In the middle of an already lively and substantive discussion on this recent post, an occasional, undistinguished commenter added this to an already snarky entry:
“I also love how this blog comment section is essentially the same 5 people talking to themselves. Remember tgt and Charles? Ah those were the days. Now Old Bill responds to himself.”
Since the comment was what I often refer to, being baseball obsessed, as a hanging curve-ball right over the plate (For the sadly baseball ignorant, that means a stupid statement too inviting to resist knocking out of the park), I performed a quick survey of the readers who had issued substantive comments over the past two days and listed them, eventually reaching a count of over 20, and ended my retort with,
“DAMN! You’re right! Just 5 commenters! And they can’t count, either…”
Note that I chose irony rather than invective. My first instinct was to write, “You can bite me, asshole. That’s a lie, and an unfair swipe at both a respected veteran commenter here and my project.”
However, since that exchange, I have become more annoyed by it by the hour. If I had just waited a day for my quick survey, the count of regular commenters would have swelled to over 30: I had forgotten Arthur in Maine, Gamereg, Ohwhatfunitis, Humble Talent, Heres Johnny, and more. In fact, after doing some checking into the archives, Ethics Alarms has never had a more erudite, serious, engaged and enlightening group of regular commenters. It is perhaps what I am most proud of after starting the blog 16 years ago.
So the commenter was not merely stating a falsehood—that she could have disproved as easily as I did—just to be nasty. She also was gratuitously insulting a specific commenter while denigrating the other serious (unlike her) participants here.
Looking back over her dossier, this commenter’s main themes are that 1) she doesn’t like the blog but reads it anyway, and 2) she dislikes the President intensely. Most of her participation consists of jumping in to agree with any other criticism of me or a post, or “sealioning.” A tone of condescension is unmistakable in most of her comments, but as her snark above shows, she is a long time lurker. tgt hasn’t shown up here since the Obama Administration, and Charles Green self-banned more than eight years ago. She first graced us with her open presence in March of this year.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is..
Should I ban this jerk?
One other detail that is tending me to vote “yes.” My response made her look like a fool, and the honorable and respectable thing to do then would have been to reply with, if not an apology, at least an “Okay, you got me!” She’s been silent.
Ethics Alarms 
I do “respond to myself” because I invariably hastily fire off a comment and then almost immediately an additional thought pops up. WordPress formats these as replies.
As I commented at the end of the discussion, it’s remarkable how any place where a group of conservatives can talk among themselves is a toxic echo chamber while anywhere a group of liberals can talk among themselves is … the mainstream media. See, e.g., MSNBC, The View, Morning Joe, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR. These are not echo chambers, these are revered truth tellers! Safe spaces for me but not for thee. Any time liberals get together, it’s a community. Any time conservatives congregate, they’re a terrorist or white supremacist organization.
On the one hand, I would really love an edit feature.
On the other hand, the lack of one preserves thoughts that ought to be out there, but which we sometimes might like to erase.
On the gripping hand, I often post something and then think of another thought I wish I had included. As often as not, I just let it go.
Banning is your call.
I see what you did there, Bill. 🙂
As for the “echo chamber” insult, I’ve already said what I think on that subject.
I don’t think a ban is necessary. Frankly, Jack, this little mosquito isn’t worth your time and certainly not worthy of getting you “more annoyed by it by the hour.”
Even if it were true that you only had the same five commenters, they are indeed every bit as “erudite, serious, engaged and enlightening” as you say they are–and they’d still be worth writing to and engaging with. That quality-over-quantity approach (yet you still write A LOT!) is why I’m still here 16 years later and I’m sure that’s true for the other four. 🙂
So head-up, Jack. Be proud of what you’ve built here. The rest of us certainly appreciate it. Don’t for a moment think you should have to apologize for it.
–Dwayne
I’d say your earlier/linked comment pretty much covers the “echo chamber” issue, Dwayne.
“Sealioning” I learned a new term today. That sent me down a rabbit hole to this comic from 2014: https://wondermark.com/c/1062/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
“The core of what I set out to criticize is just the notion that any random patient stranger should feel entitled to as much of someone’s attention as they want”
That cartoon’s pretty funny. I’ve always thought of it as passive-aggressive behavior. But I like ‘sealioning” very much. There’s always Ann Althouse’s “civility bullshit.” Being “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” has also been brought to mind by some slyly hostile commenters’ style. But I recently heard, “a wolf in wolf’s clothing.” I think that’s a pretty good description of the rhetorical smoke screen deployed by a few annoying commenters. Their sheep’s clothing is so transparent to anyone who recognizes the type as to be non-existent.
Here’s how I deal with sealions (excerpted from the dignity index post):
If the other side refuses to engage, we don’t have to constantly spend time trying to engage, but we do have to make it clear the door is still open. If someone claims to be sincerely engaging but seems to be wasting your time, you’re entitled to set boundaries. I suggest referring them to other resources and other people who would be more interested in talking with them, rather than just shutting them out.
A good test of whether someone is worth talking to is if they can demonstrate they understand your concerns. I still offer a workshop to make discussing concerns easier. I’ve also got an article in the works about how you aren’t seeing the reasonable side of the opposing faction, and they aren’t seeing the reasonable side of yours.
I am typically not a fan of banning people. But, if they have shown no ability to make constructive contributions to the dialogue, you lose nothing by banning her.
-Jut
Not having done an inventory of the commenter’s posts, I can’t really form a good opinion regarding banning or not banning. I found the comment in question unhelpful, and almost cryptic. I would have appreciated more explanation of her opinions.
The final paragraph was fairly rude. For that, without the context of her other posts, I would issue a warning.
I fear your response, however, made her point. Saying there were only 5 commenters on the blog was pretty clearly hyperbole. If quantity of commenters is the goal, “over 30” is still pretty small. (Do I count as 31? 😉 )
My personal opinion, though, is that quantity is irrelevant. This is one of only a few websites, and the only blog, that I visit on a daily basis. I come for the quality of the posts and the comments, and I don’t really care about the quantity. I’ve learned a lot here, and my opinions on a variety of subjects have evolved, in large part due to things I’ve read here.
It is unfortunate that nearly all the liberal commenters have left post-Trump. Not Trumps’s fault, at least not directly, but the quality of discourse between the two sides has dropped immeasurably since 2016, not just here on Ethics Alarms, but nationwide.
Actually, 0ver 30 substantive, serious commenters is rare. And none call themselves “Anonymous”! The only blog that had similar commenting quality from so many regular commenters was the old Volokh Conspiracy when it was free standing.
Yes, see, for example, Jonathan Turley’s comments at Res Ipsa Loquitor. No one seems to police the comments, and they quickly devolve into really nasty attacks on the professor.
Perfect example. Turley’s comment section is better than it once was (with lots of “I make 2,000 a week at home!”) comments, but just a bit.
I am thrilled to be one of the … ahem … five.
Are we chained to the blog? Do we need a GoFundMe to “Free the EA 5!
Seriously, this is one of the very best commentariat I have ever run into — Althouse’s blog is probably a serious contender.
I love Turley’s blog, but I hardly ever wade into the comments. Some topics on Quora are decent, but a lot are a hot mess from the get go.
Perhaps next best are some gaming topics on Reddit — but those tend to be fairly niche topics and by people who all like the game they are discussing (I’m looking at you, Factorio).
It is hard to justify banning commenters while lamenting cancel culture. It would seem to me that there is sufficient talent in the commentariat to effectively rebuke such comments. The other option is for no one to respond. I am sure the goal of those engaging in sealion behavior is to get a reaction.
Whenever I see the comment number quickly go through the roof (forty or fifty), I’m invariably correct in assuming (as Bullwinkle would say), “There sems to be skullduggery afoot.” “Do not engage” is usually the right course, but so many EA commenters are skillful and able arguers who act in good faith, they too often get dragged down a rabbit hole by bad actors.
The fact that Marisa hasn’t spawned such a rabbit hole (that I’m aware of), makes me less favorable to banning her.
A boss I had years ago rarely fired bad employees. He revealed his secret once to me when I popped into his office to say hi. He said, “I just deal out the rope gradually and people eventually hang themselves, leaving me to just bury the body.”
As for the ban of the commenter in question, of course it’s up to you. The individual does mostly respond to complain about the format or the host or the content or the commenters (or a perceived lack of them), while offering little salient commentary on the topic. But those of us that have been here a while know that people like this individual eventually…inevitably…end up banning themselves, either by self-banning or repeatedly breaking the rules of the site and earning a ban the old-fashioned way.
The mean-spirited side of me enjoys witnessing that.
Trolls like Marissa seek happiness by trying to make other people unhappy; rather a sad condition, am I right?
Anywho, she’ll self-inflict more ignominy with her keyboard than any EA commentariat supplied invective could ever do.
PWS
Your(JM) choice of irony was much more entertaining.
I miss the departed rambling novelist commenter who was rather stream of consciousness on steroids, but that was her choice to leave. And, I remember the self banning of Charles Green – time flies.
Personally, I enjoy observing the diversity of writing styles here and the dissection of nuance, even the take downs of bad commenters. Obviously, you want only to allow a few of those every so often, otherwise your domain would become as trashy as althouse and turley.
Perhaps the jerk in question could be given an unmentioned 2nd chance even without an apology. Perhaps she was provoked by your intense writing style.
I like to think that we are a country from federal to personal that is both “law and order” balanced with “mercy and grace” on a fulcrum of oportunity.
Ah, the halcyon days of Alizia Tyler. Yeah, she wrote a lot of very long, rambling comments. I think I’m a pretty smart guy, but I understood almost nothing she posted.
She was on an entirely different plane from me.
She’s written me off site a few times. Thus proving Still Spartan wrong that Alicia was a bot.
Bots are WAY more coherent than Aliza was. I pride myself on reading every article and nearly every comment, but whenever I encountered her full-page ramblings, . . . I just couldn’t. She’s so the opposite of my own writing style (brevity is the soul of wit) that it made my head hurt.
–Dwayne
I know exactly what you mean and generally I was the same way. Even we Five, when reading stuff on the internet, can suffer from the TLDR syndrome.
I feel my own comments sometimes err in the too long direction. Reading others — if your every comment is a 12 page term paper, you are just not going to get many people to slog all the way through them, especially when you are confident it’s something you’ll never agree with.
So while Alizia had some worthwhile thoughts, she didn’t get them across very much because they were just too darn long to read.
“So while Alizia had some worthwhile thoughts, she didn’t get them across very much because they were just too darn long to read.”
Agreed; but she was a dyed_in_the_wool Holocaust Denier, which was a bridge too far.
PWS
I’d be more likely to label Tyler “Kamala Harris.” Alicia served her word salads family-style…with super-sized fries and a drink.
Sometimes I wish this blog had more comments in general, because that would mean more people are actually reading it. And part of me does feel a certain unethical satisfaction in watching bad actors get hammered for thinking their standard social media style trolling will score any points here. But a bigger barrel means more bad apples to deal with, so we should be counting our blessings. As it is, I’m happy to have stumbled upon this little community, and I hope it lasts a good long time.
So, essentially, this was a crack aimed at the visibility and overall success of the blog. It’s no different from media estimates of the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd. It’s akin to judging your worth based how many kids showed up to your 10th birthday party or in what order you were chosen for team sports in gym class.
Essentially, yeah. It was hostile rather than critical. I don’t need hostility here. Critical is swell. I benefit (sometimes) from critical.
AS a staunch advocate for free speech, I say let her talk. her words will comtinue toe reveal her asholeishness,which is the goal of free speech