Aw, she just can't "quit" me...

 Althouse the blog turned off comments -- I'm pretty sure she got tired of being a platform for paid puppets, but today, links to a past thread from 2013, with this buried nugget in the comments.

Ann Althouse said...

"It would require policing, but I think the goal should be to minimize ad hominem attacks..."

You have to understand that we had bad faith commenters who would not follow the rules and who, despite deletions, would repost and repost, including many times per minute.

That's was the problem and it was not policeable through deletion.

Now, I think that kind of interference with my website is a criminal law violation, and I know the name of the commenter who was doing that, and it is a former student of mine who is a member of the Wisconsin Bar and a practicing lawyer, incredibly enough.

7/8/13, 10:20 AM

Sue her for slander, I should! ;-)  

 I suspect, if she is linking this today, pulling this out, eight years on, the blog is dying numberswise from lack of an open, participatory comments section. 

Ann is still finding herself as a writer and political voter too, trying to figure out what she wants the blog to be, after getting setup help from Instapundit Glenn Reynolds  and most recently, accepting sidebar blog support payments to provide a Trump-supporting comments platform for the past presidential election years. She's a tease (hit my tipjar!) like that, content to tell her retired white conservative male commenters what they wanted to hear ... until it apparently proved not so lucrative, post election.

It's just sad really, I have seen so many excuses and reasons for her closing comments over the years... -- the real answer  she chose a poor platform to build on with very few options for monitoring who comes through the door or verifying who is posting comments..

Not me -- I don't play the paid games and I'm not into puppets but I sure can spot em, and if you read widely, they do play on multi-platforms, for pay I suspect, especially in the political election years...

I was always rooting for her to figure it out, to demask those true trolls who used her place to play at all hours, but especially after her re-marraige, the intellectual spark is just not there to learn more.  I suspect, the sidebar donations discouraged such investigation too. Much easier to point fingers at younger, better women writers, as Althosue's past has shown.

Well good luck to her, and I do forgive the false allegations -- that was early cancel culture at work from the denizens of the ivory tower not well practiced at deflecting criticism that most of us encounter in our real-world work.  Just sayin' if you are spending time looking back and linking and still pointing false fingers of blame all this many years later, you're missing today's biggest stories.  

The future is here, old professor emeritus! Fear not. Just do your homework next time, invest in a better blogging platform so you can tell the players and the IPs, and never ever make false accusations or threaten criminal charges against former students, even if you think you can get away with it.  I'm white, remember.  Many of your "former students" are not.  Tread lightly... Makes you look bad bearing false witness while others play you and your selected Google blogspot platform.  Hth.