Spam is ubiquitous on the internet. Offer an email address or a comment box and a spambot will attempt to make use of it. If you can’t beat them, at least find some humour!
Recent spam comments on this blog (which don’t make it through) have been on behalf of a bewildering variety of commercial interests, including: beanbag chairs, laptop batteries, a pizza store, lawn mower reviews (yes!), search engine optimisation and money-lenders. Does any of this produce a result for them???
Lately, I’m finding the comments they post are more sophisticated, as they try to sound like a genuine comment. But sometimes the artificial intelligence goes awry. My favourite was a comment on my post on Peter Singer and infanticide:
I want to talk about this page with my children.
I’m sure they felt comforted!
So that’s why those comments by me didn’t appear! : o )
Anyway, that comment is very hilarious. It gave me the mental image of a parent reading Practical Ethics to his/her children at bedtime. Perhaps traditional fairytales aren’t that horrid compared to bedstories like that!
I was thinking that telling one’s children that some people believe in infanticide might not make them feel secure.
Ah yes, that would be a disturbing real-life scenario too. Though it would be a cold comfort for those children, but if they are able to understand the infanticide defense then Singer would regard them as persons, right?