No Subject

Again, hard though it seems to be for people to acknowledge, these
attacks took *a severe personal toll* on me.  I have found for the
last *year* that my thoughts return again and again to this injustice,
and I find myself searching for arguments to communicate my unhappiness.
*No* level of flaming is inconsequential, except perhaps to someone
completely lacking in sensitivity.  These April flames were surely the
most violent anyone here has seen, and were entirely directed at one 
lonely, *innocent* soul.

Then came the debacle of the Aspel tape tree.  A European fan offered
a videotape, and I was the first to reply with a promise to organize a
tape tree.  Chris was livid with envy, and undermined my efforts by
*lying* about his willingness and ability to convert the tape in his
home, and savagely lying that I had treated other participants in the
project badly.  These lies can easily be verified by examining the
sequence of messages in the archive.

Once again, by the violence of his approach he wore away all resistance,
and imposed an entirely false perception that I had done wrong and that
he was saving the day.  A bystander named Gene Haldeman, apparently
not even a Kate fan, bravely volunteered to mediate, and then fled
when he realized that there was no mediation possible.  (He now
entirely regrets getting involved at all, and refuses to discuss what
happened for fear of being dragged back in.)

I tuned out the group again around July 30, when the half dozen top
flamers unanimously rejected my proposal for a 'birthday gift for Kate'
consisting of a pledge to at least *label* flames as such in our
headers, so those who wished to ignore them easily could.

When I tuned back in in November, I found my FAQ had been taken over
by Uli.  I was especially troubled that it still reflected my naive
hopefulness from two years earlier, claiming that Kate fans were
generally the kindest people in the world, and that if you felt rejected
you should persist, because you would surely eventually be accepted.
By now, that sentiment was an abhorrent travesty to me.

So I protested, and was again massively abused.  One particularly
vivid attack came from a new Ectophile, someone I'd never had *any*
dealings with, whose reaction to my complaint that the flamewars
had been the most painful experience of my life, was 'We're just
getting started.  You ain't seen nothing yet...'

So from December to April, I tuned out again.  (Someone drew my
attention during this time to an interview in Rolling Stone where Kate
spoke of emotions being exuded onto audio tape.  Someone else just
drew my attention to a very similar comment by Tori Amos in her tour 
program.)

So this is my complaint:

I have been made a pariah, for entirely dishonest reasons, by
demagogues.  Chris Williams has determined to make a career of
tormenting me at every opportunity.  The community that I depended on,
and that I more than anyone else in recent years worked to build and
strengthen, has turned on me, and accepted uncritically a series of
slanderous falsifications of the truth, that paint me as an
egocentric flamer trying to impose my views on others, when in fact
I've been trying to create a safe space for Kate's explicitly stated
metaphysics to be investigated in an unprejudiced atmosphere, and to
win *re-admittance* to the community that's ostracized me.

The question of the faq is now moot-- today I got a copy of the latest
revision, and it's been changed so much I no longer care about its
unacknowledged roots.

But the question of the irresponsible totalitarianism on r.m.g and
Ecto remains a disgrace that no Kate fan should tolerate.

=----------=-    ,!.    --=----=----=----=----=----=----=----=----=----=----=
Jorn Barger      j't     Anon-ftp to ftp.mcs.com in mcsnet.users/jorn for:
  <:^)^:<    K=-=:: -=->   Finnegans Wake, artificial intelligence, Ascii-TV,
 .::.:.::..   "=i.: [-'   fractal-thicket indexing, semantic-topology theory,
jorn@mcs.com   /;:":.\     DecentWrite, MiniTech, nant/nart, flame theory &c!
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