thought I was dealing with a Moby, and here was SEK, apparently, bragging about being a Moby. So I threw him a link and quoted him. He then showed up in my comments and said:

Dear Ann,

I didn't write any of those comments. You just got fooled twice over by your own racist and misogynist commenters. Please, feel free to check the IP addresses of the comments I claimed, all April-Foolsy, to have written.

I was in the middle of a 1000-mile drive, so I wasn't exactly anguishing over my failure to pick up whatever-the-hell SEK had layered into his blog post that was written in the form of a confession. My response to that — written at 11:23 at night from an I-80 rest stop in Iowa — was:

Someone was fooling, either you, per your confession, or someone else, if you're not fooling now. It makes no difference to me who did it. It wasn't one of our regulars and it wasn't a believable story.

The attempt to paint my commenters (or me!) as racist or whatever is inflammatory and ugly, and I've lost track of who wants that to stop.

Now, SEK has updated his post, with a not-too-attractive mix of hostile insults and whiny fears for his own fate:

You Althouse people really aren’t very bright.  To anyone who thinks that I actually wrote the comments paraphrased above, I suggest you click here and enter my last name into the “Instructor” field.  I’ll wait … so are you really ready to accuse me of writing that?  

Well, you'll have to wait a long time, because I don't know your last name, SEK. Is that me being not very bright? Or are you patently a fool?

I’m only asking because, unlike Althouse, who has tenure and can misbehave as she pleases, I’m a lowly lecturer who, if he steps out of line, will be fired on the spot.  

So why are you being so hostile and calling people names? It's interesting that you feel vulnerable, but what are you doing slugging people and then claiming vulnerability when you get a response.

Ann has the IP addresses of the people who left those comments and knows that it wasn’t me.  If she insists on lying, I can’t afford to prove her wrong in a court of law; however, I’m willing to put my name and career on the line and proclaim, in no uncertain terms, that I didn’t write the racist comments I mocked her for brooking on her blog.  She can’t be fired for besmirching her university in public like this, but if I’m lying, I can be dismissed with two snaps from an irate bureaucrat.  So in the interests of truth, I demand that should Althouse insist on claiming that I wrote those comments, she publish the IP addresses of the authors of the comments I linked to.  If they all resolve to Corona, California, I’ll exit the internet for life.

As noted above, I do not have a collection of IP addresses. I have no way to check who's behind the various pseudonyms, so you're on your own denying that you wrote what you previously said you wrote. I believed you then, and you ask me to believe you now, and the reason you're supposed to be believable now is that you have a strong self-interest in disassociating yourself from your own words. You made your own problem, and yet you are still being nasty to me, trying to smear me with racism for nothing but maintaining a free-speech forum. You accuse me of lying for quoting you. You threaten to sue me — for quoting you! — and at the same time whine that you can't afford to sue me. You stress that you would like to see me fired — for what?! — and yet you beg in the most pusillanimous fashion that I should pity you because you could be fired.

This is all so pathetic. Or is this another satire that I'm not bright enough to understand?

Anyway, to my commenters: Please understand that there are Mobys here. There are commenters who pretend to mean what they are saying, when what they are trying to do is to make us look bad somehow. Take that into account when you interact with people here.

"I went over to Althouse’s and wrote a number of insanely offensive comments, but everyone started agreeing with me before I could declare 'April Fools’!'"

Oh, bullshit! No one agreed with you. They just didn't let you wind them up like you tried. It was pretty obvious what was going on, but you did fool TBogg, a lefty blogger, who was so eager to believe the commenters over here are bad people that he was thoroughly humor deaf... even on April Fool's Day.

UPDATE: There are some strange levels of complexity to this, explored here. 

"All I've ever wanted out of Althouse was a place to hang out with a bunch of cool people."

Yes, that's it. And we want to hang out with you.

At the Show-Your-Face Café...

... it would be cool if people who read and never (or almost never) comment would introduce themselves  and tell us something, like why they don't like to join the conversation. This includes people who used to comment and don't comment anymore, including at least one dear commenter whose absence is making us worry that something has happened to him.

Why is Ta-Nehisi Coates shouting an obscenity at me?

He writes:

Ta-Nahesi Coates. Fuckin' Althouse. My name's at the top of the blog and I still can't get Ann's respect.

The link on "Fuckin' Althouse" goes to this post of mine:

Hey! That's sexism against Sarah Palin!

When Glenn Beck says it.

My post links to Coates calling out Glenn Beck for sounding like a sexist. It's phrased to imply that Coates probably wouldn't call out a liberal for sexism, but now that there's an opportunity to slam Beck, he's up for defending Palin. Now, explain what set Coates off in this new post where he curses me. Maybe he didn't understand my post and thinks I didn't realize I was reading his blog (since I didn't use his name in my post — I just linked). I'm not really sure. Perhaps he's so ready to hate me that he didn't pick up my bloggerly comic concision. But — wow! — there he is on The Atlantic website spewing an obscenity at me for...  nothing.

As if to cover up his brutishness, he combed through my comments section and found something offensive that one person said. He quotes someone named "grapp" — with no available profile— who said "I might respect Ta-Nehisi Coates more if he has less of a jackass ghetto name and was more of a serious thinker." Grapp — who claims to be a black woman — wrote at the end of a long thread, and 2 of the 4 comments left on the thread take Grapp to task. Nevertheless, Coates goes on to say "She'd respect me more if I "has less of a jackass ghetto name." He says he finds the comment hilarious — presumably because of the typo/grammar error. Because of the way he began his post by weirdly accusing me of some sort of disrespect related to his name, he's cued his commenters to trash me, which they basically do.

I guess to be like him I should select the nastiest comment to make him look even worse than he made himself look. But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to quote a sensible commenter there:

Come on, TNC, just a couple of days ago you rightfully chided people for talking at strawmen, and here you're writing as if Althouse herself, and not a commenter, made the crack about the name. It looks as if a number of the commenters here have not realized it wasn't Althouse herself who wrote it. The commenter is not the blogger.

There's no rule that says a blogger has to police her comment section and delete offensive posts; some like an open comments policy and some like a moderated comments policy. Althouse has an open comments policy and as a direct result attracts some odious commenters as well as some very good ones.

Come on, Ta-Nehisi Coates. A very serious apology is in order.

ADDED: Now, I see that the problem was that I had a tag for his name and I misspelled it. That brought an obscenity... and a connection to a commenter who took a racial point of view. What a jerk.

IN THE COMMENTS:  AC245 said:

I was curious to see how many other places on the net misspelled his name in the same way (as "Nahesi") that Althouse did.

1. Salon's Glenn Greenwald has it spelled that way on his blogroll.

2. Here's a post by "Bitch Ph.D." praising him as wise.

3. Mark Hemmingway has a post on The Corner mentioning Coates, Obama, and hip-hop.

4. This post on Pandagon "corrects" Coates that one cannot be both a feminist and a PUMA.

5. It's also spelled "Nahesi" on the blogroll of The New Yorker.

6. There's a post by Enchanting Juno who says "Ta-Nahesi Coates - who may just be my favorite blogger of all time..."

And that's when I got bored, after browsing through just the first 3 pages of the over 20,000 Bing results for "Nahesi".

I didn't go through any of the 256 instances of "fuckin'" on ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com that Bing found, so it's possible that he's also hurled the vulgarity he graced Althouse with at every other person on the internet who's dared to dis him by unintentionally misspelling his name when linking to his blog. But for some reason, I rather doubt it.

The New Yorker, eh? Ha ha. Apparently, the topic of sexism is like the topic of having your name misspelled for Coates. (AC245 provides links for his 6 items. Go inside if you want that.)

And grapp came back and said:

Althouse, I apologize for leaving a comment that caused Ta-Nehisi Coates to cuss you out.

Yes, I am a black woman. Really. Moreover, I'm heartily sick of names that no one can pronounce, and fed up of people in the community who get angry cuz they seem to think that ALL blacks automatically know how to pronounce the crazy names.

Coates has demonstrated to you why I have no respect for him as a thinker. Ah, there I go, marching out of lockstep again!

And:

I had a typo with 'has' which should've been 'had', I think. Coates, that great mental giant, seems to think that a typo is worth crowing over. Lame.

I assume he found it funny because it gave you the appearance of speaking like a stereotypical black person while you were making fun of his name for being stereotypically black. It's like correcting spelling while making a spelling error.

AND: My own first name is also hard to spell, even as it is easy to spell.

IN THE COMMENTS, PART 2: Susan said:

I'm a TNC reader, but what a weird issue for him to flip out over, given that his grammar and spelling are atrocious.

[Link.]

[Link]

Jim Treacher said:

Ann, I can't believe you showed such fuckin' disrespect to Ta-Tasilly Coat.

"Hi, I like this article but... Can someone tell me about Barack Obama?"

"I know that he is a serious candidate for '08, but I would like to know where he stands on the issues. I checked his site but nowhere can I find the info. i am looking for. so please tell me..."

Comment, left on a post last night. It's spam, and I've deleted it, but not before laughing.

"Sadly, Nancy."

The closing on an email that reads:

I so love reading your blog, and often so love reading the lively comments. But then there are the times when reading the comments that I feel like I am looking into an unflushed toilet. Does it have to be this way?

At the Closer Look Nightclub...

... let's talk intimately.

AND: Here's the more distant view of the butterfly (moth?). [Thanks to commenter Seneca: "Butterfly. Moth antennae are fluffy."] And, from the same beautiful herb garden, a hummingbird.

ALSO: Thanks to Instapundit for linking. By the way, when my titles designate a post as a "nightclub," "café," "tavern," "restaurant," or some such place, it means you can use the topic thread to talk about anything you like. It's an open thread, so don't think anybody in there is hijacking the thread or disrespecting my photography.

AND: Chip animates my first photo:

Thanks to all my readers who gave immediate and overnight pushback to a vile new commenter...

... who I assume was pro-Obama and writing under a pseudonym here with the object of making this blog — and more generally, criticism of Obama — look racist. This coward put up his comment on my 9:50 p.m. post — "Should the President be insulting pop stars?" — at 11:52, presumably to maximize the time that it would be up on the blog and that it would sit here as long as possible before I would take it down, which I did as soon as I got on the blog this morning at around 9 (Central Time).

The commenter, Metlife, had never posted here before and had a profile showing that he'd joined Blogger just this month. He wrote — and the asterisks are mine: "can someone murder that f***ing n***** fast? It will be a good day when Hussein is murdered by one of our southern patriots."

The pushback was immediate. Joe wrote at 11:59: "Could the previous comment be stricken and the poster banned?" Just Lurking said: "Is that you moby?" (suggesting, as I am doing now, that Metlife was against not Obama but this blog community). John Stodder said: "Althouse is probably asleep, but if you have her phone number, wake her up and tell her to delete it." (No one did that.)

Seven Machos said: "Okay, first, get Metlife out of here. At least Cedarford is subtle and occasionally witty.... All racist ass clowns and pretend-racist-agent-provocateur ass clowns should take note of Cedarford's work. This is how it's done." (Cedarford is a longtime commenter who writes well but often expresses extreme ideas of the sort that I do not censor).

Peter Hoh said:

I'm guessing that nolife is a plant. A true Southerner always capitalizes the S.

And wouldn't a full-blown racist southerner consider that "southern" is an unnecessary modifier for "patriot"?

Plus he knew how to spell "Hussein."

Good ole boys spell it "Hoo-sane."

Former law student said...

Speak of laying a turd and someone does. Probably an agent provocateur, because he created a fresh identity for the occasion.

Blake said:

Ugh. The Mobys are getting disgusting in here.

Urban Dictionary defines "Moby":

An insidious and specialized type of left-wing troll who visits blogs and impersonates a conservative for the purpose of either spreading false rumors intended to sow dissension among conservative voters, or who purposely posts inflammatory and offensive comments for the purpose of discrediting the blog in question.

The term is derived from the name of the liberal musician Moby, who famously suggested in February of 2004 that left-wing activists engage in this type of subterfuge: “For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion. Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, ‘What’s all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?’”

The strategy has been frequently attempted on conservative blogs, but has not been nearly as effective as Moby envisioned, since false rumors are easily debunked by fact-checking minions, and cartoonishly extreme commenters often get immediately identified as mobys and banned.

Lucid said:

Actually, Metlife, with his registration [email] and ip address, should be reported to the secret service. Threatening the president is a serious crime, as it should be.

I also wonder if Metlife is actually a lefty troll pulling an Alinsky.

Hey, Alinsky isn't defined yet over at Urban Dictionary. But I know what you mean, and I certainly think he is.

Jack said:

God, what a festering stinkhole of a web site this is. I don't know how you wingnut loons can stand stewing in your own shit like this, presided over by the shit mistress, Ann Althouse.

Of course she's too dishonest to tell you dumb motherfuckers that Obama's remark was made off the record, thus rendering her posed questions ("should the president be insulting pop stars?" and "what business is it of the presidents?") inoperative. And of course you stupid shit-for-brains don't follow the link to find out for yourselves. Maybe the ever-dull Althouse didn't bother reading enough of the story to find out that the comment was off the record, or maybe she's just dishonest.

You're stewing in a cesspool. And you like it!

And that's an example of the sort of comment I don't delete. I'm that into free speech. But Metlife deserves deletion and, as Lucid said, investigation by the Secret Service. I like to think the Secret Service is good enough that they are already on it.