Lessons learned from comment spam...
Just cleaning out my comment spam (Anonymous Dastard comments are filtered through an approval queue)... All of the comment spam I've gotten since I switched to Drupal has been for online gambling/poker places. A couple of weeks ago all of them were crude things with "ONLINE POKER" written several hundred times, every other time hyperlinked, which created something of an interesting rotating pattern that although ugly in reason for existence was a brief flash of beauty prior to pressing the delete button (Drupal shows the comment in the "Are you sure?" message). This time each comment was presented as a semi-reasonable text of a sentence or two, with the spammy portions constrained to the subject ("Free Online Poker!") and a byline ("by Online Poker", which I thought was a funny author for a quote). These segments of text I would assume were scraped from other blogs on the internet, and thus random and somewhat incomprehensive being taken so far out of context. One sounded like the prologue to some physics lecture (the author was making no apologies for using lots of fourth-dimensional geometry). Another offered an intriquing insight into our culture (and which I can only guess at where the real author may have taken this statement):
Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation...
Why I didn't participate...
I didn't participate in a majority of the protests and rallys that went on prior to the election because I felt they were futile. I think the people have forgot the meaning of a protest. Luckily for me, my position was vindicated from experiences and stories, which I'll use to illustrate my pointes later into this rant. It began life as a comment on LoadedMouth, and I've done little to reformat it.
This is a question that deserves to be pondered. Think about it: In the last 20 years, when has a staged protest changed or influenced policy on a public issue? What has protesting done? Can protests be successful if a strong movement isn't built around them, or do protests have to start small and hope that their fire sparks? Much like the way that the Vietnam War protests metamorphosized from infantismal to legendary? Why haven't strong movements formed around protests lately? And how come the meaning of protesting seems to have changed from something that was actually meaningful to what I witnessed in Montpellier, VT., yesterday afternoon: 10-15 people standing around holding signs for a short amount of time, then dispersing. Is this really something to people get a feeling of accomplishment from? Are protests outdated?
Perhaps that it is just the fact that we in this country have lost sight of the reasons and ways to protest. Look at the Ukraine, that was a hell of a protest: thousands of people descending upon the capital city to live in tents for several days.
But, I think it isn't the protestors in this country that have lost sight of the reasons and ways to protest so much as everyone else in the country has forgotten how to respond to a protest and ...
