Approaching Infinity said:
Any interesting tidbits or themes from those 79 pages?
This was one anonymous (unverified) reviewer. Had reviewed
nothing else. Started in 2012; comments thread included apparent multiple 'sock puppet' accounts, and so...much...Sneering and Jeering. At Paulides (he made the mistake of commenting/rebutting a few times in the thread), at anyone who attempted to ask the troll/troll team "What's your
problem; why're you so obsessed with Paulides?" and at anyone whom, obviously a fan, had tried to defend Paulides. (It's possible some of the 'Paulides Defenders' were sock puppets themselves, as some of them descended into a very unflattering rudeness. That or they just got
that frustrated, playing that ever un-winnable game.)
So...
much...'Loosh'.
The 'accusations' consisted of stuff like: claims that Paulides had cherry-picked data to push an agenda, that despite not saying it explicitly, he'd had a 'Footer' agenda all along, that for that reason he'd way overemphasized the strangeness of the disappearances, that it was so easy to get lost and die in the woods, that he was profiting from the disappearances/deaths of missing children, that he had been arrested/sanctioned in some way at one of his police jobs (for allegedly using police stationary to get some celebrity's autograph, and was probably forced to 'quit/retire' so that he hadn't worked a full 20 years, and/or wasn't technically a 'retired police officer'), that he had ignored common realities known to all SAR people about outdoor exposure phenomena such as paradoxical undressing / terminal hiding and burrowing (to explain away the undressed bodies), that he was a bum for not advising that parents educate their children in the 'Hug a Tree' SAR recommendation (if ever lost in the woods), that he was lying about not being able to get missing person data from the Park Service via the FOIA requests... or that if they wouldn't give it to
him, it was because they knew he was a fraud... that he'd colluded with Ketchum to scam $ out of the 'Footer community over that DNA study... that his stuff looked like some of it'd been plagiarized from some other website, that SAR organizations had no respect for him, that his fans couldn't face the reality of what a fraud Paulides was, were of low intelligence, and that they were just crazy and one of these days would outright physically attack SAR personnel somewhere...
Every so often, someone 'new' would pop in to the thread to thank the reviewer; now they knew not to bother buying Paulides' over-priced books! (Another sockpuppet, natch).
I looked through the whole thing... (Amazon had at one point deleted MANY posts due to complaints). It was...THREE YEARS worth of sneering, jeering invective. I don't think I'd ever actually poked through a trolled-out thread before; had just heard about them.
It was....Instructive.
Paulides has been...getting hammered in this way (and, unfortunately, apparently unable to keep from reacting publicly to it from time to time)...for a
looong time.
I'm currently in a Facebook group which discusses Missing 411, and Paulides comments there sometimes - but I'd say it's now completely cointelpro infiltrated. I'm seeing the same game being played there. Bit more subtle, but same playbook. Some of the carping behaviors could be due to the usual internecine rivalry in his field, but the quickest way by far to get one of the 'regulars' barging into a thread to start disrupting is to speculate about a possible hyperdimensional aspect to the disappearances... (Which Paulides himself does not do, of course.) Paulides has intimated that at least one of the mods there is hostile to him. (At one point one of them removed him briefly after he expressed frustration over the insinuations popping up there, though he was re-added again soon after.) I'd say he called that
one right.