@chrisndodge, I'm not sure we're using this method of showing alerts elsewhere (our plan on the design side was to have CSS-based classes control the visibility and animation of elements rather than relying on JQuery's .show()/.hide() methods.

It looks like you may be adding this to make the alert UI accommodate a case it was never supposed to - asynchronous error messaging (it was meant to be displayed when a page was loaded after a traditional page request).