Google is officially random. (And yes, my blog is back...)

Today, possibly around noon or so, my blog was removed. It turns out that Blogger, owned by Google, decided that it was a neat idea to block access to my Gmail account and my blogger account at the same time, while also blocking everyone else's access to my blog that I've been faithfully contributing to for years. A damaging message was placed on it to the effect of "This blog has been removed." Obviously, it's not... now.

At the time all Google told me is that it was due to a "violation". Violation of what? From me? How on earth?? I maintain a mundane linguistics blog. How did this become too X-rated to handle all of a sudden? Sufficed to say, my heart dropped and I was completely floored that Google's system could really be this asinine. Yet it is. And it gets even more suspect as I was to soon discover.

I was given only two options to remedy the situation. The first thing I tried was to use their contact form. But let's face it. We all know that the Google Team would take their sweet time responding because I, you and everyone else is just a number in their overblown bureaucracy. By that point, all my readers would be completely gone and my blog effectively destroyed just by some retarded technicality. And keep in mind, Google was just not telling me what the "violation" was! Why the secret?

I was leery of the second option that Google provided. Supposedly, my account could be "immediately" unblocked if I simply provided them one teensy thing: my cellphone number. Excuse me? That's really getting personal. I don't hand my cellphone to everybody because I don't want jerks phoning me or advertisers harassing me with their wares. But Google had me by the balls and was essentially holding my blog and email account for randsome until I divulged my personal info which may or may not be compromised in the future. I caved in, shelled out the number, and magically, the block was lifted and my blog restored.

WTF IS GOING ON?!!!!

Checking into my gmail, I noticed a message in my account that I never wrote. Now I had the disturbing answer. Apparently some jackass hacker from Russia had cracked into Google's servers and used numerous accounts just to spam some stupid site of theirs to each victim's contact emails. Swell! So basically, my worst fears realized: Google, not being able to keep my email, my blog account or even its own server secure now has my cellphone number to be abused too. Hooray!

I'm so turned off with Google at this point, I mean war. I'm thinking of ways to wean myself off of Google products quickly and Wordpress is looking good now. I'll be looking into that shortly. I expect better handling of the problem than this from a legitimate "service" but it seems that nowdays "service" has become a jaded term designating its complete opposite. Freedom is slavery; war is peace; service is random.

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!

A tasty bucket of 'chicking'

John Wells recently stood up to a distractive commenter on John Wells's phonetic blog:

"Sometimes the comments on this blog get sidetracked into topics that have nothing to do with the subject of the blog posting to which they are appended. So it was on 28 November, when David Marjanović was surprised 'that anyone would seriously say anything other than [ˈt͡ʃɪkŋ̩]' for chicken."

The insincerity of pronouncing "chicken" as "chicking" is obvious to most simply by the word-final en. In fact, the statement is so transparently false that we might naturally start wondering if this is a sign of a highly intelligent yet obnoxious troll with a specialty in subtle academic confrontation.

Yet this "David Marjanović" insists he's a graduate student in paleobiology and spends his time on Wikipedia earning Barnstar rewards to prove it while informing us of his taste for fine mint chocolate chip ice-cream. Earlier on my blog, he came to the defense of the dubious North Caucasian hypothesis in a comment that takes up several pages. At the time, I found the length of his commentary just a tad odd but I rolled with it, answering his many concerns, fake or not, at least for the benefit of other readers if not for him. In hindsight, one has to wonder about the intentions of someone who starts it all off with:

"First of all, as a biologist, it baffles me to no end that historical linguists talk about 'proof', 'unproven hypotheses' and suchlike."

Meanwhile on Language Hat, after commenter marie-lucie completely fabricated statements I never made just for lulz, David chimed in to dish out some of his own self-defacing sadism:

"No wonder. [Glen Gordon]'s so aggressive he's probably literally incapable of getting a paper published."

This of course has "self-talk" written all over it. In all of these instances, he is accompanied by other trolls (see sockpuppet for more information). It would appear that all it took was a skepticism of both Wikipedia and long-range reconstructions to provide him with a motive for this mean-spirited behaviour. The "aggressive" label he uses here is becoming cliché now after so many trolls have been using it to shut down opposition. Enough.


UPDATE
(13 December 2009) Another Language Hat troll came to the rescue of marie-lucie. He informed me that the "offending" blog entry in question is Some observations concerning Woodard's The Ancient Languages of Europe and pertains to my "shame" in calling the Etruscan f a "bilabial fricative". Oh dear, we'll have to tell Larissa Bonfante, a noted Etruscan specialist, that she's an idiot too then. {chuckle} Or maybe we can just stick the sad troll's meaningless letter in the garbage can along with his overzealous schadenfreude and add relevant footnotes with required reading for those sincerely interested in the Etruscan language.

Some new changes to my commentbox policy

I certainly don't want to offend my readership but I'm forced to either strengthen my commentbox policies or be dragged down to the level of Wikipedia and Youtube debates where no distinction is made between a five-year-old, an educated adult and a mad person. "Neutral point of view" (i.e. Wikipedia's famous policy: see here and here) is really just a form of maoist control that undermines experience, knowledge, wisdom and respect for individuals (i.e. the very things that moved our civilization forward in the first place) and replaces it with immaturity, stupidity, shallowness and political correctness.

So at the risk of making it more difficult for anonymous individuals to comment nonsense on my blog, I will now only post comments from individuals demonstrating established identities. If you are a blogger whether on Blogger/Wordpress/whatever, naturally your blog constitutes an established identity and I want to see your identity visible through your name when you comment. Even a real email address is a better alternative to anonymity. If not, I will not post it for whatever reason. More honest identities will discourage anonymous vandalism and lack of accountability to one's actions and words. I hope readers understand my dilemma with online trolls but I think readers will appreciate reading more of the kinds of great input I've received up to now (coincidentally often from responsible and productive netizens with great blogs of their own) and less of the comments to the mentally numbing effect of "u stink and ur mother shud have aborted you, booooo!"

The recent number of trolls on my site has definitely increased since Language Hat made mention of my blog and this experience has informed my ever-evolving philosophy on blogging. Some bloggers focus more on publicity and quantity of viewers at the expense of truly thought-provoking content. A blog's content definitely includes the commentbox but it's often neglected by blogauthors to appear popular. Others prefer to use their blog to exercise their own power of free speech without coercion, cultivating quality content without it being tainted by marketing numbers. It's not just about cultivating quality of my blogposts as an author, but of the readership and of the comments of this readership. Everyone's interpretation of quality is different and so that's why there are so many blogs out there about as many subjects and in as many styles as there are stars in the sky.

My philosophy definitely sides with quality of speech over quantity and I refuse to compromise by threats of unpopularity. There are more important things in life than being loved by a bunch of anonymous people anyways (i.e. like being loved by your family and friends perhaps) and I figure that if I really wanted 85 000 subscribers, it would make more sense to make a porn site than a linguistics site! Lol!