Faknig creds
So now johndoeX has been forced to admit he's not a working pilot, due to many pilots losing there jobs after 9/11 or he's on medical leave (because he's nuts perhaps?), depending on which of his posts you read. Someone said he claimed to be still in middle school when Iran/Contra broke, and he also claimed to be flying for 20 years w/ thousands of hours on jets. Anyone dig up the Iran/Contra post to further bust his balls?
And I love that credentials thread, absolutely hilarious! The loosers are all experts w/ high levels of education, yet they write like 9th graders and have reasoning skills far below that.
Too bad the new forum is "members only". No doubt because they realize they keep geting their ***es handed to them on a silver platter whenever they debate a skeptic. I may have to register a sock there just for lurking purposes!
eta: I see his balls have been busted on the Iran/Contra thread. Have to take the cat to the vet, be back later to see the ensuing hilarity!
Well, remember that the whole key to the Internet flame world is anonymity. You can be anyone you want, claim any kind of past and credentials you like, and most of your interlocutors and opponents will not have the ability or technology to hunt you down and find the truth. I could log on at Loose Change and call myself Anna Kournikova or Wally Schirra, and only someone deeply conversant with their lives and careers could prove me wrong.
Or I could just make up a fictional identity...I used to do that when baiting Nigerian 419 spam scammers. I was "D.W. Grifter, pornographer extraordinaire," and "Ashley Farnes-Barnes, British Secret Service," and "Sheikh Ratel en Roll, special adviser to Ayatollah Rock en Rollah," and even "Boris Badunov, Pottsylvanian Secret Police." The Nigerian jerks bought it. My wife told me to cut it out.
Over at The History Channel, where switchblades are the rule, flamers would impersonate their enemies, adopting the handles of their opponents, with a period or a comma added, to fool the unwary. One extreme nutter from Canada would not take banning seriously, and he kept returning a couple of hours later, under a new version of his handle, "Confucius."
He spouted semi-literate anti-Semitic garbage and cut-and-paste copies of "Red Symphony," a Falangist postwar forgery of a "confession" by one of Stalin's purge victims, Christian Rakovsky, that somehow proved that Communism was financed by Wall Street capitalists. He was ignorant as well as illiterate, so he'd get derided for both. He lacked a sense of humor (like most fanatics) and would fire back with obscenities and demands that his opponents kill themselves.
After 54 identities, THC's lawyers hunted him down (I did a lot of reporting of him) and made him go away for good.
I had it the other way around...I was accused in that same forum of impersonating people and fomenting flame wars, and people were slamming me and my character for a year. I contacted them to say they were attacking an innocent man. They demanded proof I wasn't doing the flames. That was tough to do. I finally rattled off a series of dates and places I had been where I did not have access to a computer...like a trip I took with my wife on my birthday weekend to New Hampshire, going to baseball games at Yankee Stadium, and Sunday dinners with my in-laws.
(Let's see, I was sitting in the mezzannine at Shea Stadium with my scorecard in one hand, my soda in the other, and with my other two hands, I was sending flame e-mails with my laptop. Right. Or I celebrated my birthday by waging a flame war from the front seat of our brand-new Toyota Forerunner. That's right, I did the navigation with two hands holding a map and the flame was with the computer implanted in my skull.)
After I gave up all this stuff about my personal life to this arrogant interlocutor, he then had the nerve to ask me to help him by asking the real flamer to stop what he was doing. This guy went to the Leo Durocher School of Nerve, but I did it anyway, as a gesture of goodwill. After a year of being assailed on an hourly basis at THC, the attacks stopped. I still hate this guy's guts, even though he apologized and has behaved civilly and supportively since then.
But my point is that these folks can say they are anyone and anything they want...and how do you prove it? And how do you prove you are what you not?
The lack of accountability on the web is the best thing to happen to bullies since the invention of school lunch money.
