QuizLaw, down in the ABA Blawg vote, has resorted to negative campaigning, perhaps recognizing that the site proprietors are unlikely to sue for libel:
And here’s the God’s honest: Walter Olsen [sic] and Ted Frank, the purveyors of legal smut over on Overlawyered, are robots. Yes. You heard me right. Built by the IBM Corp. sometime in the late 90s and given fake, prestigious resumes (like a University of Chicago graduate would actually blog! ha!), Walter and Ted were programmed to spit out thoughtful, sometimes amusing legal analysis (and relevant links) about cases that actually matter in the world of law, which as we all know defies every tenet of the blogosphere.
We plead guilty to violating blogospheric tradition by knowing what we’re talking about, but we do deny that we’re robots, much less ones built by IBM. Of course, if we were robots, we’d probably be programmed to deny that we were, so such a denial only gets you so far. But, alas, such QuizLaw’s scurrilous lobbying has pulled them to within one vote in the ABA poll, so reader support is needed.
10 Comments
Besides, why would you make a robot look like Walter?
http://robotgossip.blogspot.com/2005/11/actroid-receptionist.html
I myself deplore underhanded campaigning. I thought it was a shame when the deserving Howard Bashman slipped to third place in this race, and really have no idea who might have put the pepper spray in his barrister’s wig. Probably some pageant volunteer.
Not that I ever thought so, I hereby stipulate Ted Frank is not a robot.
But, it appears the overlawyered.com site does in fact automatically, if not robotically, flush any serious dissenting opinion on this blog, such as mine about your tinfoil hat post stating that trial lawyers are influencing US national security policy via the Senate.
I’ll be surprised if this post makes it.
Overlawyered printed your dissenting opinion. We reserve the right to moderate our comment boards. I choose not to post racist remarks, tendentious repetition by commenters who are effectively shouting down other opinions by playing Argument Clinic, off-topic trolling, ad hominem insults, or other attempts to derail conversations; Walter and David each have their own standards.
If a commenter is a net negative, I sometimes act as an intelligent Bayesian and just block their comments on sight rather than waste time trying to decide whether to post them. Every legal blogger knows precisely who I’m talking about here.
Trial lawyers are influencing national security policy in the Senate, and for the worse. If you have a refutation of my extensive exploration of the subject in the Liability Outlook, feel free to blog about it yourself and I’ll link to it and respond. If all you have is name-calling like “tinfoil hat posting” from behind a veil of anonymity, you won’t last long in the comments section to my posts.
Backfired! Argh. You robots are wily.
As a long time reader of Overlawyered.com, I must say, your robotic skills appear to be intellectually far superior to that of your human counterparts. I will definitely have to remember to congratulate IBM regarding its robotic acronym known as “Walter”.
Since we’re on the topic, can you explain how to most effectively use my MP3 video device?
just to make sure ibm programmed walter and ted to follow isaac asimovs rules right?
This is like Keyser Soze meets The Matrix: The greatest trick the Matrix ever pulled was convincing the world it didn’t exist.
matt, sure, but to enable them to do this job their programming must exclude tort lawyers from the class “human”. Not that I see anything wrong with that. 😉
I had heard rumors of a secret project at IBM by the folks that created the the chess system, “Deep Blue.”
Now we have PROOF!
“Deep Pockets”