Like I said, I had initially left names unnamed, because I had no desire to keep hostilities alive. I merely wished to tell my side of the story. However, here we are, coming up on 11 months after the fact, and some not only wanted to keep that hate going, they were clutching at straws to do so. Yet another person was accused of being me (gasp !), one Matthew Koch of New York, I believe, who was guilty of such hideous offenses as thinking for himself, having a sense of humor, and holding some non-left wing opinions.
As bizarre as it is, more than one person on the New York list seriously argued that this proved that Matt was really me. In fact, I've never even met or spoken with the man, much less been him. No matter, this alleged deception was grabbed onto as an excuse to continue personally attacking somebody who hadn't been present on that list to defend himself for far and away the better part of a year.
He was a piece of work. For those who don't recall him, here is some of his choice prose. http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:dD1xcG1N2CIC:members.netnormal.com/comm http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:hTK4HkzgOGIC:members.netnormal.com/comm (quoted material from other posters deleted; end of post) |
Here is what I wrote on the old site :
" What ranting would that be, Dusty? No rational person could look through the previous few pages, and seriously call what was seen on them "ranting". What you, the reader, see linked to, is nothing more than copies of some of those pages. Obviously, I have not taken them down, I've merely moved them into my main directory, a move made necessary by the FTP problems which I mentioned as you came onto this site. Should Internet Trash ever prove willing to fix the FTP server, I will be more than delighted to place forwarding pages at the old location. But, without a working FTP server, how am I supposed to do that with InternetTrash's software?"
This site has since been moved from Internet Trash to Newsguy for reasons that are Dustin Smith-related. We'll get to that.
Dusty was just grabbing onto any possible excuse to sling a little more mud, such as here, where he leaves the misleading impression that I'm hiding something. For this, there was no excuse, as I had left notes explaining the situation at most points of entry into this subsite, as I set up new links to the new location. My technical problems here weren't exactly a state secret. For somebody to make political use of them, like this, was really tacky.
It's also really typical behavior for this crowd, so I see no reason to hide their identities any more. As time and opportunity allow, I'll be posting documentation, with added details, for some of the incidents mentioned before. Unfortunately, in some cases, posts were cancelled before they could be saved, or were never archived in the first place (as in the case of the Photography and Drug Use discussion, which took place on the Diox Burningman list). But, you will see enough, if you choose to look, to get a real taste of what was going on, and this time, I'm naming names. The gloves are off. These people do not deserve even the least degree of courtesy.
Oh, I mentioned a Dustin Smith-related move, didn't I? It would seem that Dusty and Jamie Slater, who were more than comfortable with the idea of continuing the personal attacks on the New York list long after I had left it, weren't so comfortable with the idea that I would be free to defend myself and post a rebuttal. They and one of their friends (the aforementioned Tara Ball) wrote to the owner of Internet Trash asking that my pages be censored, said owner then rolling over on me in the most cowardly and shameless of ways. I set up this account at Newsguy after that, and have been happy with the switchover ever since.
Unfortunately, the material I can show you must, unavoidably, give you a somewhat distorted picture of what went on, because the Diox list didn't archive its posts. One might get the picture that what took place on the Diox list was mild compared to the feeding frenzy on Balt-Wash, for example, but this would be false. What happened was that I underestimated just how vindictive and just how persistent the Diox list people would be, and so I just deleted most of the abuse from Diox, and did my best to forget about it.
Unlike the Balt-Wash crowd (as far as I know, right now), the Diox people literally followed me into real life and onto the Playa. One day I'm coming out of my camp, and am approached by two young men who ask me if I'm Joseph Dunphy. I say that I am, a mistake which I'll never repeat in a Burning Man setting again. They ask me if I'd like to go over to Lazy Camp and meet some of the people from the Diox list. No thanks, I reply, pointing out that I had already been missing a lot of the things that I wanted to do from lack of time, and I saw little sense in seeking out an unpleasant experience. I just wanted to walk away from the situation.
The Diox people had different ideas. For the next few days I repeatedly (though hardly invariably) had the unpleasant experience of discovering that people who I had gotten along with very well during previous encounters, had suddenly turned cool toward me in my absence, to the point of not even wanting to talk. Invariably, when this would occur, I would find myself facing, right next to the people who no longer wanted to talk - the two people who wanted me to go visit the Diox list crowd. This happened far too may times for it to be plausible that this was all just a coincidence.
This bordered on stalking, and answers the question of why it is that I have no contact information on this site. Online cabals are just this petty. This incident is part of why I won't ever return to Burning Man - would you enjoy being shadowed like this ? It's more than a little creepy. Bad enough that this was happening to me during my five days on the Playa. Far, far worse if I should find this insanity following me into the day-to-day life I live year round, which I can't just walk away from.
So, would you like to see the documentation for
or would you rather just move on? Unless you've had enough of this, and would just like to return to "Bad Times on the Green Tortoise", that is.
