Spam & Snipers (w/Updates)

A few weeks ago I wrote about being besieged by comment spammers trying to register as regular readers. I didn’t understand why they thought they needed to register, comments being open and all, and mentioned that I’d seen only one or two attempts to actually post comment spam.

I should have known better. The one or two spam comments I saw (and quickly deleted) were the exceptions that somehow slipped through the anti-spam filter. Last week I discovered the special folder where the filter hides comment spam. There were thousands of them. Most were here at Paul’s Thing, but the Half-Mind Weblog and Crouton’s Kitchen had full folders too.

Romney has binders full of women; I have folders full of spam! Sorry, couldn’t resist.

The nice thing about the filter is that it keeps spam comments from appearing on the blog, which is why you don’t see them. The other nice thing is the “delete all” button that lets me empty the folder with one click. I cleaned it out yesterday morning. Checking it again just now, I see 435 new spam comments waiting for the old heave-ho.

More than 400 spam comments in 24 hours. Just at this one blog. Someone in Russia must think highly of Paul’s Thing. I suppose I should be flattered. Zdrastvooyte, comrade!

Here’s a typical spam comment:

Don’t worry about accidentally clicking on the links. It’s a screen grab, and if you click on it it’ll just take you to a larger version of the image. You wouldn’t want to follow those links anyway: the sites they take you to are probably infested with malware.

I suppose the people who run the spambots generating this shit 24/7 get paid a few kopeks for every comment they post, whether to million-follower megasites or teeny little blogs like mine. I suppose they also get paid whether or not the spam gets through the filters and out into the open where people might see it. Someone, somewhere, must be making serious money creating oceans of spam no one but a few webmasters will ever see, otherwise there’d be no reason for it.

I want to shake my head like Marge Gunderson in Fargo, and say “And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well. I just don’t understand it.”

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Everyone is talking about American Sniper, mostly enthusiastically. I’m sure it’s a gripping movie, but so was Zero Dark Thirty, and it too was about things Americans at one time would not have glorified or celebrated. With Zero Dark Thirty it was torture; with American Sniper it’s assassination.

Was the real life sniper Chris Kyle substantially different from the fictional sniper of The Jackal, crouching a hotel room across the square while trying to get a clear head shot at Charles de Gaulle? Well, Kyle wasn’t a mercenary, I guess, and he worked for the good guys.

Old-fashioned stick-in-the-muds like me think hiding on rooftops in order to take long-distance rifle shots at unknowing human targets is sneaky, underhanded, somehow un-American. But as with torture, tribal loyalties determine what you likely think about the subject. If you’re a member of the authoritarian right-wing tribe, you think assassination and torture are just great, especially as administered to filthy Arabs, all Muslimy and shit. If you’re a member of the progressive left-wing tribe, you think it’s abhorrent and unworthy, especially if it’s also racist.

Imagine one of those ISIS beheading videos. Now imagine the ISIS guy is FBI Fred, wearing a nice suit and standing tall over some shifty-looking Yemeni kneeling at his feet. Half the folks on Facebook would be furiously masturbating as FBI Fred swings his sword, like the chickenhawks creaming their jeans over American Sniper.

I guess I’m not making much of an attempt to hide my tribal loyalties, am I? A fence-straddling friend (not a chickenhawk, but a fellow veteran with years of military service) reminds me that as a fighter pilot I was not that different from Mr. Kyle, that my job was to shoot down enemy aircraft, sometimes unobserved and from afar.

Yes, fighter pilots are sometimes described as aerial assassins; some folks even called us Yankee air pirates. But if I shoot a missile at an enemy warplane in a combat zone, I’m not targeting some poor unknowing schmuck going about his innocent daily business, and there’s nothing sneaky about it. He knows I’m out there, and he knows he’s likely to be targeted and shot unless he targets and shoots me first.

Granted, Mr. Kyle’s targets were not poor schmucks going about their innocent daily business either, but they were unknowing, and I do draw a line between our occupational specialties. What Chris Kyle did for his country may have been necessary and important, but there’s nothing heroic or glorious about it, and I don’t think it’s something Americans should take pride in.

Update #1: Well, isn’t this interesting? This isn’t the first of Chris Kyle’s war stories I’ve heard called into question, either. Grain of salt, people!

Update #2: In my post, above, I contended that shooting down enemy aircraft in combat, even from great distances, isn’t quite the same as hiding in a tree and shooting unknowing victims dead with a sniper rifle. I put a link to this post on Facebook, where a couple of friends pointed out (see the comment below this post) that carpet-bombing civilians from on high, or employing precision weapons against ground targets where innocent victims are likely to be killed along with enemy fighters, is pretty much the same damn thing. They’re correct, of course, and I don’t deny it. I don’t think, though, that Hollywood has made many movies glorifying long-distance aerial assassins. They certainly never made one about Paul Tibbets!