It was a glorious summer, and I'm glad that I spent it away from the keyboard. As I explained in what is probably my last post on Right-Wing of the Gods, contributing to Blogger just stopped making sense. There were the statistical issues raised in that post, but there were others as well.
Call it a new year's resolution to clear the garbage out of my life, to make room for things that are more worthwhile. More recently, still a few months back, Webring announced a new "membership plan" with some very interesting fine print. Each free membership was allowed five ring memberships, with the next two levels above it being not much more generous. For those, one would be paying some tens of dollars per year, which made the next part of this even more interesting. There was a stipulation that while ring memberships in excess of what one's own individual membership level allowed would be trimmed later this month, membership fees were going to start being assessed starting in ... I think it was September. The way Mr.Killeen had his policy written, one could reasonably interpret it to mean that one would be billed for the equivalent of not one "level two membership" (not to be confused with what is now a level two membership), but a good number of them. This would mean that one would end up being presented with a bill for a few hundred dollars in the case of a mid level Webring management presence like myself at the time, and in the case of somebody truly prominent, a James Huggins for example, the bill could run into the thousands.
Bills can not simply be ignored or left uncontested; doing so renders them automatically collectable even when they are otherwise without merit in most states. The law shouldn't work that way, but it does, and to judge from his actions, Mr.Killeen seemed to be trying to make it work for him, in a way that could have been financially devastating for some of us, had we been a little less alert.
Had this been the first time Webring was a source of unwanted and unneeded drama in our lives, this would have been really bad, but Tim had struck before. Consider, for example, the case of the man who administered the Delphic Oracle webring before I did. One day he gets an abusive piece of e-mail from the Webring support staff, threatening him the placement of his ring up for adoption if he doesn't manage it. He logs in. His rings all have a navigational ratings of 100: every single member is passing. Not a single member is in the queue for any of them. Every image is in place, everything is working. There is literally nothing for him to fix, but Webring is threatening to take action against him, as a ringmaster, unless he fixes it. Very reasonably, he sends an e-mail back to Webring support complaining about the unreasonable behavior of the offending employee, only to get a threatening letter back, warning him that his "rudeness" is on the verge of getting him thrown off of Webring.
Were ringmastering a paid job, one would expect managerial behavior that insane to inspire a round of desertions, but it isn't. Ringmasters (now downgraded to "ring managers") perform volunteer labor, giving the Webring system enough free consulting work that were the system forced to pay for it all, Webring would be bankrupted within the year. "Do you know how much our facilities cost?" 1/4 of a cent per meg of diskspace, Tim. Do you know how much the PhD you had vetting additions to that science ring on your system charges for his time? I'll give you a hint - it's more than 1/4 of a cent.
When the quality and profitability of your product comes courtesy of the generosity of others, who have gifted their time to you, at the very least you should be prepared to say "thank you". Killeen and his staff, however, persisted in treating volunteers as employees, and badly abused employees at that. Some of us tried to reason with the man and his help in the gentlest of terms, and getting nothing other than more grief, found that we were running out of patience with a service that wasn't giving us much of anything other than a hard time. When we found ourselves at the point at which we not only being repayed for our service with abuse, but now were being expected to pay Tim a holiday bonus of a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars apiece, some of us decided that we had had enough, and began our departures from the Webring system.
One should have enough business sense to know who is giving and who is getting, and reality as it as existed on much of the Internet has ignored that reality. Those who provide content have often come on bended knee, as they are expected to, terrorized by those who have hosted content or linked to content (eg. Webring) without the logic of that situation ever being questioned. Consider, in the case of my own site, just how much time obviously has gone into writing, formatting and posting what is, after all, only the introduction to a much larger work. Consider how much more time has been eaten up defending it against meritless complaints lodged for censorious purposes. What, really, would I lose if one day I said "forget it", got up, walked away and just let the site die?
Income? In my entire life, my net earnings from the Internet have been what they've been for almost every content contributor - zero dollars and zero cents. Financially, this is a dead loss for me, $65.95 a year going to maintain a site at Freeyellow that gives me nothing more than the opportunity to give something away to people who, when they are heard from at all, spit on one 99 times out of a hundred. Recognition? If one wishes to view the discovery that one has had one's work plagiarized by somebody who has then included one's words in lessons he's sold for hundreds of dollars as being some kind of honor, maybe, but the buzz one tends to get running a site like mine tends to be of the kind that would bring out the lawyers, if carried out offline; it has been almost altogether libelous.
This means that the experience Webring is enhancing is one barely worth having at all. Even if vanishing off of the Webring system meant that one's site would never be seen again, a part of one should be ready to say "who cares", and judging from the one quarter of a million hits my site saw last year, of which maybe a few hundred came from Webring, this is not the case. Webring is thus left in the position of issuing a hollow threat that one will be denied the opportunity to give something away while being abused for having done so. This doesn't give them much leverage in any negotiations, if the other side has even the faintest hint of a presence of business sense. It does, however, give a reasonable man good reason to view the actions of our good friends at Webring with real anger, and many of us did.
There was something profoundly obnoxious about Killeen's stance. One found oneself reminded of the corporate practice of "constructive firing", in which conscientious older employees would have their careers cut short unjustly, so that management could give their jobs away as perks for younger employees, who presumably would be too excited about the fast track they were on, to ask what was going to happen when they reached the ripe old age of 35. Webring was applying this same approach to volunteer work; "thank you for building this place up for us, now get lost while we use the fruits of your labors to draw somebody else into the system. Bye, sucker!" That's outrageous, as was so much else we had seen, and so many of us decided to make a statement, the effects of which can still be seen here and there on the Webring system.
What some of us would do would be to delete our rings before exiting the system. Webring would just resurrect those, so the next refinement was to delete the memberships and then delete the ring. A little better, but I think the best was to delete all of the memberships except for those held by oneself and a few confederates, hold onto the ring for a while, and then have oneself and one's allies leave it a while later. I tried a few weeks later, which wasn't enough. Others report more luck, after waiting a few months and then deleting the rings. The point is the same either way: "Tim, if you're going to be a jerk about this, we're not going to let you turn a profit off of our work".
What is the one thing worse than this kind of New Economy pseudo-corporate scheming? How about a little of the opportunism that followed from somebody who tried to use somebody else's bad day as an opportunity to promote her (1) own obscure no name blog? This was from another Pagan, and serves as a beautiful illustration of why it is that I avoid the community like a plague.
I'm not going to name the place or give its url, or link to it, because I don't believe in rewarding unsavory behavior, but I'll give you a few representative quotes. The domain name for my account was deleted by me, not by our friend, who seemed happy to point the spambots in the direction of my inbox.
Pagans Should be Above the Negative Traits of other Religions
The vast majority of Pagans have been subjected to the lies of other Religions for as long as we can remember so you would think as a group we would hold ourselves to a higher standard. Yet what I physically see happening over and over again is something else.
Take for instance and email I received today from the new owner of a web ring I was a member of.
“Your site in the Ring, Pagan Philosophy, has been deleted. by antistoicus@**** (send REPLY) Sent: 10/01/2006 10:28:54
Nothing personal against you or your site, but when you find out about the new changes at Webring, I think you’ll understand exactly what is going on. ”
Of course I immediately wondered what was happening with WebRing. I had not heard of anything so drastic as to need anyone to start cancelling sites from their group. And I did not find anything I had not heard of, so I wondered why this person would say that.
When I checked the front page of the groups WebRing I found a rather obnoxious statement as follows:
“This ring is under new management, and the “come one, come all, as long as you shock and upset the middle class” spirit of the old management is gone. Posturing and expressions of how you feel is not good enough. I expect to see logical arguments in support of your positions, and like most Conservatives, I am not positively impressed by ranting and raving, or by childish attempts at winning through intimidation. For the time being, only Hellenic Pagan, Roman Pagan, and Conservative Pagan applicants will be considered for admission to this ring. Postmodernists need not apply. ”
Now even though I find what he has posted on his site to be somewhat obnoxious and feel he is telling everyone that does not agree with him that he and his way is superior to everyone else, it is his right to be obnoxious on his own site.
Where my problem comes in is the fact that he tried to blame it on WebRing rather than just admit he doesn’t believe sites that are not directed a one specific path are worthy of being in this WebRing.
Really? This person shows up on the Webring site sometime around October 1, 2006 and expects us to believe that she didn't see anything out of the ordinary?
This was the time of what was easily the biggest blowup in the history of Webring.com, commented on at length in the member's forum, stating with this post from b24_bestweb entitled "Webring just committed suicide". The membership policy, much changed since this remarkable individual made her post, was up for all to see. The boxes of webring members were flooding over with announcements of rings being put up for adoption or deleted by angry ringmasters, many of whom invited their members to follow them as they relocated to Ringsurf. And what do we get out of this delightful woman? An attempt to play the persecution card on behalf of a site I had never even heard of, at the time when I started preparing the Pagan Philosophy ring for deletion.
Did this person notice, before I cleared the ring, that a good number of Hellenic Pagan and Conservative sites were present that weren't present afterward? How about the fact that a number of my own sites were deleted as well? Was I trying to persecute myself as well?
Do I feel that "my way", as in insisting on the presence of coherent argumentation in anything that would call itself Philosophy, is better than everybody else's? Yes, and anybody who feels otherwise should be sent in for psychiatric counseling, because that's what the word "Philosophy" means; complaining about the requirement that one present substantive and coherent arguments to get on a Philosophy ring is like complaining that one is required to do lab work in a Chemistry class; if that thought bothers you, why are you even present? In this woman's case, the answer was simple - to spam a ring.
As for the requirement that new applicants being Classical or Conservative Pagans, our backbiting friend knew full well why that requirement was in place, because this was explained both on the homepage and on the hubpage for the ring - because application to the ring had been made into a juried process, with the juries consisting of the active memberships of two lists I moderated ("A Graeco Roman Soapbox" and "Conservative Midwestern Pagans"), which effectively excluded liberal non-Graeco-Romans, because I had not yet hooked up with any lists on which their posts would have been on-topic. As the application process involved becoming an active participant on the list and then introducing oneself and one's site, until I could find an Asatruar list willing to participate, for example, I would have no way of having one of the liberal Asatruar run through the process without spamming one of the participating lists.
In other words, doing unto the list as our friend did unto the ring? Perhaps, but all as explained in simple enough terms, terms which she has edited very selectively, that anybody whose IQ exceeded her shoe size should have had no difficulty following the explanation. But a willful refusal to understand what was clearly explained did serve her purposes, as it gave her the chance to play the victim and get a little more attention for a site that would otherwise be too much of a snooze to be noticed. Pure, unprincipled opportunism, as we see when we get to watch her decide that she's going to tell me what I'm saying, instead of letting me decide that for myself.
Had the owner of the Pagan Philosophy web ring simply said “I’ve changed the rules for types of sites allowed in the group and your site no longer qualifies”, I would not be writing this post.
As a group however, everyone that follows a Pagan path must start placing some checks and balances on what is acceptable behaviour in public and when dealing with others. What you do in your personal groups is your business but every society will always have standards of what is acceptable in public that we must all abide by. Since we are the “new guys” on the block, it is up to us to set our standard slightly higher than everyone elses.
Sounds good. How about if we start with some version of "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor"? There are very few Christian denominations that teach their members that defamation of character is just one of any number of equally valid life choices. So long as the majority of the Pagan community insists on doing just that, Pagans are going to be shunned and scorned by the general population, not because they are misunderstood, but because most of them are understood all too well.
But then again, some of us live for the notoriety, so maybe for people like this individual, that's no deterrent. Some have asked why the pseudonym, why I don't just go by my real name in Pagan settings. Many reasons, not the least of which was the experience of hearing an Anglo-Saxon high priestess try to pronounce the unanglicized form of my surname, but the primary one is that as I take a good, long look at the people I've met through Paganism, I often find myself wishing that I had never gone to my first gathering, that I had stayed a solitary and kept my faith to myself. There are really very few good moments to balance the bad, just a group of scheming predators for the most part, people who see their newfound religion as the key to their fifteen minutes of fame or to the winning of riches their own native talents would never win for them honestly. Paganism used to be about the fresh experience of Man's encounter with the Gods on terms other than those we have been conditioned to expect; now it is about fringe science and quack medicine and sad delusions of grandeur on the part of those who, failing to even manage to be human, imagine that they can settle for being divine.
I can do better than to keep company such as this, and do so almost every time I step outside my door. My FreeYellow site comes up for renewal in a month or so. I doubt that I shall renew it, and if I do, I won't do so for long, maybe just long enough for the free version at Bravenet to come up in the listings a little more. My love for the gods is undiminished; their followers are the ones I have my doubts about, and it is away from the vast majority of them I have walked with great pleasure. Every day that has passed has made their absence fonder, until today, when I can scarcely remember why I ever bothered to place a Pagan site online at all.
On to better things.
Addendum, Jan.17: If you're desperately eager to find out who this person is, you can still easily find her by doing a blog search under my name, a fact that she may find difficult to explain because her position is that my name never appeared on her post and I had never been identified!!! This was yet another lie, as my full e-mail addess, of which my name is a part, was posted, and she ran on and on about the ringmaster of the Pagan Philosophy ring, who I still was at the time. But she didn't identify me, right? So nobody was defamed, in this fictive reality that she tried to create.
As you can see, if you've been to this post before, blog posts can be edited after posting, and edit she did, removing my address, though keeping the lies about what transpired in place and denying me my right of reply. Aside from a brief hiatus during which one of the members filled in for me, I was, in fact, the ringmaster for that ring for long enough that even this oblique reference is enough to get the rumor mill running. As I pointed out on a list of hers I found open, one needn't take what I'm saying on faith, either, as the cached copy of her blog post will remain available in Google for the next few weeks. She can rewrite the record and lie about its former contents, but the evidence will be there for all to see until Google refreshes its cache, however long that takes.
The spin she came back with was truly shameless, in a way that is disgracefully typical of the New Age community. There was the line that nobody would have known that she was talking about me had I not spoken up, which is wrong for reasons already given. What was even better was the argument that I was complaining about something she had posted three months ago and had been long forgotten until I brought it up. In actual fact, as you can see for yourself should you choose to do that search, at the time of my initial posting of this article, the article on this
I was asked why I waited for three months to complain. How about because somebody's blog was an obscure, no name affair until she decided to take a slog through the mud, and I didn't even know about that post until recently? Having had this explained to her, she then proceeded to play the broken record game and ask the same question again, as if it hadn't been answered in the first place. Imagine the ever remarkable experience of confronting a pathological liar about her misdeeds, and picture how that would spiral downward.
Were this an isolated incident, I would wish that life would teach this person a lesson that she could not forget because libel and slander, like any form of betrayal, strike at the very fiber of society, but it wouldn't influence my decisions that much. The sad news is, though, that while this woman's behavior may be unusual in degree in the Pagan community, it is so far from being unusual in kind that in a Pagan setting, the backbiting is practically inescapable, and I've run out of patience with it. I've posted a closure notice of sorts on the Almond Jar. There won't be any new articles on it, as far as I'm concerned at this point. I may or may not post philosophical articles elsewhere - probably not, as I have other things to do - but even if I do, I almost certainly won't be doing so as "Antistoicus" and I'm not going to make them specifically Pagan or Traditionalist or Hellenist. To write for that world is to get stuck in that world, and I deserve better than this. The good news is that "better than this" is easily available, and I've been availing myself of it on a nearly daily basis, so far, as my work schedule has allowed.
I guess I shouldn't be completely surprised when I see somebody like our offending party post a link claiming to show the reader a way to find "effortless prosperity", telling him that it is his "birthright", and find her trying to con her audience later on; "shucking and jiving" are a snake oil salesman's specialty. What is disheartening is how many, what a clear majority of the community is willing to be taken in, both when it comes to seperating them from their money and seperating an honest member of the community from his deservedly good name. To try to discuss philosophy with those who place no value on honor is futile; all of the other virtues crumble to dust in its absence, and we are left speaking of the search for the truth and the promotion of morality with those who couldn't care less about the former and actively scorn the latter.
My only regret as I depart this project is that I didn't depart it sooner.
Note: (1) Yes, it was a "she", which is why I've replaced the generic masculine; I visited somebody's site and checked. I will not, however, refer to her as a "lady", because that connotes respect, nor will I made the terms of derision gender specific. A jerk is a jerk is a jerk, regardless of the jerk's reproductive function, and as mildly amusing as coining the work "jerkette" might be for the 0.25 seconds needed for the concept to become tedious, there's something to be said for letting the language reflect that reality.
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