Remember that post I made a few days ago? The one immediately beneath this one? If not, I recommend you read it now or nothing I say in this post is going to make much sense. Or maybe it will. Either way, I'm bored with it now and am just posting this so I can move on to something more interesting.Anyway, some of the mysteries in that last post are now not so mysterious. I've had some polite discourse with the formerly mysterious Brian S. Murphy, who is Nathan Bech's Volunteer Coordinator. Pleasantries were exchanged, tales were told, etc.
Contrary to what I had speculated about, my annoying commenter "BSM" was not Mr. Murphy (who is quite civil). My bad!
On the other hand, BSM is a supporter of Nathan Bech (albeit informally), swiped most of the comments directly from a policy paper written by Brian S. Murphy, used BSM as a name to somehow "credit" Mr. Murphy, and contacted Mr. Murphy to brag about the commenting, at which point a chiding was presumably administered.
So while it wasn't a direct connection, there was at least some connection there. Mr. Murphy had basically been identity-thefted! Though most identity thieves don't brag about it to the victim. This is a shame, because it would make catching them a lot easier. Still... Not cool, BSM!
Of course that was only one element of the whole weirdness. There was also the matter of the Phoenix blog. And that was the real Brian S. Murphy commenting!
I chided him in my post for not disclosing his affiliation, and he conceded the point in email:
I will make sure that we include our affiliation when we comment on a blog. It's a fair criticism of something that wasn't intentional. I don't think it gets to our honesty at all. You made a good point and we'll modify what we do going forward.So that's good, and gives me little to complain about here.
There was also discussion about who's behind Bech's Wikipedia page. I'm not going to go into details about that one, but will give you the gist.
The story given to me by Mr. Murphy indicates that while it indeed was someone with a political agenda, they weren't officially with any campaign, and indeed support neither Bech nor Olver. They also sound like sort of a dumbass.
There was more to the emails than just that, of course. I got a lot of campaigny talk about what Nathan Bech is about and what he believes and so forth. Which is all well and good, and I will perhaps talk more about it at another time. Some of it's good, some of it's just plain baffling. I also might do a Q&A thingy with Bech at some point. We'll see.
Brian Murphy was quite pleasant in representing Bech. His emails were well-written, and not super make-fun-of-able. He also came off as pretty sincere. The kind of guy you can have a civil conversation with, even if you disagree.
So, some mysteries are cleared up, some speculation is put to rest, and after my pleasant email exchanges with Mr. Murphy I must be feeling good about Nathan Bech, right? Maybe I'll lay off him for a bit? Only time will tell!
yeah, I'm writing another post about him now...
