Deleted Comments: Wonkette, Your Filthy Mouth Is The Best Thing About Your Reportage
Twilight Sparkle Has Had It With Your Bullshit
It was a strange week in the moderation queue, kids. Not only did we have some confused racist moron who felt the need to reply immediately to a story from last year, but we suddenly got complaints, just this week, about some comments that were actually written months ago. Odd!
We'll start with something a little more recent, from "Lawrence F," who made a whole special Disqus account to leave a single comment on ourSeptember 18 article about the revelation that Paul Manafort was the subject of FBI wiretaps. Somehow, we hadn't managed to find room in a Dear Shitferbrains for this one at the time, but it's worth a late look, if only because it crams so much strange into only 50 words. Besides, it addresses an issue of perennial concern here: Wonkette's dirty language, shame on us. "Lawrence" was very disappointed in us, all in all:
Wonkette, your filthy mouth is one of the most attractive things about your reportage, because it is aimed at total scumbags. However, I urge yourself to recognize when the obscenities become the center of attention rather than the reportage. E.g., "laving Putin's penis." Nice in the abstract, but rather juvenile en situ.
Not entirely certain, but it looks like "Lawrence" is of two minds here: the dirty talk is all we have going for us, because our readers are scumbags, but golly, why must we include so much dirty talk in our dirty talk? Also, "laving Putin's penis" is an obscenity that detracts from what was, at the time, hot breaking news, and so while it seemed like a good idea in the abstract, it was very juvenile "in situ," which, if you want to nitpick, is not actually the opposite of "abstract." In conclusion, ourself has certainly been put on notice, hasn't we?
Update: Alert Wonkette Operative Serai 1 notes, in the comments we do not allow:
I think you may have misinterpreted that first comment, at least the bit about the language. I think he meant the obscenities are fine because of the subject you're aiming them at (the subject being the "scumbags", not the readers). Otherwise, the second part of the comment wouldn't make much sense. Honestly, I think he was trying to help.
That actually makes sense, and so we have revised our view of "Lawrence" considerably. He's not a confused hater of Wonkette, he's a would-be friend of Wonkette. But still a confused censorious Pecksniff, because somehow he doesn't recognize this blog is fueled by dick jokes.
Then there's "Jungle Jim Miller," who showed up last week in the comments to our September 8,2016 piece on Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, who wrote a rambling piece about crime in his fair city. Kass mused about "feral" young black men who turned out that way because Democratic social programs destroyed The Black Family (there is just the one). Not sure why "Jim" felt the need to leave multiple replies to year-old comments; maybe he thought the piece was from September of this year, or maybe since it was about race, we needed to be told just how terrible black people are, which is, for folks like "Jim," truly a timeless topic. Here's a sampling:
The gov't is paying them to breed, dumbazz. The more children they have, the bigger the check.
They still won't work.
The mothers are denied cash if (able) father is living at home.
"Jungle Jim Miller" even replied to one of myyear-old comments! Last year, one "wm c barker," (original Disqus username "whimsybehere") had left this whimsical comment on the article: "Jungle DNA can not be changed." Charming, huh? But I was rather pleased with my message telling that twit he was banhammered: "Look, Mr. Kass, you don't have to comment on everything written about you." I thoughtthat was pretty darn whimsical.
But "Jim" didn't even get the joke! He simply replied to me, "They are genetically predisposed to crime." He seems nice. I wasn't about to let that fly, so I replied,
That seems like an awfully unfair generalization about Chicago Tribune columnists. Also, you are aware that you're spewing your bullshit all over a post that's from September 2016, yes? Bye, troll!
That didn't go over so well! Not long after lowering the banhammer, I received this delightful email:
Subject: Nigger Lover
James D Miller [email redacted]
to me
Fuck You, Nigger Lover. Hope your family is ass-raped by twelve of them
I guess he must really hate that I accused him of slurring Chicago Tribune columnists. Here's hoping this Jim Miller is not one of the Jim Millers any of you readers know.
Then there was this weird thing that happened when I refreshed my moderation queue and it spat out for review eight comments, all by different people on different articles, that had been written 8 to 11 months ago. Not new comments on old articles, but maybe newly-flagged old comments, or perhaps Disqus was just clearing its throat? The system shows when a comment was written, but not when it was flagged for review. VERY STRANGE.
One was part of a string of oddball rightwing comments on a piece we did in February about fake news spewer James O'Keefe discovering unspeakable bias when a CNN editor said the role of journalism is to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," a line that's we noted is over a century old. Several wingnuts dropped by to complain about something, though it wasn't exactly the article:
"John":
how easily the liberal propaganda machine controls your simple minds. all of you are complete trash. useless, horribly confused, naïve, lowlife trash. where were all of you when Clintons husband was putting cigars into monica Lewinski?
"Aj" [in reply to someone who called "John" a troll]:
It's only trolling if it's not true. You goofy liberals are indeed useless, horribly confused, naive trash.
If you don't think so then you need to stop protesting when people you don't agree with are due to speak & remove those of your kind that give the rest of us the opinion that you are a useless lot.
Well then! Those were certainly on-topic critiques of absolutely nothing in the piece. I had popped in (again, this was all back in February) to reply to "Aj,"
So basically the game here is to just show up, ignore the actual article, and yell rightwing talking points? WHAT ABOUT BENGHAZI? WHY DID YOU IGNORE BENGHAZI?
In reply to that, I got the comment that was, for some reason, brought to my attention this week. It was from "youse" (credit where it's due -- that's a good yousername), who explained why none of them were actually talking about the article: Because liberals are just full of hatred, and that made the article itself unreadable:
I guess it's just hard to get through your juvenile rant. You are certainly not a journalist. Very boring, as all rantsa re because it is just an outlet to your pent up anger because you are a mediocre human looking for attention. Please don't give up your assembly line job.
Heavens! Trashing assembly line workers? What an elitist comment! Sad. Now, if we could only figure out why it got flagged in October.
We'll close with a real doozy of a time warp: Another comment that was tossed into moderation last week, but was written ten months ago, on an article from April 2013, when Donald Trump was not running for president. We'd like to thank the Disqus glitch or whatever for calling our attention to this one, since it's among our all-time Trump Weirdness stories, about the decidedly odd skin-care regimen Melania imposed on their son Barron, then just seven years old: She put her very own line of caviar-based skin conditioner on the poor kiddo:
“It smells very, very fresh,” Melania, who launched the skincare line exclusively in Lord & Taylor this week, told ABC News. “I put it on him from head to toe. He likes it!”
It turns out that this article from four years ago really upset one "anncauley," because we are justmonsters:
You sick twisted people! Children are off limits, go bully someone else. This reeks of jealousy and envy, coming from what I assume is an adult it's disgusting. Grow Up and find something interesting to write about. Leave the children alone.
Gosh, we feel terrible, or we would if the article had been making fun of little Barron Trump, which of course it was not: It was making fun of Donald and Melania Trump and their weird penchant for smearing $150 fish-egg-based moisturizer on their innocent child, who as a seven-year-old had very little choice in the matter. Why "anncauley" thought we would be jealous of such horrible people is quite beyond us. Obviously, we hate them for their freedom to put the overpriced lotion on his skin.
Still, we must thank The Accident for belatedly flagging that comment, because otherwise we would have missed this othercomment on the same piece, from "sharon," a year ago:
Beautiful brilliant kids and wife..............we should be so lucky...........they can afford the nicer things, but they are modest...........
All the kids worked hard to get where they are today, educated hard working
and Huffington post is so liberal only crap is written,,,,,,,,,they are the lowest fourth rate paper.........just a gossip rag sheet. Go trump you will be the best president
That is certainly a comment.........we wish we could understand why some rightwing commenters write that way,,,,,,,,,It's not like any published writers, even at Breitbart ----------- we mean the staff, not the commenters of course ----------- abuse punctuation so mercilessly. Then again, "sharon's" prose style seems to be an evolving thing; her comment history lately has branched out, now combining the exaggerated ellipses with ALL CAPS:
YOU LIBERAL PIGS ARE HATERS..............NO KIDS SNOWFLAKES..........KARMA TO YOU
no idiot.........it's the liberals who are getting desperate by their violent actions
WE STAND BEHIND TRUMP...........YOU ARE FOOD STAMP REJECTS
OBAMA WON ON A LIE...........HE PROMISED FREE HEALTHCARE.................THAT WAS A HUGE LIE
Funny, that last one strikes us as.......perhaps......mistaken. In conclusion, we are tired of time travel and would like Disqus to please stop turning comment moderation into a Philip K. Dick roleplay, thank you, the end.
Jim Fucking Sterling, son.
I'm pretty sure they already believe it.