Title: Appius II: Just when you thought it was safe to go back to your computer

Date: Thursday, July 20, 2006
Time: 6:37 PM



In case you thought that I was kidding in that last post, when I claimed to have been accused of being a Jewish Neo-Nazi, no, I really wasn't. The whole thing gets wilder and crazier than that. It can almost seem funny, briefly, because the stakes seem so low, but picture somebody like that getting called up for jury duty and walking into a courtroom with such a badly mangled sense of justice and of reality.

I believe that it was the much mocked former vice president Dan Quayle who once said "religion is not a hobby". I'd add that it's even worse as a fantasy role playing game, because sooner or later one has to return to the real world, and if one does so with distorted values, somebody who deserves better is likely to end up suffering as a result. One can't just play at being crazy and then go back to being sane, if one has been playing for so long that the craziness has been reinforced as one's normative behavior. Here's the rebuttal I made to a post by somebody calling herself "Maior", in which she called for me to be disciplined because I had questioned the party line in Nova Roma.

"Maior" wrote:

> M. Hortensia Quiritibus spd;
> this spurius Antistoicus sounds suspiciusly
> like that neo-nazi fool Priscus,
> bothering all of us.

LOL. The "spurious Antistoicus" as you refer to me has a documented history on the Web spanning most of its history, so if you wish to look foolish, go on accusing me of being a sock puppet of this Priscus person, whoever he is. That, and of being a neo-nazi, as I used to regularly attend Beth Shalom, and somehow just don't picture the American Nazi party welcoming my application. Going out on a limb on that one, just a guess.

> I want to register an official complaint &
> also one against this post.

And I wish to register an official complaint against this outrageous abuse of process. Please put Maior on moderation until s/he learns not to make frivolous disciplinary complaints, in response to legitimate postings.

> Who allowed this post through, honestly must I suffer
> this person's posts everyday whilst my fellow Israelis
> are at war?

Who's forcing you to read them?

Your fellow Israelis? I was about to get really indignant about that, about the sheer ingratitude of living in a country that owes so much to American assistance calling on the suppression of the civil liberities of Americans on the basis that her country is at war - as usual - but I had the sense to read her profile. 37 year old woman living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Which part of the Levant is North Carolina located in these days?

Give you a hint ... here's a map.



http://tinyurl.com/new2u



What makes this classic is not just that she's writing about her "fellow Israelis" when, in fact, she's a resident of the United States, but she had to post this from one of the original thirteen colonies. Yiddish needs a new word, because "chutzpah" doesn't even begin to adequately cover this one.

But this would have been a non sequitir under any circumstances. "Appius can't express political views that I don't like because we're at war"? Maior, the whole point of freedom of speech is that Appius is entitled to express views that you don't like, that I don't like and that everybody else here doesn't like, either, whether there's a war on or not. That right wouldn't mean anything otherwise, because there's always a war on, so how about you get over your bad self and grow up?


Antistoicus

There is a standard of justice being spoken to by such proceedings, so lacking in transparency, in which it is considered right and proper to seek to have action taken against somebody, not even for disputing the fairness of the justice meted out to somebody else, but merely for asking questions about it, and inviting an open discussion of those questions. It's the standard of a totalitarian state.

We may be mildly glad that Nova Roma's fantasy of having its own country will never be more than that, a fantasy, because we know exactly what kind of country it would become - Albania in a can, a tiny little police state shivering in the chilly waters north of Scotland. Only mildly glad, because one would have to be almost as crazy as the Nova Romans to really be worried that the Caesars were going to be returning to us somewhere up in the Orkneys or Shetlands or wherever they think that they're going to insert themselves. What is more disturbing is that we are seeing the development of a pressure cooker environment in which the values of totalitarianism are being fostered and made to seem normative to about a thousand of the citizens of what have traditionally been free societies. Multiply Nova Roma by the number of other subcultures that work on similar terms, and you end up with a very unwholesome social trend.

In fairness to Nova Roma, I should point out that I was invited to return to their list with posting privileges restored, after the previous blog post, and after my real world existence was vouched for by somebody I never pictured coming to my support. That last part was appreciated, but let's look at the explanation

"The moderators thought you were a socket puppet of Priscus. I know you're real, but was asleep when your moderation was announced and thus couldn't intervene. I have now informed the Praetores that you are, in fact, a real person, and you're now welcome to rejoin the main list."

What basis had they ever had for believing such a thing, other than the fact that I had been accused of it by somebody ("Maior") who had already stated her belief that the expression of political views that she didn't like should be stifled, in order to help her emotionally cope with the war? A war involving a country which, as it turns out, she doesn't even really live in. We are looking at a standard of conflict resolution in which malicious flights of fancy are treated as evidence, and one is still left with a few uncomfortable questions like "what if I had been born a German", and the accusation of neo-naziism directed against me hadn't had that ironically humorous twist. What if I had never run into anybody from Nova Roma offline? What if I had started writing the Almond Jar four years later, after getting search engine placement started getting much more difficult than it used to be, and my virtual footprints weren't all over the electronic landscape? How would I have fared in the face of that mudslingng accusation, tossed out with the visible intention of bullying me into not asking questions?

I might also add that not everybody backed down, even when the facts of the situation were made so clear and this little society was so clearly looking foolish in public. Having been blocked from posting my rebuttal to the Nova Roma main list, I circumvented that indefensible act of censorship by posting to another of their lists, the ReligioRomana list, also at Yahoogroups, sharing the posts you see above, saying

"This is the response that I tried to post ... but I couldn't, because that insane complaint had been acted on by a moderator who removed my permission to post, going on to post in a cordial tone as if nothing had happened, probably leaving the casual reader with the impression that I had no reply. In fact, I most certainly do.

Before this latest action, I was a fully neutral party in the dispute, having never heard of Appius, but this latest action is an exercise in just pure sleaze, leaving no room for reasonable doubt that there is something very corrupt about the justice in Nova Roma. "Dog bites man", given the prevailing ethical standards in Pagandom, but I felt it needed saying.

I wonder if the Christians are right about us.

and I still do. I suggested as much in my reply on the Cypress Nemeton blog to the "Right Wing of the Gods Closing Down? post - that old joke I used to bring up at similarly strange moments, "Is it too late to become an Episcopalian?", is beginning to feel less and less like a joke. At first, I wandered the Pagan community looking for inspiration, and then merely for decency, and now all that I'm hoping to find is sanity - and that hope is fading quickly, and is just about gone.

That's why my volume of posting has dropped so low. As I've said elsewhere, maybe it's time for me to start spending a lot less time being Antistoicus and a lot more time just being Joe, and lately that's exactly what I've been doing, off in the real world where people still remember that there is a real world.

Posts in this topic: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 main page for article