"Who the **** is Joseph Dunphy?" Slightly cleaned up, this is a question I've actually heard (OK, read) seriously posed by total strangers, only to be answered by other strangers who are very glad to vent. For example, consider these wise words penned at the expense of the nefariously infamous Joseph Dunphy, by a netizen by the name of Robert Carlson. Until recently, at the time of this writing, the page I've just linked to could be found at this location in the Internet Archive, but well within a day of my first posting of the incomplete first draft of this article on my site, Rob had placed a robots.txt file on his site keeping older versions of his site from appearing in the archives, according to the system. The man would seem to have something to hide, and I will be glad to show it to you, as I answer his remarks point by point, and give you a little sample of what the Internet has meant to me.

If past experiences with Carlson's friends are any guide, I suspect he'll now consider removing the robots.txt file and pretending that it was never there. I'm not even going to try to play that back and forth game, updating my site every time he reverses his earlier choice. Who has time for that? I'll just leave the link in place, invite the reader to check it at his leisure to see how that archived copy is doing today, and remind him of the common sense principle, long honored in law, that destroyed or suppressed evidence is presumed to be unfavorable to the one destroying or suppressing it. If the man has nothing to hide, as I'm sure he'll claim he doesn't, then why does he need to hide it?

The old version of that article, which was up in public view for some time, begins ...


Joseph Dunphy

For what it's worth, he gets the spelling right, of the Anglicized form of my name, at least. Treasure this moment, because it's the last time you'll ever see him concern himself with the facts.


In my opinion, culled from my personal observation

One has to love the dodge. Really, one does, unless one wishes to be the subject of a blog page about how one is "righteous asshole", oneself. That will make more sense in a minute, as you read more about the nightmarishly judgemental evil that is Joseph Dunphy, and try not to think too much about the question "isn't it judgemental, to complain about how judgemental somebody is being". Remember, honestly thinking for yourself is bad; playing the Bill Maher game of pretending to be deep in thought before giving the canned answer that is expected of one and then acting as if this were independent and original thought is the way to go in the Politically Correct world that some like to live in. God forbid that you should presume to question the actions and thoughts of those annointed to lead in reward for their eagerness to follow the rest of the herd.

A full page of defamatory prose from Mr. Carlson is about to follow, absolute naked character assassination, but we're not allowed to object to this generally questionable behavior on the man's part because he's just stating an "opinion" about this Joseph Dunphy character, who the reader has probably never interacted with before, much less met in person. If it's an "opinion", it can't be slanderous, right?


of his web page and activities on Burning Man related mailing lists throughout the United States, this gentleman is a distinguished member of the following groups:



Since we're about to start wading into the mental world of a postmodernist, do a little creative visualization and imagine yourself pulling on your hip boots. It's going to get ripe in here. Point by point deconstruction follows, whenever this Carlson person is coherent enough to make a recognizable point. "Joseph Dunphy wouldn't know the sun if it came out of the sky and flew up his ass". Ummm, OK, how does one respond to that, other than to observe that this man is a fixture in the Burning Man culture, where drug use is prevalent and limited only by the depth of the pockets of some of the richer and very generous participants. If some of the people that you are going to be reading about on these pages seem more than a little stoned, that's not your imagination. They really are that out of it.


People who believe that the entire purpose of the First Amendment is solely to defend their right to be righteous asshole

"Just because we're supposed to have freedom of speech, that isn't supposed to mean that we're supposed to have the freedom to say things that other people don't want to hear, does it, Mr.Dunphy?" Actually, it does, and it has to for that right to mean anything at all. Otherwise, what one is left with is "the freedom to say anything that nobody objects to". How could one not have such a freedom?

We have Carlson basically writing "Joseph Dunphy has taken the position that the first amendment gives him the right to write offensive things", without going into any specifics about what that allegedly "offensive" material is, and if you take a look at his comments on that page, you'll see that he does that a lot, so let's make specific what he would like to keep vague, and give a typical example of material deemed "offensive" by him and his friends.



On the burningcorn list, somebody came up with the bright idea of creating a magnesium bonfire. This violently, dangerously reactive column II element was going to be burned in a location that was a short hike from a swamp, implying the likely presence of a high water table. A large pile of magnesium will burn at a very high temperature, in the thousands of degrees, more than high enough to burn away soil, dropping our semi-molten mass of magnesium into the ground water below, where, as the oxygen in the water bonds to the magnesium in preference to the far more weakly metallic hydrogen, large amounts of heat will be released by the oxidation. Compare the density of water to that of air, keep in mind the fact that about 90% of water is oxygen by weight, and think about what that implies in terms of the rate at which the immersed magnesium will be exposed to oxygen; it would be equivalent to burning the magnesium under high pressure, and sure enough, any safety manual will warn one to not let magnesium come into contact with water. This is fantastically dangerous, not because somebody named "Joseph" had a few negative thoughts, but because physical reality works that way, like it or not.

Not only would one have the rapid combustion of the metal, but one would also have large amounts of now liberated hydrogen, mixing with the air, right next to a very, very hot fire, leading, with near certainty, to the ignition of that hydrogen. To add to our joys, as if this weren't enough already, this was going to be done in a field surrounded by woods, during the dog days of summer, when the ground above that thick layer of forest clay would be coated with relatively dry grass, excellent kindling for the forest fire one would be starting. Did I mention that, as many sites will point out, magnesium will burn with a light many times brighter than the sun, enough to cause flash blindness at a good distance? Picture being a local firefighter called in to control a blaze putting out toxic smoke, that one can't look at without courting irreversible retinal damage, and ask yourself "does this really sound like a good idea". To the bulk of the people on that list, it did, and they were greatly offended that the Evil Joseph Dunphy had said otherwise. Tsk, tsk, what won't those grad school educated riff raff post in clear view of their high school dropout betters? *Sniff* Pass the snuff, please.



There are other such incidents, and you'll see documentation of some of them if you wander this site, but this last one illustrates the point nicely. The word "offensive" gets thrown around very lightly by our Politically Correct friends, who count on a level of trust from their audience that is mystifying, given how often this kind of game has been played in the recent historical past. There is a fundamental, qualitative difference between saying something that is genuinely morally offensive, like advocating the return of slavery, and merely saying something that somebody doesn't want to hear, even though it happens to be true, in the case of the magnesium bonfire incident mentioned above. Any attempt to equate the two is a crying plea for involuntary commitment and medication, and yet from Carlson we see just that.

One can certainly see why Robert would choose to keep the details a little vague in such a case, but he is not always so cautious in this piece, as we see in this next line in which he lets himself be pinned down on a specific, untruthful accusation. Speaking of remarks which genuinely are offensive:



People who believe that egregious censorship occurs when they are ignored by intelligent folks with day jobs



Implying that anybody unemployed or underemployed must be lacking in intelligence? Nice, progressive attitude, Rob; perhaps he might want to drop by an IEEE meeting or a department of Mathematics, and try bouncing that theory off of a good number of very hungry people who will be visibly brighter than himself, but in the meantime, let's focus on what he is claiming that I said. According to Rob, I complained about censorship because other people decided to not read what I had written.

There is no truth in that. I have complained about people who've demonstrably responded to posts I've made without reading them first, and am positively fascinated by the notion that I was wrong to have done so, but as a matter of objective, undebatable historical reality, I've only complained about censorship when I've actually been subjected to it, either by having my posts or other writings deleted without my consent, or when I was otherwise not allowed to be heard. One can try to play lawyer and argue that Rob's spin is a fair description of the NoCem posts that I've criticised on ethical grounds, but again, there is a difference between deciding, for oneself, to not read something, and trying to make sure that others don't read it, either, or in some cases won't even know that it is there to be read, depending on how filters have been set. The former is a personal choice, the second is power politics at its very worst, when those seeking to keep others from being heard resort to misreprepresentation of their positions to get their audience to stonewall their targets - but then our good friend Mr. Carlson would certainly know about that tactic, wouldn't he?



People who use "quote marks" as a literary tool to express derision



Yes, this so rare a usage, almost as rare as indenting one's paragraphs on a typed page.



People who pretend to understand the groups they are participating in and get upset when confronted with an actual experience different than how they believe things should be



In other words, people who object when they're treated unfairly.



Paranoid delusionals



This is a seriously defamatory piece of innuendo which you may notice that Carlson backs up in no way in that earlier version of his page. One can almost picture him saying "I don't have to back it up, because I'm just stating an opinion", but that's absurd. Such an "opinion" is nothing more than an accusation, and Mr. Carlson knows it. In this later post, Carlson apparently decides to back up his personal attack with a gross misrepresentation of events on one of the lists. Quoth our trollish friend:



Joseph Dunphy is busy trolling the MI_BM list. His last post checked in at 12,000 unquoted bytes. Gotta hand it to the guy, it takes some stamina to write a new 16 solid paragraphs about all the people who are out to get you every few days.




A quick survey of the archives of the MI_BM list (search for posts mentioning commonsense666atlast@yahoo.com) soon tells one a much different story. Starting with the Papparozzi Incident, one will come across a troll who, even in the company of people like Mr.Carlson, managed to stand out through his sheer loudmouthed, obnoxious sleaze and stupidity - one "BobbyG" (Bob Gifford of Athens, Wisconsin). Bob got my attention when a certain young lady started lighting up her stash, and he decided to photograph her in the act of puffing on her contraband. Personally, I might not approve of her choice of smoking material, but I even less approve of the act of collecting what could be used as evidence against one of one's supposed friends, should she be taken in on a drug charge. I asked Mr.Gifford to please stop doing that, and was immediately treated to a true prima donna performance by somebody who was simply aghast to hearing a younger person daring to criticise his actions. A model of standard Woodstock generation psychotic ageism, Mr.Gifford has not let go of the affront to his ego to this day.

In the incident linked to in the paragraph above, I found myself shot, without my knowledge or consent, in a state of undress by somebody who then stated his intention of place the film he shot on the sly on Cable Access TV in Columbus, Ohio, which gets to be a little too close to being in my own backyard, close enough that I'd have to worry about where that film might wander to, and what the social consequences might be. You can see for yourself just how much of an asshole Bobby continued being in the course of that discussion and others, with the result that when a few of us decided to hold a get together and the question of inviting this guy came up, I almost lost my eardrums to the unanimous response, as a small room reverberated with the sound of people crying out in out in unison



Oh, Hell No!




A short while later, there was some talk about creating the Alternative Chicago Burners list, an unoffical list created specifically to be a safe haven where the flamers and trolls like Mr.Gifford would not be let in, allowing the rest of us, in theory, to breathe more easily and enjoy the peace and quiet. Rather too much quiet, as it turned out, as we discovered that the trolling was all that most people online seemed to be interested in, but peace and quiet that a number of people, some of them in BMORG and one of them one of the moderators on MI_BM (calling herself "firefabulon", aka Cary Lixey), were not prepared to be tolerant of. Ms.Lixey, in response to the mere fact of my having posted on her list over a year after being gently corrected by somebody accused of being me in response to her ranting and raving over the fact that somebody was being refused an invitation "merely" for being a loudmouth and an asshole (a very personal issue for her, this), decided, having deleted her own posts in the relevant thread on ePlaya, to rehash the whole incident on her own list in (what else) the vaguest of terms, and I simply stated what had occured during the earlier discussion on ePlaya.

To refer to such an incident, in which I merely defend myself against an unwarranted ranting personal attack as "16 solid paragraphs about all the people who are out to get" me is utterly disingenuous, as the existence of the personal attacks I'm responding to could hardly be disputed; they were made in public onlist, where all could see them. One could also say something about the insanity, not just of the fact that Ms.Lixey was dredging up a completely unrelated fight in which I was not even a combatant, as far as I can remember, from over a year back in a discussion in which this was completely off-topic, but let us gaze in amazement at the issue that was the source of all of this drama that would not die: whether or not I and a few of my acquaintences had the right to decline to invite somebody to the occasional party, on the basis that we found him completely obnoxious. It boggles the mind. Was this really being treated as a serious topic for debate? No, even nuttier than that, the ludicrous position that "an invitation is an entitlement" was taken as a dogma that we had no right to even question, to judge from Ms.Lixey's tirade on the subject which, again, was out for all to see. To point to behavior this bizarre and merely call it unreasonable and explain why is not merely not paranoia, it's downright generous, a free gift of undeserved tact given to somebody who could have had far worse said of her with complete justification.



Hypochondriacs



I have no idea of where he gets this one from. Yes, yes, it's "just an opinion", right? As in, make up anything you want, throw some mud and hope it sticks? The best I can come up with, as my health is fairly robust and I have yet to write about any serious illnesses I've experienced, is that I've reported having a few food allergies and sensitivities. This comes up in "Bad Times on the Green Tortoise", and I suppose that I could make myself very sick were I foolish enough to ignore those, but ... is this 2007? Can there still be somebody out there so ignorant that he thinks that having allergies is so rare as to be unheard of? Or is he just trolling? You be the judge, and keep in mind, as you read Robert Carlson's words of wisdom, that you're hearing this medical diagnosis from somebody who has never met me in person, and is not a physician, raising the question of how one could seriously maintain that he would even be qualified to hold an opinion on that subject.



Closed minded people who lambast others for their lack of an open mind when they reply with intelligent opinions or expressions of open-jawed disbelief



Ah, like that brilliant magnesium bonfire debate, mentioned above. You have to see this one to believe it, and if you come back later, you will - I saved copies of all of the posts. It's just a matter of finding time in my day to write up another account, and I'm glad to say that I have other things that tend to take priority. I'll get around to it, but until I do, just drop by the burningcorn list on yahoogroups and do a search under "magnesium". It is classic, with somebody citing an url in support of the groupthink expressed on the subject, and the regulars then losing it when I have the bad taste to actually look at the page referred to and note that it doesn't support the position it was cited in support of, and many other moments that childish or more so. Then there's the one in which somebody who couldn't even spell "prosecutor" decided that two of my brothers who actually are licensed attorneys didn't know the law, and that a photo of somebody smoking her pot would not be admissable in a court of law. (The prisons would be much emptier were the law to work the way this man thought it did). Go through this site, and you'll see that the opinions I'm responding to, almost without exception, tend to be incredibly stupid ones, as do the people I'm usually responding to.



People who write about other people on their web page to make a point (this is actually something of a distinguished group, but I digress)



In the case of Mr. Carlson's site, aside from it giving him the opportunity to pick fights with people he isn't likely to have to face in the real world, given the lack of anything but vague soundbite content, one wonders what that point might be, other than a vacuous encouragement of hostility for its own sake, which fits in perfectly with the next line.



People who get in their minds that something that offends their sensibilities is simply wrong, not different



But this is exactly what Rob fails or refuses to get - that some things are simply wrong, and not merely different, like, for example, lying about what other people have written. Or calling for somebody's murder because he decided to not show the John Waters movie "Pink Flamingoes" at a movie night set up to help get an African percussionist for one of the camps. Or making a commitment in advance to have gluten-free food available for a gluten intolerant customer, collecting a few hundred dollars from him, and then going back on one's word without any offer of compensation, leaving him to wander from camp to camp begging for food. Or, knowing that somebody's mother is barely cold in the grave, joking about how one is keeping her dead body in one's attic. There are some behaviors that are just simply not acceptable under any sane, civilized standard, even when one's friends encourage one to continue pushing, and there is a word for those who aren't willing to accept such limits. The word is "sociopath".



People who take Internet mailing lists too seriously, and wouldn't know the sun if it came out of the sky and flew up their ass



You thought I made up that line, didn't you? No, Rob Carlson really did write that. But when, for example, a few of our extreme left wing friends decided to show their dislike for my moderately conservative political opinions by phoning death threats in to my now departed mother on Christmas Eve, right as she came back from chemotherapy, which they knew about, yes, I took that seriously. The Internet can and has been used for some fairly vile purposes, many times by Rob's friends, if one can call them that. While Rob can't seem to wrap his brain around this concept, yes, there are real, flesh and blood human beings on the other side of the connection, whose reputations and lives can be affected by the misdeeds of others. What really is the difference between carrying out a whispering campaign by telephone or by e-mail, to mention one common problem? Why does the choice of medium matter, morally speaking? When one uses the Internet to defame, harass or both, one's target does have a legitimate right to object.



People who have a bad time at Burning Man and blame the organizers, other participants, playa dust, naked people, and friendly hippies for being out of place and not "getting it"



Really? Let's take a look at what I wrote about these very matters, in a number of cases in discussions in which Mr.Carlson was a participant himself, no less, and so would be in a position to know the truth. In point of fact, my blaming the naked people at Burning Man for any bad time I might have had there would seem most unlikely, because I was one of the naked people at Burning Man 2001. Mr.Carlson knows this, because he was present for the bizarre argument on the baltwash-burning list in which one of his friends ("Ranger Clay") tried to create the impression that there were going to be arrests for nudity on the Playa, which, by the way, there weren't. Having watched his faction lose an argument that, given the long established clothing optional nature of Burning Man one has to be amazed that Rob's friends ever wanted to take up, Carlson now wants to swap positions between my side and his side. Read the posts for yourself. It's not debatable.

Nor was this an isolated pattern of behavior on Rob Carlson's part, during the course of his writing of that post. Rob mentions Playa Dust. Let's take a look at what I actually wrote on the subject on this page, which you can see hasn't changed much in the last few years (aside from being redecorated and proofread a little).



One of the claims that we are given is that the Playa dust is so corrosive that it will eat its way through one's shoes during one's stay at Burning Man ... No doubt about it, the Playa is rough on bare feet and it does its damage very quickly. One quick barefoot trip around Black Rock City can leave one limping for a month. But that corrosive? As Truthteller so rightly argued, we should use a little common sense.

The Playa dust is not heavy, coarse stuff that a wind will barely lift off the ground. ... Here's the common sense: if the Playa dust was corrosive enough to burn its way through your shoes, what would it be doing to the delicate tissues of your lungs? Leather is nothing more than cured cow skin, the curing makes the skin tougher, and seriously, who has tougher skin, you or a cow? If the dust would eat its way through leather, ... what would consuming it do to the delicate membranes lining our mouths and esophagi? ...

Clearly, this is a fairy tale. Sure enough, I still have the gym shoes that I wore that week. They are in practically mint condition. The worst thing that you can say about them is that they still have that slightly funky playa dust smell. (Actually, I kind of like that).




What we're left with, then, is my saying that walking barefoot on the Playa is generally a bad idea, a point that BMORG makes itself and practically every burner alive has reiterated, and that the nastiness of this stuff has been greatly overrated. In fact, to show you just how far our good friend Carlson was willing to go as he seemingly lied just for the sake of lying, let's take a look at what little I did write on the subject of Playa dust on that bm-chicago list he mentions. In message 422 on that list, in regard to my experience of being caught in a dust storm I wrote:



File this one under pleasantly strange experiences ...

I'm out in the center of the Playa, well away from the Esplanade and the tents. I've left the backback at home, in the House of Indulgence, having gotten tired of carrying it. All of a sudden - bam ! - a wall of dust blows up, and is about to hit, and here I am with no keffiyeh, no goggles, just me and my bare skin, and one nasty dust allergy. Here's what's strange. When the storm hit, it almost felt soothing. My air passages opened up. My muscles relaxed. I actually felt better. Much better.

I have no logical explanation for this. Inhaling particulate matter should make it harder to breathe, not easier. Anybody else have this experience?



The worst thing that one can honestly say about that post is that I misspelled "keffieyeh", because surely a fellow burner could not have mislead me on the proper way to Romanize that. In a subsequent post on the same thread, I go on to write



On Fri, 7 Sep 2001, Magorn wrote:



> I'll vote for Playa Magic and let it go at that......



The Playa gently healing me? I like that.

It did seem to happen that way, though. On Saturday night, there was some guy who was spinning out of control, not watching where he was going at all. All of a sudden, the back of this guy's hand came out of nowhere, as he swung wildly toward me out of the darkness, and it split my lip right open. Annoying, but the wound was largely healed within hours! Very unusual, and quite pleasant.



> Playa dust stroms for me always made it
> much harder to breathe and in one case
> damn near impossible.....but that's the
> playa for you.....its barely possible
> that the particulate matter was so fine
> that it acted as a lubricant, something
> like powdered graphite, but the akali
> content should have made it most
> irritating to nasal passages and mucus
> membranes....however the ways of Black
> Rock are passing strange.....



The reaction does seem to be very individualized. I went out with a suitcase full of skin care products. By the end of the week, the only problems I had were directly attributable to a bad pair of shoes, and a panicked barefoot run when I hit a hot patch of dust. (I hit a rough patch under the dust, and loosened some skin. Dumb !) But the only skin care product I used, other than bag balm and boric acid soaks on the feet to protect the blisters, was sun screen. No nasal saline used. No problem.

A campmate over at H.O.I., though, found himself bleeding out his nose, and with cracked skin, so if a BM virgin is reading this, I hope s/he doesn't take this as an indication that there is no need to read that survival guide. Quite the contrary. Until you've experienced the environment, you don't really know how far your DNA will carry you, and overconfidence did get some people really badly hurt. They'll live, but they won't be happy about the fact, for a while.


Joe



leaving me in the position of being one of the few, if not the only person who has ever been to Burning Man and reported a benign side to Playa Dust. More to the point, one finds me in the unpopular position of disputing the very mythology that Carlson would have you believe that I invented. On the other hand, that very same believe in the corrosive alkalinity can be seen to be an article of faith on ePlaya, the New York Burning Man list, and other places where the Burning Moonies gather, just by looking around.



People who write eight paragraphs of nonsense when two sentences will do



Rob, please, take credit for your creation. You have far more than two sentences worth of nonsense in that post. As for your belief that common decency requires one to write in soundbites, what exactly is the attention span of an adult supposed to be? Longer than a few paragraphs, I would hope, a length that is a little difficult to avoid anyway when answering complaints as vague as this one:



People who don't read or understand the rules, and then complain loudly when people call them on it



Which rules, in which location, violated in which way? Carlson doesn't deign to tell us.



People immortalized in The Killfile Dungeon



The whole documented, silly story of that can be found in the "Tim Skirvin lays down the law" section of The Fred Cherry Story. Yes, that's the one about the guy who sued then mayor Ed Koch of New York because of his supposed role in "The Organized Homosexual Conspiracy of America". Read and be amazed, as you think about who some people are willing to turn to for validation.







Yes, Robert is quite the character, in not a very good way, but surely I must have met others just as loathsome and they don't all have pages about them on this site, so what makes him so special? Because, I would say, he so beautifully illustrates so much of what is wrong with the Internet as a social experiment, that his story, in all of its random lunacy, serves as an excellent starting point for this site. In the old days, before the Internet became part of my life, I certainly ran into people as unprincipled and as insane as this guy, many of them students I ran across as a TA in grad school.

We had one TA who rescheduled a mere study session, because it conflicted with his mother's funeral (no, not me), to find that a few of his students tried to get him fired because of that. I, myself, aside from the many wonderful memories that one's Jewishness can afford one in a redneck college town, had more than a few students who turned in work that was wrong, got angry about the fact that they were marked off for being wrong, and thought nothing of trying to get me expelled because as they came into my office with the attitude that an A was their birthright, they heard the forbidden word "no". Some of the stories that got spun were more than a little creative, which is why I learned to make a point of having other TAs around as witnesses during office hours. The good news was that our office building was one of the more social places on campus, so I never had to chance, in my initial idealistic naivite, to get burned as badly as some people did. I suppose the fact that I looked a little too young to be capable of being a party in a sex scandal, and that I was more than a little prudish back then (even by Conservative Jewish standards) probably helped, but I definitely did get a chance to see just how petty some people were willing to be, how dishonest and how vicious.

I can still remember the guy who turned in this random pile of scribbles, nothing coherent on the page, and tried to claim full credit on the problem on the basis that he could talk glibly about how problems like that one were solved, no specifics offered, of course, and this being done after the exam had been returned and the solution set posted. He couldn't even understand the solution set, but he could wave his hands around a lot and make authoritative sounding noises, and was indignant about the fact that I didn't think that was good enough. I wouldn't have to doubt that he would try to end my career, because I heard back from the head of graduate studies about somebody's meritless complaint, and his attempt to get a university admin to support him in it. Certainly, in intent, this clown was orders of magnitude worse than Rob Carlson, but in the long run, he never came close to being as much of a headache as Carlson and his ilk. Why?

Because when it was over, it was over. If that former student was living next to me, he'd be a headache, judging from his conduct during an incident in which he took to paying me personal visits at home, just so he could share a few racial epithets between problem sets. But I'm here, back in Chicago, and he's off in whichever unfortunate city got him, and it's done. Probably. That's what the Internet changed - by making everybody into everybody else's virtual neighbor, it eliminated the possibility of just moving away and being left alone. Without the Internet, somebody like that student may vent at a handful of people who will listen to him for a while, and maybe make a few supportive noises, but will eventually just be sick of it, because being in the physical presence of a crazy person is a little stressful. But online, we are always meeting new people, we can meet them en masse, and we are never so close that dementia can be as scary as it used to be, when seen in others. The problem never just goes away, so what does one do about it?

What you do if you are me, is set up a page telling your side of a few stories, and then ask yourself why anybody would want to visit such a boring monstrosity. Because you set them up, really - the people, I mean, not the sites that you're trying to get them to visit. What you do is create a number of pages that people will want to visit just for their own sake - recipe and photograph pages in the case of the Halls. Some will visit and skate on to other things, and that's cool. "Hope you enjoyed your stay". But with others, curiosity gets the best of them. "What's over there? Probably nothing that interesting, but ... what's over there?" They can't help but look, and one does one's best to reward them for their adventurousness with a readable narrative and maybe a little more eye candy. Nothing museum quality, necessarily, just a sign that one made an effort. Having done so, one then does one's best to unstick oneself from the tar baby that is the interactive internet.

The premise offline has been "mind your own business and be reasonable, and even if you run into a few crazies who will tell a few stories, the truth will come out in the end and everything will work out", but then along came this little thing called Postmodernism, and the Online community is full of it. Think about it - if reality is thought to be nothing more than an arbitrary culture construct, then what happens to the concept of honesty? If you get to create your own truth, then how can anything be a lie? Look at the behavior you see out of some of the people whose works appear on this site, and then think again about what Rob Carlson has written, and how often you've heard others say things reminiscent of it in so many places:



People who pretend to understand the groups they are participating in and get upset when confronted with an actual experience different than how they believe things should be ...People who get in their minds that something that offends their sensibilities is simply wrong, not different



In other words, wrong is right and anything goes. There is no room for conscience in such a world view. The "truth outs in the end" because people see something other than the truth going called the truth, and eventually that's something they can't live with, if they want to be able to live with themselves. But if there is no truth other than the truth we make, and there is no morality that goes beyond a summary of our whims, or rather, if you believe these things to be true, then in your mind, where is the sense in following anything but the easiest course?

Elsewhere on this site, as I talk about the Internet as it exists as a community, I speak in the past tense - about where we've been, why we've been there, and where we might have been instead, had different choices been made by people who really weren't thinking about the choices they were making. Right now, I'm speaking in the ... future tense? Does English have one of those? I'm speaking of what might be, or in this case, what probably can't be, and as I do, I can't help but notice that the culture of the world I encounter offline has changed greatly. Were I to find myself in 1977 rather than 2007, facing the growth of a technology like the Internet, I might feel a little more hopeful about the possibility of seeing it used well, but time has passed and the players have changed, and what was once a matter of honor so instinctual as to go unnoticed has become a game played for the sake of no greater reward, than the empty satisfaction of a meaningless victory. I have seen the hush that falls over a virtual community when the moderators declare and enforce no harsher a rule than one that one may not lie about what others have written, as the group mills around in virtual confusion, unable to know what to do next.

Honor itself has become something that our new generation can not conceptualize, with its well-trained incredulity toward such "metanarratives" as those of integrity, honor, or even sanity, so when, as a moderator, one tells the participants "just be honest and hesitate before going on the attack, and you'll be OK", many seem to find themselves as ill at ease as before, because they have no idea of what the word "honesty" means, and are thus left completely in the dark as to what will be demanded of them. One can not help but know what to expect, and on how brief of a timetable. My view of such things is that while we may speak of the proverbial road not taken, in this case we have missed the off ramp and left it so far behind, that we're going to have to drastically change our travel plans. I have a few forums attached to this site, and if they pick up and are put to responsible use by decent people, that'll be wonderful, but I'm not going to put a lot of effort into trying to make that happen, for the same reason that I wouldn't put a lot of effort into weeding a garden, were I to find myself in the middle of a levee breach following Katrina. There's just too much accumulated toxicity out there for me to be able to keep pace with bailing some of these places out, especially since I'd most likely be the only one doing the bailing. "Lie low, and maybe you won't be noticed" has been the lesson several decades of Political Correctness, much of it reinforced by the fanatical crazies ranting and raving online, has taught to many Americans, helping to give many of us an abundant pool of very timid, very passive people to draw from. I've tried that, made no progress, seen little support, and have decided that the time has long since come to try other things.

In these pages, I probably come across as being a sort of put upon everyman, but aside from that, sometimes something of a cipher. In part, because I make some limited effort to remain so. There are, apparently, literally dozens of people named "Joseph Dunphy" in the Chicago area, and I have no desire to help the crazies track me down. This is not paranoia on my part; just wander the Net and read up on the topic of netstalking. One of the side effects of the last two decades worth of exaggerated PC rhetoric has been to encourage some of our more unstable young people to think of their anger management issues as being an expression of idealistic zeal, and to feel proud as they turn fanatical over issues often so trivial, that one is sometimes amazed that they could even be seen as being topics for debate. For example, we had the several dozen people who came completely unhinged when they discovered that I would not let another man give me a massage - as if that were any of their business. But they decided that it was, deciding that in some vague sense I was persecuting homosexuals through this refusal, and so pursued me from forum to forum to continue their crusade, imagining their petty harassment to be some sort of noble fight on behalf of the imaginary oppressed. Then there were those who were enraged when I dared to argue that if one got killed, that this should generally be regarded as being a bad thing. I've substitute taught gang members in the Chicago Public School system, literally seeing people killed on my way to work, so you can imagine some of the things I've seen and heard, and even I was shocked at the vile hatefulness of the rhetoric that followed the simple, common sense observation that on the whole, one is probably better off if somebody else doesn't kill one. These were, in no way, isolated incidents.

In the old days, before the Far Left saved the world and before the Internet was here, and people had to face the people they socialized with, there was a simple solution to the problems posed by people such as these. They were put in closed psychiatric wards, but the Internet, with its many opportunities to gather and mobilise anonymously, Postmodernism with its fashionable blurring between reality and fiction, along with other factors, have helped turn the world upside down, turning what would have once been simple matters to resolve into something looking like a the product of a collaboration between Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka. Having no desire to be a character in such a story, I've made a point of keeping my online life out of my offline life, as the former fades away. Most of my interests never get mentioned on this site. I don't give you any pictures of myself, my friends or family, tell you where I live, talk about my research, or otherwise really give you a solid picture of who I am. Safety is one issue, because, as I've said, we live in a crazy, vicious world, and the most vicious crazies have e-mail accounts these days. That's one reason, but not the only one.

The truth is, I'm not 100% clear on who I am, myself. To get to know oneself, one has to know freedom, and that's precisely what I, like so many others, have been denied since birth. The person you meet, if you run into me in person, is kind of shy and quiet, in fact more than a little mousy. That's not by choice. Picture the experience of working your way through college and grad school, at a time when schools are price fixing on tuition, which they're jacking up at many times the rate of inflation, without financial aid, on jobs paying subpoverty level wages. How much free time would you have? Now picture yourself completing your coursework, having barely had a moment to so much as catch your breath much less have a social life, discovering that all of the jobs you can locate are being given out to those who partied with the right people, and finding that you've been left to hang slowly, twisting in the breeze indefinitely, offered no real opportunity to escape poverty, because despite having gone through all of that and still put in a distinguished, Dean's list average performance in school, after years and years of looking, you find that nobody is willing to let you have a chance at that first "real job".

Picture yourself getting by during those years, in an economy that is sinking on the bottom, by scraping together a living out of a multitude of odd jobs, while watching semiliterate Anglo-Saxon frat boys and sorority girls, ones whose gross incompetence you've witnessed first hand as you've tutored them, get lavish offers. There aren't that many real world experiences to be had, just above the starvation line, in a city run by the overcompensated and underworked, for the overcompensated and underworked, and few of them offer stories that would make for good dinner table conversations. I've learned a lot about just how smugly rotten people can be, as if being partially disabled hadn't taught me that growing up, but there is nothing in that experience that teaches me much about myself, because there are no surprises to be found there. What are you going to learn? That if somebody kicks you in the face it hurts, and that you'll do what needs doing to make him stop? A surprise, perhaps, to those immersed in Pop Christianity who will be appalled that you acted in self-defense instead of "turning the other cheek", but not really to anybody who hasn't completely lost his mind.

A life like that is bound to make one a little mousy, but there is a difference between acknowledging one's victimization and laying back and enjoying it. As very limited finances have allowed, I've pursued theatre as a hobby, not just because it allows a chance to get out and do something creative, but because it offers a chance to step out of oneself, take a look at one's own character and slowly nudge it into a form more to one's liking. One can gradually make oneself a little more outgoing and I have. Some of this you'll see over on the Cafe Satan homepage, eventually, which will be fleshed out more over at Bravenet. You'll find some images of Chicago over on my space at Geocities, along with images of other places I've visited while travelling with friends and family elsewhere in these pages, and a hint at how the experience you see me chronicling might end.

At the end of one week in New Orleans, I was more a part of the community than I was after half of a decade in Chicago. In Arizona, New Mexico and even the frequently maligned Georgia, I was struck with the warmth and friendliness with which I was greeted, something I had not seen at home in many years, and not really so often even back in those barely remembered good old days, and found myself thinking that I was living in the wrong town. Who can say? Today, the Chicago photogallery is my hometown section and the pictures from Albuquerque are travel pictures; maybe next year the reverse will be true. When I see the jaws drop in the places I visit as my hosts ask me about what my home is like, and I tell them of what is left of my mother's old neighborhood, of my brother being picked up off his crutches and thrown into a wall and of neither the police nor many others in the supposedly "nice" neighborhood he lived in seeing anything wrong with this, of that same police force rushing my mother with weapons drawn as she came out of her office because they were sure that she had to be there to burglarize it, of these and similar incidents, I remember that there is nothing normal about such a life, and that sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence.

I have written, elsewhere, with considerable scorn of this new America that some among us are so hellbent on creating, in which man falls upon his fellow man as a matter of habit because the very belief that there is a difference between right and wrong is seen as being a quaint relic of a less multiculturally enlighted world, but I wonder how far that new America spreads out across the landscape it does so much to poison, wherever it has taken hold. Outside of the Internet, which is its own little world, where have I run into that Multiculturally Politically Correct New World Order, with its strange and unwholesome blending of the cultural worst of what the Far Right and Far Left had to offer? Outside of the Central Plains States, and a tiny handful of cities on the coasts (New York and Boston on the East, San Francisco and Los Angeles on the West), really nowhere. Even on that disastrous trip with the Green Tortoise into the Black Rock desert, the only people who were a problem on the trip were the San Franciscans I was travelling with. The Nevadans, when I got to interact with them, which wasn't anywhere close to being as often as I would have liked, were an absolute delight.

Maybe, I think, that healthier saner America of old that I long for is still out there, wherever the word "trendy" hasn't come to be thought of as a compliment. It's an interesting possibility to explore, and I do like to explore. If so, what will you see on this site, and its sister sites, including my blog, after that? Really, no more of the strangeness or very little of it, because there will be little to report. A little more photography, a few more recipes exploring the boundaries between African and Spanish cooking, and a few pleasant oddities to come which you may find surprising, but little in the way of narrative.







Enough said, so let's enter the site. A silly question, perhaps, but are you in a mood for something pleasant or for something unpleasant? I can accommodate you, either way, and you should be easily able to find a path back to your ring should you wander off onto one of this page's sister sites.



  1. The Halls of Eternal Disbelief

    A guide to some of the strangeness I've encountered online and off, along with a rebuttal to the same, including the story of how the original incarnation of this site was censored to appease a few of the nutcases mentioned on it.


  2. An African Kitchen
  3. The Abyss
  4. Stumbling into the Void
  5. Return to Your Ring