From: Mark Randolph Date: Thu Dec 28, 2000 9:16am Subject: Warning! Serious Online Travel Advisory! It is my sad duty to report that we have a viper among us. I don't mean somebody who's a little unfriendly. That's no big deal. We can forget about those. No, I mean the kind of person who will drop barely veiled threats that he's going to try to have one put in prison with fabricated evidence on a trumped up charge, if you criticize him or try to have him overruled by the list's owner. What's scary is that this man is a list's moderator. I hope that we can agree that criminal behavior of any kind is not a legitimate use of a moderator's discretion? Here's what happened. Take it as a warning of what to expect, if you go to that group. This is a one-time post. It's a one time post, because I know that Dwarf and company hate to see people fight and I respect that. It's a one time post, because after this, I'm never going to sign up for a Pagan list outside of "Nekkid" again. I just don't want to deal with it. Dwarf, I'm sorry I'm bringing this up in your nice, happy forum, but some things are so bad that people need to be warned about them. Warning. The sequence of events is a little convoluted. There's a lot of lead-in before things start getting dark. Really dark. I signed up for this list called "The Telepathy Society". It's a little different. It's for people who want to communicate with animals. Cool, let's see what these guys are going to do, I think. Then that whole flamewar thing with Networker happens, and things get strange. I get a letter from the Telepathy Society. It's a file expressing sadness that I've decide to leave them, and asking me why. I write back to say, hey, guys, must be a malfunction. I think you guys are cool, I'm not cutting out, please sign me up again. I'm waiting to hear back from them. I'm talking to the moderator at some other newsgroup about problems between our people. He seems to want to make his place argument central, and that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. "Uh, huh. That's nice, Mark. Now, kindly tell me about this argument-free list that you've seen work. Is it real, or did you have a psychic vision of this occuring?". I mention Telepathy and what's going on. He practically falls out of his chair laughing, and tells me that I don't have a clue. I write back to (address ommitted) and ask if this is so. The other moderator is saying that Ellen didn't think that I had unsubscribed at all. He's saying that after I took some heat on the other lists, that the Telepathy staff took the easy way out. I send the basic "Ellen, say it ain't so!" letter. Cawlboy sends me back a letter assuring me that this isn't the case. He says that Ellen has been stalked from somebody from my service. He adds that he tried to look up (ommitted) and couldn't find it, so he's guessing that this must be a small service. I must know the guy doing this, he says, unless I'm the guy. "Ah, ha! There's the problem. He just left the first l out of (ommitted). No wonder the search isn't working", I think. I write to him and mention the (ommitted) / (ommitted) thing. I still trust him. I mention that I don't know anybody else at (ommitted), so I couldn't be of any help anyway. All I can do is keep Ellen in my thoughts and prayers, and I ask him to pass along my sympathy and concern to her. I was wondering whether I should write to the community asking it to rally around her and tell her she's not alone, or if she'd just like her privacy during this bad moment. Then things got dark and kind of twisted. Cawlboy said that if I was not the stalker, he'd be happy to sign me back up. I took him at his word, and applied for re-admission. What followed was memorable. Here are the letters. From: Mark Randolph To: [email protected] Subject: I am confused ------- Start of forwarded message ------- Subject: Unable to process your message To: mark-randolph ... From: WebForum Date: 27 Dec 2000 15:22:29 -0000 You may not join the TelepathySociety group because you have been banned from this group by the moderator. ------- Start of forwarded message ------- I am confused. One of your modkin wrote back to me, and said that if I wasn't that horrible person bothering Ellen, that he'd be happy to sign me back up. I assured him that indeed I was not. I went on to point out the source of his confusion. (I'm not posting from "(ommitted)"). I took him up on his invitation and this is the response I got. Folks, I'm hoping this was an oversight, because I have to be honest, it feels like a game of "red rover". This is the last e-mail I'm going to send you. If you were serious about what you said, please sign me up. Otherwise, all I have to say is, I've never played games with other people, and I expect them to be just as straight with me. Fair enough? From: Cawlboy Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 23:53:06 EST To: Mark Randolph Subject: Re: I am confused Let me try to clear up your confusion here. 1) (ommitted) is the name of the email service that both you & the stalker use. 2) On another list, you have verbally attacked another member of this list when he asked for more information about your own list "Nekkid In Illinois." I, personally will not tolerate this kind of behavior toward any of my friends. 3) I still have not ascertained that you are not affiliated with (fake name) (*) and or his group Agora. They are responsible for libeling several prominent pagans in the Chicago area. 4) I have yet to open the attached file you sent with this email. When I do so, it will be on a computer not attached to my network so in the event it contains a virus I can merely wipe the system and restore the backup. Should it contain a virus, it will be forwarded to Norton, McAfee, WebForum, AOL, and the FBI for investigation and prosecution. 5) As moderator of this list, it is up to my discretion who stays on the list and who goes. I have made the decision, not Ellen. Any further discussion on the matter will be with me. Any further correspondence with her will get you blocked from her email and I will file a complaint with both (ommitted) and AOL. I hope I have made my position very clear on this matter. Cawlboy From: Mark Randolph Date: 28 Dec 2000 07:40:33 PST To: Cawlboy@... Cc: ellen@a... Subject: Re: I am confused You've made yourself perfectly clear sir. You're a nut, and a vicious one at that. I have never sent you an attachment and you know it. I was sincerely worried about Ellen, and was ready to ask people to rally around her. I'm glad I held off. My guess is that there is no stalker. You've done a cowardly thing. One of your members was attacked in public, and when he defended himself in public, you rolled over on him. Is there anything you won't do to protect yourself from criticism? How could I have been this naive? What you've been doing is making veiled threats to trump up false charges, if I criticize your group's actions. "Back off, or we'll tell everybody that you're a stalker". And now after I take your invitation, and find that you were playing games, "don't try going over my head to the list owner, or I'll get you". Fine and dandy Cawlboy. You've made your position plenty clear. You're a petty wannabee thug who thinks nothing of making childish attempts to terrorize people who question his actions. Let me make my position clear, pipsqueak. You have no authority to tell anybody who can or can't write to Ellen. Only Ellen has that authority. This letter has been cc-ed to her. If she says nothing, I'll take that to mean that she's backing you up. I'll respect that, and stop writing. Of course, I already said that I was going to stop writing, so what's your problem? Aside from this childish need to prove to the whole world what a big man you are, I mean? I'd like to change one thing, though, I don't want to be signed up for your worthless list. I was curious to see how it would turn out. Nobody had written yet, practically. Now I'm not curious at all. Why would I want to hang around with people like you, Cawlboy? Ellen, this and the other letter have been cc-ed or forwarded to you so you can see how Cawlboy has been treating your subscribers. I hope you won't take it personally and you'll understand if I never want to hear from your group again. It was all nonsense! Cawlboy had never meant a word he was writing. I guess it's a good thing I didn't do the sympathy drive thing. I have no idea of who (fake name) is. I don't want to know. What I do know, is that trying to get to know the pagan community got me to know a vicious individual like Cawlboy. "Don't try to go over my head, or I'll trump up a charge or two and get you?" Dear God. This isn't religion, that's the plot for "Murder, Incorporated". If anybody was thinking of signing up for that list, now you know what you're getting yourself in for. This is serious advice. Stay away from the Telepathy Society. Maybe Ellen is cool. I don't know. Some of her people though are just thugs, and you have to deal with them, too. ............................................................................................................................. Mark

Shrine comment : Well, isn't that special? Would you want people like this dropping by your door? Click here to return.

(*) Here, the writer has used a name for somebody that we are pretty sure doesn't exist. What he did was take "Mike Daley" 's first name, and attach it to a badly garbled version of one of our member's last names. I almost let it stay, but, what the h***.

The Agora (real name) was a listings site, not a group, and its staff has never libeled anybody in its history. The staff has always been careful to hold onto the correspondence it has received. What we're seeing here is a self-righteous acting job from "Cawlboy". A number of accounts of actual events have been either put on line, or on their site, with names named, and lettters uploaded for documentation.

As the saying goes, "same old, same old ...". It is so 90s, and we're still seeing it over and over : the deliberate misuse of an inflammatory accusation in order to intimidate people into not hearing what you don't want them to hear. Why take the time to write a rebuttal to an argument whose maker has had the bad taste to be persuasive, and be in the right, when you can start shrieking about how he's "bashing" one and use this bit of mislabeling in order to appeal to a rule against flaming in order to get him silenced? Why clean up your own bad behavior, when you can declare that accounts backed up with documentation are "libel"?

It is law that the truth is an absolute defense against all libel complaints. This much comes down to us from the founding fathers. It is from the philosophy of Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll, that "a word means what I want it to mean, no more and no less". What can we say, when a community finds that it would rather model its standard of justice after "Alice in Wonderland" than after the Federalist Papers? Only that it is a community that we can't support.

If you found this incident as appalling as we did, let us ponder one small bit of comfort. This is still an overwhelmingly Christian society, in which this particular Wiccan community has little clout. Try to picture a world in which the likes of the people you've seen in these accounts, were setting the norms that guided society.

It's too ghastly to even think about. Clearly, it is time for those of us of good will who remain in the community to stand back, and cease all efforts to maintain it. The only thing that will heal it is for us to let the natural cycle of destruction and recreation to do its work. It's time to let go.