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24 July 2007

Oy, Robot

Dear Robot pretending to be Scott Kohlhaas,

This is the second time you e-mailed my blog to ask me to carry a banner for draftresistance.org . The first time I was so dumb I wrote back and discussed this issue thinking I was writing to a sentient Human Being.

"Yet answer came there none."

I do not dialogue with Robots.

If I hear from Scott Kohlhaas the actual Human Being, maybe we have something to discuss.

Otherwise, please keep your Robot from bothering my blog again. When I write about conscription, the Iraq War, and the draft on my blog, I consider it a very serious matter, and I deeply resent having my time wasted by Robots, and clowns who run automated boiler rooms full of Robots.

Sincerely,

Bob Merkin
Massachusetts

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2 comments:

Mike Stone said...

I'm not entirely convinced that this is a robot. I think that we're probably dealing with a defined process, but not totally automated. If I were to guess, I'd say that Scotty boy there has some sort of scanning program pulling up "the draft is bad" type of comments from Google or something, and adds those to a list. A real person probably comes along then and tries to add a little something to the beginning of the comment before soliciting your aid in his endeavor. Why do I think this you say? Check out these lines:

I never heard of the New York City draft riots in July, 1863 were anti-irish. I know many blacks were attacked.

The proper English isn't used here. Anybody reading it knows that it should read something like "I never heard that the New York..." or something of the like. It does include additional information, like someone actually did know something about your subject. The rest of the post looks like it's canned. That part wasn't included in the other post by Scotty. Everything else is an exact duplicate. Probably a copy and paste. Besides, to post on your blog, it requires one of those nasty "Word Verification" things, and I can barely get those right anyway. I doubt there's a program out there with good enough OCR to do it. If there is, they should be selling it.

Vleeptron Dude said...

Yeah, I think you're right -- it's not a Robot, it's a Cyborg. 90 percent automated, and then Scott or one of his boiler room Amazon Mechanical Turks adds a little personal touch. The first time I heard from his anti-draft boiler room, there wasn't even a personal touch, it was all auto-boilerplate.

But in the highlighted graf you point out, the Human hadn't read the blog post very carefully. The draft riots weren't "anti-Irish," they were largely Irish-American immigrants (and free blacks were indeed a common target).

Scott K (the original human sentient) is a Libertarian who at one time ran for governor of Alaska.

It's strange that this subject -- the draft -- seems to bring out Odd People and Cyborgs; there's that law student from Georgia who likes to inform me that The Draft = Slavery. (Scott likes this simplistic supersimplification too.) I advised the idiot law student to tell all his uncles and grandfathers that they were Slaves when they served during World War Two. They will be very interested to learn this.

It just pissed me off that the first time I heard from Robot/Cyborg Scott K, I wrote a fairly long e-mail reply. It just pisses me off to find myself dialoguing with software. It scares me to think software might just become sophisticated enough to make me send it candy and flowers.