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.
I’m of the belief that its all the same person/persons. For years whoever identified as Alizia Tyler would respond with such word vomit responses, and rarely on the topic you presented. I was never sure what to make of it. And then they finally broke character in <a href=”https://ethicsalarms.com/2020/03/04/there-are-many-ethics-villains-in-this-story-but-the-boys-put-in-handcuffs-arent-among-them/”>this</a> post. Where did the high minded prose go? I didn’t take them serious after that.
Reading back those comments, it’s funny… I somehow merited not one, but two comments from the AI cat lady. I didn’t know about this then, and I still can’t bring myself to care now, except to enjoy the discovery that I lived completely rent-free in someone’s head for years.
“except to enjoy the discovery that I lived completely rent-free in someone’s head for years.”
Must have been kinda crowded with all those other voices and demons rattling around in there…
PWS
It makes me kind of curious as CAA / AT had an unhealthy obsession with anything related to Israel, and I do not remember you weighing in on this.
I have to admit that I often skipped over AT’s long and hard to read posts.
Agreed, as to AT’s walls of words.
Update: the WordPress commenter blocking system worked! (Thanks, Steve). Nothing from Cassandra (or A Friend) since I added their info to the blocked list. I also think the fact that I haven’t received any emails from Alizia, who has never been shy about contacting me off site, is more evidence that CAA isn’t her.
You’re welcome.
Are reading the commenting policies really necessary?
Don’t be a jerk.
Follow the golden rule.
Don’t insult your host.
Do whatever you want in your own house. This one is not yours.
For me, EA is like time travelling back to college and a good class’s and professor’s discussion section, the most enjoyable aspect of college. What a treat.
It’s horrifying how bad the commentary is in Res Ipsa Loquitor. I guess Prof. Turley has no one providing moderation. Francis Menton’s Manhattan Contrarian has quality commentary, but he puts out only one or two pieces a week.
Who knows how many people comprise Alizia, but the real question is how many Jack Marshalls are there behind the curtain?
Moderation takes a lot of time, and not every blogger has that time. The correct thing to do for Professor Turley would be to disable comments if technically possible on his blogging platform, as they distract from the value of his blog.
Right. Or hire people to do it. But yes, simply not allowing comments would be a good solution.
Rationalization #22: Turley’s comments used to be worse. They used to include those “I made 2000 bucks a week at home…” posts.
Every ethics rationalization has an exception that justifies it; I believe this to be EA’s official take. I am tempted to say that big money offers a very good rationalization. At the other hand, is 2000 bucks a week all that Prof. Turley makes? He should have learned to code….
Wait, Turley wasn’t the one making those comments. Haven’t you seen those? They are basically ads for “work-at-home’ operations. Pure spam. Every post used to accumulate a bunch of them.
No I haven’t seen those. I am just looking at his post about Laetitia Jones which has over 200 comments, mostly short-form and not very well argued.
Let me clarify again: You wouldn’t see them: they used to infest Turley’s blog before he got someone, maybe a student, to at least remove the spam comments. It’s a phishing scam. Here’s a template: “I am earning a decent online income of $350-$700 daily from home. It’s an easy and simple online job. Last month I received a check of $18,450. Check out this site for details…”
Just a couple of trivial thoughts:
Even though Jack and I are not on the exact wave length when it comes to American football, I have not been banned. A have read and even agree with many of the criticisms of the NFL, but still enjoy watching the games. There has no been no bullying, no insistence that I capitulate and waste my time some other way. I am a little conflicted by my behavior, just as I am conflicted that Danny and I catch a movie every week, even though we are subsidizing Hollywood and its craven ideologues. Again, no one on Ethics Alarms has demanded fealty, subservience or obedience.
IF I were banned – I would hang my head in shame and be too humiliated to ever comment again.
Grandma Lisa,
And what you wrote is exactly what I wrote to Alizia Tyler…more than once. She would repeatedly write about how she was being censored when writing her responses, and I would remind her than no-one – NOT EVEN ONE person – censored anything she wrote. Ever.
There were people who disagreed with her content. I couldn’t have cared less about her content – mostly because I couldn’t follow 80% of it – but actually liked a few things she wrote. I only ever criticized her condescending, I-am-too-smart-for-all-of-you methods of delivery.
Ms. Tyler equated disagreement with her content as the indicator that the readers here were blatant Christian Zionists. She wrote that more than once. If people didn’t respond, she often resorted to insults, seemingly to goad responses from readers. She equated instruction from our host about “moving on from beating a dead horse” as censorship.
She was here with one single axe to grind – the whole alt-right “Israel wants to rule everything” schtick – and when it didn’t take, she threw down her keyboard and left.
I think it would be good to learn to argue in the alternative, as is done in moot court for law students. Hereby we pick a side, and then we try to find the strongest arguments that support that side. The side we pick may not necessarily the one we morally agree with. This is a necessary skill for lawyers who need to represent clients zealously, be able to handle litigation and appellate court arguments.
This skill is also useful for EA commenters as it teaches us to research the position of those we disagree with, and to write persuasively. It also gets us out of thought bubbles, and helps us to the see the strength and weaknesses of multiple positions.
Personally, I don’t give a hoot if Cassandra’s AI Agent and Aliza Tyler are the same person or not because they are both obsessed internet trolls and should be treated as such. Cut ties with trolls, ban them, and move on with life.