Disemvoweling in effect May 23, 2008
Posted by dorigo in internet, personal.Tags: censorship, nazism, racism
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Today I disemvoweled a comment. I had never done it before, although I had considered it a possibility in the past. I think it is a much better way to convey a message than just deleting an outrageous or insulting comment: no chance that its author can pretend it was the automated action of a lucky spam filter.
In general, this blog is an open place, where people are free to discuss whatever comes up in the threads. However, since the site it is by now not totally irrelevant as far as traffic is concerned, I feel the obligation to watch a bit more closely what is dumped here. I have a rather high threshold for obscenity and it is hard to really make me feel insulted -surprisingly so given my large ego. I tend to find the ironic side in almost anything, so really, it takes effort to have the disemvoweling alarm go off here. But it is on now. The guy who set it off managed it by means of a delirious racist argument against italians and in favor of nazi occupying forces in 1943. No, he won’t learn much by getting ridiculed, but I think he’ll think twice before using the same language here.
I just realized a problem with this approach: it makes me very curious about the content of the original post, to the point that I began devising a reconstruction algorithm (using a dictionary and statistical matching with other texts for contextual resolution of ambiguities) while I stared at it…