Monthly Archives: August 2004

comment spam

(Warning: if you have a blog of your own, you already know what I’m about to say, and this may be boring.) My blog usually gets hit four or five times a day by “spam.” People post ads, often for extremely unsavory products, as comments. Their motive is to generate links to their own sites so that they will rank higher on Google searches. Spammers use software to place their comments, so that they can post many in a short time. Last night, I was hit by more than 100 separate comments, all advertising a particularly disgusting and illegal form of pornography. These comments are difficult to remove with MovableType–it takes five clicks plus a certain amount of waiting to get rid of each one. MoveableType allows you to block particular computers from posting comments, but spammers now hide their identity by using fake IP addresses. Every one of last night’s spam comments had a different address.

There are solutions. For example, you can change the technical structure of your site so that it’s much harder for programs to “know” automatically how to post comments. This kind of change is not easy for someone like me to make, however–it would take me at least an afternoon, and I would probably mess it up at first.

The other kind of solution essentially involves restricting public uses of one’s site. I could, for example, block all comments on old entries. However, I like the serious remarks that periodically appear on archived posts. I could get rid of comments altogether and tell people just to email me. But that barrier might discourage participation. So it’s a dilemma, and it exemplifies the dark side of all open networks.

If any spammer reads this (and I’m sure they won’t), I would make one request. If you are going to advertise some kind of exploitative sex involving minors as a response to one of my earnest comments about civility or civic education, please don’t compound the insult by writing “Nice site,” or “Good point” in the comment field. It drives me nuts.

“News for a New Generation”

Susan Sherr has written an important paper by that title, which is on the CIRCLE website. She interviewed producers of newspapers, magazines, tv shows, and websites that are specifically aimed at youth. She also conducted focus groups of the youth themselves.

The producers believe that young people have very short attention spans, are easily impressed by fancy visual presentations, and are mainly interested in practical news about local issues–things that may affect them directly. One said, “So for instance while most papers might lead with something really important that happened in the UN that day, we’re more likely to focus on, you know, a rapist caught in a neighborhood where a lot of our readers live.” Another said, “like on the money page, it’s not going to be about stock, company mergers, and you know the New York Stock Exchange guy resigning, it’s going to be about how to keep a job, how to get a job, what to do if your boss is a jerk, are they reading your e-mail, things like that.”

Participants in the focus groups suggested that the producers are largely but not completely correct. The young adults claimed that they want more local news and more positive news. “I’ll pay attention more to the things that pertain to New Jersey or New York. … Anything that is global, I don’t really pay attention to, I don’t know why. If it has anything to do with the president I don’t listen to it. It just doesn’t interest me.”

However, these young people despise tricks, such as visual effects designed to exaggerate the importance of stories or “teasers” that promise a topic that is then delayed. They claim to be turned off by elaborate graphics. They have a low tolerance for statements that they believe they have heard before (for example, that the “war on terrorism” will go on for a long time).

Many of the young adults in these focus groups could not identify Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings, but they reacted extremely negatively to both men. “He looked, like, constipated all the time. He wasn’t moving his mouth, he didn’t seem like, it kind of is like when you call up and you need help and they don’t help you. And they act like they hate their job, that is what he sounded like.”

teaching the teachers

I’m just back from Washington College in Chestertown, MD (a classic liberal arts college), where I taught social studies teachers a little about liberalism and classic republicanism–a standard topic in political theory. I presented liberalism as the combination of the following five ideas:

1. “Individualism,” meaning (specifically) that each and every government institution must make every individual better off than he or she would be otherwise, or else it is oppressive.

2. Politics is a necessary evil, the price of living in a community.

3. The private realm can be clearly distinguished from the public realm, and only the latter may be regulated.

4. The state should not make people good, nor do we need good people to have a good government. A decent polity can instead be preserved through checks-and-balances and other constitutional mechanisms.

5. The government should be neutral with respect to various ways of life, unless those ways of life involve one person violating the rights of another.

Civic republicanism is then a particular criticism of liberalism that says:

1. Political communities have intrinsic value, and are not merely “cooperative venture[s] for mutual advantage? (John Rawls).

2. Politics is desirable and advantageous, because it’s the only place where people can exhibit certain excellences, such as public spiritedness, eloquence, and patriotism.

3. The so-called private realm is often a legitimate public concern. For example, the state should support educational institutions that (to some degree) shape private opinions and beliefs.

4. A good government can only exist where citizens are fairly virtuous; and promoting virtues is an appopriate role for the state.

5. The government should favor certain ways of life over others. Above all, the state should honor lives of public service and civic engagement.

Although almost everyone feels some affinity for both sets of propositions, it’s much harder to make civic republicanism plausible for an American audience than to persuade them of liberalism.