Blogger reluctantly fights spam

This past week or so, Blogger notified its users that it's finally decided to fight spam. You can read all about it here. Perhaps many of us would have found this impressive if implemented several months or, quite frankly, a few years ago but the admins seem to have only responded to this common problem now, and only after a deluge of complaints have been posted on their unresponsive feedback site (through Google), over the course of uncountable eons. Some other bloggers are mildly more hopeful than I about this banal update.

I'm one of those crabby realists who doesn't buy into the overused "better late than never" excuse that barely keeps typical bureaucracies from imploding into failure. Behind the scenes, I've been spending my precious time deleting and redeleting automatic spam from some computer-savvy psychopath writing short quips (half in Chinese & half in English, oddly enough) with a trail of elipses anchored with tags to Russian porn sites and the like, purposely designed to capitalize on accidental user click-through by bloggers trying hard to moderate their commentboxes from this very stupidity. From browsing other sites, I see I'm not the only one of his victims since his spam has successfully rooted itself in other commentboxes by more careless Blogger users. For some odd marketing reason that I can't fathom, Blogger allowed this to go on for quite a long time with no solution, no doubt driving yet more bloggers to their competitors. If I could find a Wordpress solution that was free like Blogger and matching all the capabilities of this system, I'd be gone too. Soooooo gone. But we must do with what we got and make lemonade out of the sour lemons.

After perusing Google's explanation of the new system however, I see some obvious flaws. It would make far more sense to simply allow us bloggers to individually determine for ourselves what constitutes "spam" and not force Google's comparatively blind algorithms on people. For example, I would like to specifically block a few rather dense and obsessive commenters permanently from my blog without having to go through the motion of specifically deleting their consistent nonsense in my mailbox. Can I do this in the new system? It doesn't appear so and this irritates me.

But then, as capitalistically glib as it is, they say "you get what you pay for" and Blogger is as free as they come.

Happy Easter Monday and/or Qingming Day

It turns out that Qingming, the day for the respect of ancestors, coincides this year with Easter Monday, the day that the mythical demigod Jesus rose from the grave. I find that nicely symbolic of death and rebirth, don't you? It seemed like an apropos day to restyle (or possibly obliterate) my blog. Enjoy.

Things coming for spring...

Just to make sure that no one thinks I've suddenly disappeared, I'm letting everybody know that I'm still pondering, still creating, and will be making some new posts shortly. My attention is presently diverted between making a blog redesign (and convoluted Blogger code associated with that task), my attempts at modelling historical things in 3d, tracking down a decent meaning for the Etruscan word aclχa, collecting the details on another potentially contrived PIE root (*)*galakt- 'milk', and a whole bunch of other stuff that has nothing to do with this blog. It's spring afterall and the extra sunlight is making me extra creative after a chilly winter of relative ennui. Hold tight, readers.

Some thoughts about trolling

For me, the usual definition of the word 'troll' needs a serious readjustment. When online, intent is impossible to determine with certainty. They could have a determined intent to be a jerk or they could just be mental. Morality and civility can never be your guide in anonymous environments and is a typical way for trolls to exploit your guilt for 'hurting them' when fighting back or deleting them. They're last tactic is to attack you from another website, but this just makes them look like twits and is free advertisement for you.

So when assessing weak links in your commentbox, the only objective criteria is rationality. A 'troll' must be redefined as: Anyone **for whatever intent** who constantly exploits logical fallacies. Hold your own. Don't back down. Be merciless. Rip the purposely ignorant apart with glee.

Fallacies are the very bread and butter of a determined troll. It's the bug-spray to kill them dead. This also effectively identifies and zaps yappy children, crackpots, spammers, topic-derailers, and the traditional intentful troll. No self-respecting academic-oriented blog wants anything other than sane adults on their blog. Only sane adults add reader value to a blog. Unfortunately, until laws are in place to jail some of the extreme offenders (watch, it's coming), keep in mind that every website is a troll target. No one is a virgin to troll attacks.

Typical trolls I get in my commentbox are as follows:

1. The pompous no-lifer troll
   
   It's the idiot that can't defend his position so he hurls invectives like "You don't know anything about [fill-in-blank]". It begs the question why they don't just take their free time to read something better. Answer: they're social rejects.
   
   
2. The language-kook troll
   
   One nut is still posting falsifiable Vasco-Caucasian etymologies to me for months on end. He fails to absorb that each and every one of his messages has been rejected. Maybe it's time for the meds? No, I'm not interested in how you think that Etruscan is related to Mayan or that you took offense to my position against clumsy protolanguage reconstructions. Get lost.
   
   
3. The neophobic troll
   
   These trolls try hard to twist any new idea proposed by the blogger as a logical fallacy without facts to support it in a transparent attempt to interfere with open dialogue. It doesn't matter how often you espouse Occam's Razor or explain that it's only a rational possibility to ponder given the facts. But grown-ups know damn well what you're saying or ask pertinent questions when they don't. These people tend to be flakes who have no ideas of their own and due to their deficiency bitterly try to discredit others simply for sharing ideas to bring everyone down to their brainless level.
   
   
4. The free-speech troll
   
   This is the person that yells "Free speech" whenever you try to shut them up with a deletion or two. Obviously if all commenters are free to blog their own positions, then there is no free-speech issue. The person is just an aimless jerk who is trying to wear down your own inherent freedom to delete his stupidity from your own blog.
   
   
5. The you-hate-all-opposition troll
   
   Such trolls will say that you can't handle opposition and that you hate everyone, blah blah blah. You're told that you're ornery, you're a prick, you're an aspie. They've got every name in the book for you but no facts. Of course, bloggers have a right to object to factless, argumentative opposition from nutty commenters who pretend that they represent everyone when you're clearly only objecting to their own personal views.
   

Hip-hip-hooray for the blessed 'Delete' button! The best technological innovation ever!

Comments on the Etusco-Latin tupi/tōfus connection

As probably some can tell by my previous explanation of the rules of this blog, I recently received a comment that irritates me for the reasons already mentioned: stubborn to facts, condemning the very act of speculation even when facts are present, and being all-in-all too stubborn to look up viewpoints that are contrary to one's own. The internet is not just a valuable tool of self-expression but a powerful tool for research. This is why I can't understand those who will take the time to comment but never take the same amount of time to do their homework. Evidently further facts need to be known by some readers here.

First, here's a portion of the aggravating comment I received in response to the connections made between Latin tōfus and Etruscan tupi but which I promptly deleted for being unnecessarily ornary and also thoroughly invalid:

"Between you claiming (with no proof) that word X is Etruscan and an ancient Roman claiming an Etruscan origin for word Y, the latter is naturally more trusted, more reliable. Let's take this way, how many scholars quote you for words claimed of Etruscan origins and how many scholars quote, let's say, Varro?"

In no uncertain terms, this naive person is evaluating statements based on popularity (ie. 'how many times they are quoted')! And notice the word "trusted". Does that mean "trusted by European society"? "Trusted by elites"? "Trusted by published scholars approved only by a handful of reknowned institutions"? "Trusted by democractic vote"? Trusted by whom? And why should we care about the trust of others when rationally evaluating for ourselves the validity of claims? Ugh, blind credentialism at its worse. Surely Varro et alia aren't trusted a priori based on valid Logic since all statements must be evaluated regardless of their source to avoid one of the most common and ugly pitfalls of reasoning referred to as argumentatum ad hominem (literally 'argument towards the person') or simply ad hominem. How can a competent reader ignore the myriad of tall tales woven by these same classical authors regarding eponymous ethnic origins and wild legends incorporating both gods and men? Ceteris paribus, authors (regardless of who they are or when they lived) can be both correct or incorrect. At face value we can't tell. So source is patently irrelevant no matter how artfully a heckler stands on his head. Nice try though. DELETE!

A related argument, invalid for the same reasons, I had already allowed through to my commentbox:

"No offense, I find far more reliable the glosses of ancient Latin authors who might have even heard Etruscan in their lifetime than the speculations of a modern blogger based on formal resemblances."

Offense or no offense, the statement is patently ridiculous for several reasons. It makes me frankly a little annoyed that the reader apparently fails to realize something he could have looked up for himself. The most important fact is that the relationship of Latin tōfus and Etruscan tupi cannot be labeled a "modern blogger speculation" at all since blogs hadn't been invented yet ** in 1932 when Fiesel's article entitled Etruskisch tupi and lateinisch tofus had been published in Studi Etruschi **! Yes, folks. This blogger speculation has been around for at least 77 years! Again, nice try but no cigar.

As far as I've personally read, this interesting connection remains unresolved which is why I find it's important to talk about it. Speculation-haters be damned. If only certain commenters stopped feeling the need to cast stones at new ideas when ironically unwilling to look up the absurdity of their own statements and views, but then maybe that would take a bit of the spice out of scholarly life. Can't have the good without the bad, I'm afraid.

Blogger lynchmobs - Get out the pitchforks!

Given recent comments, let's overtly explain what my intentions are as a blogger and how I moderate my blog against the general intrusions of internet nonsense. Paleoglot discusses comparative linguistics (most often on Proto-IE and ancient Aegean languages), but I will often speculate about things that are of interest to me based on existing facts. Please note the following:

• Fact-based speculation and random speculation are not the same nor on a par.
• Healthy fact-based skepticism is not equal to toxic absolutive skepticism based on petty feeling.
• Speculation is not a danger to Reason for those with minds sophisticated enough to separate fact from fantasy.
• In fact, without speculation, we lack a vital step in the learning process since speculation helps us reflect on the implications of new information.
• We must have clear reasons for our objections, not just for our personal conclusions.
• I reserve the right to delete comments that I deem unconstructive (whether abusive, factless or downright nutty).
• I don't distinguish trolls from genuine but stubbornly ignorant persons - both are unworthy to have voice in an academic forum. (ie. This isn't a kindergarten.)

There are no quicker ways to make my trigger-happy finger delete your comment, besides being insulting to other commenters, than to have people repeat facts and references over and over, chastise me for merely blogging/speculating/expressing, or reducing one's rebuttals to vacuous denials of facts presented without further substantiation.

Blogger quickly getting on my nerves

I suspect other people are having the same trouble with Blogger. I've been noticing an aggravating bug that's just appeared on all Blogger comment boxes that successfully mangles your comments by deleting spaces from them in unpredictable ways for no clear reason other than to elevate your blood pressure. This is really annoying, particularly when you have to rewrite the message over and over trying desperately to make it look moderately readable for others!

I'm thinking that it has something to do with a faulty program by the Blogger team that misinterprets things like hyperlinks and thus strips away spaces incorrectly and at inappropriate times if the message is written just so. For me, hyperlinks were the problem and I had to incorporate the links into full sentences with periods before the cursed program left my spaces where they were.

WAKE UP, BLOGGER TEAM! HIRE REAL WEBPROGRAMMERS!

Ugh! :o) Now I've vented. Carry on, people, carry on.

Ignore that last post

There's nothing more irritating than Blogger's pointless lack of safety precautions for the Publish button. Yet again (it's almost inevitable) I accidentally pressed this cursed Publish button and without even a warning window saying "Are you sure???" as a competent web interface would provide, it just automatically publishes your post IMMEDIATELY and it shows up less than a minute later in Google Reader for everyone to see.

Some of you may be confused by my republishing of Draft 8, but I assure you I will be publishing Draft 9 shortly if Blogger's system allows me.

The fact that Blogger still hasn't fixed this obvious flaw is really starting to make me fuming mad. This to me is a glitch important enough to make me want to switch to another blog authoring system like Wordpress. I'm really tired of having to correct these major errors caused by a simple misplaced click of the mouse.

Blogger!!! Get up off your ass and finally correct your mediochre system!!!

Language Hat goes from 'hot' to 'not' in 7 days

Not only five days ago, Language Hat's positive mention of my blog was an honour because I respected him as a skillful writer. While his review mentioned skepticism towards my views on a 'Proto-Aegean' language family from which Etruscan would derive, there is obviously ample room to disagree on that. I use my blog to both inform and explore new ideas. So I expect my readers to distinguish an established theory from a conjecture or to disagree when I've gone overboard with specific points rather than childish name-calling. At any rate, things were going kosherly for a while but it hasn't taken long for things to sour on his site.

John Emerson, one of his regular commenters, set the tone for the incoherence that would follow:

"His anti-Dravidian bias vitiates Gordon's entire research projects. Hard words, but the truth."

Strike one. After this fallacious statement that Emerson fabricated out of random fragments of pseudo-intellectual jibberish, I decided to investigate this odd character further only to find that he maintains a rather 'erratic' website filled with this same childishness which is devoted to simply shaking a fist at the establishment without goal. What value among adults is a person who disguises his disdain for structure as a form of 'comedy'?

After three whole days, Language Hat finally found the time to redress things (and only after some of my readers questioned Emerson):

"That's John's little joke. He pretends to believe that everything is descended from Dravidian. Don't mind him."

Strike two. It's mentally perverse to expect readers to waste their time weeding through trollish drivel to get to the good stuff. I would definitely call that a lack of appreciation for one's audience. Intelligent adults don't come to academic-oriented blogs to read flame wars caused by a resident troll. They want blogs to inform them and inspire them with new insights on a subject. Anything less can be easily replaced by a computer program. Unfortunately, this lack of comment moderation goes on and the blogauthor doesn't know when to stop:

"Hey now, I didn't say you were wrong about Proto-Aegean, just that talk of such things makes me nervous. As I'm sure you're aware, in the wrong hands such talk can be a sign of all sorts of weirdness."

At this point, something is obviously lost in translation since I never object to disagreement if it's grounded on facts, but this persistent insinuation of 'weirdness' is condascending rhetoric which attempts to both imply something negative about the addressee while dodging logical debate about what was actually claimed by the person. At this point, I look at Language Hat as merely a puppet, whether consciously or unconsciously, for John Emerson's scholastic Dadaism.

Some of my own readers piped up and presented themselves well but coherency was short-lived when another troll under the rather expected nickname "Anonymous" decided to chime in with more rhetoric:

"Gordon talks the talk but doesn't quite walk the walk."

And then today, this gem that obviously sinks to a new low of lunacy in order to desperately discredit my Etruscan language database project that never hurt anyone:

"The guy seems unbalanced and possibly mentally unstable."

Strike three, you're out. How can one ever respond intelligently to such a desperate attack? It speaks for itself. Whether we can say that Language Hat is a direct contributor to this commentbox madness or merely a passive middleman, it conveys a total lack of respect for not only me but also his readers who are forced to weed through mindless trash in order to find anything informative if at all. Without comment moderation, a blogger diminishes the value of his or her blog. This latest fiasco demonstrates why it's important for bloggers to be clear-headed and assertive on policies from the beginning concerning what comments are beneficial and what comments are without value to even publish. On my blog, people like Emerson are always deleted. There is no space here for chitchats about alien conspiracies, bigfoot or the latest discovery of Noah's Ark because those kinds of unmoderated blogs and websites are a dime a dozen. And we obviously don't need to go around mudslinging others to feel alive, do we? We're all looking for something better than that and this blog is about linguistics first and foremost. Not comedy or stupidity. Free speech isn't free.

Therefore, I've eradicated Language Hat from my blog. In the end, you have to laugh though. Why compliment someone and then immediately afterwards try so hard to rip out their heart and eat it? It's really over-the-top.

Sherdnerd hosts Four Stone Hearth and spreads scholarly love my way

I forgot to take my happy pills this week. Just when you think you're unloved, the world is getting dumber and we're all going to die in an ominous mushroom cloud of atomic radiation, badabing! Hugs and kisses come out of nowhere and smack you upside the head to brighten your day. Go figure.

I was scoping the internet today and visited the Four Stone Hearth website again. This link was an interesting tip-off provided by one of my visitors and so I've been lurking on it lately to see what it's all about. It calls itself a "blog carnival" and it chooses other bloggers to host each installment every two weeks. From what I gather, each bi-weekly host then submits content on their own blog as a holy offering to Four Stone Hearth. In this way, it provides readers with a steady, meaty collection of informative leads on topics relating to the social sciences and helps bloggers combine their readership together to make their input more visible. Wow! I have to say it's got me hooked. A fabulous idea. See, Wikipedia? That's a proper use of "Web 2.0". Bad Wikipedia, bad!

So moving on, it turns out that a Egyptology blog called Sherdnerd recently hosted the 19th installment of Four Stone Hearth. And looky, looky...

To my shock I'm mentioned there in company with Abnormal Interests, a very intelligent blog that I uncovered some time ago through the article By the Numbers concerning Egyptian numerals written in cuneiform script during the Middle Kingdom.

Well, geez Louise. The pressure's on. I better get snappy and pull up my sport socks then. No more boozing for ol' Glenny on the weekends. Time to crack open more of those library books and blog, blog, blog!

Interesting blog: The Effing Librarian

While I know this has nothing to do with historical linguistics, I came across this well-crafted blog called The Effing Librarian that gave me a good laugh because of its idiosyncratic style of writing and because it also put out some interesting insights into the world of information, society's treatment of information, and many other quirky, librarian-centric perspectives.

Since I'm really anal about finding truth and accuracy in a sea of meaningless advertising, it's a relief to see that not all daring thinkers have been wiped off the planet just yet.

Some of my favourite picks so far on this site include:

• What's right or wrong with Wikipedia?
• Do we love our Dewey system? Yes, we do, we do, we do.
• Burn Baby Burn

Blog alert: 'BadArchaeology' Rated E for Everyone

I love to find tasty morsels of information on the internet and always feel the need to alert everyone else about my little discoveries even if it bores them. While we might complain that there is a lot of crap out there on the 'information superhighway' and that I'm probably contributing to it, at least there are some informed archaeology bloggers out there that offer some intelligent opinions on things.

Don't let this blog title mislead you: Badarchaeology is good archaeology.

http://badarchaeology.blogspot.com/index.html

I'm adding this one to my yummy list.

Roman video blog: i-claudius.com

Wonderful! Joy upon joys! I finally found a really fun video blog (or is it a "v-log", "vidblog"...?) that I came across months ago. It was a blog on Roman history and I appreciated it because the host comes across as a down-to-earth, approachable guy who has a strong zeal for the past. This is someone who enjoys history and wants to share the beauty of it with others without pretense and ego, able all the while to poke fun at himself and have fun with the subject matter. Kudos.

Sometimes it seems like his zest borders on the fetishistic with his use of period costumes and such. Yet in my books, that's what makes what he does both informative and entertaining to watch for everyone. Even if it's not your cup of tea, you have to give him some credit for the amount of work he puts into it

Check it out: http://www.i-claudius.com/ (The Ancient, The Modern and The Ridiculous)