June 09, 2005
Peekaboo!
We See You
"Jack Peek, Portland's angriest internet troll -- a chronic poster and voracious reader of local blogs -- declined to be interviewed when I called/emailed him to see what makes him tick," writes Andrea Chalupa. "Now that I'm on his mass-emailing list along with Lars Larsen [sic] and Crossfire, I pieced together info from his emails that more or less matched the questions I hoped he would have answered personally."
Comments (34)
Dave J. on 10 Jun 2005
Sadly, that "interview" doesn't ask the one question I really want answered: "Jack, what, exactly, would you do if your caps lock key broke?"
Mikey on 10 Jun 2005
The original idea was to get to know Jack Peek the human, as opposed to the side we all see, JACK PEEK the troll. Unfortunately Mr. Peek was either too busy or too weird to too ________ to be up for an interview. Kudos to Chalupa for jumping in to a potential minefield and trying to get the real story. At least it ends up being entertaining. :)
Pedro on 10 Jun 2005
Ah JACK PEEK,
Over on Blue Oregon I made a joke about Lars and his weapon(s). JACK PEEK emailed me to let me know his weapon of choce is an "AK-47".
I stopped leaving my real email address after that...
Pedro
William on 11 Jun 2005
I thought the AK-47 was Russian-designed and manufactured. What would a patriot like Jack be doing with one of those? It is a good rifle, but patriotic Americans should buy American!
Lily on 11 Jun 2005
I was surprised to get a ranting and raving email after the November election- from Jack Peek, crowing about Bush winning the election and what losers "we" all are. Apparently, he got my email address from Jack Bog's blog. He didn't actually sign the email, but the rhetoric and caps let me know just who sent the email.
What amazes me about Peek is his complete inability to tolerate anyone who doesn't march in the exact same lock-step as he. Many of us feel the same way about some of the issues he is upset about. I hate the plethora of halfway houses and social services (methadone clinics and parole offices) that Buckman is inundated with. I was all for the recall Vera petition. But Peek seems unable to communicate without heaping insults upon people. And how does he know that we haven't battled long and hard against the same issues? The truth of the matter is that the City government just puts up a brick wall about alot of things, and you can beat your head open on that wall.
jack peek on 11 Jun 2005
"AND WHY WOULD I THINK AN INTERVIEW WOULD BE FAIR AN BALANCED?" (all caps)
Perhaps this is the reason...and one of your "own" said it far better then me.
Leaving the left
Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.
I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.
I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.
My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.
Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.
Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for so long ignored. The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has my rapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological -- something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the voice whispers. "How did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did many years before.
I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community, where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right, wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought").
The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful that way.
I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice, lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate ever to a Democratic convention.
Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.
A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word "evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert.
When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'" too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport.
My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like "gulag" to the dinner table.
I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.
Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics.
Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day.
All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity.
These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic.
I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.
In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).
Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that."
When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided."
I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?
He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators. Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice for "all of God's children."
My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body politic.
In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders' talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.
America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.
At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society (whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to "foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe."
One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my reactionary hometown.
This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.
True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.
Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection, and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.
All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.
ALL OF THE ABOVE ...PLUS MENTAL ILLNESS!
jack peek on 11 Jun 2005
I pieced together info from his emails that more or less matched the questions I hoped he would have answered personally. So in the nature of half-truths, the following is a half-interview.
QUESTION: Is this the great reporting style famous at Newweek and the retired Dan Rather is so famous for? Sure it is!
My friends.....the half-interview can be a whole one anytime B!X want's too drop by the house.
We can sit out front, or we can sit in back, but we must not speak too loudly, me neighbors are a bit SENNNNSETIVE!
jack peek on 11 Jun 2005
JACK PEEK emailed me to let me know his weapon of choce is an "AK-47".
I stopped leaving my real email address after that...
Pedro
Pedro: The Romanian AK47 (LEGAL) is used quite a bit at a local gunrange in Tulatin, not in a Rock pit in Camas as your close friends choose to do.
Since owning it I can "group" the 7.62x39 rounds at less then 1.5 inches at 100 yrds...Good shooting by AK standards.
Love to have you drop by as well!
The One True b!X on 11 Jun 2005
Jack, just how much are oyu getting paid to use your URL field for comment spam purposes?
jack peek on 11 Jun 2005
I hate the plethora of halfway houses and social services (methadone clinics and parole offices) that Buckman is inundated with. I was all for the recall Vera petition. But Peek seems unable to communicate without heaping insults upon people. And how does he know that we haven't battled long and hard against the same issues? The truth of the matter is that the City government just puts up a brick wall about alot of things, and you can beat your head open on that wall.
This post really pissed me off the most!
Did some checking on old meeting lists..LILY NEVER SEEMED TO BE AT ANY OF THEM( all caps)
The recall: None of you really want a fight..you hide when some of you were asked to do more then post words on a blog. How about telling some of these idiots that we are mad, just work too recall just one of them. Can you imagine how that success would silence a "cell phone tax", a 200 dollar an hour consultant..etc. etc. etc.
Sadly, I'm dealing with people who think we can win the minds of people like Vera Katz when none of you in any numbers that matter show up.
Me, ANGRY???? not anymore..just sad, sick at heart...we are losing this country because the BASICS OF GOVERMENT(all caps) AND THE COMMONSENSE of community safety are lost in political correctness that will eventully kill us.
Leaving you "PDX FRIENDS" with a question: WHY IS SAVAGES BOOK SELLING SO WELL?
jack peek on 11 Jun 2005
"ALL POSTER:" Just invited B!x over for the interview he thinks I will not sit for. No reply yet!
jack peek on 11 Jun 2005
Its not bad...I must be honest:
What’d you do for a living?
Truck driver. “I traveled 12 states to earn a living while my wife and kids were home alone.” ADDING: I worried about 5 insane guys on our backfence.
What are your core political beliefs?
“My politics are not what could be elected, but my passion for the basics can’t be challenged.” ADDING: Maybe the time has come too run(there is money for it, and Savages book sales show a bunch of people are waking up.even here in BLUEPDX.
What’s it like being a conservative in little Beirut”?
“When you think right, an towards the middle of politics, and all here in PDX, is as “blue” as it gets, it’s damn lucky, as nasty as some comments have been made about me, that I haven’t been shot at.”
Why do you post?
“You provide the passion and evident frustration that some things aren’t the way you want them, which people do hear even if you may not believe it because they don’t’ necessarily agree with you all the way. Your contributions nonetheless provide useful reminders that some citizens are mad as hell and not wanting to take it anymore.” ADDING: Maybe I COULD WIN on just the above .
Do you have an online nemesis?
“B!X has the talent to root out the facts we would never hear…sometimes slanted his way…but nevertheless, he writes what others are afraid too, my respect towards him.” ADDING: B!x could be my chief of staff and correct my speeling>
How would you sum up the Portland political establishment?
“Train wreck” ADDING: STILL THE SAME ANSWER!
You spearheaded a futile recall effort against Vera Katz. What’d you learn from that experience?
“Back too the original challenge…just once, can people unite in this city to really be heard...LOUDLY, and just not here, until then, those jobs at city hall are safe.” adding: SAME ANSWER!
Do you see any more recall efforts in your future?
“There comes a time, that the fact has to sink in, that until we have a voice that speaks from where we do…’we are screwed.’” ADDING: Or until someone is killed by what I have posted about.
How’s Mayor Potter doing?
“Sick, JUST SICK!”
What is your greatest extravagance?
Passion. ADDING: It seems a crime for me at least!
Any last words of wisdom?
“If you have kids….DON’T HAVE ANYMORE!” ADDING: Gee! MAYBE I'M MORE LEFT THEN I THOUGHT.......LESS DISPOSABLE DIAPERS IN GARBAGE DUMPS.....(the right wash's there's)
Steve Schopp on 11 Jun 2005
Frankly, with all the things to blog about I can't see how b!x thought this "peekaboo" bit on Peek was blogworthy.
What is the point or interest I am missing?
This is the stuff of juvenile chat rooms.
Come on b!x, don't you think that was just a little silly and petty?
I can't blame Peek for firing off some reactionary posts but the entry and thread is as lame as it gets.
The One True b!X on 11 Jun 2005
I found it amusing. There really doesn't need to be much more reason than that.
The One True b!X on 11 Jun 2005
Also, it's certainly no more lame than Peek becoming a comment spammer, using his URL field to advertise some Russian dude's mp3 site.
jack peek on 11 Jun 2005
Also, it's certainly no more lame than Peek becoming a comment spammer, using his URL field to advertise some Russian dude's mp3 site.
OK.. NOT GUILTY! If there was a problem with my computor, I had no idea.
The One True b!X on 11 Jun 2005
Yes. My crankiness meant I slid into presuming it was intentional.
As I understand it, it's being addressed. In the meantime, I am going to go through Peek's recent comments and get rid of the spammy URLs (leaving his comments in place, of course) so he's not connected to their domains by anyone else.
jack peek on 11 Jun 2005
B!X: When are you coming over for that interview? Perhaps two complete opposites can sit down and bring a bunch of people together.
jack peek on 11 Jun 2005
Randy Leonard: When are you coming over for that interview? Perhaps two complete opposites can sit down and bring a bunch of people together.
Sorry I missed our last appointment...surely it was just a miss-communication on my part.
There seems to be alot of that on others as well, I could have sworn you promised too meet with me first, BEFORE, you met with Cascadia.
William on 12 Jun 2005
The Romanian AK-47... doesn't that pay licensing fees to a Russian. And it's still not Made In America.
Lily on 12 Jun 2005
To Jack Peek-
One more time-
You won't find my name on those meeting lists because I lived in a different neighbourhood way across town back then. WHat's so f*cking hard to understand about that?? And during those times I fought long and hard against losing the Lovejoy Ramp and against the coming Pearl DIstrict. And you WILL find my name on many many meeting lists since I moved to Buckman 8 years ago.
b!X- Why are we wasting time and energy on someone like Peek?? He has zero credibility with anyone and most people simply skip over his posts. If he can't accomplish what he wants (and I am all for keeping half-way houses of the "criminally insane" out of residential neighbourhoods), then he just visciously attacks whomever is around.
Further, I find his intense jealousy of JAck Bog very disturbing. On a number of occasions he has said very disturbing things about Jack and his family. He's obviously jealous that Jack could afford to move his family into a different neighbourhood.
P.S. Peek, you just don't get it- to be called an internet troll is NOT a compliment.
jack peek on 12 Jun 2005
Further, I find his intense jealousy of JAck Bog very disturbing
Jelousy???? You old crone! He moved when the rest of us fought to protect those that couldn't fight or move. I'm not mad he could move, I'M MAD HE QUIT THE EFFORT, WHICH AMONG OTHERS QUITTING, THROUGH YOUR OWN WORDS IN THE START OF MY HANGING HERE, ALLOWED THE COUNTY, CITY, AND STATE, TO BURNOUT THE REST OF US OVERTIME AND CONTINUE WHAT IS GROWING TODAY.
You didn't fight nothing, or you would be calling for the recall of just one of these idiots today. The hell with you all.
jack peek on 12 Jun 2005
And during those times I fought long and hard against losing the Lovejoy Ramp and against the coming Pearl DIstrict. And you WILL find my name on many many meeting lists since I moved to Buckman 8 years ago.
NONE OF THESE WILL KILL A KID..THE OTHER FIGHT WOULD NOT BE PC...SAVAGE IS RIGHT!
The One True b!X on 12 Jun 2005
I wonder what the comparative stats are between kids hurt by group homes in their neighborhood and kids hurt by guns kept in their parents' houses.
The One True b!X on 12 Jun 2005
FYI, Jack, that virus/trojan/whatever is active again, and you are once again posting spammy URLs with your comments.
jack peek on 12 Jun 2005
I wonder what the comparative stats are between kids hurt by group homes in their neighborhood and kids hurt by guns kept in their parents' houses. SAID B!X
Gee,B!x ..maybe guns..more guns then group homes, (slanted facts) but since you won't come over an interview me, nor publish real data that RANDY LEONARD, DAN, VERA, SAM, DIANE, LISA, TOM, AND TOO MANY OTHERS ROUNDFILED when they were sent it,the real story will never be known will it.
An of course there is commonsense, care to debate that?
On the virus..cleaned my end up...why don't you just state why I was finally kicked off here...its the plan anyway.
The One True b!X on 12 Jun 2005
(1) Who's been kicked off? Do you see your comments? I see your comments. Does everyone else see Jack's comments?
(2) No, you haven't cleaned things up. Or rather, you did the other day, but you somehow brought it back again. These spammy URLs don't appear for anyone else but you, and there's no way for my system to be injecting them. It's on your end, not mine.
The One True b!X on 12 Jun 2005
To be clear, it was established, as I commented previously, that Jack's spammy URL submissions were the result of some sort of virus/trojan (or so I was told by a family member of his, anyway). So I get that it's apparently not intentional. But notice how Jack is now going to somehow claim it's on my end, and then use it as some kind of proof that I'm about to kick him off.
The One True b!X on 12 Jun 2005
Also, FYI, you all may not be seeing that Jack's name has been linked to spammy URLs because I am deleting the URLs he's submitting with his comments once I see them.
jack peek on 12 Jun 2005
Just a quick thought, much rather be an "internet TROLL" then a coward.
The wasting and hanging of me isn't the problem, it's you and others that have the power too change this issue(even Lily expressed here agreement earlier) that these high risk places don't belong next too a grade school with 400 litlte kids.
You are the coward! She and Bogdanski quit and others who like Leonard didn't even start to fight for the kids he swore too protect are the ones someday hopefully will be ashamed they did quit.
But as is evidenced here...Leonard has no shame!
Still wanna real face to face interview.....???
jack peek on 12 Jun 2005
So I get that it's apparently not intentional. But notice how Jack is now going to somehow claim it's on my end, and then use it as some kind of proof that I'm about to kick him off.
USED A BUNCH OF ANTI VIRUS STUFF..TALK TO THEM.
The One True b!X on 12 Jun 2005
Yes, Jack, I understand that. But you did something once that caused that virus to infect your system and start spamming the URL field of your comments, and you've apparently done so again, because, well look, there they are again.
The One True b!X on 12 Jun 2005
FYI, for those interested, I've installed a hacky/kludgy workaround which prevents Peek's name from being used as a link. This is the interim "solution" until we can eliminate whatever the actual problem is that's causing his comments to be submitted with spammy URLs attached to them (a problem which Google reveals has been occuring elsewhere as well, although normally on BBSes, not blogs).
This kludge should not affect anything or anyone else's URL field.
Note of warning, however: It's likely that as the problem spreads, the spammy domain in question will end up in the master blacklist of the software I use here to automatically prevent comment spam. If that happens, said software likely will block any comments which include those spammy URLs without my ever seeing them.
Here's the point: If that happens it is not because I am deliberately censoring legitimate comments. If that happens, it's because comments from legitimate commenters have been "infected" by these spammy URLs and are getting caught in the blacklist.
If that happens, the only real solution is to figure out exactly what on the user's end is causing the problem to begin with and eliminating it once and for all. Otherwise, their legitimate comments will continue to get caught in the blacklist.
For the moment, that spammy URL has not yet, it seems, made it into that master blacklist, and so Peek's comments should continue to display here, just without that URL connected to his name.
jack peek on 12 Jun 2005
Hoping the fix proposed is a good one...Am getting a lesson on this kind of problem and it's impact.