Inside baseball.

(This is some seriously tedious material. I only wrote it so I wouldn't ever have to write anything about it again. More interesting material also published on 28 September 2012 can found here.)

As some of you may remember, back in 2006 myself and others were subjected to a comment and email campaign of unhinged rage from someone who claimed to be a better philosopher than everybody else. Steps were taken, by many, to stop this person. The difference between the steps others took and the ones I did had to do with the fact that he'd threatened my wife's life, on multiple occasions, and lived around the corner from me.*

It was not cool.

In late 2009 or early 2010 I began to receive similarly unhinged emails from someone claiming to be "Jeff" from "proteinwisdom.com." I asked this person to stop sending me emails. He did not. After this persisted, instead of repeating the annoying trials of 2006, I simply had a friend, a former grad student with a law degree, send Jeff Goldstein a cease-and-desist letter. I sent it to the address he'd provided me when he wanted me to send him a free book. For the purpose of verification, that address looks like this:

5*** P****** C*****
F******** C* 8****.

I hope that establishes I sent the letter to the correct place without actually revealing the actual address, as I'm not the sort of person who posts private emails or home addresses or cell-phone numbers on the Internet. (All of which has been done to me, including quite recently by you-know-who.) The vile emails continued for another week or two, then stopped. I assumed that the cease-and-desist letter had taken awhile to arrive but had finally done its job, and given that I didn't want to have anything else to do with Goldstein, I considered the matter settled. I did, however, make a mistake in mentioning that I'd sent this letter to Patrick Frey without explicitly indicating that I'd rather it remain private. And I wanted it remain private with good reason: the harassment had stopped and I didn't want it to resume.

For reasons unclear to me, Goldstein claims not have been the one harassing me or the person who stopped harassing me after I sent the letter. That's just a big coincidence. As I have no evidence to the contrary, I suppose I'll just have to take his word for it. There is evidence that someone sent emails to Jeff using my name at this time, and those of you who know me and can  recognize my style can judge for yourself whether I wrote this email from an account I don't have. (Those of you with whom I've corresponded can search your emails and see if I've ever sent you anything from a non-Gmail or non-UCI account. You'll see that I haven't.) Here's the thing: now Jeff demands to see the emails that I never publicly claimed he sent.

But I don't have them anymore. Jeff thinks this is "convenient," which is indicative of his paranoid mental state, since I have informed him—as well as all of you, in not one place but two—that my computer died last January. (And thank all of you for chipping in to buy me another.) He believes I "conveniently" murdered my computer last January to avoid ever having to provide him with information in September. The truth is, I lost a wealth of information last January, including a good three years of emails I'd downloaded from the Gmail server. Why would I download them? Why not just leave them all up on Gmail servers to be there forever? Because I teach visual rhetoric. Which means every quarter I receive multiple drafts from hundreds of students that include large image files and embedded films. So I'm regularly compelled to download emails off the Gmail servers to preseve space and lost many of them when my computer died in January.

All of which—by which I mean all of these things that are in the public record and have been for months and years—Jeff finds very suspicious. That says all you need to know about him and concludes all I'm going to say about this.

Except for one last thing: the person who claims not to have harrassed me a few years ago has sent me 38 messages on Twitter in the past hour. I take it this is his version of "making the case" that he doesn't harass people, because he doesn't seem to realize that his performance undermines his message.

*Google "Troll of Constant Sorrow" if you're interested in more on that. Which you shouldn't be.

Comments

[SEK]

Before you say anything: this is dumber than it sounds.

[Ahistoricality]

JG thinks you sent him an email in which you claimed to have tenure? Holy Close Reading Fail Batman!

[SEK]

Like I said, dumber then it sounds.

[Marc Page]

Well, somebody had to be the new 'Frisch' ... (there's more than one way to fill the old tip jar)

[SEK]

For me with all my infinite power, to oppress poor Jeff, who has nothing his sycophants don't provide him. It's not fair!

[Marc Page]

Nobody said the Internet was going to be fair, but it can be entertaining; providing, of course, that one has the good sense to refrain from responding to armed lunatics.

[bored internet detective]

I would suggest you obfuscate the address a little more aggressively. (see my email address). (Obviously I am nobody involved in this. Well, not obviously, but you'll have to take my word for it).

Cheers!

[Marc Page]

Well, hell, just can't resist a puzzle, I guess:

5*** Prairie Circle
Frederick CO 80530

... warm ?