A note for anyone finding this market now: Oliver's previous comments can still be viewed in the edit history, just click the "edited" line at the top of each comment.

I have removed my previous comments because I have now filed a lawsuit and I do not want my comments to jeopardise my claim. I deny all of Ghost of Lomax's allegations but this is not the place to dispute them. I have also deleted my account. Anyone can contact me still by email. - Oliver Smith

@OliverDSmith Lol, who against this time?

Ah, RationalWiki. https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/57112597/Smith_v_RationalMedia_Foundation

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Smith: you've evidently caused the article to go offline again, and nobody else seems to be paying attention to the discussion here. So I suppose I'm forced to reply to this, because otherwise you'll be able to continue using this page to argue that the Substack post is defamatory, and cause it to keep going down repeatedly.

At this point, virtually everyone who tracks your behavior has seen the email about Noah Carl that you mentioned in your comments here and here. Unfortunately, Noah Carl's legal settlement with Cambridge University forbids him from publicly discussing the events that led to his firing, and he's asked others who have seen this email to avoid sharing it in public. This is why bloggers writing about you have tended to be circumspect in their discussions about it. But now that you are accusing others of failing to provide evidence you were its sender, of libeling you, and apparently are now having some success at getting others to believe you, I feel you've given me no choice but to present some of the documentation about your responsibility for Carl's firing.

The email you mentioned in those two comments was sent to Cambridge University on November 11, 2018, by someone using the email address bill_connors@mail.com. The email from "Bill Connors" used specific phrases that only you have ever used, such as referring to Emil Kirkegaard as a "child-rape apologist", the same phrase you had used for him from your "Storyfellow" Wikipedia account. "Bill Connors" is obviously a pseudonym, but you haven't been careful about preventing this alias from being linked to your other identities.

The posts from Bill Connors' Disqus account are directed almost entirely against Smith's various enemies, including Mikemikev, Emil Kirkegaard (along with more examples of calling him a "child-rape apologist"), Rome Viharo, and Abd Lomax, including links to the RationalWiki articles about the last two. As for the "Bill Connors" email account, aside from the email to Cambridge that eventually led to Carl's firing, it has been used for one other significant action: a complaint against Eleonora Dubiczki, who ran the far-right website Rightpedia. As can be seen from the linked page, the owner of that email account also is the owner of a Wordpress account named "mikemikevwatch2", meaning that “mikemikevwatch2” and Bill Connors are the same person.

For those who don't know, "Mikemikev" is the handle of Michael Coombs, an alt-right troll, and Smith is well-known for his preoccupation with Mikemikev around that time. See the article about him at Encyclopedia Dramatica for a summary. The "Mikemikevwatch" accounts are a series of accounts that monitored this troll's activities, and are well-known to have been operated by Oliver Smith. See this summary, which appears to have been made by Smith himself, among many others. (In that post, he said that the "Mikemikevwatch" accounts were operated by "Atlantid", which is Smith's best-known alias, as mentioned in the Encyclopedia Dramatica article.) To summarize, in addition to knowing that "Bill Connors" is the same person who operated the various "Mikemikevwatch" accounts, we also can know that the person operating those accounts was Oliver Smith.

It's hard to overstate my disgust that you've made it necessary for me to post this documentation in public. You know full well that your email that eventually led to Carl's firing has been widely shared in private, and it could not have been difficult for you to figure out the reason for our reticence about discussing it openly. But now you've taken advantage of our effort to respect Carl's wishes, so as to convince an innocent party (Isaac King) that we're libeling you, and apparently also as the basis for another complaint to Substack. If Isaac King contacts me privately, I am willing to share the email itself with him for further verification, under the condition that he promises not to share it any further.

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@Ghostoflomax Hey, thanks for commenting here. I'm sorry to see that your Substack article has been taken down; this surprises me, I thought Substack was pretty committed to free speech principles. Given the rampant subterfuge and sockpupetting that seems to be the modus operandi of nearly everyone involved in this saga, I frankly wonder whether you took it down intentionally to try to create a Streisand effect or make Oliver look worse.

Regardless, I would encourage you to copy the article elsewhere so there's somewhere people can view the information, perhaps here. I think Manifold is pretty unlikely to cave to legal threats. You could also try https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/, or I'd be happy to host a copy on my personal website. (I've already been threatened by one company over an article I wrote about them, I have no plans to start rewarding legal threats any time soon.)

I would be willing to verify the email you mention and agree not to share it, though I'll note that my background knowledge of this whole drama is still very poor right now, and it's difficult for me to keep track of how exactly it ties into everything else being accused.

As some additional context, I am in general sympathetic to your position. I'm strongly against the censorship of intelligence research that currently runs rampant in our society, along with all other forms of online censorship and harassment. When reading your article I was initially entirely on your side, but the various oddities I noticed in its claims made me concerned that there may also be some harassment of or false claims about Oliver being made here. I would appreciate it if you responded to the concerns I mention in the description and in my comment below.

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@OliverDSmith I have been trying and failing to locate Anatoli's post of the article for several minutes now, so I wouldn't be too concerned about it damaging google searches about you.

I agree that posting pictures of you is unwarranted, and if it's true that they've been repeatedly doing so for no good reason, that does seem like evidence towards bad intent.

My offer to host a copy was just on principle out of my opposition to information suppression; now knowing that it's currently available on both Karlin's website and archive.ph, I won't bother. (If you ever succeed in getting both of those taken down, I'll probably post a copy, without any images.)

@IsaacKing To clarify, I did not "update the article" to add a mention that there is no evidence of Smith being a pedophile. That mention had been there from when the article was originally published. This can be verified from an archive of the article created on the same day it was published.

The reason for including a screenshot of his post on Kiwi Farms was simply that the thing Smith was taking credit for in that post was so outlandish, I was concerned readers would have difficulty believing Smith had actually posted it unless I included a screenshot. The old photograph of Smith and the "pedophile" label were never the point of that image. The only reason they were included is that as a matter of principle, I think any screenshot of a post should be a faithful representation of the post's actual appearance. Now that his strategy with respect to that quote seems to be claiming that the forum administrators maliciously edited his post, instead of trying to argue that I've misquoted it, including a quote instead of a screenshot more or less accomplishes the same purpose, so it isn't a problem that the screenshot has been removed.

The reason for the illustration of Smith in the article's header is so that the article can be represented by something visually when it's shared on social media. This is no different from what's typically done in any other article about a public figure, and Smith probably does qualify as a public figure at this point. (In legal terms, he would be what's considered an "involuntary public figure", mainly for his having filed five lawsuits within the space of a single year.) What's unusual is how big of a deal he makes about this being done. Can you imagine Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates trying to remove every image of them that was posted on the internet without their permission?

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Oh yeah, another very strange statement from the Ghost of Lomax article:

Johns/Psychologist Guy has stated that at RationalWiki that he is “in [his] 50s” and that he has worked “about 40 different jobs”, or in other words that he has changed jobs an average of about once per year for his entire adult life. Meanwhile at Wikipedia, he claims to have been a historian of the vegan movement “for over 25 years”. If he is in his fifties, this means that he must have begun his current job as a historian no later than his early thirties. This raises the question of when he held the other ~39 jobs, unless he held them all before he was 35.

Being a "vegan historian" is obviously a hobby, not a full time job, so it is not mutually exclusive with holding another job. This reads like the author was just looking for ways to discredit this account and didn't much care whether what they wrote actually made any sense. (Likely knowing that many people wouldn't be reading every paragraph carefully in an expose this long.)

@IsaacKing If you read some of the comments that Psychologist Guy/Veg Historian made about his work as a historian, it seems to have been clearly intended as more than a hobby. For example, in his comment about Noah Carl that was linked in the article, he said: "This isn't in public record, but the first group of researchers to complain about Noah Carl were from an animal ethics journal, I know this because I know the researchers. [...] I am in contact with a lot of the people who publish on animal ethics, so I am aware about what goes on."

I also should point out that in the discussion on RationalWiki resulting from the Substack article, the apparent contradiction between the employment histories he gave for himself at RationalWiki and at Wikipedia was brought up by the RationalWiki user ApooftGnegiol. The potential explanation you've offered is not something he mentioned in response, even though this would have been an obvious thing to bring up there if it were the case. What he did say is that it had been a mistake to link his RationalWiki and Wikipedia identities to one another, apparently because doing so had brought this inconsistency to light, as mentioned by ApooftGnegiol in the linked comment.

Regarding your point above that the "email abuse" that Psychologist Guy/Oldman4 received might have been directed against some of his other accounts: that is an explanation he might theoretically have given, but it does not align with his actual explanation. In his comment here, Oldman4 claimed that in his earlier comment where he took credit for over 200 RationalWiki articles, he'd merely been exaggerating. That is, his explanation does not include admitting to have created dozens of articles using sockpuppet accounts. This may seem a weaker alibi than the potential one you've offered, but he likely was aware that, as the article mentions, someone other than Smith could not have accomplished that without RationalWiki's other users eventually noticing.

I'm reluctant to become heavily involved in this discussion, because I know from past experience that Smith will go to virtually any length to deny past actions from which he wants to disassociate himself. This includes, for example, claiming that posts on a Gab account which had been active for months under his real name, and which had been used mostly to make mundane posts about YouTube videos, had actually been made by another person impersonating him. Aside from the obvious absurdity of that assertion, he had already admitted in an earlier comment that the same posts on his Gab account were in fact made by him, describing them as "non-serious tongue-in-cheek posts I made to a bunch of literal alt-right trolls."

Years earlier, this pattern of behavior was pointed out by someone else in the Kiwi Farms discussion: "Oliver constantly refuses to acknowledge that he's the source of all of his problems, and when someone calls attention to his past idiocy, he claims that impersonators or his brothers did it." It's a waste of time for me to go very far down his rabbit hole of bizarre alternative explanations for actions that everyone who's familiar with him can see that he did himself. However, if you give me your email address (here or in a private message), I'll forward you the email from "Bill Connors" that initiated the protests over Noah Carl's hiring at Cambridge. The email is too long to send in a screenshot.

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@OliverDSmith Your post on Wikipedioracy was literally quoting those comments from the alleged impersonation account. I'll include an image of your post, with the quoted comments highlighted, so that there can be no possible ambiguity:

In that post, you were arguing that the quoted Gab comments' message and tone were very different from the emails you'd sent... yet you also expect us to believe you didn't look at the comments you were quoting carefully enough to realize they weren't from you? Have you any idea how bizarre this sounds to anyone who isn't drinking your kool-aid?

This is the type of thing I'm talking about, and that Michaeldsuarez was talking about in the comment I quoted from Kiwi Farms above. I could spend hours pushing you into ever more outrageous explanations to deny your past behavior, but once Pinocchio's nose has grown to several meters, adding another meter seems unlikely to accomplish anything further.

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Ironically, on reading your post the first thing that crossed my mind was that you might be yet another alias of Oliver Smith! In fact I think you very likely are, because who else would care enough to type such a long and detailed creed? But I'll play along, and give you the benefit of the doubt ...

It isn't clear what OS has been or is trying to achieve, besides harrassing various people whose views presumably meet with his disapproval. Why has he apparently no blog of his own, where he could lay out his views in a dispassionate manner or, come to that, any manner he wanted? To me he sounds like an intolerant, obsessive crank, and IMHO it isn't worth an hour of anyone's time, let alone dozens, to research all this carry on.

If the Linkedin page at https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliver-d-smith-346206252/ is the OS's, then two things stand out: He's not keen on showing his face online (although arguably that is a sensible attitude for anyone to adopt, as far as possible, given the risks of identity theft and suchlike). Also, his work history is patchy and he doesn't seem to last long in any job and has been unemployed for the last two years (unless it's simply that he hasn't updated the page in that time). So, again if that is him, then I would guess he is as difficult and contentious in real life as he is online, and has far too much time on his hands

P.S. FWIW, I'd vote no! :-)

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@JohnRamsden What is your relation to this saga, if any?

@OliverDSmith Thanks for the explanation. I did rather take the Ghost of Lomax account at face value, but I guess there are two sides to every story. So my apologies if I came across as rather rude. I'm relieved for your sake to hear you don't live in Watford. There are a few nice areas on the outskirts, but the centre is a hellscape, with locals mostly to match! Well, I have nothing further to contribute to the discussion, so if you don't mind I'll make myself scarce.

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