Anonymous

I think its a safe assumption that people who read my blog know who Alex, the anonymous douchebag, is. In case you don't, I'll give you a quick recap.

Alex the anonymous douchebag went to Penn State. We met during the summer of 2001 when he was in a class of mine and started to date my friend, Colleen. Since the end of that summer, he's held a ridiculous grudge against me. Now, five years later, he still hates me and spends a lot of his time posting on my blog about how much I suck. Here's a brief list of why he hates me:

• A friend of mine dumped him
• I made fun of him because he claimed to fall in love with this friend after only two weeks
• He assumed she dumped him for me
• I urged my friend to get a restraining order against him because he started to stalk her
• I'm better looking than he is
• I don't live in Ohio
• I have friends
• I let a friend of his give me a blowjob in Lot 80

So, as I said, he spends a lot of his time posting irrelevant comments on my blog in an attempt to piss me off.

Recently he's been employing a clever new trick. He's been posting on other blogs under my identity to make me look bad. On one blog, he wrote "I hope you fall on the motorcycle going 60" and on another he wrote "I think that everyone born should be sex slaves. I think that you should be my sex slave as well and bend over and take it nice and hard". Tasteless? Soul-less? Yes, Alex has these qualities and many more.

The process is actually pretty easy. While posting a comment, you select "other" instead of "anonymous." Once selected, you type in the name and website of the identity you want to pose as. It's pretty slick but nonetheless an ethically void trick -- and I'm pretty sure it's illegal to make disparaging remarks while posing as someone else. Character Defamation comes to mind. Libel does too.

In any event, his actions have made me question my decisions on comment moderation and restriction. Should I moderate his irrelevant comments? No, I've decided to be the bigger man and let his word speak to his character. I respect free speech even when its hateful. Should I restrict comments to registered users? No, he would just create a profile called davesucks and use that to post. Moreover, many people leave relevant and meaningful comments on my blog and I'd be missing out on those. So, the desired effect does not outweigh negatives. But what do I do about his libel? Well, what can I do? I can't moderate his comments on other blogs. All I can hope to do is educate my friends about what he's doing.

Jealousy and hatred lead some people to do horrible things -- like waste their time trying to disparage others in an attempt to make them feel better about their own shitty life.