Today I received two comments from an aspiring participant here called “snowflake.” They are really a single comment submitted in two installments. The topic was this post, about the weenie professor who grovelled an apology for daring to show Sir Lawrence Olivier’s screen performance of “Othello” in a class for discussion purposes.
Here is the comment:
WOW! Do better? Black face was a highly respectable and noble thing? Your disgusting. if you think for ONE second that black face in Othello is not because they didn’t want to hire a black actor then your greatly confused. You guys are all hiding behind this mask of being some pompous intellectual as you ignore the facts. You were NOT there, black face is immoral and racist, and Othello could be played by a white man without needing to smear black paint on his face to imitate a different race. Black people face many different forms of discrimination and a white person playing a black mans role, and slapping on some black face paint to play a struggling black character? and your saying a white man was genuinely the best candidate to portray the pain and struggle of a black man. theres no thesis or theory’s here, its the facts that all of these comments reflect a bubble of WHITE people who are hiding behind intellectualism to cover how racist all of this is. I asserted that white characters cant put on BLACKFACE to play other characters and when the characters story line is mainly based around there race (which most non white characters in Shakespeare are). Hire an actor from that race instead of perpetuating the predominantly white theater industry. OR just don’t have them smear makeup imitating racial features that people were killed and mocked for not fifty years ago. On the other hand white characters often have storylines that have little to do with they’re race so it makes sense that other races can fill those roles (WITHOUT WHITE MAKEUP I MIGHT ADD???). The reason I repeated the same thing over and over is cause somehow the points been lost on you GEEZERS but ill spell it out. a mass majority of the black community has expressed a discomfort with blackface in ANY depiction. A discomfort all you commenters as white people HAVE NOT experienced. For you to sit here and tell black people they’re soft for not wanting something that DID originate from deep slavery to return. and for you to act like what hollywood needs right now is more white actors playing the roles of poc is beyond stupid. no matter how many texts you reference or unrelated contexts you use nothing can hide how racist all of this is. also the movie came out 10 years after the jim crow era. they’re fully connected and you continue to echo white voices as you point fingers. I’m the only commenter here who has an issue with blackface. You know this isn’t the consensus if you were to walk down the street asking people if they agree with black face. You’ve sought out an echo chamber and then have the nerve to tell the one person that disagrees that they don’t know what they’re talking about. when all of this is about a PRIVATE school miles away you don’t attend. We can agree to disagree, i think your racist, you think your some misunderstood intellectual. But I’m lazy and need to do better for trying to teach you hags how racist and biased this whole thread is? I can guarantee our society is not moving towards finding black face being acceptable and you all know it. So you can hide in these comment sections while I will continue to have a clear conscious and be able to openly express how racist black face is. this is a racist think piece based of a liberal school article where the students who PAY for a private education requested that black stereotypes and cartoonish depictions not be dignified or given a devil’s advocate. but somehow that got lost on all of your thick skulls.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Should I allow this unmannerly rant out of moderation?
My usual practice is not to do so, when I am confronted with comments like this. The only reason I am tempted is that ripping the comment to shreds would be fun, since it teems with bad arguments, logical fallacies, rationalizations and misrepresentations of what I wrote (I have never claimed that blackface was “highly respectable and noble,’ for example. The screed also violates several standards articulated in the commenting rules (which were just revised).
I am also suspicious of comments this carelessly written I make more than my share of typos, but entering “your” for “you’re” repeatedly is a tell, as is the persistent lack of uppercase letters when they are required. The post relies heavily on insults, including ad hominem attacks, and substitutes emotion for facts. Most of all, everything about the comment indicates that I would have to ban the commenter eventually anyway. I want to keep the level of discourse here high.
Of course, I am also sensitive to accusations that Ethics Alarms is nurturing an “echo chamber” and discouraging dissenting views. Do keep in mind, however, that if I alter Ethics Alarms standards to permit this comment, I will have to post others like it, and believe me, there are a lot of them.
Ethics Alarms 
It’s my opinion that “snowflake” appears to be a bigoted anti-white racist, yes snowflake I just called you a bigoted racist, get over yourself.
I say post the comment and actually spend the time it takes to completely rip snowflakes bull shit to shreds. This is the kind of crap these ignorant people think are rational arguments and they need to be shredded.
Are you volunteering? For I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep…
Jack Marshall wrote, “Are you volunteering?”
Not necessarily.
Jack Marshall wrote, “For I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep…”
As you can probably tell from my low participation level lately, Ditto.
One of my favorite poems.
Seemed appropriate for “snowflake”…
This is not a provocation…just an observation of a co existing fact. Eddie Murphy in whiteface as the barber shop Jew in COMING TO AMERICA twice? The first COA is old but the 2nd installment is very recent and I have not seen one word or opinion about this.
There is a world full of black Jewish folk who could have been cast in the 2nd installment of COA and would have been just as funny as Eddie Murphy in his reverse minstrelsy lampooning New York Jews. Offensive? Maybe. I didn’t think so because I laughed and I like laughing.
Before Larry Olivier donned dark makeup to play OTHELLO the quintessential and definitive OTHELLO was played by none other than Paul Robeson an African American of such talent and intellect that few have met his match. Unfortunately he went to the USSR and got cancelled from history. That is what our SNOWFLAKE should be in agitation over.
Contemporary snowflakes had and have no experience so they are told what their experience was and is without having to suffer the original messiness and so our SNOWFLAKE is reiterating experiences he never had and judging and condemning the rest of us for his counterfeit memories.
My own parents, the badly behaved (I’m going to get in trouble for this but it is a truth) Holocaust survivors always reminded my brothers and me that what happened to them did not happen to us. They maintained and survived so that they could end up in this marvelous and safe country (USA if one is not sure what I mean) and raise us here. I have only love and gratefulness to them for this.
SNOWFLAKE needs to get a real job.
A few thoughts.
1. Just because something is fun doesn’t mean it should be done. I’m sure you’re not the only one who would have fun deconstructing their argument.
2. You have the rules for a reason. It’s your house, the guest should respect it.
3. Nothing about his argument appears to be done in good faith. If he had left out the ad hominen attacks maybe…(see point two).
4. I don’t think it’s fair to count his grammar against him. We all make mistakes this way. Maybe your frustration with him is boiling over?
5. I’ve worried about the echo chamber here too because it’s rare where something is written that I don’t disagree. It was one of the things that brought me to the forum. However, see point two.
6. Res ipsa loquitor
Do you WANT to open a flood of screaming, cursing, and insults? Things have stayed (relatively) civil for almost a year now. You start allowing comments like that and this blog becomes no better than the comments section on Youtube or Huffpo. You yourself said (although not in those exact words) that you didn’t want that. In fact, you took your time slicing and dicing a commenter who set his keyboard on fire with multiple eff yous. The reason that there are few dissenters here is that most (but not all) of the leftist voices here belonged to either idiots (in at least one case to a drunk) or hate-filled jerks who came up against a cadre of intelligent and articulate conservatives who wouldn’t take their garbage. This person needs to be told to get lost, grow up and learn how to write, then come back.
Jack wrote, “Do keep in mind, however, that if I alter Ethics Alarms standards to permit this comment, I will have to post others like it, and believe me, there are a lot of them.”
Maintaining standards is a serious consideration even when irrational racist social justice warriors like “snowflake” have no standards.
“Should I allow this unmannerly rant out of moderation?”
Nope!
1. There is way too much garbage like that in the world already. We truly don’t need more of it.
2. I come here for your wit, thoughtful points and good grammar.
3. Your time is more valuable to me by adding to your repertoire, not indulging garbage producing idiots.
Exactly. Your sentiments are succinctly stated!
People who rant have the right to do so, there is, however, no reciprocal obligation to respond unless they threaten violence!
No one out there looking to fulfill some pro bono work representing “snowflake” in an open-n-shut educational malpractice suit…OB…Bueller…?
Education and grammar and spelling are white supremacist oppression, Paulie. I doubt he has a claim. I suspect he was top of his class. Probably at Yale right now.
I rarely have seen “there” spelled “they’re.” It is usually the reverse.
Bravo for that!
I also think that the commenter does not know what Blackface is. Othello isn’t that. However, there is an argument to be made that skin color is not a part of a costume the way clothing is. There is an argument to be made that Olivier did not need any make-up to play the part. However, those arguments were not made, or, if they were, were difficult to discern.
I am sympathetic to those here who think that allowing “snowflake” in would lower the level of discourse here.
However, if I were you, I would offer this compromise:
If snowflake wants to re-frame his comment in a way that complies with the commenting policies (AND is an IMPROVEMENT of his previous comments (typos, insults, etc.), you will post his new and improved comment (unedited) in its very own post as the subject for debate.
If he can’t or won’t make his case in that way, move on.
-Jut
These screeds, no punctuation, poor spelling, weird capitalization… just a pure stream-of-consciousness rage rant…. Who does this? Do they not understand how unhinged it comes off? Do they expect this to be persuasive? I often wonder if comments like that are the product of a bot. I say this fully cognizant that I’ve complained a couple times about people on Twitter assuming I’m a bot (because obviously, no one real would ever actually disagree with them), but I just… I almost hope that this is a bot, because if this is a real person, they’re a real person with problems.
Their problems are our problems.
The comment is too articulate for a bot. It is tempting to assume people we disagree with are bots, but that is part of the problem of our times: dehumanizing opponents. I was listening to a podcast recently about the media director for the governor of Florida. She seemed to have a digital army to sic on those who criticized the governor on Twitter. Maybe people assumed she had a bots that she would turn on people. Accounts would flood critic’s inboxes with vitriol and very specific messages that seemed disingenuous. It was easy to think these were literally mindless drones attacking people. The podcast, however, sent private messages to some of these accounts, and got real responses. Some agreed to be interviewed, and it turned out the governor’s media director was just savvy at reaching out to disaffected Floridians, who would faithfully follow her posts and hash tags criticizing the governor. Examine her post history, she’d offer condolences for deaths in her followers lives, and provide guidance to peopy looking to be politically active. The net result is an apparent hive mind that actually represents thousands of real people’s disgust with the modern state of affairs. It was easier for the governor’s critics to think these were fake people who could be ignored, rather than real people who disagreed with their virtuous and we’ll thought out positions. The consequences of such disagreement are hard to discern, so an intellectual shortcut is taken to avoid the problem.
Maybe I wasn’t clear… I expect this to be a person. I don’t think “bot armies” are nearly as endemic as people seem to think they are, and the ones that are are fairly easy to sniff out. I was *hoping* this was a bot because the alternative is that this is a person, and I’m concerned about what that meant for the person’s mental state.
I think you’ve nailed it on the head how some people get a following: They speak to people’s concerns. This is something Democrats fundamentally fail to understand…. The operative word in “white people” isn’t “white”. Those people are still people, they have concerns and struggles, and those concerns aren’t mitigated by being told that other people are worse off, those struggles aren’t overcome with the knowledge that other people in their racial group are OK. There are huge swathes of America that feel left out of the process, and regardless of how reasonable or pressing you feel those concerns are, as a politician, particularly a local politician, you should probably heed those concerns, because those people get a vote too.
The other thing to remember is the efficiency of signaling. Back in GamerGate, and hoo boy is that going back some years now, part of the spark that lit the fire was the appearance of journalistic collusion in the “Gamers Are Dead” articles. Within hours of each other, something like 20 articles were released giving VERY similar opinions of the irrelevance of the “Gamer” identity, and how game producers shouldn’t consider “Gamers” their primary consumer. Not only were these very similar, but this really bad advice, and it was really specific. The thing is that unlike with “gamesjournopros” where we eventually found out that some games journalists were in a chat server together and actively colluding to kill (or Streisand) certain stories (Like the Zoey Post), it doesn’t appear that the authors of the Gamers Are Dead articles actually colluded…. The first article was written, and the rest took that signal and piggybacked. Because of the ease of writing and posting articles, helped by a little good old fashioned plagiarism, 19 (or so) like minded authors blasted their take on the internet.
Collusion isn’t necessary. “Can Someone Rid Me Of This Meddlesome Priest” isn’t necessary. They know what they’re supposed to do, and they don’t need to be told.
Rich in CT wrote, “The comment is too articulate for a bot.”
I completely agree. I get BOT comments all the time on my blog that go directly into spam and I take the time to permanently ban each and every one of them. The ratio of bot comments to real person comments on my blog is currently somewhere around 20 bots to 1 real person and that ratio of bots is growing every day because I don’t get much traffic at all. In fact, bot comments are damn near the only traffic I get on my blog.
P.S. I’m really not complaining about the traffic on my blog, I wouldn’t have much time to deal with a lot of traffic these days anyway.
Bots are people too!
BLM – Bots Lives Matter!
People who comment have an obligation to understand what they are commenting about. Clearly, this person hasn’t read sufficient entries on this site to understand your position on black make-up in movies versus blackface or about the danger of professors having to grovel every time they show a film, assign a book or discuss a topic that someone finds offensive.
I’m sorry there’s an echo chamber here, too, but that doesn’t get fixed by allowing rants like this to go through.
I miss Alizia Tyler.
Didn’t she make this forum less of an echo chamber?
She certainly had what we in the business call, a knack.
Don’t Batman, just don’t!
You know she’s lurking around these threads like the card carrying member of the California Association of Trolling Teachers, Chris and our once resident drunk fattymoon and you’re just going to puff up her head even more than it already is and once Alizia’s head let’s loose it’s going to “undergo gravitational collapse and create a sphinter singularity”. Thanks valkygrrl for sharing that awesome quote with the world!
Well, IMHO, there is no one quite like her and I mean that in the best possible way.
Would love to discover if she talks like she writes and if not what that difference is.
It is not uncommon for brilliance to be accompanied by eccentricity.
Batman wrote, “It is not uncommon for brilliance to be accompanied by eccentricity.”
I’m glad I have my boots on. 😉
No kidding. Her takes were completely unique.
That’s one way of putting it. I responded to her once mockingly and once seriously, that was it.
Jack Marshall wrote, “Her takes were completely unique.”
The following is my favorite quote of all time regarding Alizia’s verbose commentary and it was a reply to one of Alizia’s nearly 1000 word stream of consciousness comments, “Any ethics issue can be blurred and muddied by piling on generalities, tangents, cosmic puzzles, dancing angels and navel-gazing exercises.” The reply was very direct, very pointed, and dead-on accurate in a very creative way. It was creative genius; I wish I had that kind of creativity.
As Diego Garcia wrote below, “…you can go on with thousands of words of stream of consciousness — but there is an excellent chance of losing your audience in mid rant.”
I’ve written some rather lengthy things in my time at Ethics Alarms including a recent comment that was near 1700 words but I couldn’t hold a candle to Alizia’s verbose rhetoric. Having an excessively verbose “stream of consciousness” in her epic screeds was one of Alizia’s three biggest problems, the second was her gaslighting Aliziaisms trying to drag others into down her rabbit hole of metaphysics and the last was her blatantly obvious unapologetic anti-black segregationist racist viewpoints. Alizia had rare moments where she brought her rhetoric down to the level that regular Earthlings could engage with, it was pleasant having discussions with her when she did that and I made a point of personally encouraging those kind of comments.
In the end, Aliza chose her words. Alizia chose how to interact with others. Aliza’s words represented who Alizia was to Ethics Alarms participants. Words and actions have consequences. I’ll miss the possibility of more of the good conversations but I won’t miss, not even for a moment, the off-topic overly verbose gaslighting Aliziaism deflections that drag others into Alizia’s never ending philosophical abyss.
As do I. Alas I must admit I would have to read her comments multiple times but she did have a unique perspective. Chris is one of those I do not miss.
After reading snowflake’s comment many times and rereading the comment snowflake posted in the other thread a few times, I’m officially changing my mind. Based on snowflake’s own writing I’ve come to the conclusion that this snowflake is a complete imbecile that likely couldn’t reconstruct their comment into a rational argument if their life depended on it, plus if the comment were to be posted it would become more difficult than it already is to maintain Ethics Alarms standards. So in the end, chipping away at Ethics Alarms standards just so a few of us could prove with real arguments that this imbecile’s belligerent rhetoric is ridiculous when we already know this is true is quite futile and likely destructive to Ethics Alarms in the long run.
Don’t post the comment but feel free to pass on the following award…
snowflake’s…um…efforts are eminently worthy of a “Gotchie,” an award you never bestow without due consideration!
Well, I made him the recommended offer, writing via email,
Regarding your comments: They both have been rejected, and if you read the Comments policies, which are right on the home page, you will see why. If you can send in a version of the same basic points within the standards of the blog, I would post it.
Based on what you wrote, I don’t think you can do it.
Jack Marshall wrote, “Well, I made him the recommended offer, writing via email,”
My gut tells me that the comment above from snowflake is a hit-n-run so there’s no telling what you’ll get back or if you’re going to get anything back. You took the extra step and tried when you didn’t have to and that’s reasonably fair.
OK, here are my thoughts..
My first post here was in lowercase how i always type and how i get my thoughts out best. it takes me a LOT of time to go back and fix them to meet YOUR RULES.
You told me after my first post to fix it even though I said it was my style and you said “I doubt you are e.e. cumings” and honestly thought you were a jerk to say that. I did want to say “no but i’ve had over 100 songs i wrote recorded on commercially released records, poetry I’ve written win awards, and have an award winning children’s cartoon i wrote and, prove my poetic and professional writing abilities, but I thought that was defensive and stupid so I didn’t do that. LOL, but now you know hahaha.
That being said,,, YOUR RULES your house, etc. and IF i wanted to comment here I needed to be respectful to YOUR rules. Even if I don’t agree with them. (I do now)
Reading this person’s rant made me want to say “oh let it be posted, this is what we need, both sides to speak to each other as if we keep separating, we will never fix this stuff and there’s hope to have discussion, etc”
AND, after reading all the comments, I have changed my mind…
WHY??? because if I had to type the way the rules say, and if I had to follow rules I may not have agreed with to have a voice here, THEN they do too!! And if they can’t, they really don’t want to engage honestly.
I did, which is why I mostly always run back and fix my grammar, and capitalize, and then deal with the thing not publishing my comments and have to go through all that! lol. makes me know I really do care.
So, no, let the snowflake keep the rules or they can just go post crap like they did on Facebook.
Unless they can be respectful enough to keep your rules, they don’t have the mental capacity to engage in a learning conversation and they SHOULD see how it feels to really not have a voice LOL.
So sad. It’s an opportunity missed. Now to go fix stuff and see if Word press will allow this comment!
Good points.
I think you do bring a different perspective to this blog, and I am glad you consider it worth the effort to post here.
I am not too hung up on posters being precisely grammatically correct, but I do think that if you want to get your message across you need to be reasonably articulate. If one has never taken the trouble to learn most of the rules of standard English, it has the effect of diminishing any message posted.
Also, as someone already mentioned — paragraphs are your friend.
And I have noted a time or two that there is a reason for the acronym TL DR. Yes, you can go on with thousands of words of stream of consciousness — but there is an excellent chance of losing your audience in mid rant.
Lovely comment. I had completely forgotten that I gave you a hard time about the lower case, and I’m so glad you stuck around: you’re a treasure.
Did I mention that my Freshman room had also been where e.e. started college?
Thank you!!
Can I type in lowercase now? LOL. 🙂
I know i forgot a lot of stuff, at the time it think i’ve found them all then i read back and am like OMG!! LOL.
I”m glad you think I am a treasure! you’re smarter than I even thought!
And, no, i did nkot know e.e. started ad your room! how cool!
my EXCELLENT comment got eaten booo hoooo
mermaidmary99 wrote, “my EXCELLENT comment got eaten booo hoooo”
A suggestion to help stop this weird comment eating bug; open a free WordPress account and use that account to post comments here. You don’t have to do anything special with the WordPress account and as long as you’re logged into WordPress it should take care of the issue. Of course if at some point in time in the future you had the urge to start a blog, then your WordPress account would already be there for you to move ahead with that.
Thank you Stevei! i do log in!! that’s the weird thing! i have an account! you can’t reply unless you do!! so odd!!
mermaidmary99 wrote, “Thank you Stevei! i do log in!! that’s the weird thing! i have an account! you can’t reply unless you do!! so odd!!”
Now I’m really perplexed.
Hmmmm…………..
So am I. I don’t have a WordPress account and I reply with no problem.
No, it wasn’t, and I rescued it before I knew about its spamming!
I couldn’t read it. In fact, I refuse to read lengthy screeds that lack paragraphs. They are simply too demanding for my old eyes, and I wouldn’t be the least offended if you moderated out all of them regardless of worth.
Frankly, if someone can’t be bothered to make paragraphs, that tells me they have no interest in communication. What they really want is to offend as much as possible, including grammar and style.
This… thing, from the two or three lines I made it through before surrendering, appears to fill that bill in spades.
Send it to /dev/null where it belongs. It is unworthy of reading, let alone Fisking.
Allow them sparingly such as when the roll of a 13 sided die fails to land on any of the twelve months of the year.
On the plus side, your site traffic would increase.
Quality, not quantity, has always been the mission here.
Maybe traffic would increase but what KIND Of traffic? numbers for nubmers sake is purely ego driven.
I’d rather this smaller place than the plethera of places yo can get NUMBERS and read nothing but the same old crap from both sides. here you get some discussion and listening…
Who cares about “numbers” when it’s hell to read stuff.
Jack has integrity. that’s NOT numbers based, and why still come after 5 years. 🙂
It is not opinion, it is a verbose, paranoid screed not worthy of seeing the light of day. There were some points he touched on that may have been worthy, but they were unfortunately lost in his grammatically challenged paranoia.
This place isn’t an echo chamber. It might feel like that to an outsider, but Ethics Alarms is actually “equal time”. It’s a middle-of-the-road alternative to the countless wildly left-wing media outlets, social media sites, and blogs that permeate our collective existence. If there was nary a liberal responder here, this place would still have tremendous value.
And I appreciate the responses with which I disagree, because on this site, they are generally well-written. I know that curating comments requires a time commitment, but the quality of the commenters (and the original writing) is better highlighted because of it. The response from snowflake is not well-written, and resorts to the way-too-tired attack of “you’re a racist” way too often to be of much value. I started reading and after the second or third “racist” accusation, I was done.
If someone wants to present a left-wing argument, do it in a way that doesn’t make it look like it was crafted by Joy Behar.
Well, at least Snowflake got his/her/its pseudonym right.
Wasn’t Behar a comedian before the bitter harping set in?
I don’t see the point in allowing the comment. The tone and quality of the comment leads me to believe the author is a bigot who has no desire to engage in any sort of honest, worth while discussion. I’ve engaged with people like that before and the result is ALWAYS insults, gaslighting, and lies. Maybe give the person a chance to straighten out and fly right, but I agree with your gut reaction that you will most likely end up banning them.
One quibble: I went back to the original post. Snowflake had originally posted on December 8. You responded. These posts are responses to your response.
That re-cap provides some needed context. This was not exactly snowflake’s first impression. More akin to a bad second impression.
-Jut
I didn’t recall the name, so when his subsequent comments ended up in moderation, I assumed those were the first. Not that it matters: I’d typically ban a previous commenter after a post like those today. I reread the original comment…it was obnoxious and stupid, but I let it through—again, eager for some dissenting views— and gave him a second chance with the “Do better next time” warning.
He did worse. He is also apparentlya one topic commenter—it took him more than a month to reply to me, which led to the confusion. But thanks, now I know the issue is whether to ban “snowflake” or not.