Possibly my last rant.
Hypocrites for indency
There exists a vigilante group that is called Warriors for Innocence. Today they claimed responsibility for the deletion of 500 journals and communities at LJ.
The fact that most of these deleted journals were fandom sites, incest survivor sites, journals dedicated to literary discussion of the work of nabakov, and in a few cases fashion sites is unimportant to them. What mattered to them was that somewhere out there there might have lurked a pedophile.
At a time in this country when we are busily decrying civilian casualties in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have an example of people who have no care for the emotional and literary civilian casualties of an action that carried with it symbolic overtones of the callousness toward the innocent perpetrated in the name of the innocent that we are seeing elsewhere in the world.
What happened is simple.
Two months ago, WFI singled out LJ for action and posted about it on their site. I am certain that the real pedophiles immediately either cleaned up their act or vanished into the shadows. After all WFI had fired a warning shot that gave them plenty of time to get out of Dodge.
As far as I can discern, Six Apart/Livejournal was simply provided with a list of trigger words and then turned loose to do a random search and deletion of all journals and communities that had those words listed either on their posts or their profiles.
And, frankly, that was the only way it might have been achieved, considering how large LJ is.
It was like using a twelve gauge shotgun as a fly swatter.
There are two kinds of people. Those who believe that the end justifies the means. And those who believe that the means must be honorable, otherwise the cost of achieving the end is too great a price to pay.
One of Neitzche's most famous quotations is "Those who hunt monsters, must take care not to become monsters themselves."
By that definition, Warriors for Innocence have joined the ranks of the monsters.
It is not their goal that offends me. It is their way of achieving that goal.
Their gross insensitivity to the rights, needs, and freedoms of so many innocents is a terrible thing.
Blackstone's formulation is at the root of our own democracy and due process of law. It states "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
And yet, here we have an organization (I suspect it is actually a very small group of individuals) who would rephrase that wise and merciful dictum and say instead "better that ten innocent people suffer, than one guilty person go free."
When justice becomes unjust, by what right can anyone ever again call it justice?
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Sunday, March 04, 2007
More Naughty Peaches
Eventually I will move on to other subjects, but I have not yet said everything on this subject that I feel needs to be said.
I closed down my xanga blog a few hours ago. Peaches had left 60 footprints on my xanga in three hours. He just kept digging and digging and digging, looking for enough dirt to get it shut down.
I decided to curtail his activities by shutting it down myself.
I had been thinking about it for several weeks. It seemed the right thing to do.
When I created the ReynanSharani blog at xanga, I wanted it to be another fun spot much like LJ is. Yes, I have dozens of blogs. Well, maybe not dozens, but a lot of them. In fact I don't even remember all the places I have opened blogs.
The very first person to post a comment on that blog was Peaches and it was a threat.
He said that he intended to ruin my sales.
I archived that blog before I shut it down. It was a paid acct so that was no problem. I reactivated my Insane Journal tonight. I'll be posting there as well as all the other places. As always, I'm cussedness there.
Why so many blogs?
Well, that's what Naughty Peaches does. He gets blogs by the dozens. Most of them are dead now and haven't been posted to for years. And some have been taken down for TOS violations.
I got all of these blogs because I felt the need to have somewhere to flee to when he was bothering me too much at one of them. It gave me breathing room.
I use up a lot of emotional and mental energy working on my novels and short stories.
I can only handle Peaches in small doses. When I get too caught up in fighting with him, I become exhausted quickly. Then my writing suffers. So I needed these retreats to recharge my batteries.
I closed down my xanga blog a few hours ago. Peaches had left 60 footprints on my xanga in three hours. He just kept digging and digging and digging, looking for enough dirt to get it shut down.
I decided to curtail his activities by shutting it down myself.
I had been thinking about it for several weeks. It seemed the right thing to do.
When I created the ReynanSharani blog at xanga, I wanted it to be another fun spot much like LJ is. Yes, I have dozens of blogs. Well, maybe not dozens, but a lot of them. In fact I don't even remember all the places I have opened blogs.
The very first person to post a comment on that blog was Peaches and it was a threat.
He said that he intended to ruin my sales.
I archived that blog before I shut it down. It was a paid acct so that was no problem. I reactivated my Insane Journal tonight. I'll be posting there as well as all the other places. As always, I'm cussedness there.
Why so many blogs?
Well, that's what Naughty Peaches does. He gets blogs by the dozens. Most of them are dead now and haven't been posted to for years. And some have been taken down for TOS violations.
I got all of these blogs because I felt the need to have somewhere to flee to when he was bothering me too much at one of them. It gave me breathing room.
I use up a lot of emotional and mental energy working on my novels and short stories.
I can only handle Peaches in small doses. When I get too caught up in fighting with him, I become exhausted quickly. Then my writing suffers. So I needed these retreats to recharge my batteries.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Naughty Peaches
Today, Naughty Peaches demonstrated that he did not know what the word "plagiarism" means.
A critic reviewed his only not-self-published book, House of Spiders 3. In the review she parodied two of his characters from the novella having a conversation. He immediately accused her of ... you guessed it ... plagiarism.
That seems to be the flavor of the month with him. He picks up words and uses them without understanding what they mean.
During a particularly ugly period, I received phone calls from his mother, his grandmother, and his cousin, as well as numerous IM contacts and emails and comments posted to my other blogs. I later changed my phone number to put a stop to it again.
Naughty Peaches is 30 years old, and yet his family feels they must protect him from the hordes of people that he hurts and offends with his abusive behavior.
To be honest, Peaches is a somewhat pathetic figure. At times I pity him.
That does not mean that I'm willing to put up with his abuse, however.
Peaches was a special education child. He graduated from High School taking special ed classes and he has admitted that he has a learning disability, although he has never said what it is.
I can understand the angst and anger of the disabled because I had polio at age eight. At this point in my life I have no memory of ever having been "normal."
His cousin told me that most of the family is "slow."
What prevents Peaches from being pitied and ignored is his abusiveness and his relentless pursuit of anyone he thinks has wronged him.
I no longer loom as large on his hit parade as I once did, but he still comes after me.
Now, before you ask whether he has asperger's syndrome or some related condition, I can assure you that he doesn't. All the abusive obscene language is very consciously used on his part.
For a time he had an author blog on amazon.com. They call them 'plogs' and they are not selective about who gets them. Therefore, even though Peaches is self-published, he got one. He lost it. And they took away his product wiki also. The reason was the obscenities. Amazon.com has a software system that removes obscenities. So he began using alternate spellings and *** to get past it. And he crowed about his victory on his numerous blogs.
He posted a picture on all of his blogs that cost him his blogs on deadjournal and greatestjournal. He has a blogspot and a host of others. The picture? He put two pictures of writers he disliked into the toilet and pissed on them and then took a picture of his deed and put it up all over the place. It was childish and immature.
There are forums where young writers gather such as spinetinglers. There they post their work in a protected area where it can be critiqued by other members in the hopes that the feedback will help them to improve. What happened there is typical of Naughty Peaches. He posted one of his grammatically challenged stories there and people responded with their usual honesty. Several of them did what I had on first meeting him: they suggested he get a copy of Strunk and White.
He reacted by abusing them in harsh language on the forums, in private messages, and emails. If they had a blog somewhere, they also received ugly comments from him.
I pointed this out to his family once, and they laughed at it. I guess it runs in the family.
I suspect that he is, at least to some degree, delusional.
His accusations seem to come out of thin air and left field. They include sex, e-piracy, conspiracy, and now plagiarism.
during my early days of investigating him (I was looking for some explanation of why he was doing ugly things to me), two women contacted me who knew him personally. They had both gone into hiding to escape him, and asked that I not give out their names.
Where is all this going?
Well, my first reaction to his accusations of plagiarism was shock and anger. Then I became depressed (a normal reaction to getting as angry as I had) but today after a good night's sleep, I have leveled out again.
Hopefully, something can and will be done about him one day. He's making an entire community miserable.
A critic reviewed his only not-self-published book, House of Spiders 3. In the review she parodied two of his characters from the novella having a conversation. He immediately accused her of ... you guessed it ... plagiarism.
That seems to be the flavor of the month with him. He picks up words and uses them without understanding what they mean.
During a particularly ugly period, I received phone calls from his mother, his grandmother, and his cousin, as well as numerous IM contacts and emails and comments posted to my other blogs. I later changed my phone number to put a stop to it again.
Naughty Peaches is 30 years old, and yet his family feels they must protect him from the hordes of people that he hurts and offends with his abusive behavior.
To be honest, Peaches is a somewhat pathetic figure. At times I pity him.
That does not mean that I'm willing to put up with his abuse, however.
Peaches was a special education child. He graduated from High School taking special ed classes and he has admitted that he has a learning disability, although he has never said what it is.
I can understand the angst and anger of the disabled because I had polio at age eight. At this point in my life I have no memory of ever having been "normal."
His cousin told me that most of the family is "slow."
What prevents Peaches from being pitied and ignored is his abusiveness and his relentless pursuit of anyone he thinks has wronged him.
I no longer loom as large on his hit parade as I once did, but he still comes after me.
Now, before you ask whether he has asperger's syndrome or some related condition, I can assure you that he doesn't. All the abusive obscene language is very consciously used on his part.
For a time he had an author blog on amazon.com. They call them 'plogs' and they are not selective about who gets them. Therefore, even though Peaches is self-published, he got one. He lost it. And they took away his product wiki also. The reason was the obscenities. Amazon.com has a software system that removes obscenities. So he began using alternate spellings and *** to get past it. And he crowed about his victory on his numerous blogs.
He posted a picture on all of his blogs that cost him his blogs on deadjournal and greatestjournal. He has a blogspot and a host of others. The picture? He put two pictures of writers he disliked into the toilet and pissed on them and then took a picture of his deed and put it up all over the place. It was childish and immature.
There are forums where young writers gather such as spinetinglers. There they post their work in a protected area where it can be critiqued by other members in the hopes that the feedback will help them to improve. What happened there is typical of Naughty Peaches. He posted one of his grammatically challenged stories there and people responded with their usual honesty. Several of them did what I had on first meeting him: they suggested he get a copy of Strunk and White.
He reacted by abusing them in harsh language on the forums, in private messages, and emails. If they had a blog somewhere, they also received ugly comments from him.
I pointed this out to his family once, and they laughed at it. I guess it runs in the family.
I suspect that he is, at least to some degree, delusional.
His accusations seem to come out of thin air and left field. They include sex, e-piracy, conspiracy, and now plagiarism.
during my early days of investigating him (I was looking for some explanation of why he was doing ugly things to me), two women contacted me who knew him personally. They had both gone into hiding to escape him, and asked that I not give out their names.
Where is all this going?
Well, my first reaction to his accusations of plagiarism was shock and anger. Then I became depressed (a normal reaction to getting as angry as I had) but today after a good night's sleep, I have leveled out again.
Hopefully, something can and will be done about him one day. He's making an entire community miserable.
Friday, March 02, 2007
The Tale of Naughty Peaches
The Tale of Naughty Peaches.
Naughty Peaches thinks I'm an internet bully.
Bullying
"Cyberbullying involves the use of information and communication technologies such as e-mail, cell phone and pager text messages, instant messaging, defamatory personal Web sites, and defamatory online personal polling Web sites, to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behaviour by an individual or group, that is intended to harm others." -Bill Belsey http://www.cyberbullying.ca
I was still rather naive when I first encountered Naughty Peaches. At least as far as the internet is concerned. Back in 2003 I was extremely lonely and the Iraqi War was looming. I had several nephews shipping out to participate, both in the marines and the navy.
I had had the internet for close to ten years, but I had never gone to messageboards and chatrooms. I had been told that they were toxic.
I'm an active member of SFWA, having made pro in 1980.
Onr day, I was looking over the SFWA website and stumbled upon an article I thought was outdated. So I contacted the webmaster and got into a discussion with him about it. He discerned that I was lonely and introduced me to chatrooms and the people in the chatrooms introduced me to messageboards. One of the first messageboards I went to was gothic.net.
While I was there, Naughty Peaches approached me, introduced himself as a writer of great talent, and said that we should get together. He sent me some of his work to go over. I suppose he was waiting for me to praise his genius. What I found was a document rife with grammar problems, incoherent sentences, bad dialog, and other errors. I recommended that he get a copy of Strunk and White.
His reaction was to launch into me in the ugliest of language. I've always been a fighter and I replied in kind. Then I dropped it and quit going to gothic.net to get away from him. I had started at gothic.net in September of 03 and I quit going in December. I eventually heard that he had been banned, and in April 04, I went back for a brief visit. He must have been reading the board, because he knew I had been there, and he sent me a series of ugly emails. I fired back at him and thought that was the end of it.
Then on June 17th of 04, Naughty Peaches joined HWA and lit into me on sight. Naughty Peaches had joined under the affiliate rule which did not require possessing any publishing credits (that has since been changed). I was talking to an editor in IM and she said to me "Have you seen this?" From September of 03 to June 17th, Naughty Peaches had been bad mouthing me all over the net and accusing me of plagiarism.
The really odd thing about it was that Naughty Peaches thought I was a horror author (I still don't write horror). At that time, the only things I had out were Sword and Sorcery that had originally been published while Naughty Peaches was still in diapers. He had also written a story using my name as the main character and telling people that it was about me and the it was a "cautionary tale of plagiarism."
Well by that point I was becoming better versed in the internet and I googled. I discovered that Naughty Peaches had been Naughty with a lot of people. I got the story taken down several places by threatening legal action. It's still out there at two spots, and every time he gets angry at me he threatens to have it published.
I stopped going to the messageboard at HWA as a result of his presence, but as I got my legs under me I flamed back at him. No matter how hard I looked for a new messageboard to participate at he showed up soon after. By September of 04, I had become extremely angry. He had an anthology out that he self-published through Lulu.com. Most of the stories were available for free various places on the web, so I wrote a review of the stories that I could find. Admittedly, it was partly to get back at him -- at least in the beginning -- because I could not imagine someone as functionally illiterate as Naughty Peaches being able to edit an anthology. I have edited them. However, once I started, my past as a reviewer and critic for several publications led to my writing ah honest and perceptive review, but he viewed my criticism as libel and slander no matter how politely I phrased it. I offered helpful suggestions to his underage authors and many later thanked me.
By then he had moved from attacking me to also attacking my daughter who was in high school at the time and living on her own because she had not wanted to move to the other side of the state with me and give up her friends.
Eventually I went back to ignoring him and hoping that this time it would stick. It didn't. He came after me again. It became an endless round of him jumping me or my child and me jumping him back for it. When he was not jumping on me, he was jumping on others. The numbers of his "enemies" grew as a result of his stalking and abuse.
Naughty Peaches was banned from many boards and it gradually became safe for me to return to them. I would ignore him for months at a time and then he would try something new to hurt me and my child.
As more people were hurt by his abusiveness, Naughty Peaches found that his "enemies" had become so great in number that he was practically getting cornered with torches and pitchforks at every turn.
One of the things that he came back to again and again was to harp on my sexual orientation. He would jump on me with obscenity laden posts. Whenever I got a new blog in an attempt to gain a bit of peace, he would be the first one to post a comment on it. Those comments were threatening and abusive. There seemed to be no way to slow him down.
I tried everything I could think of, banning, blocking, and so forth, but he always got around them to have his say.
Finally his "enemies" became an impromptu vigilante group that stuck together and every time he launched into a fresh round of abuse, he was parodied and slammed. Some people continued to try and reason with him, but like the rest of us who had been around longer, they soon saw that there was nothing to be done about Naughty Peaches.
Now he wants to say that I'm a bully because I won't lie down and take it.
At this point, Naughty Peaches knew a lot about me, my work, and my family. He had not read anything by me, but he knew that I wrote dark fantasy and Sword & Sorcery. A few days ago he accused me of having plagiarized Robert E. Howard. The blow came totally out of left field and followed on a long string of fresh threats from him. When I demanded that he show me and my readers where I had plagiarized REH, his response was "I can't betray my sources."
What?
Naughty Peaches thinks I'm an internet bully.
Bullying
"Cyberbullying involves the use of information and communication technologies such as e-mail, cell phone and pager text messages, instant messaging, defamatory personal Web sites, and defamatory online personal polling Web sites, to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behaviour by an individual or group, that is intended to harm others." -Bill Belsey http://www.cyberbullying.ca
I was still rather naive when I first encountered Naughty Peaches. At least as far as the internet is concerned. Back in 2003 I was extremely lonely and the Iraqi War was looming. I had several nephews shipping out to participate, both in the marines and the navy.
I had had the internet for close to ten years, but I had never gone to messageboards and chatrooms. I had been told that they were toxic.
I'm an active member of SFWA, having made pro in 1980.
Onr day, I was looking over the SFWA website and stumbled upon an article I thought was outdated. So I contacted the webmaster and got into a discussion with him about it. He discerned that I was lonely and introduced me to chatrooms and the people in the chatrooms introduced me to messageboards. One of the first messageboards I went to was gothic.net.
While I was there, Naughty Peaches approached me, introduced himself as a writer of great talent, and said that we should get together. He sent me some of his work to go over. I suppose he was waiting for me to praise his genius. What I found was a document rife with grammar problems, incoherent sentences, bad dialog, and other errors. I recommended that he get a copy of Strunk and White.
His reaction was to launch into me in the ugliest of language. I've always been a fighter and I replied in kind. Then I dropped it and quit going to gothic.net to get away from him. I had started at gothic.net in September of 03 and I quit going in December. I eventually heard that he had been banned, and in April 04, I went back for a brief visit. He must have been reading the board, because he knew I had been there, and he sent me a series of ugly emails. I fired back at him and thought that was the end of it.
Then on June 17th of 04, Naughty Peaches joined HWA and lit into me on sight. Naughty Peaches had joined under the affiliate rule which did not require possessing any publishing credits (that has since been changed). I was talking to an editor in IM and she said to me "Have you seen this?" From September of 03 to June 17th, Naughty Peaches had been bad mouthing me all over the net and accusing me of plagiarism.
The really odd thing about it was that Naughty Peaches thought I was a horror author (I still don't write horror). At that time, the only things I had out were Sword and Sorcery that had originally been published while Naughty Peaches was still in diapers. He had also written a story using my name as the main character and telling people that it was about me and the it was a "cautionary tale of plagiarism."
Well by that point I was becoming better versed in the internet and I googled. I discovered that Naughty Peaches had been Naughty with a lot of people. I got the story taken down several places by threatening legal action. It's still out there at two spots, and every time he gets angry at me he threatens to have it published.
I stopped going to the messageboard at HWA as a result of his presence, but as I got my legs under me I flamed back at him. No matter how hard I looked for a new messageboard to participate at he showed up soon after. By September of 04, I had become extremely angry. He had an anthology out that he self-published through Lulu.com. Most of the stories were available for free various places on the web, so I wrote a review of the stories that I could find. Admittedly, it was partly to get back at him -- at least in the beginning -- because I could not imagine someone as functionally illiterate as Naughty Peaches being able to edit an anthology. I have edited them. However, once I started, my past as a reviewer and critic for several publications led to my writing ah honest and perceptive review, but he viewed my criticism as libel and slander no matter how politely I phrased it. I offered helpful suggestions to his underage authors and many later thanked me.
By then he had moved from attacking me to also attacking my daughter who was in high school at the time and living on her own because she had not wanted to move to the other side of the state with me and give up her friends.
Eventually I went back to ignoring him and hoping that this time it would stick. It didn't. He came after me again. It became an endless round of him jumping me or my child and me jumping him back for it. When he was not jumping on me, he was jumping on others. The numbers of his "enemies" grew as a result of his stalking and abuse.
Naughty Peaches was banned from many boards and it gradually became safe for me to return to them. I would ignore him for months at a time and then he would try something new to hurt me and my child.
As more people were hurt by his abusiveness, Naughty Peaches found that his "enemies" had become so great in number that he was practically getting cornered with torches and pitchforks at every turn.
One of the things that he came back to again and again was to harp on my sexual orientation. He would jump on me with obscenity laden posts. Whenever I got a new blog in an attempt to gain a bit of peace, he would be the first one to post a comment on it. Those comments were threatening and abusive. There seemed to be no way to slow him down.
I tried everything I could think of, banning, blocking, and so forth, but he always got around them to have his say.
Finally his "enemies" became an impromptu vigilante group that stuck together and every time he launched into a fresh round of abuse, he was parodied and slammed. Some people continued to try and reason with him, but like the rest of us who had been around longer, they soon saw that there was nothing to be done about Naughty Peaches.
Now he wants to say that I'm a bully because I won't lie down and take it.
At this point, Naughty Peaches knew a lot about me, my work, and my family. He had not read anything by me, but he knew that I wrote dark fantasy and Sword & Sorcery. A few days ago he accused me of having plagiarized Robert E. Howard. The blow came totally out of left field and followed on a long string of fresh threats from him. When I demanded that he show me and my readers where I had plagiarized REH, his response was "I can't betray my sources."
What?
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