People are stupid

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 13:41:50 -0700, Anka wrote:

Uhhhh... Bill Fordler?

Have you developed a speech impediment? My wife is a speech therapist.
I'll see if she can squeeze you in. You may have to wait a bit. Is
that OK? You don't have to talk out loud. Just type with your
keyboard.

Seems you've developed a memory problem too. "Bill Fordler" was a
sockpuppet I used, how many years ago now was it?, five or six, I
think. People here, including your buddy in publishing, have used them
as well for equally nefarious purposes. Have you?

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"Mr. Jaggers" lugburzman[at]yahoo[dot]com wrote in message
...

"Bruce Remick" wrote in message
...

"Reid Goldsborough" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 22 Aug 2007 13:06:46 -0400, "Ukraina Dvi"
wrote:

Genetics has more to do with your health issues than all the stuff you
eat.
If you have good genetics, you can pretty much eat anything and get away
with it.

The problem of course is that nobody knows if they have the kind of
genetics that will prevent heart disease and cancer no matter how
poorly you eat or otherwise take care of yourself. Family history is
only an indication, not a guarantee. And besides lifestyle and
genetics, there's also luck. Your body can do a great job in
neutralizing threats from carcinogens, pathogens, and so on 99.999
percent of the time, but if your immune system is weakened by a cold
or flu or stress or whatever, you happen to be exposed to the right
(or wrong) carcinogen, and those early cancerous cells aren't
contained by your natural defenses, well, you're unlucky. That's why
people with no family history of cancer or heart disease can get them.
This is the main reason to eat healthy food, exercise, avoid smoke,
all the rest. Keeps your immune system strong.


Eat celery and grain all your life and a piano falls on you at age 45,
after faithfully having abstained from fully-loaded pizzas, overstuffed
Quiznos, Philly cheesesteaks, and gourmet French cooking. At least
you'll fit in your recycled wood fiber coffin. Twenty years beyond 45,
I've still got plenty of juicy foods I haven't tried yet. Next? Lobster
rolls with hollandaise sauce.

I'm getting healthier and healthier every day, due to diet and exercise.
I'm going to live to a ripe old age and die of nothing.

Me, too. Plenty of exercise and apparently good genes, but I'm sticking
with an "open" diet along with the occasional cigar and some full bodied
beer.

During our latest 100 degree-high humidity spell, I noticed a piece on the
local news with some 40-year old golfers sitting in their cart describing
their hard time in the heat and some kiddies sweating at the local pool.
Meanwhile, our well-conditioned 65-75 year old tournament softball team had
just finished playing three back-to-back games to reach the finals. The TV
assignment editor missed a more interesting story.

Bruce

"Reid Goldsborough" wrote in message
Mickey Mantle near the end of his life said if he knew he would have
lived as long as he did, he would have taken better care of himself.
There are lots of Mickey Mantles out there... Though he had a family
history that made him even more predisposed to live just for the
moment.


They populate Wal-Marts, MacDonalds etc. Gees I remember when I was a kid,
fat people were a minority, now they are the majority, and the super obese
are quite common. I have seen people that must have weighed over 300 kilos
whisking around on electric scooters, because apparently they got too fat to
even walk anymore. Thank you high fructose corn syrup, lots of adverts on
the TeeVee, and just plain lack of desire to live long enough to be a pain
for your Grandchildren and even Great Grandchildren.

I must have missed the desire to have a sockpuppet disease here. It seems
like lots of people feel a need at one time or another to create a new
personality. I personally find it hard enough to be my own damned good
self, why the hell would I want to be some other mentality? :}~

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 20:12:59 -0400, Ukraina Dvi wrote:
I must have missed the desire to have a sockpuppet disease here. It seems
like lots of people feel a need at one time or another to create a new
personality. I personally find it hard enough to be my own damned good
self, why the hell would I want to be some other mentality? :}~

Sock-puppets, though, are so easily identified. The same personality
defects which make their other alter-ego's plonk-fodder, make the
puppets same. I have a theory that they're all actually the same one,
but I guess it's probably more accurate to consider them all just safely
interchangable.

"Dave Hinz" wrote in message

Sock-puppets, though, are so easily identified. The same personality
defects which make their other alter-ego's plonk-fodder, make the
puppets same. I have a theory that they're all actually the same one,
but I guess it's probably more accurate to consider them all just safely
interchangable.



Gees, I wonder what Freud would have thought of newsgroup sockpuppets?
Gees, there could be some misbegotten asexual torment behind them. ;}

In article ,
says...

wrote in message
...
If I ever get cancer, I'm gonna haul my parents into court, and
sue them for every dollar they have.


Better watch what you ask for, might get it. And then the parental units
will outline every bad habit you have ever had from birth on to defend their
case.


My father's cigarette smoking will hopefully get him before he
has any position to criticise me.


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On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 20:12:59 -0400, "Ukraina Dvi"
wrote:

I must have missed the desire to have a sockpuppet disease here. It seems
like lots of people feel a need at one time or another to create a new
personality. I personally find it hard enough to be my own damned good
self, why the hell would I want to be some other mentality? :}~

There are beneficial purposes for sockpuppets, or alternative
identities online. It's all been discussed many times, but worth
repeating. Say you have a communicable disease, public knowledge of
which could potentially make things difficult for your work life or
whatever, and you feel you could benefit from sharing experiences with
others who have the same. Sockpuppet. Say you need advice about a
legal issue, whether or not for instance you should whistleblow at
your job, and you don't want to risk exposing your intentions
prematurely. Sockpuppet. Say you want to talk freely about politics,
religion, or similar topics without worrying about possible
repercussions at work. Sockpuppet. Say you're a victim of spousal
abuse and want to meet others who have also experienced the same
without risking intensified abuse at home. Sockpuppet. Those are
positive uses.

Cloaking your identity can take on a sinister hue if you create more
than one to verbally attack others or talk with or defend yourself. I
engaged in this here by using three different sockpuppets over a
period of about six days something like six years ago to defend myself
against a seemingly unending series of fairly outrageous lies by one
particular poster. I sort of divided myself into fourths to defend and
praise myself. Lame.

One poster here used a sockpuppet that was based on my name to engage
in a month-long attack against me, much along the lines of what DeMayo
has been doing with his real name for years. He tried to sabotage
every thread I was in with petty carping, picayune criticisms, and so
on, unrelated to the subject matter of the thread. When I finally
figured out who he was and outed him, he said what he was doing was
art, parody. Cowardly. Another poster did something similar, though in
his case he didn't try to rationalize away what he did when he was
outed but just stopped doing it.

Another thing I did in the past was devise alternative personalities
online for myself as creative exercises. Unlike the sockpuppet
episodes I've described above, there was no belligerence involved in
any of this, just a stepping into the shoes of a fictional character
to have fun, not at the expense of anyone else. One time I played a
wisdom-spewing dog, offering doggy aphorisms that people seemed to
enjoy. Another time I played an obese Nigerian woman in this country
to study who was head over very thick heals in love with a very good
friend of mine, since deceased, who at first had no idea that this
persona was fictional. He caught on eventually, and we had a good
laugh about it the next time we saw each other in person. It stopped
after that, after I knew he had caught on.

I haven't done any of this since the Bill Fordler et al. episode,
realizing the risk that this could too easily be done for the wrong
reasons. But sockpuppeting is a very common phenomenon online, and not
of course just on Usenet. One of the most publicized images of it, and
the most nefarious, is an adult predator posing as a child to lure a
child into an in-person meeting. Another use, no doubt much more
common, is in online dating circumstances in which people pretend to
be who they really want to be. I never really understood why people do
this because any in-person meeting would be guaranteed to be a
disaster, unless the other person had lied, or exaggerated, in the
same kind of way.

Pop psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers told me in a 1994 telephone
interview, "There is no truth testing online. No one verifies that you
are who you say you are." Peter Steiner wrote in a famous 1993 New
Yorker cartoon, which portrayed a dog typing at a computer, "On the
Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

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"Reid Goldsborough" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 20:12:59 -0400, "Ukraina Dvi"
wrote:

I must have missed the desire to have a sockpuppet disease here. It
seems
like lots of people feel a need at one time or another to create a new
personality. I personally find it hard enough to be my own damned good
self, why the hell would I want to be some other mentality? :}~

There are beneficial purposes for sockpuppets, or alternative
identities online. It's all been discussed many times, but worth
repeating. Say you have a communicable disease, public knowledge of
which could potentially make things difficult for your work life or
whatever, and you feel you could benefit from sharing experiences with
others who have the same. Sockpuppet. Say you need advice about a
legal issue, whether or not for instance you should whistleblow at
your job, and you don't want to risk exposing your intentions
prematurely. Sockpuppet. Say you want to talk freely about politics,
religion, or similar topics without worrying about possible
repercussions at work. Sockpuppet. Say you're a victim of spousal
abuse and want to meet others who have also experienced the same
without risking intensified abuse at home. Sockpuppet. Those are
positive uses.

Those aren't examples of sock puppets. I've never used any nym but "Honus"
in something like ten years of Usenet activity; your definition would
include me. Here's Wikipedia's explanation, which is what I've always
thought the term to mean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_sock_puppet

"A sockpuppet is an online identity used for purposes of deception within an
Internet community. In its earliest usage, a sockpuppet was a false identity
through which a member of an Internet community speaks while pretending not
to, like a puppeteer manipulating a hand puppet.[1]

In current usage, the perception of the term has been extended beyond second
identities of people who already post in a forum to include other uses of
misleading online identities. For example, a NY Times article claims that
"sock-puppeting" is defined as "the act of creating a fake online identity
to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one's self, allies
or company."[2]

The key difference between a sockpuppet and a regular pseudonym is the
pretence that the puppet is a third party who is not affiliated with the
puppeteer."

I'm not upset, but around my corner of Usenet being called a sock puppet is
an insult. I'm merely anonymous.

Cloaking your identity can take on a sinister hue if you create more
than one to verbally attack others or talk with or defend yourself. I
engaged in this here by using three different sockpuppets over a
period of about six days something like six years ago to defend myself
against a seemingly unending series of fairly outrageous lies by one
particular poster. I sort of divided myself into fourths to defend and
praise myself. Lame.

And that of course is correct. Your definition (I believe) is just a bit
broad.

On Fri, 24 Aug 2007 04:56:21 GMT, "Honus" .
wrote:

Your definition (I believe) is just a bit broad.

You're right. "Sockpuppet" and "handle" aren't synonymous, though the
former is included in the larger category of the latter. I should have
used the word "handle," or "pseudonym," for much of this. Though if
you want to further differentiate, "handle" and "pseudonym" aren't
always synonymous either.

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