Comment on The Belmont Club "Past and future"

OT
I take a week off and I find the Club feeding a troll?
Do Not Feed a Troll.
Please, thank you.

I will attempt to catch up, I was busy personally dragging Mike Bloomberg over the finish line, and anyone who objects, given the alternative, can meet me in a dark alley to talk it over. His strategy appeared to be that he bought rented the SEIU/Acorn, not to have them commit fraud on his behalf but just to neutralize them so they didn't go out and do the voodoo that they do so well for the Democrats.

Now we have to live with John Liu as Comptroller, gack.

Of course this means that I am unemployed again, so maybe I should envy the troll?

My hope for Iran is that they duplicate the English Restoration, a cultural swing to secularism, good theatrical comedy and music and a big party. Can young Pahlevi play Charles II? Is there a candidate for the role of George Monck?

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buddy larsen,
Restored to life I see. Thank you for the kind words.

what organization wouldn’t benefit from additional deep knowledge and clear thought?
MiniTrue, MiniLove, Education, NPR, Congress, the keep the trolls fed and quiet Management by Feeding the crocodiles club, etc. We could add to the list. In my experience there are organizations that will hire someone like me in a very low level and non-managerial capacity to get the actual work done when doing so is a necessity in extremis but both the unproductive staff and the agency problem managerial enablers of inefficiency both feel threatened by capable competition. If I was a real Boss then people would be more comfortable and feel less threatened but my presence as a worker bee or basic supervisor can be seen as a challenge.

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Sylvia,
Is it cheaper to buy ACORN/SEIU ahead of time the way Bloomberg did?

It was certainly a rational act for him to do as a candidate. As a matter of public policy I think that so many of NY's growing problems can be traced back to George Pataki's dealing with Dennis Rivera. It is a gordian knot that ties together health care, taxation, regulation, immigration, corruption and probably other issues.

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The alternative to Ignoring is a Registration and Blocking regime. The risk of that approach is illustrated by what happened to LGF. It is easy to say that the excesses that for many of us ruined that site are due to the personal failings of the site administrator but that elides the issue. A system should be designed to avoid enabling abuse as simply as possible. Relying on the virtues of the host to exercise the banning stick in a proactive basis without altering the character of the forum demands to much of him.

The other risk though that does demand some technical answer is that trolls can flood the thread with so much compost that it becomes impossible for others to use it. There is a real risk IMHO that we might see such attacks, a poor man's Denial of Service attack, by friends of Barack. There could be technical solutions to that problem if the WordPress template supports them. Giving each user an Ignore feature to filter out screen names or ideally IP addresses should be designable. Perhaps the engine could be given a feature that limits a single poster to 3 comments every 30 minutes.

Nov 5, 2009 - 4:05 am