Stupid Losers

Now I’m remem­ber­ing why I got off most pagan mail­ing lists.

I recent­ly joined a list for pagan women who are sex­u­al abuse sur­vivors, because I’m deal­ing with a lot of the old stuff com­ing up right now (it’s cycli­cal). And at first, it was nice to be able to talk to women with sim­i­lar val­ues who are deal­ing with a lot of the same issues.

But sev­er­al peo­ple on the list use that damned “sta­tionery” crap for their emails, back­ground and all. I hate HTML mail. Sil­ly fonts and col­ors are bad enough—but enor­mous back­ground graph­ics? UGH.

Some­one new to the list men­tioned that one per­son­’s mes­sages, in par­tic­u­lar, are crash­ing her com­put­er and that some­times oth­er peo­ple’s mes­sages are also caus­ing prob­lems for her. I point­ed out that it was due to this par­tic­u­lar poster’s enor­mous back­ground files, and that if every­one would refrain from using HTML in email, there would­n’t be a prob­lem. Alter­na­tive­ly, those of us who don’t want HTML mail could set up fil­ters so that we don’t see mes­sages from those people.

I’ve now been accused of nas­ti­ly “attack­ing” the per­son with the extreme back­grounds, and oh, poor girl, she’s young and “in a bad place right now.”

I don’t care how old she is or what kind of “place” she’s in, I just point­ed out a tech­ni­cal fact. She’s send­ing freakin’ huge mes­sages that just con­tain a small para­graph of text, and open­ing her mes­sages will crash some email clients (or freeze some Win­dows sys­tems if they’re already low on resources).

And the flaky idiots are all run­ning to the poster’s defense as if I’d done some­thing hor­ri­bly wrong. Wow, I’m being lumped in with her abuser!

That makes me won­der what the def­i­n­i­tion of “abuse” is for most of these peo­ple. Appar­ent­ly, it’s a hell of a lot more inclu­sive of the most minor dis­agree­ments than mine is.

I can­not stand flakes. And there are too damned many of them in most pagan groups and on most pagan mail­ing lists.