I am tired and dispirited by Trump's attack on the judiciary and the rule of law and appalled that I have to worry about a mega-billionaire who wants to buy the Democratic party nomination. I really don't have the energy for this, but I run this blog, and I feel that I have an obligation to all those who do me the courtesy of reading it.
So: If RFGA Ph D will identify himself or herself with an actual name and some identifying information, [Google failed me on this one] as I regularly do on this blog and everywhere else that I offer my opinions, I will write a considered response to his or her needlessly unpleasant comment. Absent that, I will conclude that my original evaluation was correct, and I will delete all past and future comments by him or her.
Thank you, Professor. This is one of the few places where some decent conversation occurs in the comments, and foolish or trollish individuals like this just ruin that. Manually deleting their comments is a good start, but I would look into blocking this person's IP as well, if that is possible with the Blogger tools.
ReplyDeleteFYI, if you're curious, you can find the person's Website by Googling the author of the paper he refers to in the comments here:
ReplyDeletehttps://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2020/01/academic-nit-picking.html
I didn't want to just post the direct link without his consent, because that'd be about as evil as respecting a woman's reproductive autonomy.
https://philpeople.org/profiles/robert-allen
ReplyDeleteFor those of you noticing that RFGA is temperamental, doesn't answer questions, is easily distracted, can't stay focused, and is all around inhospitable, you're not alone! His students agree too!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=949682
I’m a little late to all this, but I just have to say, regarding this RFGA PhD person....wow!
ReplyDeleteThis gem is probably my favorite: “President Trump, God bless him, was dissolute before marrying the lovely woman who is now his wife.”
Yes, such a lovely woman. And it’s undisputed that T***p cheated on that lovely woman with a porn star mere months after she gave birth to his son. God bless him indeed.
I’ve heard many T***p supporters admit what’s obvious — that he’s a person completely devoid of any morals or redeeming personal qualities whatsoever — but then say that none of that matters because their support is predicated on his policies, not his personal qualities. But it seems that this RFGA person is some sort of traditional Catholic, so his hero’s glaring iniquity can’t be admitted — it has to be rationalized away with this little fairy tale about redemption. The cognitive dissonance is strong in this group. (And how does RFGA feel about the fact that the lovely Melania never repented for that girl-on-girl erotic photo shoot*, nor to have exhibited any behavior that could be described as remotely Christian in her life? I guess we’ll never know.) But what’s even more galling, I think, is the attempt by RFGA, someone who purports to have been a professional academic, to excuse T***p’s history of swindling as just “hard-head and shrewd” business practices, when as we all know the most public of the man’s scams involved his fake university whereby he preyed on peoples’ naïveté about higher education to cheat them out of thousands. It really boggles the mind!
But again, cognitive dissonance. There really is no point engaging people like that because they don’t argue in good faith and so will never be moved. They’re just trolls looking for ways to vent their lifetime’s worth of resentments. And pretending to be wounded and aggrieved when they’re called out for trolling is just part of the troll.
So yes, please do moderate as appropriate.
*To be clear, I have no issue whatsoever with erotic photography, girl-on-girl or otherwise; I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy.
I wouldn't delete the past comments if I were you. First of all, it's an interesting human interaction with a Trump supporter and second, if somewhere in internet, as may occur, the person in question accuses you (Professor Wolff) of having censored him or her, just like in the Soviet Union (they will probably claim), you can point to the fact that his or her behavior in your blog was abusive and not up to what one expects of a scholar and a gentleman/woman.
ReplyDeleteAs for his or her future comments, do as you please.
I should have addeded above that when you point to his or her behavior in your blog, if you do not erase the comments, you'll have very clear written evidence.
ReplyDeleteWrt s. wallerstein’s suggestion at 6:54 PM here’s a pro-trump ‘question’ responded to by a rewriting of the ‘question’ from a different point of view:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Feb15.html#item-1
[scroll down to query beginning “Q: I would like to ask you to give a straightforward answer to this question: Why do you so strongly dislike President Trump, so much so that you rarely post on the good things he has accomplished? “]
The electoral-vote site, by the way, has begun to keep a running score of who has how many delegates at the top of its opening page.
The links above strongly indicate that RFPG PhD is a resident of Michigan and teaches at Wayne State in Detroit (and in fact, RFPG left hints that he lives &/or works there). It is not all that well known that there are 2 kinds of people in Michigan: yoopers and trolls. Yoopers* are residents of the Upper Peninsula (and the derivation of the word should be reasonably clear). Trolls are the people who live below (under) the Mackinac Bridge, i.e., in the Lower Peninsula, i.e., the mitten.** So RFPG is almost certainly a troll.
ReplyDelete*Jeff Daniels' Escanaba_in_da_Moonlight is the best known movie about Yoopers and makes gentle fun of them.
**Perhaps Romney's nickname, Mittens derives less from his middle name and more from his having been born and raised in the LP.
And where do apologists for trolls live?
ReplyDelete