Over the weekend and already this morning, this nice, peaceful ethics blog was the victim of harassment and attack from an embittered banned commenter. It’s far from the first time this has happened since 2009, when EA first spread its wings, but this one was unique in its persistence and idiocy. What kind of person spends his or her valuable time writing long, mostly coherent screeds to post where 1) they aren’t welcome and 2) where they will be dispatched to Spam Hell the second the proprietor, me, sees them? You can answer that question as well as I can, but the inescapable conclusion is that such conduct validates my judgment in banning them in the first place. Ethical people don’t act like that. Rational people don’t act like that. Ethics Alarms is for ethical, rational, and also smart people. For “Cassandra’s AI Agent,” one out of three isn’t good enough, and I’m starting to have doubts about the “smart” part.

[Added: One of the ways this conduct is indefensibly unethical is that all the spammed comments from CAA clogged my spam folder and caused me to miss James Flood’s constructive comment last night on this post. I just got it up.]

Thanks to Steve Witherspoon, I finally learned how WordPress lets a blogger block a commenter. It would have been nice if WordPress itself made this information conveniently available or obvious: it’s buried several layers deep on my “Dashboard.” Oh, I’m sure there was a video with the information made available to me at some point many years ago. Silly me—I assumed that visitors to an ethics blog would respect the host’s rules, orders and requests, including the order to stay out of the comment threads. Most have, in fact, usually after an angry email or a single last word. Not “Cassandra,” however, and not the previous comment-bombing champ,”A Friend.”

The device of pretending to be a new commenter using a new email address is particularly obnoxious. “Cassandra’s AI Agent” is also in violation of EA rules by not sending me the real name behind the screen name. Come to think of it, so are many of you regular commenters out there: shame on you, and shame on me, for I have been lax in enforcing this requirement. If I had, we wouldn’t be debating whether CAA is Alizia Tyler or not. (I still vote “no.”)

But before we wave goodby to this pompous asshole, let me clarify, for the record, the delusions that seemingly led to the rage-fest. Many of them appear somewhere in the Comment Policies linked on the Home Page, and every aspiring commenter is obligated to read them. Nevertheless, I’ll risk being redundant.