A brief note about the current state of “radical self-expression” in the Burning Man community, and by current, I mean very current. As in, about an hour ago. Last month I saw a video, posted by AP, about an event I’ve witnessed.

These are people I’ve dealt with before, describing the incident on this page, and their event as follows:

“Liz aka Boperella wrote:

> before it gets to cold! come out and play!

A matter of personal preference, I suppose. Personally, I’d just as soon skip that, and here’s why …

(url given for page)

As per usual format, incident is documented. Click on highlighted passages and you’ll get to the relevant letter, headers included. While the old bopcamp list and its archives have been deleted, I made sure to save copies on my hard drive.

If your opinions don’t fit in with somebody else’s views regarding political correctness and he decides to get abusive about that fact, this is the kind of treatment you can expect from Liz and company. If that doesn’t bother you, and you’re up for a few hours of repetitious banner twirling done to the tune of music that varies so little in tempo that you’ll find yourself checking your wristwatch to make sure that time hasn’t stopped, go ahead. You’ll get a beautiful view of the moon rising out of the lake, and that’s a thing not to be missed.

If what you’re looking for is genuine companionship, however, you could do better almost anywhere.”

Note that I held onto the e-mail. Follow the link, read the letters and you’ll see that there was nothing unfair about the characterization I gave of the conduct of the participants in that discussion. Nor was there anything unfair in the description I gave of the event, but all the same, I was banned from the list to which I posted that comment, “radical free expression” not covering the posting of unfavorable reviews of events. Or of views anywhere to the right of those of the average moonbat. “But Joe”, somebody will say, “that was a few years ago” – a few years that have not been followed by my getting unbanned from the list – “times have changed”. Really? Have they? Let’s take a look.

The videos are posted, and some of us respond a little more honestly than others would prefer. At the moment, you can still find these remarks by choosing to see all of the comments for the video, but even there, remarks that don’t fit in with the party line have already been buried by somebody who has been abusing the spam flagging procedure, my second, third and fourth comments being wrongly flagged as such, my and M1ndz’ first comments being buried by some other means.

M1ndz opened with an observation:

M1ndz: looks like a good stoner party

I first commented on what we were seeing in the video. Note and remember what I’m saying in this comment – that there is something very misleading about the way in which it is shot, something that creates the illusion that there are more people attending this event than there actually are. This matters, because somebody, later on, is going to try to get you to forget that.

Me: Selective editing can work wonders. I’ve seen this gathering, before. What they’re not telling you is that it’s held near a large lakefront beach in Chicago, along a heavily traveled lakefront path. On the weekend. You could sit out there on Youtube, reading a telephone directory, and you’d still have a lot of faces in the background.

and then replied to M1ndz

Me: @M1ndz It IS a good stoner party, which is one of the reasons why Burning Man never really caught on in Chicago. The Interactive Art got played down, and the drugs and the ultra-far left politics got played up.

adding (using another post, because character limits on Youtube)

This event is held by a group called “Bop Camp”, run by somebody named Liz Campanella, who is the “official” local Burning Man coordinator for Chicago. You can read up about her and her community elsewhere. If you do want to go – and I do not recommend this – the event you’re looking for is called the Full Moon Fire Jam, and it’s held on the weekend of the full moon during the warm months, about 1/2 Mile south of Foster Ave Beach on the Lake

closing by spelling out an url, because of Youtube’s bizarre decision to strip urls from Youtube comments. Oh, and before anybody tries to claim that the presence of this url is what got my comments flagged as spam – the url citing was in a separate post, which wasn’t flagged as spam. The whole post is what you’re about to see, with one difference – I’ve turned the spelled out url into a link on this blog, and inserted a nofollow tag, because I don’t want to give these people any link love. Or any other kind of love, at this point, given the way they’ve behaved.

See pyrotechniq org fullmoonjam

Here comes the bait and switch: Remember how I mentioned that these events are held in an area with a lot of foot traffic, something that you could have easily seen for yourself, had we even been shown a wide angle shot? Or even a shot that wasn’t really narrowly closed in? What you would have seen, and what the folks at AP weren’t willing to show you, was

1. Lake Michigan, literally a few feet away from some of the participants.



2. The footpath along Lake Michigan, which this event has parked itself on, obstructing foot traffic going up and down the lakefront.



3. A long and fairly dense line of people going along that path in either direction, and that includes a stream of people walking away from the spin jam, that party you’re seeing on the video. Which really doesn’t fit in very well with the story that they were there to see the spin jam.

So, seeing somebody in-frame doesn’t give one a good reason to think that somebody is there to see the spin. A fair number of people are just trying to get past the obstruction which the relative handful of partiers have, most inconsiderately, created on a public way. Picture a garage band setting up a stage in the middle of Madison and State, snapping a photo of the traffic jam they’ve created, and then trying to claim that so many people had driven out to their concert, that the Loop had been shut down. It’s that kind of logic. Or should I say that kind of spin.

This, then, is remarkably dishonest. But notice how, in the passage I’ve set in bold, “halfpinttrota” tries to leave you with the impression that the subject of the crowd that would be there without the fire jam being present came up in a discussion of this event’s supposedly excellent planning, instead of in a mention of the fraudulent nature of the promotion. Did I mention that these events usually take place during the summer, when Chicago is buried in tourists fleeing the summer heat of places like Southern California and Texas? Or that the Lakefront is one of our top tourist attractions, especially during the summer, when the cool lake breezes make it the most comfortable place in the city? This person is absolutely without shame.

halfpinttrota: Regarding ‘selective editing’ – it can ‘work wonders’ but it wasn’t necessary here. The jams do attract very large crowds now, with many people showing up early to get good spots, and yes, the jams are in the lakefront park with lots of foot traffic – which is why we take community safety seriously. Also, the jams fall between Sunday-Thursday evenings, NOT weekends, and go from sunset until 10:15pm, as everyone must be out of the park before it closes at 11pm.

Because, of course, Sunday isn’t part of the weekend? Note that we never said that the event went past 10, but that won’t keep our friend from acting as if we had, and “correcting” us. While the Fire Jam seem determined to back up our friend, currently stating this

“Jams do not happen on Friday or Saturday nights.”

on a page that somehow has failed, to date, to show up in the Internet Archive, they do seem to have forgotten that Liz Campanella was in the habit of posting fire jam annnouncements in a place where she can’t edit her words, only delete them. Namely on Yahoogroups, where in this message, dated 2006, we see Liz write

Hello Beautiful People who love to gather for the full moon

This Friday, October 6th, is the Full Moon. I apologize for the goof up on the web site saying it’s Oct 7th. Thanks to those who pointed out the mistake.

Come Friday night, around sundown to celebrate the full moon, the gathering of the tribes, our community and hopefully the warm weather.

So much for spins never happening on Friday. I guess Liz missed a spot? Oh – wait – Friday doesn’t count as part of the weekend, either, I guess. Our friend follows with another little dodge …

halfpinttrota: I have to beg to differ with previous comments about the jams being “stoner parties”. The jams have become very well-organized events, especially over the past year, and we take safety and community responsibility very seriously. One of the most important tenets we have is that the jams are family friendly events being held in a public park, therefore we DO NOT encourage drug or alcohol use by either spectators or performers and will ask anyone with such substances to put it away or leave.

If stoners attend something that is of particular interest to stoners, then it is a stoner party. One doesn’t cease to be a stoner, just by benefit of putting one’s bong down for a few minutes, as remarkable an accomplishment as this must seem to some of the participants in the video. I’ve made the mistake of going to some of that community’s shindigs in the past, at the last one I ever attended watching as somebody sat with the rest of us in a sidewalk cafe, passing around the pot as a few police cars passed behind us. Which is why that was the last time. That’s just incredibly stupid.

No drugs in the community? Really? if anybody believes this, please drop by a few of their events, and bring a few undercover cops as guests. I mean, if there is no contraband there, it’s not like I’m ratting these guys out, right? What are they going to get caught doing? No harm, no foul. I’m sure they won’t mind.

M1ndz replied, mild profanity softened by me because of WordPress’ terms of service.

M1ndz: @BurningManMovies that (inhales sharply)

I replied to halfpintrotta

Me:

“The jams do attract very large crowds now, with many people showing up early to get good spots”

I’m sure you’d like us to think that they do, halfpintrotta

“and yes, the jams are in the lakefront park with lots of foot traffic – which is why we take community safety seriously”

Notice how he deliberately misses the point of the observation.

Which he did. But hardly anybody will ever see that rebuttal, because posted, as it was, at around 4 am Chicago time, it had been wrongly marked as spam before 5 am. It doesn’t even appear on the video page, itself. The only way that you can even know it exists, is by either reading this blog post, or by going to the view all comments page, linked to at the bottom.

Functionally, this is not much different from a deletion – a comment that nobody knows is there might as well not be there. How many people are going to click on that link? So, we have a blatant misuse of spam flagging being used to effectively achieve censorship, followed by a spin doctoring response to comments that are no longer in clear view, in order to protect a misleading promotional video from being outed as such. With a once respectable news agency being willing to be a party to such a low rent scam for reasons at which one could only guess. Times have changed, you say?

If so, surely not for the better.

Link for this post: http://is.gd/hE4rK

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