September 2003 Archives

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

AKMA wrote a response to my recent Shinto Commandments, in addition to Joi Ito’s writing, and Jonathon Delacour’s commentary on what we discussed.

AKMA is a Minister and a Professor of Theology. More than that, he is a Christian. He wrote:

Among the things I stand for is the premise that the God about whom Scripture and the saints have taught me is God, not in a perspectival or contingent way, but in a thorough, undeniable, absolute way. Not ‘among other gods,’ though I see the interest and functionality of a polytheistic world. I just don’t inhabit a world like that, and it would be false politeness for me to pretend otherwise. That doesn’t mean I want to stamp out other people’s ways of believing, or legislate against them, or get into condescending arguments with them; it just means that so far as it’s given me to know things, I know the God of Abraham to be God in a unique way.

AKMA could not write anything else, not without bringing into question his own beliefs and the Truth behind them, as he knows it. Belief is an all or nothing proposition – if you believe in God in a certain way, no matter how much you respect that others may not agree, you still have to believe your own truth is the Truth. You internalize as fact that there is only one God, and for AKMA, this is the Christian God.

I can understand this. To me, the key difference between AKMA and the “There is only one God and my God is the only right God” that Joi discussed is that AKMA does not insist others believe as he does. He respects each of our right to develop our own Truth, even if it doesn’t agree with his. My interpretation of his writing is that he doesn’t need others to believe as he does to bolster his own sense of what’s Truth. We don’t have to share beliefs to talk, or to co-exist.

At an intellectual level, I can identify with this, but I can also see a breakdown at a more emotional level – if our belief is Truth, then our belief is also Right, and that means all other beliefs are Wrong. Therein likes the conundrum: belief is both an intellectual and an emotional investment; once conversation, or other action, leaves an intellectual plane for an emotional one, a fundamental sense of rightness about one’s beliefs and sense of God or Gods are very much a part of the equation.

In AKMA’s comments, Jonathon acknowledges an individual’s sense of religous Truth, but he also sees the conundrum:

If the God of Abraham is God in a unique way, how are we to regard the other Gods that are worshipped by billions of non-Christians? If the Christian God is God in “a thorough, undeniable, absolute way”, does it follow that these other Gods are partial, questionable, and relative?

Clearly this cannot be resolved by suggesting that all religions share an underlying belief in the same God (or all paths lead to the same destination) since I suspect this propostion would please hardly anyone – apart from myself and a few others.

AKMA wrote something further in his essay, which I think goes to the heart of discussions of this nature, not only online but elsewhere. He wrote:

First, let me note that I am who you’re talking about. I may not agree with everyone to whom you’re referring — surely, surely, surely not with Roy Moore — but I want to make the discussion personal, so that people don’t feel as though they’re deriding an abstract, absent buffoonish blob. In that blob, you’ll find me, doing what I can, standing up as best I can for that which is true.
…
I respect, admire, and learn from much that some non-Christian traditions manifest and teach. I have no interest in making other people accede to my faith if they don’t acknowledge its truth. That’d amount to more of the haranguing, bullying, arm-twisting, behavior of which the world has seen more than enough. Nor do I write this in order to extract apologies from people who may think they’ve offended me (anyone who’d care enough to worry is someone I already like enough to expect they meant no offense, so there’s no need, honest). I write this because sometimes it seems as though anyone who holds a position such as mine can safely be dismissed as an arrogant, intolerant imperialist; and I hoped to make sure that someone who wanted to hold to that assessment knew to include me therein.

(emphasis mine)

Jonathon responded with Although my natural inclination is to apologize for any offense I’ve given you, I’d rather trust that I fall into the category of those whom you already like enough to realize that no offense was intended. Unlike Jonathon, my first reaction was not to apologize when I read the highlighted sentence. But I was confused by it.

Was the very fact that I did not feel worried enough of what I wrote to think of apologizing to AKMA mean that I’m not the type of person that AKMA would like anyway? Intellectually, I read this as nothing more than AKMA’s assurance that he wasn’t personally offended by anything we wrote, and that wasn’t the reason for his own essay. Emotionally, though, my interpretation gets a bit murkier.

Consider the original circumstances: I did not see my writing in the original essay as a condemnation of Christians, generally, or AKMA specifically. I am writing Truth and to me this Truth is that regardless of any person’s belief, there must be separation of Church and State in this country. I also wrote that if this separation is enforced in Alabama, then it must be enforced universally and consistently across the country; otherwise the act is hypocritical. If I condemned anything, it was this hypocrisy, and Moore’s own religious bigotry, which he tried to enforce using his secular position.

Reading Joi’s and Jonathon’s essays, and comments with each, I could see no overall condemnation of Christianity, but I’m not sensitive to this as an issue. To me criticism of religious fundamentalism is not the same as criticism of religion – but again, who am I to judge?

I can understand AKMA’s interest in putting a face to Christianity in these discussions. However, as we’ve seen in the past, it is the very act of stripping away the abstract, of making these discussions personal, that tips them over the side of the intellectual plane, where conversation can occur, and into the emotional one where Right and Wrong hold sway.

I will think on this discussion the next time I write about religion, and I will be writing about religion again because it’s becoming more and more core to our politics in this country and the world. As someone who cherishes AKMA and calls him “friend”, I will reflect on AKMA being Christian and what he wrote this weekend. However, as a writer my reflection will be momentary, an imperceptible pause in my writing, because my belief, my Truth if you will, allows me no more than that.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

From the trackback entries I’ve received from an old comment spamming entry, I gather the spammers have been out and about recently. I received a recent comment spam myself – a shotgun message that seems to provide links to everything your kid wants to know about, but you don’t want them to ask.

It goes by vig-rx. Rings the bells?

Even though I discussed a method for preventing these, I received the comment because I don’t currently have the comment trap (described in the post referenced by the trackbacks) enabled. Why? The reasons are simple: I’m currently adding new weblogs and there’s too much overhead for too little payback with the technique.

The comment trap requires changes to all comment forms in all templates in all weblogs. I have recently added several new weblogs, and am adding three new ones in the next week or so; that’s a lot of template changes. As all of the weblogs use the same comments application, mt-comments.cgi, either the template change is added to all weblogs and weblog pages, or it’s not used for any of them.

I could add the change, and that leads to my second reason for not using the comment trapper at this time – effort and payback. If I implement the comment trapper, it’s used with every comment to my weblogs, from either friend or foe. Though the code seems insignificant, it adds to the overall process burden on my weblog’s server; start adding up tiny little burdens and over time, you have some significant performance hits every time a person tries to post a comment.

It would be worth the performance hits if I received a lot of comment spams, but I don’t, and other than the bad nuisance ones that post a thousand comments at once, the comment spams I get aren’t much more than a minor annoyance. I see them, I delete them, end of story.

What I find more annoying is the Google searchers who search on some esoteric search phrase and post comments on old posts that are irritating and irrelevant to the post. These do not fit the criteria of ‘comment spams’, but they also don’t add a lot of value, either.

I have a couple of options for older posts. The first option is the one I’m currently using, and that is allow the comment but filter it from my ‘recent trackback/comment’ list. I also did this with trackbacks after getting several trackbacks on old posts from Radio-based weblogs when trackbacks were enabled. However, this also filtered out the recent trackbacks because of the comment spam problem – odd how this works out – and I decided to keep the comment filtering, but eliminate the trackback filtering. For now.

Another option is one that I’m very seriously considering and that is turning off comments for older posts. Weblog writing is both ephemeral and enduring, contradictory as this may seem. Our writing rolls of the page to barely accessed archives, with faint hiccups of activity that linger a week or two from latecomers; but because of search engines and other weblog writers with long memories, the writing never completely disappears.

Have you ever been to a party and been in an animated discussion with a group of people, and someone joins the group with comment about a conversation you were involved in 6 months ago? Unlikely in real life, but this type of activity can occur in weblogs. It’s particularly noticeable with weblogs like mine and so many others that implement some form of recent trackback/comment feature.

While I can see the value of the trackback on older posts – look how three pings have re-awakened an old conversation in response to comment spammers – I question the value of comments on old writing and old conversations. The players have moved on, the songs changed. Additionally, turning off comments for older posts provides fewer entry points into our systems for comment spammers. This is an option I’ll continue to think on.

Two options I won’t explore, though, are IP banning and comment registration. I find comment registration to be irritating, and have been put off more than once having to register to leave a comment. I’d rather just turn comments off.

IP banning is more troublesome, and I hope that people who’ve implemented this consider carefully the consequences. As some of you may have discovered, the recent vig-rx comment spam originated from a domain that’s part of the Asia Pacific Network. APNIC is the equivalent agency as ARIN, which manages the IP addresses for America; it is one of the four major registries that manage DNS for the world. Further lookup at APNIC shows that the IP originates with ChinaNet. In case you’re curious, ChinaNet is the major Internet backbone for China.

If you add the IP address to your .htaccess file to block it, congratulations – you’re effectively denying your weblog to people in China, because chances are, the next time someone uses that IP, it’s some student or other person out exploring or looking for information. If you add them to MT to block comments for the IP, they can still view your weblog and most likely wouldn’t leave a comment anyway; however, then you’ve added a tiny bit more CGI processing for every comment that is left.

The problem with IP banning is that it only works with consistent IP addresses, and the only entities with consistent, unmasked IP addresses are companies who don’t use proxies and people affluent enough to have a static internet connection. It’s too easy to spoof IP addresses – originating a comment spam from one IP address, making it seem like it comes from another – and too easy to use a random connection to change the IP address next time you’re in the neighborhood with porn to sell.

An additional constraint on the effectiveness with IP banning is that people and organizations also use open proxies to access the internet so that their IP addressed aren’t exposed. The use of proxies was covered not that long ago when it was discovered that China was blocking access to Blogspot weblogs from people using IP addresses that originated in China. In fact, IP addresses from that same China Net that originated the current flurry of comment spam activity.

As regards to our friend, vig-rx, if lists of IP addresses are passed around weblogs, as was discussed over in comments at Liz’s weblog, and added to .htaccess files everywhere, then the Chinese government doesn’t have to censor weblogs – we’re doing it for them.