h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

First, I never said that Quincy was stalking anyone. During the Silent Lucidity debacle I felt that SL was stalking Hoovooloo and insisted on continuing to discuss LeKZ with Hoovooloo when he'd been asked to stop. I won't dredge through a bunch of dead conversations to link to that. If my impression was wrong, I'm sorry. It's how I saw it.

SL was LeKZ. LeKZ lost all credibility as someone whose honor won't allow her to sneak back into h2g2 under another user name. LeKZ also lost credibility as someone who won't lie about it when she's been busted.

I don't know if Quincy is LeKZ. In many ways Quincy feels like LeKZ, but it doesn't mean he is. Apparently he's chosen not to clear LeKZ of the charge of manifesting again because he thinks the burden of proof should be on the editors. That's his right, to feel that way. If I were in his position I'd probably decide that it's better to clear someone of the charge of having done something dishonorable than to stand on the principle of innocent until proven guilty. I'm not Quincy, so that's not for me to decide.

People voiced concern to the editors that LeKZ is back again. They are responsible for trying to enforce the rules here. The only person who can submit evidence that he isn't LeKZ prefers not to. It'll be interesting to see which way the wind blows on this one.

Having just read the correspondance between the h2g2 Editors, Satyagraha and Quincy, I am amazed. There are only two possibilities:

1. Quincy and Satyagraha are both genuine individuals who have managed to make friends in a week with all the people who LekZ was friends with, see nothing strange in the fact that LekZ is a multiple personality, assume Lekz is an innocent who has been wronged and are completely consistent with each other and with Not Banned Yet in every thing they say.

or

2. Lekz is a mentally ill obsessive who has made the whole thing up from start to finish.

We already know that Lekz is a mentally ill obsessive. Very few people here would dispute that. So is it such a big step to think that she made it all up? She's done it before, twice, although not on this scale.

There must be a better euphemism to use instead of "mentally ill obsessive." Or better yet, state the allegation as "LeKZ ... has made the whole thing up from start to finish."

I would hope anyone could see that once the identity of a researcher has been called into question by several people, arguments from that researcher which fundamentally rely on the truth of that researcher's identity for support, and which seem to contradict widely available information will be:

a) Accepted as mainly or wholly true by people who believe the researcher is exactly what they claim to be.
b) Treated with varying degrees of caution by people who are undecided.
c) Considered as of little or no weight by people who believe the researcher is not what they claim to be.

In the case where someone is what they claim, and yet for whatever reason their postings lead some people to believe that they are not, it is certainly most unfortunate.
However, that cannot alter the undeniable fact that arguments founded fundamentally on the assertion 'But I *am* X' are logically of no value. Only arguments which support or diminish the claim for identity without also relying on it can be useful.

Similarly, arguments relying on understandable sympathy or antipathy towards any researcher or anyone else cannot help decide the identity debate, they can only confuse the undecided, and risk polarising the decided.

In reply to MoG and Gnomon:

I see where you're both coming from. I wonder what Murray Strauss, MD, thinks about the fact that his taking the fifth basically screws LeKZ. It does this because the existence of Murry Strauss and Sam Thierry as non-LeKZ individuals involve some coincidences that no reasonable person should be expected to believe, barring *some* kind of mitigating explanation.

There are mitigating explanations. 'Name 3.' Ok.

1. Denver/Boulder area. There are reasons that people with certain similarities would be drawn to this area. Being homosexual, having mental health conditions, being drawn to certain types of spirituality, being politically liberal... these are things that are not comfortable in the US West outside of a few areas, Santa Fe/Taos, Denver/Boulder, Sedona, LA, San Francisco. (ready to be attacked by sundry for dissing the US West...)

2. Writing style. This is a very subjective issue. People are very good at seeing what they're looking for. The tone of communications with h2g2 editorial, though, would be pretty similar, I think. Here are three people who have been thrown off of the same website, by the same Italics, using the same official emails, etc. All three believe their bans to be unjustified. Might they not respond similarly? Most of the writing that we have of Murray's and Sam's to look at is stuff that they wrote in response to being banned from h2g2! Maybe they sound like LeKZ because LeKZ sounds like someone who feels they were treated unfairly, in a very specific way.

3, and nobody's gonna believe this one. MPs are more prone to bizarre coincidences than the popluation at large. I'm not aware of any documentation of this phenomenon, other than anecdotal evidence from the MP who told me that this is true, most of which I haven't actually heard, and assents from two others, passed on by hearsay. So, do with it what you will.

Anyway, some of the things that Gnomon listed don't even deserve to be called coincidences. Getting to know the Friends of LeKZ? Well, it's mostly Friends of LeKZ who know LeKZ well enough to be in a position to say that Murray and Sam aren't LeKZ, and it's mostly Friends of LeKZ who have been willing and eager to contact Murray and Sam, isn't it? Before the bans were enacted, they were getting to know a wider variety of people, I thought.

Agreeing with each other and with NBY about things? Not a problem if they're the only three researchers at h2g2 in a position to *know* that they really are three different people.

Anyway, maybe it's too late, but Murray, Sam - if you don't prove who you are, then LeKZ's name suffers. I can see applying principles like "I don't have to prove who I am" if it's just about yourself, but when it's gonna affect someone else, it's pretty s****y, IMHO. That's what I think, feel free to email me if you wanna discuss it. (Or just open another account here and post at my personal space, if you're LeKZ, there's no need because you'll catch me at TrusT.) I'm Tony, [email protected].



"People voiced concern to the editors that LeKZ is back again. They are responsible for trying to enforce the rules here."

Yeah, they are. I wish they'd enforce them according to their old principle that if banned researchers return, and don't cause trouble, then that's ok. I don't know where they've said that they were abandoning that principle, or why, but they obviously have left it far behind. (Any of you crazy link kids got something lying around? Meet me at Lifetime Sus, ok?)

If they did that, then the issue of whether Murray Strauss and Sam Thierry are really LeKZ would never have needed to be aired. People would have complained, and the Eds could have saved everyone a *lot* of trouble by just saying, "So, you think she's back. If she does something wrong, yikes it." That would be much less of a headache all around, doncha think?



Until such time as that happens...

"If I were in his position I'd probably decide that it's better to clear someone of the charge of having done something dishonorable than to stand on the principle of innocent until proven guilty."

So would I, but principles are funny things. Sometimes, they become more important than people, which is funny, because it was the people that the principles were supposed to be helping, I thought.

In the interests of fairness, I'd have to add to point 1 that the pure proximity issue itself, however much or little significance people may place in it, really boils down to the single coincidence of the proximity of Quincy and LeKZ.

Whatever people's opinion may be about Quincy, the geographical closeness of Quincy and Satyagraha can be understood, since their independent existences seem inextricably linked, barring circumstances so bizzare as to be best left alone.

I would agree that Quincy and Satyagraha are linked. I might even go so far as to say

1. IF either of them are real, THEN both are real,

2. IF either of them are LeKZ, THEN both are LeKZ.

Continuing, (this is the good bit) I would say that,

3. IF Quincy and Satyagraha are different people, THEN neither is LeKZ.

(I'm numbering these so they can be more clearly disagreed with.)

Now, I seem to remember that Satyagraha's IP was traceable and Quincy's wasn't, which seems to me to be evidence that they're different people...

FYI the decision has been made to close Quincy's account permanently. You can find more information here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A681374

I guess that should be http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A681086

- Keeper of Links

GTB:

Not wishing to prolong this now academic debate, but the traceability of S's account compared to Q's is "evidence" of nothing. It suggests to you that they may be different people. It suggests other things to me. The most pertinent piece of information which supports my suggestion was first made public by you, in fact.

In the correspondence you posted, you will note that Quincy asks the Eds to use a different address than the one he signed up from, claiming the original address as belonging to "his kid" and not being comfortable with an address with the name of a cartoon character in it. This is a perfectly plausible story.

But so is this: the "Quincy" account was set up fraudulently by a user who realised that it may be possible to trace communications from the original email account. They therefore set up another email address, less traceable or untraceable (I'm not a techie, so I don't know the details...), and used that to communicate with the Eds. This subterfuge would be necessary to allow Quincy to "take the fifth" and remain untraceable. I have not bothered to check the timing to see whether Quincy became "uncomfortable" with his kid's email account before or after Satyagraha was definitively traced to LeKZ's ISP. Someone else surely can.

Of course, once Satyagraha's account *was* traced to that ISP, any change of email account for that ID is academic, which would explain why Satyagraha never bothered to change email accounts like Quincy did.

One might question why someone trying to fraudulently sign up under two or three different new names when they're already banned would not realise an IP trace could localise them so precisely (and to those who say it isn't precise, getting it down to the users of a particular ISP in a particular town is narrowing it down a LOT from the total number of people it COULD be). On the other hand, it's not so surprising if the person posited to be operating the account has publicly stated that "an IP trace isn't worth s**t". IF that was the opinion of the person setting up the account, it is natural to assume they wouldn't bother being any more devious than they think necessary, until proven wrong, again.

I'm not saying the above is what happened. I'm saying that, given what undisputed facts have been made available (and there are remarkably few...), the above interpretation is another alternative to the one you offered.

I'll not be drawn into further debate about this, but please consider the other possible interpretations of the facts, at least.

Thanks.

H.

Hoovooloo, the time is past for arguments. The decision has been made. Let's talk about something else now.

Yeah, hear hear.

*sigh*



Ste

Hoovooloo,

Indeed. You could be right. I'll see you around *other* parts of the site.



GTB

that was supposed to be, of course,

At the risk of reviving threads that should be left fallow, during the upgrade yesterday I got copies of the h2g2 server logs (so I could do some analysis of the speed improvements since the last upgrade).

Out of curiosity I also had a look at the times when Quincy and Satyagraha were logging in, to see what I could find, and I found the following:

* The Quincy account was created by the user of the Satyagraha account.
* The Satyagraha account was used when logging in to the wallflower girl account.

This was all done around the times these accounts were created, before any suspicions had been aroused.

This proves conclusively that all three accounts were being operated from the same machine.

I've posted this to all the relevant Ban/Don't Ban threads for completeness.

This post has been removed.