Thanks!

Thanks to everyone who commented, e-mailed, or phoned about the recent unpleasantness. I posted a whopping 4 comments at Sadly No, detailed below, three of which were a single sentence in length. But in daring to have an opinion, dumb fucking asshole bitch that I apparently am, I generated all kinds of venomous bile, and apparently handed the right wing forces of evil some sort of victory, because if it wasn’t for my four comments (and the 15 minutes I spent typing them) the Democrats would be back in power, the Iraq war would be over, there would never be another sexual assault, all the right winger nutjob bloggers would turn in their keyboards and start building a (well deserved) memorial to the late, great Paul Wellstone, and not a single teenager would ever get acne again. Sorry about that.

Much love to the awesome co-bloggers here; massive apologies for drawing the mostly too gutless to blog or comment under their full real names, unlike us, trolls to this space.

–Ann Bartow

Important update: I have deleted all of the comments here to protect the privacy of one of the commenters. She was a fairly unpleasant commenter, and her employer monitors the use of work resources, so my guess is that this is not the last she has heard on this issue, but that is not my concern. She made her employer’s name publicly available via this blog. I warned her privately about this via e-mail. I got called “asshole” and worse for my trouble.

There is no anonymity in cyberspace. Certain steps can be taken to minimize identity exposure. Educate yourselves about this. Don’t kill the messenger.

Update: Okay, full disclosure time. The obnoxious commenter referenced above had made a point of saying that she had to comment under a pseudonym because of her employer. When I emailed her, to clue her nasty self into the fact that because she was apparently using a work computer or connection to spew her venom, I could tell exactly where she worked, and so could anyone else, some readers thought I was lying, and dumped all over me. I was not. There was, at the time, a completely public “stat counter” at the bottom of the page that permitted anyone at all to see the IP addresses of commenters here. That was not my idea, to put it mildly, but a policy decision I had no control over. People who understand the Internet would have known this, but under the circumstances, I didn’t want to draw attention to any of it until IP addresses were cloaked as much as I could manage. The “stat counter” has been changed, so that only “blog adminstrators” have access to this information. I reiterate, however, that there is no privacy in cyberspace. If you use a work computer in ways that are contrary to your employer’s policies, you put yourself at risk, and simply using a pseudonym is no guarantee that your words will not be matched to your real space identity. Behave accordingly.