My Socks - Apology and Explanation

I don't recall any banned member ever being reinstated at JREF, but you never know. Good luck.

I don't particularly like you all that much really. I just want to say that since you were banned you have been personally attacked by a lot of people but haven't responded with attacks of your own. I think it is ironic that the ones who complain about you the most are more cruel to you than you ever were. There is a dog-pack mentality there, which is why I rarely post anymore.

I must ask. Why do you care?

Pathetic. You obsession with the JREF forum and rationalisation for breaking it's rules continues unabated by reason or rationality.

Finally got a chance to read the thread in Community about me.

@BenBurch - None of my socks were created before I was banned. Look at their Join Dates for crying out loud. There's no excuse for posting such misinformation.

@Bookitty - When did I *ever* claim to know someone's identity, where they lived and their social activities? Do you have evidence? I know *your* name because you registered with it on this website. I know you live in or around L.A. because you've posted as much numerous times, but I have no clue where you live or even where your bookstore is. I have no idea what you do for fun. The closest I ever came was exposing XJX383 as lying about being a doctor. Beyond that, you're mistaken or making things up.

@Bookitty - You are once again heavily spinning and outright lying about what happened with VisionFromFeeling. She NEVER sent a suicide note or anything that even remotely resembled one. She sent me an e-mail (long after I repeatedly told her stop) claiming that she thinks she's dying of some mysterious heart ailment (doctors said it was an anxiety attack) and that she "LOVED" me. She went on to say that is I never see her post again, it's because she has died. There was nothing at all about suicide.

Thing is, you KNOW all this stuff, so why are you repeatedly lying?

@Bookitty - You claim I "then posted my reply on his site in order to embarrass me." Not quite. You sent me an unsolicited e-mail - it was not a "reply" to anything, and I had never e-mailed you before. In that e-mail you explained why you had such a soft-spot for VFF and even acknowledged that e-mail has "no expectation of privacy." You then continued to ride my ass publicly including pitching a fit that I called you "Boo" (something others have done since without a peep from you). Fed up with your lies and attacks, I posted the real reason why you have issues with how people treated VisionFromFeeling - she reminds you of your sister. And that was only after MANY attempts to get you to reveal this obviously relevant piece of information on your own. I think what you did was morally dishonest.

@Everyone - There was no objective information that revealed my sockpuppet. I have a new IP address and a new computer. There was no technological evidence that Thrasher was me. It was conjecture based on mostly confirmation bias.

What's sad is that if the Admins had treated someone well-liked in Community the same way I have been treated, there'd be a huge outcry. As it was, quite a few people found their decision questionable at best, and some of those who dared to speak out out didn't like me all that much in the first place. That tells you a lot.

I go to the forums because there are enough intelligent people and/or skilled debaters to make it interesting. That's really about it. If that means I have issues, so be it. I know it pisses of some people who think "rules are rules" and since I was banned, I must stay away. Meh. I haven't even had so much as a post moved to AAH with either sock, so why the big fuss? I think it says more about the people all pissed off than it does me.

What's delicious is what Not Telling wrote. Ostensibly my four infractions (in 7,500 posts) for attacking the arguer make me a bad guy, and yet look at how viciously people are attacking me when I'm not there to defend myself. I guess personal attacks aren't really the problem - it's just the ones not permitted by the rules.

There have been a number of bannings for sockpuppetry lately, I was wondering if one of those socks could have been yours.

I thought the decision to ban you was overly harsh, as was Articuletts.

They put a tag in the sockpuppet notice linking back to the original member (or they are supposed to). To my knowledge nobody has been banned for being me that wasn't me (Sluagh27 and Thrasher). However, based on my experience, they are probably banning on suspicion rather than evidence.

For example, Thrasher's original registration was rejected because I connected from a smart phone with an IP address in another state from where I was physically located and claimed to be from. I then e-mailed Lisa with a link to an article explaining that you can't rely on geolocation for 3G/4G IP addresses because they could be thousands of miles away from the cell phone's location and area code. Similarly, the IP addresses can change even within a browsing session. After she read that article, I re-registered, and she let me in.

Yes, I see it there in the tags, I never bothered to actually open a ban notice before.If they are banning on suspicion, you have to admit they are doing a good job of analysis, since they accurately identified you.

I looked at that thread in Community since you mentioned it, just read the first page though, it's up to seven.

If your goal is eliminate socks without concern for false positives, then you can call their process "good." I would think that skeptics would be concerned about false positives.

Since there was no technical evidence, it comes down to examining the writing style and content. If you suspect a sock, you start looking closely at their posts for unusual/distinctive phrasing and references as well as working the other direction (start with the original identity and search the suspected sock's posts). One recently banned sock reposted verbatim several full paragraphs he had posted before. That's a no brainer. I didn't do any such thing.

For my socks, they had to rely on what I call verbal tics. For example, I use "(say)" quite a bit as in "suppose you (say) pick a card at random." My socks never used that and instead used "for example." I like to do silly numbering when I outline multiple points but my socks didn't.
1) First
ii. Second
c. Third

Working from the sock, Thrasher wrote, "It don't make me no nevermind." The only other person the JREF to write that was Jeff Corey. My socks ended sentences with prepositions and failed to use proper punctuation in compound sentences. UncaYimmy was rather a stickler for those things.

Thrasher used the terms "bosom" and "thingie" whereas UncaYimmy would use breasts and penis if not other slang terms.

So, while I made no attempt to disguise my style of argument, I did omit some verbal tics and added a few new ones. I guess their burden of proof is lower than I expected.

BTW, I was watching The Nooch. It occurred to me that some people could have suspected it was my sock especially since it went into Forum Management, itself highly unusual for new members. The Nooch was briefly suspended for adminstrative reasons, probably to ask for proof of identity as a suspected sock. Shortly after being reinstated he received rather harsh suspensions (5 days for the first, 30 days for the second). Make of it what you will.

Are you sure there is no technical evidence? I know you are an IT guy, could there be some method beyond mere IP addresses that they are using?

Whatever method they did use, you would have to say that they were successful in this case since they did correctly identify your two socks.

The first time around I was using a web-based proxy. The way it works is you go to their site and enter the URL. It loads the page on their server, rewrites all the hyperlinks to point to their server, then sends you the page. When you click a link, instead of going directly to (say) the JREF server, it goes through the proxy server which in turn goes to the JREF server and repeats the process of rewriting links on the requested page.

What got me with Sluagh27 was that after you log in (assuming you don't have automatic login) you are presented a page which says in effect, "Click here or wait for the page to come up automatically." The Click Here link is rewritten to go through the proxy, but the automatic redirect is not. Thus I ended up going directly to the JREF server (I tested and verified this). Right after I saved a post I looked at the address bar and saw that it wasn't going through the proxy. At that point all they had to do was check that IP against the IPs stored with UncaYimmy's posts to get the match. This happened probably around post #100, which is why it took so long to nab me.

The reason I didn't change my IP was because I have my IP address on some servers I remotely manage (allowed IPs for certain tasks). If I change my IP, I have to go update those various lists, which is a headache. Besides that, even if I get a new IP, it will still show as coming from Phoenix whereas the proxy was east coast.

Due to some hardware changes on my end, my IP address changed. It was still a Phoenix IP, and when I registered Thrasher, I reported Phoenix as my location. I built a new computer, and UncaYimmy never connected to the JREF from that box. Had it been a technical giveaway, I would have been banned much sooner, especially since it's trivial to set up a nightly query that checks for banned IPs posting on the board.

In a nutshell, the first one was a mistake on my part. The second one was a good guess. I'm reasonably confident they have guessed wrong before since I've seen at least one person with known sockpuppets claim that at least one banned on his behalf was not actually his (a "truther"). He could be lying, but the impression I got was that he was being, ahem, truthful.

For those interested, the vBulletin software has an add-in (maybe it's part of the core) that writes a cookie called idStack. If you attempt to register a second account without clearing that cookie, the software will dump your registration into a list of possible dupes. I think Lisa rejects those out of hand since I tried it just to see what would happen. :-)

As far as I can determine, they aren't using any fancy scripting to develop a "signature" for your computer. There are a number of things a script can determine about your browser such as which plugins you have installed and what version numbers they are. Individually these mean little. In aggregate they don't identify you personally. However, if you compare two different visitors to a web page by looking at this information, you can sometimes be very confident you have the same person.

Here is an example of what your browser can reveal. The combination of what's installed and their version numbers lends itself to a HUGE number of possible combinations, so if your banned member and suspected sock have the same combination, to me that's good enough technically even if the IP doesn't match.

If you want to get around that, you can switch browsers, disable some plugins and install some new ones. Your "signature" will be different. As best as I can tell, Lisa doesn't do that. It requires getting a signature from the banned member and from the sock, which means getting them to a page with a special script. I've seen no such thing. You could always disable scripts, which is what I did.

When you register, Lisa is going to run geolocation on your IP on a site such as www.IP2Location.com. If the location you give doesn't match, your account will be rejected with a vague notice about the name not being correct. Therefore, I feel bad for people who register when they are out of state or on a cell phone.

Geolocation is only about 50% to 80% accurate down to the city level and can be widly off at times including several thousand miles or even in a different country (think USA/Canada not Brazi/Iraq). Again, if you're not concerned about false-positives, this approach is fine.

Another method of masking your real IP is a Virtual Private Network. There are lots of good reasons to use a VPN. Businesses use them all the time. Some people use them simply because they want to remain anonymous even if they are doing nothing illegal or illicit. For $5 to $15 per month you can have access to a VPN that lets you choose IPs from all around the world.

Problem is, some of these IPs are reported by some geolocation software to be some place they are not. So right off the bat your account might get rejected for location reasons. It's best to visit IP2Location's site to see where they think you are and register accordingly rather than relying on the VPN provider saying your IP is from a server in Los Angeles (for example).

Still, Lisa will run your IP address through some blacklists. I'm not positive, but I think she might go to www.stopforumspam.com to check your IP. Problem is, if you're using a VPN for personal use, somebody else might have been using it for illicit purposes. Therefore, your IP might be listed there even though you've done nothing wrong. Your account will be rejected. She may also go to this blacklist checking site. Again, it's the same problem in that if somebody else had your IP (BTW, this could include IPs from your ISP as well) and taht person did something illicit, your address might be there, and you'll pay for it.

What's worse is that some of these blacklists block ranges of IPs. For example, some people not familiar with how to properly set up web hosting will set up their mail server to allow relaying without vetting who is doing the relaying. Spammers look for these misonfigured maail servers and use them to send spam. Some gung-ho anti-spammer might lblackist the block of IPs on which that server resides. This means totally unrelated parties get blocked.

Now, if you're smart about your anti-spam efforts, you look to see *why* an IP was listed. If like above it was an abused mail server, you might reject incoming mail from that address. However, there's really no reason to reject forum visitors since that's a completely different thing. The forum visitor may be totally unaware of the problem, which is typically the case with improperly set up mail servers.

Since Lisa seems to determined to catch all possible spammers and sockpuppets regardless of false positives, you need to examine your IP address carefully when registering. Like I said, she rejected Thrasher's registration simply because the 3G network put my smartphone on a gateway in a state different from where I was located - perfectly normal behavior. I wonder how many people don't bother to work throught registration problems.

I think I figured out how they were able to ban Thrasher with confidence. I created a test sock to confirm my theory, and within minutes it was banned even though no posts were made. Seems they are digging through Facebook profiles now. Interesting...

I hereby retract my position that there was no objective evidence.

[Note: I have redacted my real name from this libelous comment since it was a clear attempt at keyword stuffing for the search engines. Everything else I left intact. - UncaYimmy]

There are few things more disturbing than photos of children on the web page of a militant pediphile supporter. The reason I classify [redacted] as a militant is because he has publicly stated that a child dying is not a worse outcome than a man not being allowed to have sex with that child. After all it was pointed out to [redacted] that a child being impregnated has serious consequences that worsen their life outcomes. He stated he find't think these were measurable, objective worse outcomes. It's all a matter of opinion really.
The reason I revisit this web page is I was reminded of it after just seeing a documentary on child brides around the world. One of the main reasons women fight tor higher age of consent laws in countries where these are lax or not well enforced is the extreme health risk for teen mothers. Girls who give birth in their early to mid teens are at huge risk of combinations due to the fact their hips, pelvis, and reproductive systems are not fully formed. Turir uterus burst, their vagina tear, their abuses rupture. They are at a greatly increased risk (compared to adult women) of developing chronic infections and health problems, of being permanently injured, of losing the ability to have more children, of becoming continent or leaking feces (resulting in being strained by their communities). Trend mothers are twice as likely to die in childbirth. Their children are more likely to be born disabled, be born premature, or to emissary during the pregnancy. Christopher Hitchens, National Geographic, and others have written extensively about the health dangers girls face in societies where the men are like [redacted] have sex.

Of course [redacted] is even more extreme in his views. He doesn't even believe one needs to be a trenager, just old enough to have a "basic understanding of what sex is." Obviously the health risk for teens is much more pronounced in younger children. But [redacted] is so perverted and depraved he actually thinks that this is no worse than a man just not being allowed to gratify himself sexually with a child. What is interesting is that in these somost of these docieties where child marriages are allowed, this Isn't some universal cultural belief. The educated class who has any concept of human rights condemns this practice, sees their own 14 year old daughters as children, and regards those who practice it as barbaric. it is the most uneducated, the most rural and backwards, the most religiously extreme who practice it. the kids of people who still stone people for adultery. these are [redacted]'s brethren, and thousands of girls are maimed, permanently injured, or killed every year because men like [redacted] value their own sexual gratification more than the lives of children.

Now here is what's interesting is that [redacted] is married, yet ignorant of the most basic aspects of sex. He repeatedly stated a man can tell a woman is taking an orgasm because there are things that happen during orgasm only can happen at that time. When I told him muscle contractions happen outside of orgasm, he kept demanding to know how a woman could fake something like that, and that this can only happen during orgasm. Yet muscle contractions happen during sex outside of orgasm, it is not something that is exclusive to orgasm. But [redacted] didn't know that. How is that possible if you've had sex more than a couple times? Well it makes sense if you aren't having sex with adults. Loss leader remarked that if not for video proof of your children, they would believe [redacted] to be a virgin. Hey, IVF exists. So he still might be. Otherwise though, your sexual activity must be limited to a few incidents of you flopping around awkwardly on your wife, for you to not even know the basic physiology of how sex works.

Then there is the hilarious reaction [redacted] had to the notion that women fake it and men often can't tell. It makes sense that someone who prefers vulnerable sex partners who are easily controlled would become enraged at the idea of a sex partner doing something outside of his control.

So we know [redacted] finds children sexually attractive when a normal person looks at a twelve year old and is disgusted just at the idea of having sex with them (or else he would not be arguing a pro pedophiles stance). We know he isn't having sex with women despite being married to one. We know he is so extreme in his views and disregard for children that he mock pedophiles victims who die after being made pregnant in too young bodies and says this is not a measurable worse outcome than a man not having sex with that child. We know he is a control freak who also thinks the rules don't apply to him Does that mean that [redacted] himself is an active pedophile? No. But it does look a certain way.

I was afraid of [redacted] before, because numerous JREF posters warned me about his mental instability and his history of behavior towards women. But I'm not anymore. You're just a sad little man, great only in his own mind, addicted to the internet, obsessed, with only your sad couple of pro pedophilia sycophants here for company.

I request you not post my comments. I won't be following up in your response but I just was interested to read what you had to say after your latest banning and wanted to express my disgust at a guy putting up pictures of his kids on a blog he started after being so passionate about pedophelia he got himself kicked off a website defending it.

At least this time SC is attacking my head-on instead of anonymously. Last April Bookitty contacted me via e-mail to tell me that SC was "physically afraid." In that e-mail she quoted an e-mail from SC that read, "In the time I had been gone from JREF [two months], I gave almost no thought to either him or what had transpired, and I had honestly assumed he had moved on as well."

Being a skeptical kinda guy, I downloaded my web server logs and determined that not only had SC been checking my blog nearly every day (often several times per day) for those two months, but she was the author of several anonymous personal attacks left in blog comments. This is the polar oppposite of her claim.

Make of it what you will.

ETA: Since SC left her e-mail address, she received an automatic notification from the blog software when her posts were approved. This was her reply to the notification:

returned unread. God help your children, who you are probably raping.

It looks like Schrodinger's Cat has some kind of psychosis. This is a dangerous person who has a tenuous grip on the real world. It looks like she is obsessed with Yimmy and more so with pedophilia. Maybe there is psychological projection being expressed?

I have been watchful of how I interact with her at the JREF and all the more reason to now. Because of the postings up above it wouldn't be a stretch to predict a melt-down. Keeping a safe distance could be the prudent thing to do.

It should go without saying, but SC's comments about things I have said are simply wrong. Your first clue should be that there are no quotes. My first post in the thread in question makes my position pretty clear, and it's a far cry from what she says.

"Keep the [age of consent] laws as they are, but add an affirmative defense where the "victim" is evaluated much in the same way he or she would be evaluated if charged with a felony. In other words if we are capable of determining that a 13 year old was mature enough to understand the consequences of (say) robbing a liquor store, we are certainly capable of determining if that same teen was capable of consenting to sex. "

You can read the thread yourself to see how far from reality SC's comments are. Be sure to look for the parts of the thread that got tossed to Abandon All Hope to see more of her vitriol.

""BTW, I was watching The Nooch. It occurred to me that some people could have suspected it was my sock especially since it went into Forum Management, itself highly unusual for new members. The Nooch was briefly suspended for adminstrative reasons, probably to ask for proof of identity as a suspected sock. Shortly after being reinstated he received rather harsh suspensions (5 days for the first, 30 days for the second). Make of it what you will.""


I am TheNooch, and I am back on suspension again for questioning the mods policies at the JREF. It truly is the only issue that fascinates me about that web forum. There is absolutely zero critical thinking when it comes to forum moderation, on a forum about critical thinking....it truly is nothing more than a James Randi Cult.

When I signed up, I was immediately suspended (5 days) for being a sock puppet, I am not. I had to send Lisa a copy of my ID to prove that I was who I said I was...that seemed odd. I wonder how many members have to take a photo of their ID and email it to Lisa to get to post on the JREF.

I am currently on suspension for questioning Randi's innocence in the Jose Alvarez case as well as my Salvia/DMT thread in Forum management. In other words, why can't some illicit drugs be discussed at the JREF, but some can. So far after 6 pages, there is no answer. I also made some rather brutally honest posts about Randi and his 40 year old boyfriend, and his pederastic behavior in the past, apparently it's not OK to think critical about the cult leader.

I sent an email to Randi, (as was suggested by a mod) and I received a response, but before I could post his non-answer, I was re-suspended for 30 days. When I return I will be banned from forum management for 6 more months of probation. I will most likely not make it that long.

Here is Randi's email, copied and pasted, regarding the drug issue;

"That's not "one of [my] policies," at all. The Forum is independent, I am not involved in it, and I have no expertise at all in the subjects you mention, which do not connect with the goal of the JREF, in any case. I am not the person to which such a question should be posed.

James Randi.

The mods keep saying the rules come from on high, yet the people that are at the top say they don't make the rules.....circular masturbation at best.

I wish I could post more, but for now I will leave it at this, because I still have one more chance to post over there in 2 weeks. The Paul Harvey version of my story is much more entertaining.

TheNooch