Dancing across the blurred lines of appropriateness along the legal landscape and shifting social tapestry.

You may wonder why I moderate the comments. If only they could just flow freely, like the thoughts in your head late at night. It's not just the trolls. It's also the spam that the spam filter doesn't always catch. And nowadays, it can use AI to compose the compliment that's supposed to provide camouflage for the link it wants to post. This came in overnight:

"Twitter’s board has accepted an offer from billionaire Elon Musk to buy the social media company and take it private, the company announced Monday."

CNBC reports. 

ADDED: From the company's statement:

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," said Mr. Musk. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."

 Defeat the bots. You've got to be human. And if you are human — be free.

A glimpse behind the scenes at Althouse.

Just a stray example of the sort of comment that doesn't make it through moderation:



Spam comments tend to begin with a big compliment. Some of the real commenters here begin with a compliment. I wonder if they realize how much they're matching up with the spam I see every day.

ADDED: Feel free to debate the general proposition: Compliments are spam.

"This makes the butterfly in my chest alive."

A comment submitted for the old post, "Please don’t give them those eyebrows that look like black electrical tape or they won’t get job":



I hit delete, of course, and yet I did not want to crush the butterfly. Fly, butterfly, fly.

This gets the "translation" tag. I don't know whether that phrase is a literal translation of a phrase that's idiomatic in another language or whether the English phrase "I've got butterflies in my stomach" has been translated into a foreign language into something that then literally translates back into English as "This makes the butterfly in my chest alive."

In 1975, Deep Purple received $11,000 in advance to do a concert in Jakarta in a venue seating 7,000.

"After checking into Sahid Jaya Hotel, the band was told they would be performing for two nights at Senayan Stadium for 75,000 people per show. After the first concert, the band’s manager Rob Cooksey and bodyguard Patsy Collins met with [the Indonesian promoter] and tried to negotiate a fairer deal. The meeting ended in an altercation. Later, Collins allegedly got into a fight over a prostitute and fell down a lift shaft at the hotel. He survived and crawled outside, but died a few hours later. Police responded by arresting Deep Purple’s singer and bassist Glenn Hughes, as well as Cooksey and the other bodyguard, Paddy ‘the Plank’. Hughes was allowed out at gunpoint the next night for the second concert. Authorities declared Collins’ death an accident. Then Cooksey and Paddy had to pay US$2,000 each to get their passports back. The band was driven to the airport, where their plane had a flat tire. They had to pay US$10,000 to use a special jack and torque wrench, and their roadies had to change the tire."

That's only #3 on "Top 10 Concert Fails In Indonesia." I'm reading Indonesia Expat this morning because I have been fighting spam that contains the words "Jakarta" and "chloroform," and a Google search got me to the article at Indonesia Expat. The headline is "Delving into the Dark Web." Excerpt:

[T]here are dozens of Indonesian sites selling date-rape drugs. A typical spiel goes like, “Rohypnol pills have very powerful properties and can be used to drug a woman targeted for rape or for other crimes, but our intention in selling this sleeping pill is not for that purpose, but to make it easier for you to sleep.”

Another site offers chloroform, stating it “can be used for rape” and causes memory loss in the victim. A similar site, offering 250 ml bottles of chloroform for Rp.450,000, states “this anaesthetic is often misused by criminals who want to rob, kidnap or rape a target by first anesthetizing them”.

Police and the Ministry of Communication and Informatics are not blocking these sites or arresting their operators, so there’s no need for the culprits to use the dark web.

"Fridge caught sending spam emails in botnet attack."

"Fridge caught sending spam emails in botnet attack."

Via "My toaster hates you."

"I admire that you have a blog solely dedicated to Hillary Clinton — our next US President, and I'd like to follow your footsteps..."

Ridiculous email of the day.

"How U2 became the most hated band in America."

U2's Songs of Innocence "was released as part of Apple’s keynote event, dished out to iTunes subscribers for free."

The album reportedly cost Apple $100 million, a figure the company is likely to eat. Rather than generating the kind of hype Apple is accustomed to, Songs of Innocence generated a huge Twitter backlash, with the company posting a guide on how to remove the album from your library on its support page. Most damningly, Wired’s Vijith Assar called the “devious giveaway” no better than “spam.”

Actually, he said it was "Even Worse Than Spam."

Let me see your workspace.

Lots of links to photos, collected in a Metafilter post, but the links all go to LinkedIn, and there's some serious hostility to LinkedIn for spamming us all these years. And it's not just that....

I'd be happy if they'd just get rid of the "influencers". It seems as if they had deliberately set out to make a list of the most annoying, unselfconscious people on Earth. I mean, which other list manages to contain the globular egos of David Cameron, Deepak Chopra, Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington and Martin Varsavsky, a.o.?

If you want to see the workspaces of some admirable people, I love this book, "Writer's Desk," with excellent photographs by Jill Krementz (who was married to Kurt Vonnegut) and an introductory essay by John Updike.

And here's what my desk looks like right now:


(Partial view, with snow.)

ADDED: What's with "a.o." in the blockquote above? Is this another call for me to check Urban Dictionary?

Michelle Obama sends me email, saying "Ann, thank you."

That's the subject line. Inside, she continues this way:

Ann --

I know your life is full -- with work, or school, or family -- and yet you still find the time to help out when you can.

You may have a tight budget, but you give what you can afford.

A woman recently told the campaign her family skipped a pizza dinner at their favorite place so that they could make a difference in this election.

That is the commitment that drives this campaign.

If you can support Barack with a donation today, please know it makes a huge difference. If we win, it will be because of what you did at moments like this....

Thanks,

Michelle

P.S. -- It meant a lot to me to speak with you and everyone else last night. Thank you for everything you do.

Everything?

624 comments on the live-blogging thread last night.

Did the spam-bots find out I'd turned off word verification for commenting? I'll check it out. There's our liberal commenter Lindsey Meadows, who said (at 6:24 PM):

I think I'll just have casual sex tonight. After Romney, I couldn't possibly feel more violated (or bored).

When Clint Eastwood came on at 9, the liberal commenters, offset by Meade, went ageist:

elkh1 said... Clint is really really wobbly old.

Meade said... Clint looks great.

Alex said... Clint looks old and jittery. Remember folks he's 82. When he was in his 40s, it was scary.... Clint is just embarrassing right now. There is a reason for the old folks home and you're seeing it. Shoot me before I ever get like this. Senile.

2 of the long-time conservative commenters picked up the age theme:

Pogo said... Old, jittery, but vicious as hell.

Shouting Thomas said... Unfortunately, Clint is really struggling. Sad to see the great man suffering the humiliation of old age.

Pogo said... No way, ST, he's an elderly man whose body betrays him a bit, but he's hitting a million right notes. Hurrah!

What I liked about Clint's routine — which you had to trust not to feel nervous about — was when he said "We own this country... Politicians are employees of ours... When somebody does not do the job, we've got to let them go." As I said in this post, this was a play on something Romney said, something that's been used against Romney: "I like being able to fire people." Clint imposed the correct interpretation on that: When somebody does not do the job, we've got to let them go.

I didn't say much about Romney's speech last night, because I was way too tired by then. Our liberal friend Alex said: "ROmney talking too much about his family and church. Where are the policy initiatives? Obama is going to be speech-ifying policy like crazy next week." (Yeah, lotsa policy wonkery, that would have kept me awake.)

And our liberal Lindsey said: "I just watched Mitten with the sound on...sound on/sound off...same amount of policy specifics. Meade must be in seventh heaven." Oh, she wants policy too. If only they'd have bored us all to tears all week with specifics.

Shouting Thomas continued his lugubriousness:

Romney played small ball. I think that's what we need. He doesn't have an overriding theme, only the promise that he has the technical and managerial skills to lead.

Obama will promise social justice and payoffs to his favored groups.

The debates should be interesting.

Meade responded:

Exactly right. What we need now is boring small ball competence. Time to put obama's failed presidency behind us. Romney will be a fine president.

Lindsey with the liberal lady's focus on sex not baseball had no trouble seeing the opportunity to say:

Well by all appearances, you got a guy with small balls. I was actually hoping that all the non-policy fluff was just to woo the far right but I am now pretty locked into that being all he has. Sad really.

If a man had said something equivalently sexual about a woman, Democrats would cry "war on women." If that kind of rhetoric is okay, we ought to call out Lindsey for her "war on men."

Ah! No spam. Maybe some not-so-admirable comments in there, but nothing robotic, and so Morning on the Althouse Blog continues (i.e., no word verification for commenting). And I just want to say one thing about this supposed lack of policy specifics from the GOP and the implication of Democratic superiority on said specifics. I mean I want to quote something from Paul Ryan's speech:

[President Obama] created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. 

It was loaded with specifics.

He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.

Ryan put a long pause between "did" — the action word — and "exactly nothing."

Word verification for commenting.

I know people have been having more trouble with it lately. I'm going to take it off as an experiment. I've had it on so long, I've forgotten what it was like without it, and who knows if whatever it was will be the situation now? So please don't over-rejoice at its removal, because I might have to turn it back on. I presume I'll get a spate of horrible spam, including endless commercial links dumped in the early morning hours in thousands of old (and new) threads. You think the word verification is difficult, but I can't spend hours a day finding and deleting spam.

If (when) I put the word verification back on, here's a tip: Click the ⟳ until you get one that you find relatively easy to see. Don't waste your time attempting a difficult one.

UPDATE, next morning: It was a pretty good, low-spam over-night here on the blog. I think only 5 or 6 spam comments came in (only one of which was caught by the spam filter, but I found them because I get all comments emailed to me).

"Is Twitter working on a solution to keep liberals from abusing the spam submission system in the future?"

"Dana Loesch and many others want answers from Twitter. Why did they suspend Chris Loesch’s account? Was the suspension due to liberals flag-spamming him?"

ADDED: More here.

As our late-night-owl readers know, after Twitter reinstated conservative activist Chris Loesch’s account in the wee hours of Sunday night/Monday morning, the progressive flag-spam lynch mob — a vicious group of free speech-squelching Twitter users who trigger automatic suspensions by falsely “mass reporting” conservatives as “spammers” — took him down again and again.

Spam.

I'd been ignoring the spam filter in the last week. Thanks to the reader who emailed about missing posts because there were lots of things that got snagged that needed to be released, which I just did.

So... if you've been thinking we were deleting your comments for some mysterious reason, you were probably in amongst the many things caught in the filter.

"President Barack Obama takes debt battle to Twitter, loses more than 40,000 followers in one day."

Obama spammed us.

"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.

Spam.

The comment spam has been awful these last 2 days. I'm talking about robotic commercial spam — in Chinese characters linking to commercial websites — not annoying trolls or anything. I hate to turn on comments moderation, because it disrupts the flow, but I may have to. I can't spend an hour a day deleting comments.

ADDED: I saw that it's possible to turn on moderation just for older posts, which is where the problem is, so this is a great solution for now.

Obama's insipid emails are annoying Leon Wieseltier.

I was going to do a blog post a week or so ago titled Barack Obama is spamming me — you could sing it to this tune — but it was clear enough on the face of the email that a simple click would unsubscribe me from his email list, and since something stopped me from clicking, I could see I'd be lying if I posted that. But Wieseltier has his column bitching about the email:

"As we begin the work of remaking America," the president wrote to me, "we must draw on the common hopes that brought us together this week." And: "I'm counting on you to keep the spirit of unity and service alive." And: "We face many challenges. But we face them as one nation." And: "Our journey is just beginning." And: "Thank you for all you do." It is all perfectly platitudinous, a Hallmark homily, but not in Obama's universe. Does the renovation of the civic sense really require such a return to literalness? I do not look to the White House for irony, but the extent to which the Obama bliss is premised upon such undisabused belief vexes me.

Bliss premised upon undisabused belief vexes Wieseltier. Indeed! He's no platitudipus. Can you imagine someone running for President and saying he was "vexed" let alone saying he was vexed by "undisabused belief"? I mock Wieseltier even as I thoroughly agree that the Obama's aphorisms are hollow and inane.

Wieseltier ends his column — confession: I skipped the middle — by disapproving of a President's using an email list:

Scholars have documented the inexorable effect...

... the vexingly exorable effect...

... of the Internet in creating "communities of interest," and the Obama machine wishes to portray the nation itself as a community of interest; but this returns us once again to that mythical unity. What is more likely happening is that Obama's community of interest is depicting itself as America's community of interest. Communities of interest are formations of exclusiveness enabled by technologies of inclusiveness.

Communities of interest are formations of exclusiveness enabled by technologies of inclusiveness. It trips off the tongue!

So it was odd to get that email from my president. I voted for him, and I gave him a few dollars, but I do not revolve in his vast magical orbit.

Yo, Leon, you can unsubscribe from the list.

The personal touch had a distinctly de-personalizing effect, the way Amazon does when it teaches me about my tastes. The Obama machine may be excited to be connected to me...

Isn't it freaky when you're having an encounter with a machine and the machine gets excited?

... but I am not excited to be connected to it. I am not connected to it. The jazziness of the means aside...

Jazziness? When was email last jazzy? In 1999? 1989?

... this was junk mail.

And thus, Leon Wieseltier reveals that he is the last man on earth to perceive that email can be "junk mail" — or — in the jazzy slang of the day, here's a word for you — spam. The kids call it spam. And the kids who started calling it spam are now in their 40s.

The L.A. Times goes after 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski again.

Click the "Kozinski" tag if you don't remember the previous controversy. Now, the same reporter, Scott Glover, has a story about an email list run by Kozinski -- joined by accepting his invitation -- that sent out various humor items:

On the gag list, Kozinski periodically distributed jokes to a group of friends and associates, including his law clerks, colleagues on the federal bench, prominent attorneys and journalists. The jokes he sent ranged from silly to politically oriented to raunchy....

Do Kozinski's actions indicate a lack of judgment or are they merely the harmless expression of a free-spirited man who happens to be a highly regarded judge?

Patterico is not amused: Who cares what humor someone sends around to a willing group of friends? "To some, jokes like this are funny. To others, they’re annoying and tasteless... [I]t’s just not something that merits coverage in a newspaper," he says.

But wait. If the email went around to a lot of judges and it is truly offensive, I care! What if most or all of the recipients were men and much of the humor was demeaning to women? That would matter. What if it was full of racial and religious stereotypes? That would matter. You know people by what they think is funny. If there is insight to be had into the minds of judges, I want it! These people are trusted with immense power, and the federal judges have life tenure. Don't coddle them.

Now, let's go back to Glover's article and see whether he's found the kind of humor that I say matters:

The Times was given 13 jokes by three sources that were circulated on the gag list between 2003 and 2008.

One joke sent last spring poked fun at the Taliban, stating, "You may be a Taliban if ..." any of the following 12 statements are true. Among the statements: "You own a $3,000 machine gun and $5,000 rocket launcher, but you can't afford shoes" and "You wipe your butt with your bare left hand, but consider bacon 'unclean.' "...

The most graphic joke was set up as a three-page letter ostensibly written by a man to his estranged wife. The man sarcastically tells his wife that he still loves and misses her while at the same time detailing his recent sexual escapades with a young student, a single mother and his wife's younger sister. The single mom, the man says, acts like "a real woman . . . [who is] not hung up about God and her career and whether the kids can hear us."

Does this rise to the level that I've said matters? No.

But does that mean that the L.A. Times was wrong to publish this article? I'd say no to that too. I don't think it's important to publish this article. If federal judges were circulating racist jokes, it would be wrong to suppress it to protect these elite and insulated individuals. But that doesn't mean that it's wrong to share this insight into judicial minds. There was no prying into their private lives, no stalking or trickery.

Patterico places great emphasis on the fact that list membership was voluntary. There are 2 reasons why this doesn't make it all okay. The first I've already stated. The minds of judges affect the public, so it's good to have evidence of what those minds are really like. Just as I want news reports of things politicians accidentally say into a live microphone when they think they are speaking privately, I want to know what judges find funny when they talk -- or email -- amongst themselves.

The second reason appears in Glover's article:

Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School and former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, was skeptical that those who found jokes on the list offensive would necessarily complain, given Kozinski's commanding stature in the legal community.

"If you're ambitious, he's the last person you want to offend," she said.

It's just too hard to say no and, having said yes, to say take me off your list.

***

And, by the way, didn't sending jokes around to all your friends become completely uncool more than a decade ago? Why didn't Kozinski realize he was spamming everybody?