The Badger’s Guide to Internet Fauna, Volume 2
Today we'll look at some more of the exciting denizens of the internet. Classification of internet fauna can be tricky, because different species often share characteristics that, at first glance, seem remarkably similar. The key to successful classification rests in being able to determine which of these characteristics are derived characteristics and which are examples of convergent evolution. Another way of considering the matter is that while assclowns may behave similarly, there are a lot of different ways to get to that point.
If you have spent any time at all on internet discussion boards or on blogs with topics that are in any way controversial,you've probably seen discussion participants who tend to get argumentative, in the manner of the characters in Volume 1 of the Guide to Internet Fauna. Typically, these gits will eventually get banned, but that's often not the end of them.
Enter...
The Sock Puppet - Representative Generic Specimen
The Sock Puppet - This pernicious pest uses a variety of techniques to create new identities from which he can continue his asshattery.
These techniques can vary depending on whether you run a blog or a forum, and whether or not you require registrations. There are several categories:
The Premeditated Sock
The Premeditated Sock - This subspecies of Sock will register for your site, and then (possibly over a period of weeks or months) create several different identities. The more advanced Premeditated Socks will use multiple IPs and e-mails to conceal their common owner. These sleeper Socks may remain dormant for years, or they may be active throughout their lifetime, chiming in on discussions from time to time. It can be extremely challenging to positively identify such users as Socks. Often it takes comparisons of writing styles or trends within discussions to ferret them out. An infestation of such Socks can be a nightmare for the administrator of a large blog or forum, since they able to hide effectively amongst the normal users. One helpful clue is that if you ban someone who has been a heavy participant in discussions, and a user who has rarely or never posted turns up loudly defending the banned individual, you might be dealing with a sock.
The Impulsive Sock. Note the slovenly appearance
The Impulsive Sock - This variety of Sock is usually easier to detect. Typically, a participant gets banned, and within a day or so a new user appears that interacts much like the banned identity. Often, an administrator can figure out what's going on just by comparing IPs or the registrant's e-mail address. While stamping out Impulsive Socks isn't typically as challenging as dealing with the Premeditated sort, it can be no less frustrating. Often what the Impulsive Sock lacks in sophistication he more than makes up for in tenacity.
The Multiple Personality Sock
The Multiple Personality Sock - Occasionally you'll notice several commenters that always seem to interact with each other, sometimes in rapid-fire succession. They may all agree, or there may be one hold-out that the others gang up on, but you can pretty much count on the fact that if one comments, they all will. This may be a case of the Multiple Personality Sock. A recent example of this (which actually inspired me to write this) is illustrated here. If you observe what you think might be a Multiple Personality Sock, you can have a little fun by trying to provoke the various faces of the Sock into arguing with each other.
The Agent Provocateur Sock
The Agent Provocateur Sock - The last sort of Sock to mention here is the Agent Provocateur. These are rare, but dangerous, and tend to emerge during times of strife. Despite their innocent appearance, their sole purpose is to foment discord. Typically, they'll initiate their troublemaking with a private message or an email, maybe something like "I just wanted to tell you that you're doing a really good job of moderating the Godzilla Back Scales forum. The other mods are real hard-asses, especially Fire_Breathing_Mama." Your alerts should start triggering at this point, because:
It's very, very likely that you're dealing with an Agent Provocateur Sock. It may be someone who, in fact, doesn't like Fire_Breathing_Mama and is trying to dig dirt on her, or it might be Fire_Breathing_Mama herself trying to figure out who her friends on staff are. Or it could just be someone trying to stir up trouble. Don't take the bait. It's much better not to let yourself get dragged into the middle of internet drama.
And with that, we complete our brief survey of Sock Puppets. For our next installment, we'll be looking at the vast and varied world of Trolls.
-Jay
Conspiracy!
It's a conspiracy!
It's almost impossible these days to avoid encountering conspiracy theories. They're everywhere. President Obama isn't an American citizen! (Or maybe he's the antichrist...) Vaccines cause autism and Big Pharma is covering it up! 9/11 was an inside job! The moon landing was faked!
It doesn't take much to start a conspiracy theory. The required ingredients are few:
- A fairly complex situation
- Details that are outside of the expertise of most people
- Distrust of the authorities involved in the situation
- Creativity
Let's look at the question of President Obama's birth. He was born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father. His birth certificate tells us all we need to know to settle the question. He's as much a natural born U.S. citizen as I am. The question takes about five minutes to resolve.
Only it isn't resolved for some. Details vary, but the common elements of the Obama "birther" conspiracies are that he isn't a natural born citizen of the U.S. and is therefore unqualified to be President.
That's crazy talk.
Let's think about what would have to be true if there were a conspiracy to shim a foreign national into the office of the U.S. President, which is, after all, what we're really talking about.
- Sometime before 1961 when Obama was born, some person or group of people would have had to come up with the idea of getting an agent elected President. Richard Condon published The Manchurian Candidate in 1959, which has a somewhat similar plot, so I'll concede this point.1
- Obama would have had to have been identified as a potential candidate. It's important to start building the cover story early in order to minimize the risk of blowing the story. Everyone that knew his parents before he was born would have to be in on the plot at least to the extent that they knew to keep their mouths shut. The likelihood of a large number of people effectively keeping a secret like that for close to 50 years is, well, vanishingly small.
- He'd have had to have been aimed towards a political career from the very start. Having your potential Presidential shill decide that he wants to be a lumberjack would never do. Ensuring that his family, teachers, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances all steered him towards a political career would again require that a huge number of people be complicit in the effort.
- Ensuring that he got elected would be a major task, particularly since he'd need previous political experience. Elections would have to be rigged (in his case) at the state level so that he could being to gain national recognition. Getting someone elected is hard work. Ensuring that the someone in question gets elected while not calling attention to the effort is harder, and again requires that a lot of people keep quiet.
The bottom line is that to run a conspiracy like this, you've got to ensure that an amazingly large number of people keep quiet. If you've ever heard someone at a bar trying to pick up anyone, you'll appreciate the difficulty of keeping one person - let alone maybe thousands - quiet.
You also need a reason for undertaking this effort in the first place. This could get a little tricky. In the years around Obama's birth, the main Snorklewhacker in the U.S. bedroom closet was Communism.
A Giant Purple Snorkelwhacker
It is difficult to imagine that anyone could have foreseen the sorts of issues facing the U.S. today clearly enough to tailor a candidate to manipulate those issues (in either direction). Yet, if Obama wasn't tailored to address contemporary issues, then it doesn't make much sense to go ahead and get him elected. You could posit that perhaps there were many different potential candidates being cultivated over the last several decades, each carefully molded with a worldview and priorities that would make them useful in a variety of different world climates, but then you've taken an already implausible conspiracy and multiplied it. My head hurts just trying to sort this out for a simple blog post example.
This is generally the way conspiracies like this go - they require a lot of highly implausible, fairly convoluted things to take place, the failure of any one of which would doom the whole enterprise. Perhaps more importantly, they require the assumption that a large number of people can keep quiet, which is, well, not bloody likely.
Now, conspiracy theories like this have some general appeal in that they usually aren't personal, and for the most part don't impact individuals on a day-to-day. There's no immediately obvious personal consequence to me if Obama's birth certificate is bogus. A conspiracy theory like this can, in principle, be debunked, because the salient facts of the matter can be explained and clarified.
There are, of course, conspiracy theories that hit closer to home. The example I'll use comes from a post I put up a while back in which a local political candidate was making claims that the government was attempting to control her mind with satellites, drones, and her television. Theories like this involve everything that the others do, plus they add in the requirement of some degree of paranoia.
Thus, in addition to some seriously flawed logic and ignorance being involve, we now have the issue of psychological disorders to consider. Conspiracies like this are much more difficult. While the facts of the situation can be addressed - for example the extreme implausibility of controlling someone through drones hovering over their home - the real challenge in this situation is in encouraging the people harboring delusions of this ilk to get help.
That said, the general sort of questions one must ask when evaluating the likelihood of any conspiracy theory are very similar to the sort of questions one must ask when evaluating the likelihood of any extraordinary claim:
- What alternative explanations are there for the given observed facts?
- How likely are those alternatives in comparison to the extraordinary explanation?
- What other things would need to be true (or false) if the extraordinary explanation is true?
You get the idea.
Now if you'll excuse me, there are a couple of gentlemen in black suits and sunglasses at the door...
-Jay
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1Two direct film adaptations have been made from Condon's book - the first in 1962, the second in 2004.
The Badger’s Guide To Internet Fauna, Volume 1
The internet is a wide and varied environment, with a tremendously diverse group of denizens. In many cases, there's a layer of anonymity to the internet, so it's not always apparent who you're really interacting to. In some ways, you may come to think of people you interact with on the internet in terms of their behaviors.
Many of those behaviors are innocent in the sense that the person exhibiting the behavior probably doesn't realize exactly what he or she is doing. A fine example of this is when someone new to the internet1 sends YOU AN E-MAIL TYPED IN ALL CAPS AND POSSIBLY CLASHING MULTICOLOR FONTS. .
Other things that fall into the same category are naïve but well-intentioned warnings about internet threats:
WARNING!!! If you receive a message from someone named Stabby McEvil O'Bastard with an attachment named "800 Ways to Barbecue Kittens", DON'T OPEN IT!!!!1111!!!! It's a virus that will infect your computer, melt your hard drive, and then crawl out of your monitor and steal your soul when you're asleep and the world will end in 2012!!!! Immediately forward this message to everyone you've ever met to make sure they're safe from this!!
Ummm. Yeah. Snopes.com should be a default bookmark in every browser. Before you get your boxers in a twist over some alleged threat to freedom, the internet, and kittens, take a minute and check into it. This sort of behavior seems very common on social networking sites like Facebook, which leads me to my next category:
Conflation of personal and professional interests in awkward settings. If you run a business with a web presence, more power to you. When you start weaving that business into your personal web presence, it can get weird and annoying really quickly. An acquaintance of mine just got her real estate license. She lives in a small town in another state. Many of her Facebook friends do not live in her state. A huge number of her postings these days are descriptions of homes she's listing. In her town. Which are of extremely limited interest to anyone not in her town. Which is most people.2 Just set up a separate page for your business, and use your personal page to keep in touch with folks. It'll probably work better for you anyway, and you won't alienate the people who friended you because they're actually interested in hearing things about, say, your family or something.
Most of the interactions on social networking sites like Facebook are voluntary, so it's pretty easy to ignore things that don't interest me, but sometimes it seems that for every one status update or posted link that is interesting, there are several dozen "I'm bored now" status messages to wade through. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low.
Enter forums. Forums give their members the opportunity to engage in strident argumentation with people they've never met over topics that most people don't care about, such as the number of spines on Godzilla's back in the original film.3 Forums also take the following equation to its limit: Internet + Anonymity = Assclown. Some of the ways this equation may be expressed are:
- The Asserter. Makes claims without making any effort to back them up. When challenged, will often react defensively by releasing a cloud of new claims, much like a squid releasing ink into the water to escape a threat. The Asserter occasionally proves useful by providing fodder for discussion.
- The flip-side of the Asserter is the Demander of References. The Demander of References will challenge any point in a discussion which he feels are not adequately supported, even relatively non-controversial points like the color of the sky or the chemical composition of water. It is not uncommon for the same individual to assume the role of both the Asserter and the Demander of References, often in the same discussion.
- The Reflector. The Reflector is less common than the Assertor or the Demander of References. The usual behavior of the Reflector is to use a valid source to make an invalid claim (he might, for example, claim that a 95% confidence interval in some reported data is the same as a 95% chance of any single value in the range being correct). When someone points out his error, he'll appear to accept the explanation, but then turn it around and attempt to claim that the new interpretation still supports his point.
- The Goalpost Shifter. Superficially similar to the Reflector, the Goalpost Shifter will make an invalid claim, and will appear to accept (all or part of) the explanation, but will then retreat far enough from his original position to require a different specific explanation. Goalpost Shifters can be quite skilled and crafty.
- The Lunatic. Most forums have a certain number of regular members that are the equivalent of the creepy guy on the bus sitting in the back mumbling to himself. They randomly show up in discussions and make bizarre, off-topic comments that only make sense within the confines of their delusional architectures. They're harmless for the most part, but on occasion figure out how to start new threads, at which point the become the equivalent of the creepy guy on the bus who forgets his pants every morning.
- The Walk-off. The Walk-off will engage in an argument for a while, often quite civilly, but will at some point abruptly leave the discussion. He will then go to either his blog or to another forum that agrees with his ideology and declare that he won the argument that he walked away from. Crucially, he won't link back to his "victory", and may well not even mention the other venue by name. It's common for these obnoxious gits to build up quite an impressive resume of "victories" that evaporate like mist in the sunlight if you take the time to dig in and verify them.
- The Smoldering Ember. These guys can be fun. They give every appearance of being articulate, intelligent individuals who are normally very polite (though perhaps a big condescending). However, beneath the surface lurks a raging beast that can be unleashed if you happen to press the right combination of buttons. Maybe you express your opinion that his preferred expert is a barely literate charlatan, or maybe you point out that he's selectively applying his logic to everything but his own position, but in the end he explodes in a tirade of profanity-laced invective so scorching that people from other forums join yours just to watch the fireworks. The Smoldering Ember often vanishes for a while after that - either from a formal suspension or in an arrogant huff - and when he returns will once again be wearing his mask of sanity. When the Smoldering Ember goes off, he frequently reveals new, heretofore unknown, buttons that will subsequently be pushed.
I consider blogs to be like extremely personal and somewhat less compartmentalized versions of forums, and so we should expect to see quite a bit of overlap between the rogues in both venues. A key difference is that forums are often very partisan, so discussions on one forum don't often spill over to other forums (unless the discussion is about the forums themselves), but discussions can start on one blog and drift from blog to blog depending on who gets spun up enough to pick up the topic. This dynamic leads to a couple of interesting variants.
- The Grenadier is a specialized descendant of the Walk-off. At some point in a discussion (which may be ranging over multiple blogs), the Grenadier will retreat to his own blog, where he will continue the discussion with himself. He'll accomplish this feat by abandoning the other active discussions without warning, and will pick up where he left off at his own place. The problem is that he won't tell anyone else that he's done it, and he won't provide any links back into the original discussion. He'll then start tossing verbal grenades at the other bloggers who, unaware that they're being pelted, won't have anything to say. The Grenadier will then spin this silence as evidence of his superior logic and argumentation skills when in fact it's just evidence that everyone else thought he went away.
- The Recruiter. Occasionally someone in a blog discussion will go out and recruit his friends for help, particularly if the discussion isn't going his way. These friends will engage in the discussion by repeating the same points that the Recruiter has been making, but slightly out of phase - Recruiter makes Point A. Blogger responds to Point A. Recruiter makes Point B. Friend 1 makes Point A (again). Blogger responds to Point B and to Point A (again). Recruiter makes Point C. Friend 1 makes Point B, and Friend 2 shows up and makes Point A (again), and so forth, with the result being that the blogger must choose between addressing the same points over and over or ignoring the repetitions. Eventually, the blogger will give up because he's arguing with a bunch of tree stumps and write a movie review, and the Recruiter and his friends will slink off to their blogs and declare victory.
- The Batshit Crazy Canadian Computer Salesman Who Comment-Spams With Incoherent Screeds And Threatens To Kill You. There's only one of these that I know of.
There are, of course, other sorts out there, but many of those lack the entertainment potential as the ones listed here, and are often more difficult to spot. They're kinda like Pokemon in that respect.
- Jay
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1They still exist. They frequently go by names such as "Grandma", "Grandpa", and at least in one case, "Dad". As far as I'm aware, my father has never touched a computer, let alone surfed the internet. I've seen him answer the phone, but never dial it. He probably belongs to a support group for technophobic older gentlemen.
2I know a number of realtors. Most are very nice people and I have no real problem with them trying to do their job. I realize that the people who succeed in that business tend to be the more agressive ones, but really, some of them need to dial it back a little.
3The sheer number of web forums out there is astonishing. There are forums for movies, TV shows, music, science, religion, mythology.
I’ve Been Mabused!
Many authors of skeptical blogs are familiar with the nuanced screeds of one David Mabus, who is really a Canadian named Dennis Markuze.
David/Dennis periodically goes off his meds and comment-spams blogs he doesn't agree with. (Which, I think, would be most of them...)
He somehow found his way to Rev. Ouabache's place, and from there wandered over here. I don't know if he goes through blogrolls looking for new targets or what, but whatever his modus operandi, he's here.
If his behavior here is anything like it has been elsewhere, he'll turn up here from time to time. He may even leave me death threats, like he did with PZ Myers last year and the good Reverend yesterday.
I've left one of his comments up on this post, mainly so folks unfamiliar with him can have a look. In one of them that I didn't leave up (and that'll be most of them...), he left me a link to this piece of artwork:
I think it's supposed to frighten me.
Trouble is, I think I defeated this guy in Onimusha, back on my old PS2:
Seriously. Even if I was inclined to believe in demons and devils, which I'm not, I'm not likely to lose any sleep over being threatened with video game concept art.
-Jay
Running For Office on the Tinfoil Hat Platform
The Mayor
The local political scene isn't normally very exciting to me. Louisville has had the same mayor since 1986 (with the exception of a stretch from 1999-2003 during which the local government reorganized), and he's been popular enough that he's been effectively unchallenged whenever he's come up for reelection.
Last year he decided not to run for what would be his sixth term overall (his third under the reorganized government), and instead take a shot at the Lieutenant Governor's office.
This has thrown the field wide open, and as of this writing, there are approximately eleventy thousand people considering running for the soon-to-be-available Mayor's office.
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