Ah, trolls! Not to mention cyberstalkers, flamers and the other magical souls who do so much to make our online experiences memorable! What would we do without them, and will we ever have a chance to find out?

While many luminous spirits will come and go in our virtual lives, and usually without benefit of badly needed medication, a few usually linger in our memories. The two I remember the most clearly (Fred Cherry and Tim Skirvin), possibly because they simply would not let themselves be forgotten, I met at about the same time, back during the mid 1990s. One of them (Cherry), who I discuss elsewhere, "got his jollies" (as somebody put it) by spreading the rumor that anybody who disagreed with him about anything was secretly a homosexual neonazi who supported the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), finding a surprising number of people who were willing to take such accusations made by a total stranger on faith, even when the circumstances should have strained the credulity of even the most naive listener. Such as when, for example, one of the alleged neonazis turned out to be a practicing Conservative Jew (whose Conservatism bordered on Orthodoxy), or when somebody he accused of lying about his heterosexuality lived in the Midwest (his accuser living in Brooklyn). "How could he possibly know that?" is a question that seemed to occur to almost nobody online, until the notoriety of the accuser was sufficiently established, which is a shame because while what one is accused of in that specific case may not be a terribly bad thing, even so, once skepticism is aroused on one point, it has a way of attaching itself to the multitude of wild accusations that will follow, some of which will refer to very bad things indeed (eg. neonaziism).

One could discuss the damage done by bigotry or by that particular individual, and I do both elsewhere, and one could surely note with understandable sadness just how long the online community took to stop believing every word uttered by a crank whose crankishness was so blatant as to be almost like something out of a cartoon, but this would raise an even more unsettling thought, one which is brought to mind by the antics of the other special person who I met during the same episode. If the online community is so eager to uncritically believe and pass along rumors when the crankishness of the accuser is so blatant that its enthusiasm for doing so lasted for years, what happens when somebody decides to work that rumor mill a little more skillfully? For me, that somebody was a Mr. Tim Skirvin, then a freshman at the University of Illinois, who used tax funded computer facilities to strike out at his enemies by setting up a website on which they would be defamed, counting on the online public being trusting enough to treat anything on his site as if it were scripture, merely because it was online - and he was not to be disappointed in this. Not that Tim would rest on his laurels, by any means - a quick survey of the Googlegroups archives reveals that he posted in volume, literally in the thousands of articles, making meritless accusations stick as he attacked a number of victims, just through sheer persistance.

What did it take to get targeted? In the case of one writer who posted his thoughts to Usenet, simply the fact that he argued his points in detail, which one might think was something that one would expect a writer to do, but Skirvin wasn't about to be tolerant of this. In my own case, I incurred the wrath of this nobody with far too much time on his hands by responding to the aforementioned Mr.Cherry. After a polite expression of sympathy for the few sensible things Cherry said (he referred to cyberharassment at the hands of the child molesters online and the censorship they were able to get inflicted on their critics by sysadmins who decided to appease the crazies they were hearing from), I publicly posted a request that this discussion be taken into a group in which it was on-topic, which would not be soc.culture.israel. Ahem. Tim Skirvin then started acting like an annoying little nudge, sending multiple copies of the same rudely condescending letter. I looked on with amazement, noting that I was being nagged and mailbombed in slow motion at the same time, with an insane complaint about the fact that when I had asked people to take a discussion out of soc.culture.israel, I did so in soc.culture.israel. As opposed to where, sci.math? The discussion went downhill from there, as I describe and document elsewhere on my own page, and I dared to tell Tim to go away. More quickly than one could say "spoiled brat son of a tenured faculty member in a campus town", Skirvin showed that he was not going to accept the word "no" with good grace. It is now 2007, about twelve years since I did no more than tell somebody with a silly demand to go away, and believe it or not, he's still at it.

Most recently, as untroubled by the absence of evidence as Cherry was, Tim Skirvin has tried to get others to fight one of his pointless battles for him by accusing me of secretly being an "anonymous user" who got into a flamewar on another site, and never mind the fact that my name appeared nowhere in the discussion he cites. Tim's going to go for it, and as we see elsewhere on my site, this isn't the first time my little cyberstalker has played this little game, reportedly dropping hints that I was the user HipCrime (I'm not and couldn't be - I'm a statistician, and the offending party would seem to be an applied algebraist) and openly claiming - again without explaining how he'd know this or being asked how he would, that I was an Asian-bashing bigot calling himself "The Doctor". (Again, I'm not). Twelve years later, and he's still at it, and when you think about it, that's pretty darned creepy, in an obsessively psychotic kind of way. Perhaps unthinkingly, Skirvin even has his sock puppets Nik and Kile comment on this on his website.

*Tim really likes telling stories about Dunphy in real life, from what I've heard*

/Not quite as much as he does about Brandy Alexandre, mind you/

"Can't you let this go?", some will ask somebody who enjoys a special friendship like mine at a moment like this - clearly not getting it. Yes, I can let it go. Mr.Skirvin and others like him seldom enter my thoughts when I'm not online. But the question is not whether I can let go, but whether others can, and isn't it interesting to notice how the one attacking somebody else is never asked such a question - only the one being attacked is called on to defend his actions, as if the defense of one's own reputation were something that needed a defense? Then there is the ever popular rhetorical question "why would so-and-so say this if it weren't true", being asked by somebody who one must suppose was asleep when the subject of "Hitler's technique of the Big Lie" came up in History Class. The answer is contained in the question - if enough people believe in the assumption implicit in the question, then any shady character not taken in by the groupthink has a handy tool available for getting the masses to do his bidding. How powerful a tool? Powerful enough to have been instrumental in altering the history of an entire nation, so you think it might be enough to budge a few cliques? The mindlessness, as one asks this, will not cease. "You're comparing a flamewar to World War Two? How absurd!" somebody will retort, but think about that logic, and see how little sense it makes. Let's say one takes a bomb of the type that took out Nagasaki, and drops it on an abandoned shed in the middle of the north slope of Alaska. Is one safe in assuming that the shed would be well cooked, given that the bomb hitting it was powerful enough to destroy an entire city? Yet, by the logic above, one should feel compelled to reject that conclusion. "You're comparing the destruction of a small farm building with the death of a major city? How absurd!" It's the same argument, the same non sequitir, but passion is customarily encouraged to overcome reason and Tim Skirvin and others like him can capitalize on that fact - and they often do.

Why would somebody act this way? One would have to be psychic to know for sure, perhaps, but the conduct often witnessed is what one would expect to see out of somebody craving attention and the feeling of empowerment, and as Orwell writes in 1984, having his characters speak of the motivation underlying the tyranny of the fictional totalitarian state in his book

He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'

Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.

'Exactly. By making him suffer.

And why not? If it's on the web, it just has to be true. Thus, with a little effort in the direction described achieves a great deal of harassment, because of the unexamined popular attitudes it taps into. "If it's on the Web, it has to be true". The stupidity of this never ceases to amaze me. "Is it possible for somebody to put up a webpage saying whatever he wants?", I'll ask. "Of course it is! Got a problem with that?" Actually, I do - the laws against libel were a good idea before the advent of the Internet, and it seems strange to me that they've gone so by the wayside since. But, let's stay on subject. "Fine, if that's the case, then how does the citing of an url prove anything?"

"Deer in the headlights" look if you encounter one of these people offline, flaming and attitude online. We find ourselves encountering invincible stupidity. Unfortunately, it is also tireless stupidity, and I found myself very, very tired of answering the same questions and telling the same stories over and over. That is where the Halls of Eternal Disbelief came from. I put them up and let them do the talking for me, using the very same technology Tim used to counteract his efforts. That hasn't wiped away all of the political problems that Timmy's HTML temper tantrum has caused me, but it has mitigated them. As I gain the good sense to have better taste in choosing the online company I keep, it should help more and more. To those who find themselves in analogous situations, I would offer the suggestion that they learn from my experiences and my mistakes, and do likewise sooner rather than later, because online, the truth will not out in the end, on its own. This is something that you, as a victim, should very much care about for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because you owe it to yourself to care. That might sound like a selfish motivation to some, but when small evils help pave the way for greater ones, the line between self-interested and socially conscious behavior isn't always as sharp and clear cut as some would have us believe, a fact that can not help but have moral implications.

Popular Christianity does not encourage this thought but yes, there is such a thing as a duty to oneself. A society in which people do not assert their rights is a society in which people get out of the habit of expecting to see those rights asserted, and that's dangerous. Consider the casual way in which so many of the undergraduates of the 1990s, coming of age at a time when young people were encouraged to value empowerment over principle - to seek power for its own sake - started to gather in packs and bully those not as well connected, whenever they would dare to express a view the pack didn't care for or fail to grovel before their self-appointed betters - and then think about what some of our little thugs could have done with a little more power, because someday they'll have it. To allow unwarranted aggression to be rewarded with success is to encourage it and to change the future standards of conduct, because the bad values reinforced in those coming up today are those that will be seen in those who rule tomorrow, ignoring the long term implications of that reinforcement for the sake of a quick and dirty peace.

Dangerous, indeed, when one considers just how greatly civil liberties have already been diminished in the United States and much of the Western World at the time of this writing (July 2007); do we really need to see our populace more conditioned to expect to see the individual docily submit in the face of aggression than it already is? What happens when the unreasoning aggression which we think of as defining its own morality just by being comes, not from some little self-appointed, tin-plated dictator, but the real thing? What reasonable expectations would he have regarding the likely responses to his actions, that would disuade him from doing his worst, and what in that almost mechanistically predictable popular response would do anything but help him in his consolidation of power? If one learns to quail in fear before a chihuaha, how will one handle a wolf and does one imagine that the wolf will not smell one's fear? History tells us that the predators along us will come given half a chance, and one need only look at recent events to be reminded that they are never far at bay. To assert one's rights then, within reason, is a social obligation even if some feel this to be uncivil, because if nobody does so, neither civility nor liberty shall survive in the long run, and habits are reinforced in small and what may sometimes seem to be unimportant steps. Habits define character, and for a powerful society, character is destiny, a destiny that's going to be fairly grim if our people don't change their ways.

If you're one of the people Mr.Skirvin or somebody like him has harassed in this fashion (using state funded computer facilities, your tax dollars at work, in Tim Skirvin's case), then I'd recommend that you do likewise, and put your rebuttal here, on this little webring. This is technically a closed ring (the Ringsurf version of this ring is not), but I do welcome new members. The way you get an invitation is by using the mailform at the bottom of this page, or better, by joining my ring management list and making a post about your site, being sure to mention which ring you wish to join, because I run a number of them. Please be very, very patient. Unlike Mr.Skirvin, I do have a life outside of the Internet, and I don't log in very often. Give me a few weeks. I will get to you. Once I open the ring for you, and you've applied to it, feel free to talk with me about customising your code to suit the look and feel of your site. As long as visitors to your site can easily find their way to this ring, and as long as "next site", "previous site", "list sites" and "join ring" and a link to the appropriate Yahoo ID or the ring homepage are working, I'll be a happy camper. Let's enter the ring; would you prefer the version on Ringsurf or Alt-Webring?

(This page is part of "Joseph Dunphy's Page O' Squat", my new ... I guess that would be newish site at Geocities, copyrighted each of the years from 1998 to 2008).

If you don't see the little button appear at the bottom of this form, don't use it, because you are one of the unlucky few and you've arrived on one of those rare occasions when Bravenet is down. Not a problem, as I have a backup plan, of course. Just sign up for the "Joe Dunphy" list at Yahoogroups, and send a message to that moderated list mentioning your site.