This appeared in the "Activity Feed" section of Open Salon on Sunday. Okay, it's pretty obvious that Open Salon can't block spam, and it even appears in Real Salon quite a bit. It's pathetic, including the attempts to misspell or mis-capitalize words to avoid the spam filters that OS doesn't have.

My question is, why do the spammers assume that people in Open Salon are susceptible to soccer?

I don't have to explain what a lame, pointless sport soccer is, because all sports are lame and pointless. Only Americans can recognize its futility while they still go nuts over football, baseball and basketball. So even dumb Americans are offended by "the world's most popular sport."

So why do these spammers - who are undoubtedly posted by some third-world-country spammers  in a spam-mill - think that Open Salon is the ideal place to put this stuff? Not on FaceBook, not on Time.com's blog, not on Craig's List. They choose this place to publish this spam.

It's an insult to anyone who comes here. It assumes we like <i>soccer,</i> for God's sake! The sport that is considered "safe" by suburban parents because there's less contact than football or baseball. (The violence only occurs in the scary world outside America, where soccer, for some reason, matters. And it mostly occurs in the stands.) And it assumes we don't know that this "streaming" will cost us money and will probably steal our credit card accounts in the process.

I don't even blame Foxcom-Chan, the Chinese peasant who posted these posts. He has to post them. His family will die by gunfire if he doesn't - that's the way spam-mills work. But someone is assuming that OS readers are much more stupid than they appear.