This blog gets a lot of automated spam pretending to be comments, which needs to be filtered out. This is not surprising. These days, pretty much any site that looks like a blog will get lots of spam.
The spam is not really a problem, and I don’t think much about it. It’s just noise, formless and without meaning. For those spam comments that my filter doesn’t automatically trap, WordPress lets me pick through pending comments from unknown sources and mark each one as “Approve”, “Spam”, or “Delete”. My general custom is to choose “Approve” if the comment is from a human, and “Spam” otherwise.
But every once in a while a comment arrives which is recognizably human, but also kind of nuts. It’s not exactly spam, but also not exactly legit. My guess in these cases is usually that somebody has arrived at my blog through some sort of RSS feed, without the context of my other blog posts.
The other day I got one of these, a sort of political hate screed that seemed to be based upon a set of obviously sincere and intensely felt passions, but that also seemed to make quite a few uninformed assumptions about me. Reading it, I felt as though my little blog had wandered into a battlefield where guns were already blazing long before my arrival, and where they would continue to blaze long after I’d wandered off.
Curious to see whether it was possible to break through, to move beyond the level of rhetoric, and seeing that the writer’s email address was listed with his comment, I decided to start a dialog with this person. I sent him a long and respectful email, pointing out places where he and I might actually agree, and trying to see whether we could work through the issues together.
I eagerly awaited his response. After all, why not try to extend a friendly hand across a cultural divide? Why not try to use the internet as a way to reach out to one’s fellows, to seek common ground?
Eventually the response came back: Mailbox unavailable: user unknown. And so I did something I rarely do: I made use of that third option. Going back to the pending comments page, I hit “Delete”.
You’re a more patient man than I.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the type of people who make those sorts of comments or send/forward those sorts of mails are so wound up in their own convictions – misguided or otherwise – that it is nearly impossible to break through, much less find any common ground.
That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. 😉
Haha, I thought that “independence day” post might release an unbidden flood of hate-mail. It seems a large portion of the US population are curiously touchy on the subject of nation, national history and identity.
While a resurgent interest in History can only be a good thing, I’ve noticed that this interest is frequently accompanied by the desire to REWRITE the recent and past history of America along more heroic, noble, even wagnerian lines.
If it walks like a fascist duck… (goosestep?)
Listen to what our friend Benito Musselini has to say:
Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism — born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice.
And so it goes.