Bob Lord

Bob has mostly wound down his 39-year career as a tax and business lawyer (with a 1-year interruption to run for Congress in 2008 (CD3), when he tried to unseat John Shadegg. Bob now serves as the senior advisor on tax policy for the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans who believe the light taxation of America's rich is destabilizing our democracy, and as an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Bob has been writing for Blog For Arizona since late 2011, concentrating mostly on federal issues, with an occasional foray into Arizona state politics.

Why Huppenthal’s Apology is Worthless

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In an nutshell, the problem:  To accept Huppenthal’s apology for his disgusting online comments would be to assume he operates under the same moral code as most of us.

But he doesn’t. His sense of right and wrong is twisted. That’s why he engaged in this behavior — blog trolling — in the first place. Consider the results of research on the personality traits of blog trolls, as summarized by Heather Digby Parton:

The research, conducted by Erin Buckels of the University of Manitoba and two colleagues, sought to directly investigate whether people who engage in trolling are characterized by personality traits that fall in the so-called “Dark Tetrad”: Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), and sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others).

It is hard to underplay the results: The study found correlations, sometimes quite significant, between these traits and trolling behavior. What’s more, it also found a relationship between all Dark Tetrad traits (except for narcissism) and the overall time that an individual spent, per day, commenting on the Internet.

huppenthal-Caricature-thought-bubbleEssentially, Huppenthal is purporting to be remorseful for behavior that signifies a willingness to deceive and manipulate and an inability to feel remorse. Believing Huppenthal is sorry would be like believing the guy you see driving your truck when he says he didn’t steal your truck.

Is Huppenthal some sort of rare exception, a blog troll who does not carry the personality traits that make up the Dark Tetrad? Hardly. A discussion of the existence of each of these traits in Huppenthal follow after the jump.

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Thucky and Me, Our Magical Year (Part 3)

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Third in a multi-part series

August – September 2013: A really bad month for Thucky

I wonder if August – September 2013 was an especially eventful time in Thucky’s life. Some ambitious investigative type might want to look into that possibility. I say that because it’s when Thucky’s commenting gets out of control, not just on BfAZ, but, as I learned later, over at Seeing Red AZ as well, where he was posting as Socrates1289.

There’s somewhat of an oddity that occurs in August 2013. To my knowledge, there was only one time when Thucky seemingly had someone post a comment for him. It occurred in August 2013. Our posts move down the page quickly, so we rarely receive comments more than a day or two after a post goes up. In this case, we received a comment from Thucky in response to a post related to the common core standards. Then, four days later, when the post was old and cold, we received another comment, from an IP address at the Department of Education that Thucky had used. Although the comment was not from Thucky, all appearances are that it was made at his direction.

Frankly, I don’t have a clue what was going on here. But whatever was going on, Thucky was one angry dude by the time September rolled around. I noticed it in the comments to my posts, but it came screaming through in his comments to other posts.

There’s this comment in early September, from the Department of Education, to a BlueMeanie post on food insecurity in America:

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Vintage Krugman

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Krugman’s piece in today’s NYT, Build We Won’t, is one of his best, which is saying something: You often find people talking about our economic difficulties as if they were complicated and mysterious, with no obvious solution. As the economist Dean Baker recently pointed out, nothing could be further from the truth. The basic story … Read more

Thucky and Me, Our Magical Year (Part 2)

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Second in a multi-part Series

After my “Thucky and Dang” post, Dang lost interest, but Thucky became my new pen pal. We were still early on in our “relationship,” and I still had hopes that logic could reach him, a hope that ultimately was dashed.

I wrote a lengthy post, Conflating Inequality and Unemployment, in which I tried, with zero success, to explain to the Thuckmeister that inequality in America was a problem far greater in scope than unemployment. My motivation for the effort was that each time I wrote a post on inequality, Thucky would use the comment section to repeat conservative talking points on job creation. The thoughtless repetition of talking points was not surprising, but his comments made it apparent that he thought unemployment and inequality were the same issue.

Soon thereafter, Thuckbrain showed me his true colors in a comment to one of my posts on inequality:

The typical poor person in America has a flat screen tv, cable, air conditioning, a cell phone and an automobile. Immoral? You can live well if you are poor and if you are rich but it is cheaper if you are poor and you have a luxury the rich do not have: time.

Wow! Unbeknownst to me, he’d already made his now infamous “lazy pigs” comment months earlier, but it was to another writer’s post, so this was my introduction to how “the poor live well” in Thuckyland.

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