Conspiracy theorists and ePlaya sockpuppet accusations
Dustbuddy
This is a post that would not have needed to have been made, had one of
the moderators on ePlaya, the official board for Burning Man located at
had even the slightest amount of class. The mod I am referring to is
"Spectabilis".
This all began, most bizarrely, when a conspiracy theorist named
Fredetroit began a thread entitled "A Sept 11th experiment 'Trough &
Beam' ",
http://eplaya.burningman.com/viewtopic.php?t=12294
in which he tried to argue that the impacting airplanes couldn't have
taken down the World Trade Towers on 9-11. I swear I'm not making this
up. So, how do we deal with the reality that the towers don't seem to
be there any more? Are they maybe being camoflaged? That would have
actually made more sense than some of what we ended up reading. Ready
for this?
Supposedly, the government did it, planting thermite bombs. "That don't
mean that Al Quaeda ain't guilty, but George Bush is all behind it,
man, and like he was friends with Al Quaeda which wanted him to come in
and take over Iraq and Afghanistan, man, and why are y'all looking at
me funny", or words to that effect. Some people pointed to the
technical naivite of the analysis of the first poster, who worked on
the assumption that the jet fuel would be distributed evenly across the
floors of the towers, a dynamical impossibility given the high speed of
impact. I focused in on a different area.
One game that conspiracy theorists seem to love to play is to bury the
reader under a long list of quotes and supposed sources backing up
their kookiness and just wear their more reasonable opposition down. In
the case of one poster, somebody calling himself "Rockdad", one of the
alleged sources he cited was "Van Romero, Vice President For Research
At New Mexico Institute Of Mining And Technology". My response to this
tactic was to just poke randomly at the screen and check the name my
finger landed on. By chance, it was Romero.
It's amazing that in these days, with search engines as familiar to
almost everybody as they are, that anybody even tries to play these
games. A Yahoo search under "Van Romero" and "New Mexico" in short
order turned up a few newspaper articles in which the man had been
quoted, and his homepage, on which his resume could be found. On
checking the article, one quickly found that the man had never spoken
in support of the conspiracy theory, was horrified to find that he had
been quoted out of context in such a way as to create the illusion that
he had, and had even retracted the comments which had been taken out of
context. Further, the man wasn't even an engineer, he was a particle
physicist, a bright enough guy, but not really professionally qualified
to do a study of a building collapse.
Rockdad had lied about the commentary of this supposed source of his,
and I called him on this, not just accusing him of having posted
dishonestly, but backing up the accusation with links to the relevant
sources, Prof.Romero's homepage included. Rockdad then tried to wriggle
this way out of this, I rebutted his rationalizations, and then after a
bit of rhetorical silliness from Rockdad which shouldn't have fooled
anybody whose IQ exceeded his shoe size ("Why do you keep posting
comments on this subject, Dustbuddy" "Because you keep posting BS for
me to rebut, Rockdad"), Rockdad decided that it was time for a little
mudslinging, ePlaya style.
Much to my surprise, I discovered that I was now living in Reno,
Nevada! Which kind of surprised me, because I could have sworn I saw
the Sears Tower during my morning commute. As you can confirm just by
checking the origination IP for this post, I am posting from Netsource
Communications located in Naperville, Illinois, a mid-sized city
located in far Northeastern Illinois, about 30 miles outside of
Chicago. (I'm posting using at Hotpop address via Google, because I'd
rather not turn my primary ISP address into a spamtrap, and because,
especially when I'm being smeared, I like to maintain a little
privacy). Yet I was accused of having been the sock puppet of another
user logging in under the name "HughMungus", who was located in Reno.
We live literally thousands of miles apart and Netsource has no
out-of-region dial-up. Unless somebody has been doing the drugs, if he
has the needed evidence staring him in the face, he's going to know
that I and HughMungus couldn't possibly be the same person.
As I later told the mod in question (Spectablis), I would have had
every right in the world to be really urinated off at this point. But,
I was still a little amused, and started a thread joking about the
silliness of it all
http://eplaya.burningman.com/viewtopic.php?t=12509
My sense of humor would eventually be used up, as i discovered just how
much of the board my new sleazebag friend Rockdad spoke for, apparently
including Spectabilis the moderator. Spec had apparently had some kind
of personal dispute with the other person smeared by the sockpuppet
accusation (HughMungus), and wasn't shy about sticking it to a newbie,
if he could stick it to his enemy in the process. On being asked to
confirm the fact that our IP addresses (mine and HughMungus') don't
even come close to matching, he refused, which is why you are seeing
this post. I'm crossposting it to news.admin.censorship with the
request that Dave the Resurrector keep watch over it, just in case
somebody posts a cancel notice.
The origination IP address in the header for my post marks my primary
ISP. Google does not mask that, which is why I set up this account - by
using it, I can put an end to all doubt as to what my primary ISP is,
and it is, as one can easily check, a strictly local affair. I didn't
want to go this route. Netsource is almost like a nice little family
business, and I'd really hate to see these guys get bothered with crank
phone calls. The history of the lunatic fringe on the Internet speaks
for itself - there is a very good chance that some of Rockdad's fellow
conspiracy theorists will start harassing the office staff at Netsource
for the purposes of plug pulling. A futile effort if it occurs, given
Netsource's stance on such matters, but nice people might end up
getting hassled and that stinks.
But sometimes, there just isn't anything else to be done, especially
when other people are refusing to do what they know they should be
doing. I'm posting this article, not just to call "bulls**t" on the
rumors of a kinder, gentler, saner ePlaya, but to establish a location
where my primary ISP's ID address is visible in the Googlegroups
archives. As soon as this post becomes visible in those archives,
probably in a few hours, I'm going to post a link to the "original
copy" page for this post in the aforementioned threads on ePlaya, and
maybe on another forum. That being done, another random accusation
bites the dust and I give some serious thought as to whether or not the
new ePlaya is worth the bother.
My thought, at this point, is "probably not", not with the crazies
making the rules the way they do, now.
Dustbuddy