Sleepless in Chicago

Reply to Where we are, 10 months later

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 04:05:05 -0800

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a reply:

I am about to close down the discussion section for this group for the last time. I will never reopen it. There will not be any outings for this group, or any other group I ever run on Flickr.

When I find myself asking if the whole world has gone nuts, even though it's pretty easy to reassure myself that it hasn't - all I have to do is turn off the computer - this is a bite out of my day, and a drain on my time and spirits, in exchange for which, I've gotten ... what? This is a volunteer job I'm doing, and I'm getting spat on for it.

If you go to my moderation journal, you already know that I've cut my links to this group from there, and have been moving toward not acknowledging its existence, at all. Some of you persist in submitting photos that you know don't belong here, so I'm putting this group on moderation, permanently. In other groups, this has not been a problem for the membership, really, because the membership has actually been earning my trust instead of my scorn, so much so that I felt comfortable with the idea of making some of the members of those other groups into moderators. Here, I don't know - what am I getting out of this? The pleasure of serving people I can't trust?

Later this year, unless I'm given a convincingly good reason to change my mind, I'm going to mothball this group for good. I can't imagine what that good reason would be, so from me to most of you, this is probably goodbye.

Reply to Where we are, 10 months later

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 03:46:07 -0800

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a reply:

Some of you have tried, elsewhere, to spin these events, creatively, doing as your friend VM did, replacing inconvenient realities with more convenient fabrications, seemingly hoping that the contradictions in your positions will be successfully masked in the process.

After ten months of not looking at this nonsense and not thinking about it, I had forgotten some of the names of the guilty parties. Forgetting with whom it was that I was dealing - people who had responded to a just eviction from a group with a few months worth of backbiting - I invited a few photos to another one of my groups, this one much more a writing group than a photography group. One of the trolls had the nerve, not just to try to join the group, but to lie and claim that he, personally, had been sent an invitation. In the process, he put his own lack of integrity on display without even knowing it; not one of the members of that group ever got a personal invitation. I didn't send those for that group, as anybody in the group will tell you.

By far the better part of a year later, as absurd as this is, the character assassination is being continued, tirelessly. Supposedly I'm this bitter little man who is so consumed by rage over past events, that I couldn't remember all of the names involved in them a few months later ... no, that can't be right ... at least, my newfound friends don't want it to be right, and so with a little tweak - turning a photo invitation into a group invitation, a little inconvenience goes away. It's very slick - I have a number of groups I'm building up, and a few thousand invitations out, all of them appropriate, of photos I found in great haste, and as before, the level of personal attention given to each photo invite is low. It has to be, because there are only so many hours in a day, so if some obscure troublemaker from last year inadvertently sees a photo invite, no sane person is going to be surprised by that. So the story gets tweaked a little.

I'm not going to forgive a psychopath or his enablers for the same reason I wouldn't reach down to pet a rattlesnake - the animal is what it is, and it's not going to become something else. One should always know what to expect from it, once one knows what it is.

Which brings us to most of the rest of you, aside from maybe about ten new people who've signed up during the year. Boys and girls - even if my judgement had been absolutely wrong, this would have been my call to make, and I should have been able to count on you to support my right to make it. For what it's worth, which at this point doesn't seem to be much, I'm the admin of this group. If I'm not allowed to make a judgement call, what am I doing here?

And it wasn't a bad call. It was right on the money. I was right and most of you were wrong, and what's really bothersome is that this doesn't seem to matter to most of you. I can't count on your characters, I can't count on your judgement ... what are we left with? I'm left with the reality that the last ten months of relatively Internet drama - free life (key word - relatively) have felt like a vacation, and that I've never been paid one cent to put up with this crap.

This was a change for the better in every way, and I intend to stick with it.

Reply to Where we are, 10 months later

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 03:10:55 -0800

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a reply:

I would never be so foolish as to go off into a questionable neighborhood with people I did not know. Before I was even going to think about setting up any such outing, we were going to have to get to know each other well enough that I would feel certain that I could really trust those I invited to come with - not just that I could trust them to mean well, though that was important, but that I could trust their judgement, as well. You might notice that my groups tend to be both photography and writing groups. The plan, initially, was that we were going to talk to each other for a while, and swap stories. That could have been fun, but it also, with the right crowd, could have been helpful, because anybody who has ever tried doing theater, even as an amateur, knows, staying in character is hard work, and doing so keeps getting harder, almost exponentially so, the longer one stays in character. People putting on an act, pretending to be somebody they're not, will slip up, sooner or later.

Essentially, that's what happened, but I never imagined that it would have happened so quickly. Again, we had been here to go out into the night together, and watch out for each other, under potentially life threatening circumstances. What happened, instead? A bunch of you, provided an ethical choice to make under circumstances so clear cut and so over the top as to be cartoonish - at a time when your greatest concern wasn't the knife in somebody's hand, but just the words of the troll - threw me under the bus, the first chance you got. How stupid would I have to be to go anywhere with you, in the real world?

In ten months, not a single one of you has spoken up on my behalf, and more than a few of you played at being toadies, as you kissed up to the troll. The cyberstalking I refer to elsewhere continues to this day. It doesn't continue with any great deal of effectiveness, but in cases like this, it's the thought that counts, and there is clearly nothing on some of your minds but the pure joy that comes out of your chance to be more than a little bit spiteful.

Where we are, 10 months later

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 02:47:36 -0800

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a new topic:

Note to those I invited over from my main group: I really thought that this group was going to be a positive experience for you. I knew Flickr had a troll culture, but until the events of a few months ago, I had no idea of just how well developed that troll culture was. If I had, and I knew what was waiting for you when you signed up for this group, I would have spared you the experience. We live, we learn, and we hope that the right people understand that this is an ongoing process.

Refreshing a few stale memories: Not quite a year ago, I took a second look at a photo in the pool - I forget whether I invited it or it was added by the member - and was dismayed by what I saw. In order to find enough photos and enough people to get this group off to a decent start, I had to invite a lot of photos, and that meant that I did a lot of skimming when it came to reading the comments under the photos. I'm fairly good at that, but I'm not infallible, and skimming is skimming. I do miss things.

The member had posted a photo of a woman near the triple corner of North, Damen and Milwaukee, near the so-called "Coyote Tower", clearly taken from at least a few doors down. The woman, and the location, are easily recognizable in the photo, but by no means is it a closeup. If we take the member at his word, the story went that he took that photo in an extremely safe public place, she got this half crazed expression on her face, they passed each other on the street, and she responded to his snapping of a photo from a respectful distance by pepper spraying him in the eyes. This, he said, this alleged act of violence that she supposedly inflicted on him, meant that he should apologize to her.

Now, digging a little deeper, and looking at more of the man's photos, one finds that there is every reason in the world to not take the member at his word. There is something he calls "the kiss of (name of member deleted)", which consists of him shoving the camera so close to the face of his subject, that if the subject sneezes, the lens will have to be cleaned. He also seems to like to shoot photos in sequence. Piecing this together, and noticing that we were looking at somebody who showed that he had no qualms about lying in the course of the discussion that followed, one gets what would seem to be the real story. A large man - so he describes himself - who she didn't know, kept crowding her space and shoving a camera at her. This left her feeling understandably agitated and threatened, and she took defensive action. The person who intruded on her privacy, in that manner, then posted one of the shots he took from a distance, one from which she could easily be recognized, lied, telling a story about what happened that made her look psychotic, and then tried to cover his intentions by giving an insincere apology, basking in the praise others gave him, for his sensitivity.

How inspiring, really. At the time I discussed matters with the member, I didn't know the backstory, yet, but then, I didn't need to, in order to know that this member had to go, because even if I accepted his version of events, he was still left taking a stance worthy of a madman - that the victim of violence owes an apology to the person who attacked him. Think about what we were here to do. We were here to form groups to go out at night, in some of the more picturesque (but not always the safest) neighborhoods, so that we could enjoy safety (relative safety) in numbers. For that to work, we have to be able to trust each other.

How much sense would it have made, how responsible would it have been, for me to invite along the sort of person we'd be trying to avoid, out on the street at night? How crazy would it have been for us to bring our own problems with us, as we headed out into the night? A real concern, a sensible concern, which only grew deeper after I read a long rant he posted in response to my question about his views regarding violence that included this memorable passage.

"Engage me with violence and you may find yourself injured... maimed or even dead.

I have dished out things to people that deserved them that I wish I could forget.

I do not fight fair... I fight to survive.

I will gouge your eyeball out with my thumb if the situation warrants.

And I will wipe your vitreous humor from my thumb on your shirt."

The ellipses in that passage are his; I've removed nothing. The comments and the photo remain up, to this day. The moment I read that rant, I banned him. There wasn't anything else to be done.

If I had somehow managed to have any doubt about the rightness of the choice I had made - and G-d only knows how I could have - a trip to the man's Yelp page would have ended that doubt. Some of us go to Yelp to post reviews of the restaurants we've gone to, parks we like to hang around in, museums we've enjoyed. You know, "dull tourist stuff", most of the time. I'll give our friend - let's call him "VM", this much - his Yelp page is not dull. It is all too interesting.

On the first page, you will find a review of the Will County Adult Correctional Facility, and a lawyer, of whom he writes

"As a 'professional troublemaker' I need someone who can get my ass out of trouble with skill and proficiency and who is honest and charges reasonable rates."

Do tell. Elsewhere, you can find him telling the exciting tale of how he went out to see just how many "high class bookstores" he could get away with walking through, barefoot - behavior that the average four year old has outgrown, not just been seen out of a man at the end of middle age, but being bragged about as if it were the greatest accomplishment, ever. In summary, then, we have a pathological liar who has announced that he is willing to engage in nightmarish violence at the drop of a hat, who has (not at all surprisingly) been in and out of court on a regular basis (according to himself), who has sung the praises of violence while defaming somebody who apparently just wanted to be left alone - and he wanted to come with us, as we went out at night.

Fiction can often be seen as a parody of real life, with the reality pumped up for comedic or dramatic effect, but if I were to base a story on this clown and his actions, I'd have to tone him and them down, because he's too over the top (and too short of depth and complexity) to be a believable fictional character. He's like a cartoon. In this case, real life would have ended up being as a parody of the fiction that resulted. A reasonable man will struggle to believe what he is seeing, even as he sees it out there, in black and white, but believe it he must if he is to remain reasonable, because it is beyond debate.

Locking down the group

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 02:13:13 -0700

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a new topic:

See previous discussion. I find myself wishing that I hadn't bothered to create this group. The business with the trolls I alluded to earlier - without naming them - has become that offensive. Maybe I could have laughed it off, a little, if I had not just had the experience of watching a bunch of "my people" go out of their way to track down the trolls of whom I spoke, just so that they could kiss up to them. That was truly special, an absolute delight.

The moment I turned off the computer and stepped out the door, the day immediately started feeling warmer and brighter in more than the literal sense, brought about by the springtime temperatures and sunshine. The company was drastically better, and it left me wondering why I had just invested so much time and worked so hard, to build a social experience that's been such a huge step downward from what life gives me for free. So, I'm putting this group on hiatus. If you've got a good reason why I should ever bother with it, again, you know how to get in touch with me, but don't expect me to read anything about this group until late October, and don't be too surprised if I don't buy what I'm reading, even then. After what I've just seen, how can I trust you?

I'm going to go enjoy the sunshine. You folks can go do whatever the Hell you want.

Reply to Open Manholes

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:24:43 -0700

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a reply:

Have you noticed that I haven't named the guy? I removed the photo and banned the member when the talk about skewered eyeballs and such began so, no, you won't find his name that way, any more. But you might find out from him, and his fellow troll, who have been very actively naming me and this group, in their quest for vengeance.

React to that as you will. So far, one person in the group - visibly a friend of our troll, judging from his activity in the comments section - has responded by removing his photos from the pool in what I can only take to be an act of silent protest. I responded by silently banning him from a group - as I've said before, nobody defends psychosis but a psychotic. The craziness promises to continue for a while, but maybe that's fine. It's a chance to see what people are made of, and whether they're worth bothering with.

Deleting the photo I mentioned from my favorites, I noticed something. Yes, it was a good photo, but my favorites page hardly seemed diminished by its disappeance - the two photos on either side of it had been ever better. Good work, even if it were scarce, wouldn't be a good reason to hold onto bad company, but it isn't really that scarce, and the best usually comes from people who don't act like this. Getting past this will probably be even easier than I thought, and even if it isn't, who cares?

I'm not being payed to do this. If I'm wrong, and have given people more credit than they deserve, then best to discover this now, and invest my coming spring and summer in those on whom that time would be better spent.

Reply to Open Manholes

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:07:22 -0700

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a reply:

Much to my non-existent amazement, our two banned members have joined forces, and set out to take down the group, warning people about how dangerous it is to be around somebody who doesn't let them post nudes marked to safe to a non-18+ groups. Crazy guy #1 also started playing the game of lying about the sequence in which remarks were made, in order to create the illusion that I had lied about something he said - and then retracted, and then said again, talking out of both sides of his mouth and then quoting himself out of context.

He also seems to have been greatly upset by the discovery that I had stopped posting my remarks to the comments section for his photo. You know, where he can delete them. At about the time he started ranting about all of the things he could do to people, and the narcissism really began to show, I decided that the time for a dialog was over.

Reply to Open Manholes

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:57:10 -0700

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a reply:

I mentioned two people being banned. The other was somebody we'll call "Tim", who was fond of playing a hit and run game. He'd take nude photos, set them to safe, join a group that wasn't 18+, and then drop the photos into the pool. He'd then unsubscribe before he could be banned, always coming back the next year, after his favorite nude event had happened, ready to post some more stuff, whether the admins liked it or not.

He hadn't done that here, yet, but knowing his story, I wasn't going to give him a chance. The defense of his actions given by his "krewe" was something along the lines of "who cares about the TOS, those guys are so hot". So, there is a common thread in these deletions - the people who got banned kept their brains in their pants. One of them seemed to be straight, the other was pretty blatantly gay - doesn't matter. Either way, it's really the same mentality.

Reply to Open Manholes

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:46:46 -0700

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a reply:

We now have our second banned member, out of the 291 who have joined. I heard back from our person. Not at all surprisingly, our apologist for psychosis turned out to be psychotic, himself and not too bright. Aren't you glad that he won't be coming with us?

I'd seen his type before, and a little of his type's motivation. A strikingly ugly man, he found that he could get a little extra attention from the opposite sex by being willing to sink a little lower than the other men around him. Not every member of the opposite sex or even most of them, but enough to make a bottom feeder's day. As for myself and anybody who should want to stay here - we expect more of ourselves and of those we choose to keep around.

Open Manholes

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 04:28:59 -0700

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a new topic:

If you've been following the photos in the pool, you might have seen a discussion in which I did something other than my usual cheerleading. In fact, given my past moderation of other groups, my seemingly inevitable cheerleading. Rah, rah, go team, etc. Sincere, if, I must admit, perhaps a little good for inspiring the rolling of eyes.

OK. But no cheerleading, this morning.

The problem, this time, would seem to be that somebody didn't want to accept that the 90s were over. There are some notions that some people really seem to have more trouble understanding than they should. Simple example: let's say somebody shows up, finds a member of the group of Nigerian descent, and starts yelling a certain word I'd better never hear in this group. Starts with n, ends in r, has six very ugly letters, and you know what it is. Would anybody be surprised when I ejected that person on sight? Should anybody be surprised? Generally speaking, nobody is.

But let's say the reverse happens. Let's say that somebody - and this is not a hypothetical - goes up to somebody whose relative was a victim of a hate crime, and defends the crime passionately on the basis that the victim, being white, supposedly had it coming. I don't do double standards. I'm going to eject that person, too, with even greater speed and passion - speed and passion that would match that I'd apply to the removal of a supporter of the Nazis - because actually advocating violence is a whole lot worse than just using a word, even one that offensive.

This should not be a difficult thing to understand, but there's a certain segment of the population that has a huge problem when it discovers that when some of us talk about equality, we mean what we say. To them, I bid adieu, because I owe no less courtesy than that to those they would afflict. I won't try to talk things out with that crowd, or try to come to an understanding with it, because just by doing that in a place where people fighting for the opposite form of racism would be thrown out instantly, I'd be undercutting the very equality I had set out to defend. If person A can take a swing at person B, but person B dare not respond in kind, where is the equality in that?

The "we hate white people" crowd seems to be shrinking by the day, in part, perhaps, because of the comical reality that most of them seem to be about the same color as the background for this page, which is to say a whole lot whiter than those of us who they've usually been haranguing. Raise a half sephardic eyebrow, mutter something about pots and kettles, and it's over. But there are other forms of sensitive hatred lingering that are still with us, especially here in Chicago, a city known for a type of male bashing radical feminism so over the top, that even the San Franciscans find it to be kind of extreme and insane. Like a bad cold that should have broken a long time ago, it has lingered for far longer than it ever had a right to exist. It made another appearance recently, in the words of somebody who I can only hope was writing without thinking.

There is a notion that violence by women against men is acceptable, whether that violence is inflicted by the woman herself, or she gets somebody to inflict it for her. No motive of self-defense seems to be needed. If she is upset, then she has the right to engage in violence - so goes the thinking, if one wishes to dignify such an absurdity by calling it a thought. Again, not a hypothetical. I'm immediately reminded of a woman who hangs out near the currency exchange on Division, just west of Clark, who seems to take a perverse pleasure in getting men beaten up by wrongly accusing them of doing things like lifting wallets. Much of the time, these efforts of hers get nowhere, because there are witnesses present to contradict what she said, but sometimes the police end up getting involved, and one way or another, there are no consequences for her. "Giggle, giggle."

She's an example, a great example, of a class of street trash with which one will have to deal, if one is out at night. So, a radical feminist attitude, of the bigoted male bashing, man hating variety, is very much my business, because if we go out, and there's somebody with us who subscribes to the theory that women are entitled to do violence to men whenever they feel like it, there's a good chance that one of us is going to get harmed by that, quite seriously. Hatred and insanity are not rare things in a major city, and they surely don't go to sleep at night. If we have somebody with who believes in responding to psychotic hatred with enablement, that's not just annoying. That's dangerous.

The man tells a story about how he took a photo of a woman on the street, in a public place, and seemingly defends her right to respond to this by pepper spraying him in the eyes. If he had just said something like "OK, it's good to know that sort of thing happens and I'll build that into my plans in the future", but he actually insists on the rightness, or at least the acceptability of what she did, and that's not acceptable. This is not about being liberal or being conservative, this is just about being civilized.

If one of us were to just walk up and slug somebody, just for the fun of hitting him, usually this would not be accepted. I hit relatively hard, given my size, but I can't remember a time when I laid somebody out for 20 minutes. Pepper spray has been known to do that. It's a big deal. Using it is a violent act, and endorsing a greater act of violence is surely at least as bad as endorsing a lesser. Through this action, he tells us something about his sense of right and wrong, and what it's telling me is that he's not just trouble, he's trouble that's proud of being trouble, and that's the worst kind.

As luck would have it, he had to be an excellent photographer but there are, as I've said, some things on which one has to stand firm. I doubt that anything happening in this little group is going to rock his world, but I can at least try to make sure that he doesn't go passive aggressive at the expense of somebody else in the group - offline, where we really can get hurt.