THE SETTING A half-dead mailing list devoted to a band who have been sleeping for basically 16 years and where news are far and between. A couple of German intellectuals of different attitudes; one noticeably for the concept of fascism while some others seem to subscribe to the theory of rebellion and encouraging verbal combat. One set of rules governing said mailing list and a now-defunct list operator who is no longer able to oversee and employ the code of conduct. THE ACCUSATION - PART 1 - THE FASCIST ACCUSES THE WORLD I will begin my analysis by investigating one particular individual. This individual represents an interesting opinion, since one the one hand he is vigourously fighting for the general public's adherence to the rules, while on the other hand he breaks them in most about every single posting he is producing. We have here a typical example of the psychological disorder commonly referred to as "I-want-to-eat-the-cookie-and-keep-it"-syndrome, first discovered by the famous psychologist Janek Ravolski of the Polish Institute (...) We will return to this in the next segment. Our "fascist", as I will call him throughout this text, without any derogatory meaning, appears as a person who is privately attacked for his views and opinions, and he feels that he has to inform as much of the waking world as possible of, what he believes, are sincere wrongs against him as a person. I must stress that there is nothing wrong with this in itself; it's the manner in which one conducts said missionary that is under investigation and not the contents. The second interesting fact about him is that in every second posting or so, we are presented with the notion that another mailing list is superior to ours, and that in that idealized world, all evils are non-present. This is the classical "The grass is greener on the other side"-syndrome, which has been disproven many a time by professionals, and I will therefore not venture into that arena. If we examine the rules that our "fascist" consistently stress as important and vital for our general well-being, we will find: * Avoid HTML, rich text, attachments and other non-text content. * Flames and/or attacks on other list members. It is appropriate to claim that our "fascist" is indeed correct in his accusations. HTML have been used in some postings, and there have indeed been some flames going back and forth, most noticeably from our "rebels"; more on this later. It can be argued that the old rule against HTML and Rich Text is more or less obsolete today, given the fact that many people use Web-based e-mail services where HTML is the only choice of format they are given. Bandwidth is hardly limited today either, which is the prime reason for disallowing anything but plain text in the first place. I believe we can safely assume that this rule is no longer an active one. Flames and/or attacks on other list members is more serious, however. If you analyze all flame wars on this mailing list where the suspects are involved, you will notice that in almost all of them, our "fascist" individual strikes back on a carelessly phrased original posting, or simply falls for the rebellious bait, usually planted there with intent of causing flames to spark by the before-mentioned "rebels". To conclude the accusations made by our "fascist", they are of limited value since any sane person can identify the trickery involved by our "rebels" to ignite the flames from our hot-tempered "fascist". THE ACCUSATION - PART 2 - THE WORLD AGAINST THE FASCIST Looking from things the other way around, e.g. claiming the "fascist" is the one to blame for the current state of affairs, we find some interesting facts. Let us first investigate if the "fascist" is indeed breaking any of the rules in his missionary to correct what he believes is wrong and utterly unfair. Analyzing the latest flames, we find that the following rules are ignored with ease, repeatedly as well: * Trim down quoted text. * Stay on-topic. * If someone else is misbehaving on the list, please report the problem to the list owner rather than trying to deal with it yourself. * Flames and/or attacks on other list members. * Off-topic or excessive advertisements. * Hoaxes and forged email. * Repostings of messages or emails written by other people, unless you have the permission of the original author. Here we can see that no less than 7 rules are broken over and over again by our "fascist". I will not go into excessive detail on how he manages to break them, but if challenged I will of course do so. Re-read the recent messages and you will easily find them, however. This is the main reasoning behind the case of the world against the fascist as I've decided to call this thread in the investigation. It must also be noted that apart from breaking all the rules listed above, our "fascist" repeatedly ignores requests of withdrawal from other list members who are not actively involved with in the debate, and this is generally considered to be a serious breach of etiquette. Instead of heeding to the requests, we are commonly greeted with renewed vigour and a long verbal statement claiming that he is acting solely for our own better good and that we had better believe it. CONCLUSION Weighing these two parallel investigations hand in hand, it is obvious that the main offender in this drama is our "fascist". It has to be noted however that he is indeed aided by the "rebels", who act as a bellow on the fire, so to speak, and who therefore also are guilty of uncivilized manners. It is furthermore quite possible that our "fascist" suffers from delusions and paranoia, which can be witnessed by the sudden surge of events when he is confronted or stressed by other list members. This typically reveals an uncertain personality isolated from the waking world, determined to control and infringe upon others personal lives, generally referred to as "If I don't have a life of my own, I'll invade other's lives as a substitute". Exactly the same behaviour is what Dr. Simon LaVey once framed as the "psychic vampire" (see "The Black Bible"), or: "he who lives on others". THE VERDICT Possibly due to a clash of personalities, or the scheme of a psychic vampire or devious rebels, the list have been infested with torturous long mails from "fascists" and "rebels" alike that absolutely noone has any wish to either read or receive. None of the mails or debates have ever had any context to this list, and are clearly off-topic. It is therefore my verdict that all such postings must cease immediately, from all involved parties. Any further discussions on this matter or on any of the topics brought up in this investigation will be used as a formal proof of the involved parties totally ignoring the rules of this list and/or the inability to read and understand an English text. Whichever is true, that person will publicly have violated the rules, and should therefore be banned as a consequence, and ridiculed by the general public until quiet. Signed, Dr. Per-Olof Karlsson Ph.D. Behavioral Sciences, Dept. of Psychology & Social Sciences, Märsta University, Sweden