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Nomination for idiot sock of the month: Goddess of Whistle-Pigs

To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick.chaos
From: catherine yronwode 
Subject: Re: Nomination for idiot sock of the month: Goddess of Whistle-Pigs
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 11:41:14 GMT

Dagon Productions wrote:
> 
> If I can find the info on the internet or in the white
> pages, than I have no problem publishing someones name 
> or address... since it is already public knowledge...

Me too. And i do unto others as i would have them do unto
me. I've lived a public life for about 40 years now and i
recommend it to all mages and witches. It is very
liberating. It is a continual exercise in honesty,
consistency, and truthfulness. It frees one from fear. It is
in every way a magical act. 

> and most people don't realize how much public info is out there... 
> esp. for many years anyone with a webpage could check "who is" at
> network solutions and get their name, address and phone number... 

Indeed. And i have done so in order to check out folks. It's
not as easy to use the who-is function these days as it once
was, with so many registries out there now, but it's still
pretty much open information. 

> if  people are stupid enough to not know these things than they 
> deserve what they get.  

I recall a woman who plagiarized a bunch of my copyrighted
material a few years back and put it on her commercial web
site for her own occult shop, with my name deleted, using it
to sell her products. I asked her to take it down via usenet
and she started one of those pointless "the internet isn't
copyrighted" arguments, so i looked up her domain name and
got the number of her shop and i phoned the number she had
listed as her business phone number -- and it turned out to
be her home number because she really didn't have a shop,
she just worked out of her home -- and she started screaming
at me that i had "NO RIGHT" to telephone her at her home,
even though she had listed the number as her shop's number. 

She claimed i was "stalking" her and she was really freaked
out, not simply angry, but really flipped. It was so bizarre
that i actually took time to try to calm her down and
explain to her that i was not a stalker, not a detective,
that i had not hired a detective, that she had a web site
that claimed to be the online portion of a store and that
the telephone number for the store was listed on the who-is
web page. She was AMAZED! She thought she was ... You know,
i don't really know WHAT she thought! She thought folks run
stores but don't let people telephone them? I dunno. She was
just so ignorant that i felt sorry for her.  

> I  have published my address quite a few times on the net and my
> phone number... 

Me too -- and i even have an online map so folks can come
visit me. But then, i like people. I really do. I like
meeting strangers and interacting, and sometimes they become
friends. It's fun. I have a village mentality and i consider
the internet to be a global village. 

> usually along with the URL below since it's a nice
> warning regarding what kind of training I have and that I live in a
> heavily armed fortress:
> 
> http://www.dagonproductions.com/hisardut.htm
> 
> If someone threatens my life or or those of my family or loved ones...
> hell yeah I'd have no problem outing anything about them... eye for 
> an eye and all.

The groundhog person is exaggerating grossly, Doug. It was
never a real "threat" or "outing" situation, as far as i was
concerned. For some reason this troll named Jeff Crowe
started in on me -- cross-posting into newsgroups i read and
gratuitously claiming that i am not a published author. When
that was countered by lists of books i've written, he
claimed i was only a "self-published" author -- but that he,
Jeff Crowe, was about to be published by a Real Publishing
Firm. Well, me'n'my pals listed books i had written that
were published by Ballantine, Taylor, Kitchen Sink, and so
forth, and you know, it just felt weird saying "i am SO a
writer" to some troll and his 25 troll friends and sock
puppets, so i got to wondering about why Jeff Crowe kept
insisting that i must cross-post to this alt.religion.wicca
ng, and why he acted petulant every time i cut arw off the
cross-post line.

Jeff just got stranger and stranger, At one point he started
threatening to sue siva and me because siva had archived one
of his usenet posts. Siva took the post down -- he's got
5,000 pages of archived substantive posts about magic,
religion, and occultism  online and one post is not gonna be
missed. He always removes posts if requested, as does
google, but Jeff Crowe was apparently in that state of mind
that some folks get into where they are rushing, if you know
what i mean, adrenaline pumping to the point that they
aren't reading well or writing well, and that was about the
time i checked into arw to see where he was coming from --
just on the very day that Talesin (a.k.a. Cyric, whose name
is David Willard, by the way, and who has trolled the
alt.magick.* hierarchy for years), posted a long raving list
of "real names" of all these wacky arw trolls and socks. I
think Talesin did this because some of the trolls were
calling him names based on his weight. 

So i was reading this flame war in arw, trying to deal with
a total stranger threatening to sue me, and meanwhile i was
also talking with siva, who was simultaneously but
non-causally encouraging me to set up a new kill-filter
system on my new newsreader, and was telling me all about
about how cool his unix-based kill-filters were and trying
to get me to go more techno. 

The combination of events got me going, and being the editor
i am, i cleaned up Talesin's list of arw sock puppets and
trolls and fixed his  alphabetization and gave the document
some internal html anchors and framed it in a FAQ and
whatnot and put it on a web page. Next thing i knew, some of
the folks named in the document gave me more information,
posting in usenet to correct Talesin's errors or claiming
further nyms or adding personal tidbits. So for about a week
or maybe two, i kept updating the web page, and creating
links to the home pages of these folks, and sort of ... you
know ... *playing* with them. In a nice way, of course. 

Then one of them cracked and wanted out of the game (perhaps
with good reason -- she had been stalked, she claimed, by a
former arw troll-poster who is psychotic, she claimed). But
it got weirder by the hour. Talesin was in deep doo-doo with
his erstwhile tormentors for instigating what i had picked
up on and run with, and he was backpedalling as fast as he
could, pleading that although he had created the list, he
had only meant for it to appear in usenet (and thus on the
google archive forever, in theory) but NEVER on a web page.
Stupid, yes, but this is par for those who are 
not-getting-it about the POINT of the internet. 

The not-getting-it extended also to the fact that i had made
links to a web site i found through google on which many of
these trolls had posted  their pictures. (To this day you
will read claims from them that i "POSTED THEIR PICTURES" --
another example of not-getting-it, in this case failing to
distinguish between a LINK and an IMAGE. Those folks whose
pictures were at the web site started demanding that i
remove all links that led to their (gasp!) pictures  --
pictures which they themselves had uploaded to the publicly
accessible and fully spidered web site that could be found
through google!

And meanwhile, Jeff Crowe, the guy who started it all by
being so rude to me that i had followed him to his
troll-nest newsgroup, was still posting his boasting threats
to sue siva (and me) -- and he followed through on his
boasts by sending a legalesque letter to our isp trying to
get our entire web site taken down. 

Well, i'm an old hippie. We hippies do things with
communication, not with lawyers. So i tried to phone the
number Jeff gave in his legalesque letter, to explain to him
that he was a day late, a dollar short, and about three
cards short of a full deck because the archived posts he had
asked siva to remove were long gone and thus there was no
need to sue us -- but the telephone wasn't his; it rang at
some mail box center / UPS store in Seattle. The guy wasn't
even "suing" us from his own residence! 

I've been sued by weirder and scarier people than Jeff Crowe
(like Kenneth Bianchi, a mass murderer, for instance), i
have spent time as a reporter, and i couldn't reach Jeff
Crowe, so i wrote up an account of my telephone conversation
with the staff person at the mail box shop and posted it to
usenet. I related how the woman i talked to at the mail box
place said that there was no one named Jeff Crowe with a box
there. I noted that this presented me with a few logical
alternatives, among them that Jeff Crowe rented the box
under a fake name, or that he rented it under his real name
which is not Jeff Crowe, or that he didn't have a box rented
there at all and lied about it on the letter he sent to our
isp, or that the woman i talked to was misinformed. Jeff's
response to my reporting this stage of the "lawsuit" game
was pretty apocalyptic. But, you know, if someone wants to
play, "i'm suing you!" they've got to have a legal reason to
do so and they have to come into the open to do so. 

In the end, our isp laughed at his unfounded demands and no
lawyers ever appeared on his behalf. Game over. 

I then did a final update to the web page, leaving it as i
had actually intended to start it until i had fortuitously
run into Talesin's sock-identification and real name
"outing" post -- that is, as a mere list of nyms, socks, and
names in my kill-filter that habitually cross-posted to arw,
for the use of anyone else in the online magical community
who is bothered by these graffiti artists and wants a quick
list of who to ignore. The page is online at 
     http://www.luckympjo.com/altreligiontrolls.html

They didn't like being played, so they still try to kick up
sand every once in a while. I only know what they are up to
when someone like you or Joseph Littleshoes replies to them. 

> And I have read posts threatening Tyagi and Cat previously so if they
> posted any info on people threatening them... it is the person who
> did the threatening that deserves everything they get. 

Like i said, when Jeff Crowe sent a legal letter threatening
to sue us and our isp over usenet material that was no
longer archived at our site, since he had asked for its
removal, he put *himself* in the open. Court cases are like
that -- names and addresses get written down and become
public information. He ought to have known that, if only
from watching a few legal dramas on television, but he
wasn't wise enough. He overplayed his hand, and he didn't
like the way he was played in return, but them's the breaks. 

I suppose, by the very fact that this thread exists in
usenet, that he and his little troll-friends are still out
there, whining about how the evil yronwodes toasted them
over the gentle warmth of Talesin's troll-and-sock list and
then called Jeff's bluff with a hearty laugh (only he and
his friends will have another way to describe it, i am
sure). But i now have them kill-filed and so their
bellyaching is moot to me, reaching me like second-hand
smoke and mirrors, as it were, the faintest echo of their
gnashing teeth but a dim clatter in the corridors of
unmoderated usenet.  

> One of the
> reasons I have liked living in Arizona and Oregon... I can carry
> my 9mm most anywhere.

One of the reasons i like living without television is that
i don't receive the nightly training that most people get in
how to worry about random violence.

> -Douglas

cat yronwode 

Hoodoo and Blues Lyrics --------- http://www.luckymojo.com/blues.html

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