But he has sent me a couple of email missives. Here’s one for your entertainment: he hasn’t changed a bit.

Hey Myers –

Speaking of kooks, you and Laden are poor judges especially since you’ve been busy sliming Michael Shermer who is far more respectable than either of you will ever be. No, I haven’t read either of your lame online attack pieces on me. But these confirm why I have advised certain people and organizations never, ever, to have anything to do with either you or Laden at any future events in which either of you may be a key participant.

I do wish Shermer much success in making you answer finally for your shameless, ridiculous attacks on very credible people which have been part of Pharyngula ever since you started it. Nor am I the only one who thinks so. I’ve been in touch with other, more prominent, people in the secular humanist and atheist movements who are looking forward to seeing you earn your just desserts. Contrary to the claims expressed by yourself and your delusional fans, you have not been a good advocate for public understanding of science, period. Your bizarre behavior towards Sheril Kirshenbaum when she condemned you for allowing a delusional fan to post a threat at Pharyngula to rape and to kill her and Chris Mooney as well as your recent allegation against Shermer are two major reasons why you have never been a good advocate.

Respectfully yours,

John Kwok

P. S. If Greg wants to post a picture of Stuyvesant High School, he’s chosen the wrong edifice. That wasn’t the building I went to high school; instead, it was the former location on E. 15th Street which is featured on the dust jacket of Frank McCourt’s “Teacher Man”.

P. P. S. In lieu of a Leica M7 rangefinder camera, I would prefer you donate an equivalent sum to one of Stuyvesant’s alumni organizations so that current and future students who have interests in pursuing careers in the sciences will have some financial support for their student research.

Stay gold, Jonnyboy, stay gold.

The mother of a 13 year old boy with autism discovered this letter from a neighbor.

To the lady living at this address:

I also live in this neighbourhood and have a problem!!!! You have a kid that is mentally handicapped and you consciously decided that it would be a good idea to live in a close proximity neighbourhood like this???? You selfishly put your kid outside everyday and let him be a nothing but a nuisance and a problem to everyone else with that noise polluting whaling he constantly makes!!! That noise he makes when he is outside is DREADFUL!!!!!!!!!! It scares the hell out of my normal children!!!!!!!!! When you feel your idiot kid needs fresh air, take him to our park you dope!!! We have a nature trail!! Let him run around those places and make noise!!!!!! Crying babies, music and even barking dogs are normal sounds in a residential neighborhood!!!!! He is NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!

He is a nuisance to everyone and will always be that way!!!!!! Who the hell is going to care for him????????? No employer will hire him, no normal girl is going to marry/love him and you are not going to live forever!! Personally, they should take whatever non retarded body parts he possesses and donate it to science. What the hell else good is he to anyone!!!! You had a retarded kid, deal with it… properly!!!!! What right do you have to do this to hard working people!!!!!!!!! I HATE people like you who believe, just because you have a special needs kid, you are entitled to special treatment!!! GOD!!!!

Do everyone in our community huge a favor and MOVE!!!! VAMOSE!!! SCRAM!!!! Move away and get out of this type of neighborhood setting!!! Go live in a trailer in the woods or something with your wild animal kid!!! Nobody wants you living here and they don’t have the guts to tell you!!!!!

Do the right thing and move or euthanize him!!! Either way, we are ALL better off!!!

Sincerely,

One pissed off mother!!!!!

Speaking as a scientist here, I’m not at all interested in dismantling young boys for their organs, so I’m going to have to reject that suggestion. However, I do think someone with such a serious case of exclamation point abuse and hatefulness ought to be condemned to live in a small trailer in the wilderness with no other people about, with the Canadian government airdropping occasional packages of supplies (moose meat and poutine? Timbits for dessert? Whatever Canadians eat) so that she can live without the interruptions from other human beings. It’s the only humane thing to do. We’d all be better off.

The guy who has been pestering Skeptics Guide to the Universe to fire Rebecca Watson, and is also associated with the always lovely pro-harrasment site A News, and who created the anti-Rebecca Watson facebook page, has been revealed. It’s Cecil Fuson. Mr Fuson really, really hates Rebecca. He’s really disgusted with this feminist stuff.

Mr Fuson is also a registered sex offender who was convicted and went to prison for “indecent liberties with a minor” in 2003.

It was probably those damned feminists who railroaded him.

<Cue shrieks of “Dox!” and “Free speech!” (oh wait, not that last one, this time)>

I’ve compared him to Dennis Markuze before, and it’s exactly the same: using internet protocols and an abundance of free time to constantly harass people he doesn’t like with pointless, content-free noise. The offender goes by the pseudonym “@elevatorGATE” on twitter (right away, you can tell what inspired him), and he’s been doing this for years now, obsessively dunning his targets with noise. There are some differences: Markuze aims his vitriol at skeptics who questioned the existence of paranormal powers.

@elevatorGATE hates women.

Another difference is that Markuze is a despised loner, while @elevatorGATE is surrounded with a little cloud of filth, people who share his hatred and use @elevatorGATE as an amplifier and who love to cloak themselves in the indignant mantle of FREE SPEECH! What they really want is the opposite, though: their goal is to drown out dissent with persistent shouting, and preferably to drive their victims out of social media altogether. They’re more of the trollish toxin that’s poisoning the internet. They’re also the first to squawk if anyone makes an effort to personally block their intrusions — these are privileged idiots who feel it is their right to demand that we listen to them.

Their latest tool is to use Storify. @elevatorGATE constantly gathers up tweets into a little bundle and echoes them back repeatedly; it’s especially easy because when he does that, all of his targets get a little notification (I’ve had to set up my accounts to automatically trash all notifications because the noise is deafening and useless). Imagine dealing with a junior high snot who’s brilliant strategy for harassing you is to follow you around and repeat everything you say, over and over: that’s the brain of @elevatorGATE. And there’s the newest offense: he thinks he has the right to do that. And worse, the CEO of Storify has agreed.

Ana Mardoll and John Scalzi have posts up about this. Scalzi has published a letter he received about this problem.

A Twitter and Storify user who goes by the handle “@elevatorGATE” is a well-known cyberstalker of women via social media. His latest method of doing this is to compile thousands of pieces on Storify, often including every single tweet sent by his chosen targets, and then publish them, which notifies the women in question that he had published yet another piece archiving their every word. After repeated complaints and requests for help, Storify temporarily deactivated the notification feature on his account, which doesn’t actually solve the problem.

In a conversation yesterday with Xavier Damman, the Storify CEO suggested that the women @elevatorGATE is targeting turn off all notifications from Storify, which essentially suggests that they withdraw from the medium if they don’t like being stalked, and which also wouldn’t solve the problem of this user archiving everything these women say. One of the users pointed out that this is very much like telling a woman who is being harassed via telephone to never answer the phone. It was at this point in the conversation that Damman went from passively enabling a stalker to actively assisting one. He tweeted, in response to the women, that they “…can’t do anything about that. It’s @elevatorgate’s right to quote public statements…”

Prior to this point in the conversation, the women had named their stalker, but not used the @ symbol in front of his username. You know enough about Twitter to know why that’s a big deal. Damman either carelessly or deliberately notified a man stalking multiple women that they were seeking some way to prevent him from continuing to harass them, and then claimed it was no big deal because anyone searching for the information would have been able to find it. But there’s a very big difference between information existing and that same information being directly brought to a person’s attention.

If you know much about stalking, you’ll know what happens next. @elevatorGATE has substantially stepped up his harassment of the women who had asked Damman for help. Men who follow him on both Storify and Twitter have been bombarding these women via Storify notifications and Tweets with additional harassment. He has also increased his harassment of known online associates of the women in question, making it difficult for them to seek out help or support from fear of his beginning to stalk their friends as well. It’s the reason I’m contacting you privately, via email, rather than via social media: I’m afraid. I don’t want to be added to his list of targets.

Think about that. Damman runs a company that is utterly dependent on social media, and he’s so incompetent or so heedless that he doesn’t recognize the responsibilities or potential for abuse in his own software. He is unaware that his product is easily misused by stalkers. That should be a cause for a lack of confidence in Storify.

I do have to correct the letter above on one point. It refers to “Men who follow [@elevatorGATE]…”, but I also know of several women who also defend him and chortle along with his barrages.

@elevatorGATE should be getting the same treatment that Dennis Markuze got. His followers should be ashamed of themselves. And Damman should either work to correct his company’s product’s flaws, or he should go bankrupt.