O'Donnell Negatively Judging CLÉiRIGh Through Deception

Michael O'Donnell wrote to Sysfling on 18 Feb 2025, at 22:36:

Chris,

I am glad you are responding in person, rather than using your automated attack dog. Less toxic.

And you may be right about 2020 and what happened there. David mentioned 2012, so I responded to that. Around 2020, a different fight about your toxicity, and I don't want to go into that again.

You claim you are the defender of the list, and only attack the toxic. You tried that on your list Sysfan, but Asflanet was set up, and many abandoned your list for the more moderated list.

You then moved into Asflanet, and "defending" from that list from toxicity earnt you multiple warnings to desist or be banned.

So, it seems you moved your attention to Sysfling, as your new home for "anti-toxicity". And you say myself, John Bateman and David Rose are the toxic voices on the list.

To this, we could add those for whom you have built hate pages on your blogsite, and who no longer post because of you, Jim Martin and Lise Fontaine, Carlos Gouveia, Ellissa Asp, Robin Fawcett and others who are named in your Mistakes blogs. It must be difficult for you to need to defend SFL from all these "toxic" people, many of them major voices in SFL.

But my main concern is for all those who are not yet on your "toxic" list. After my post the other day, 3 people emailed me offlist to say "thank you, I was afraid to say anything, for fear of drawing his wrath" (my paraphrase). Only 3, but I take these 3 to represent a larger silent majority, who are not posting to sysfling for fear of getting the kind of aggressive responses you have been sending to those who do have the courage to post. Or of becoming a target of your hate-blog.

On a different issue: "The "persecution" since 2020 has been a reasoned review of Lise's paper"

 - I saw your blog Chris. You mined her Facebook, found things she was telling her friends and relatives (a concern about putting on weight), and posted this on your blog, with a commentary about how silly she was. She sent you an email asking you to take this down, and you posted that email on your blog, again saying what a stupid woman she was. You are not the "reasoning" defender of SFLers here. You are the problem. Maybe this was before 2020, so your response as written may be true, but deceptive. You attacks since then have assumed a veneer of reason, but contain the same underlying sense of predator preying on the lamb. 

But even assuming that your review is reasoned, I am more concerned with your motivation to write "reasoned" reviews of pèople's work, how are the people selected for review, and why is it only their faults are "discovered", not their strengths. You are selectively choosing particula people to target, and selectively choosing which aspects of their reality to place on the public web. You are choosing to negatively appraise certain people at length. 

 Now, you are free to write as you like, but you should be aware that you are choosing to textually deface fellow member of your community. And that is the problem: instead of building on Halliday's heritage, you are shooting down those you don't like. Being publically-posted negative reviews, these "rational reviews" can cost people job or funding opportunities, so a real world effect of you actions. So you "defend" SFL by tearing it down.

And there are a lot of people on your target list who do not deserve that. Carlos, who has spent his life supporting SFL in Portugal and beyond, earnt his attack on your bad side because your proposal was not accepted for a conference. You then examined the programme committee of that conference for possible culprits of the crime against you. And launched attacks on at least one of those. This is not "rational" behaviour. Lise who re-united a fragmented SFL community in Europe, she does not deserve this. John Bateman, in my view a continual voice of reason on the list, does not deserve this.  

So, an appeal to you Chris, please continue to respond to any points made on this list, or open questions, as you do so well. but please, stop AI-bombing any response of those you don't like, and secondly, tone down the persecuting nature of your blogs.

Mick

Blogger Comments:

KEYWORDS: toxic, toxicity, hate, aggressive, deceptive, attacks, predator, attack, bad side, attacks, not "rational", persecuting

CLÉiRIGh was not permitted to identify the many lies in this post on Sysfling because the list manager had demanded he stop after identifying the lies in O'Donnell's previous post, and so, unchallenged, this became the pivotal post that sparked displays of solidarity with O'Donnell from several listmembers. See Michael O'Donnell [4] Supplementary: The Deceptions Deployed.

O'Donnell Negatively Judging Himself Through CLÉiRIGh

On Mon, 17 Feb 2025 at 17:51, Michael O'Donnell wrote to Sysfling:

Hi David,

David Rose  

Dear Moderator and fellow subscribers

Can I ask why the decision by the international committee to ban this person from sysfling since 2012 has been overturned?

This is a lie propagated by Chris, which I see is widely adopted in Sydney. There has not been a single case in the 30 year history of Sysfling of a person being "banned" (forcefully unsubscribed) from sysfling.

Back in 2012 or so,  the server hosting sysfling changed from my university to a listserv in the UK. This listserv had a default setting such that if messages sent from sysfling bounced so many times (could not reach the intended recipient), then that subscriber was automatically unsubscribed. This affected a number of people, unfortunately including  Chris, but the setting was changed, and anyone who was unsubscribed could at their will re-subscribe. At the time, many service providers were experimenting on rejecting what it thought was spam, not just tagging it as spam, but bouncing it back. Unfortunately, some of these systems had sysfling on their naughty list. So, Chris was unsubscribed by an automated system because his service provider was over-protective.

That is not how Chris tells it. He claims to have been victimised by the then moderator of Sysfling, and has launched a holy crusade against that individual, besmirching her good name whenever he can. he has lost contact with reality, but unfortunately is dragging others down the rabbit hole with him.

As for whether Chris should become the first ever ban on sysfling, that is open to debate. His behaviour is destructive to the list's community to a level that as not been seen before.

Your own behaviour a decade ago, David, was considered a problem (as hinted at by Maria). But you took the hint and have been generally well behaved for a decade. But your voice them was not silenced (unsubscribed), and you submitted to the community code of cooperation.

The present case is different though. Chris oiginally took on the role of David standing up to Goliath (with Rose being goliath), but David has supplanted Goliath as the menace to the community. Just because he started his activity for good reason does not mean that his bullying obsessive behaviour should be tolerated.

 Now, given the nature of this list, the first response of people has been to voice their protest by unsubscribing. Even those who have long argued for reason on this list, such as John Knox. But some don't want to unsubscribe from their community list because of one flamer. They have suggested forcefully removing the abuser instead of watching victims, and innocent bystanders, flee the scene.

But look what happened last time, when a faulty listserv setting dropped Chris off the list. That lead to 13 years of Chris bad-mouthing someone who has dedicated their life to serving the SFL community, who has done nothing but good for us, building the SFL community in Europe and beyond. What would this maniac do if he was actually banned in truth? I pèrsonally would not want to be part of that decision.

And why then am i writing this? Basically because I don't like seeing bullies get away with their abuse. I like to live in a community which is mutually constructive and supportive. I will not unsubscribe myself from sysfling, but hate to see what it is becoming recently. So I speak out my views, and will ignore Chris's chatgpt-mediated responses, which are not worth the bile they are printed on.

mick

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is entirely fictitious. For this, and the many other dishonest fabrications in this email, see here.

[2]

KEYWORDS: lie, lost contact with reality, bullying, obsessive, flamer, abuser, bad mouthing, maniac, bullies, abuse

To be clear, Cléirigh's "holy crusade" was publicising the fact that he had been unsubscribed by Fontaine in 2020 and reviewing one of her papers on the basis on evidence. It can be read here. 

Cléirigh's messages to Sysfling were analyses of the rhetorical strategies used by Rose, Bateman and O'Donnell to bully. For reasons why O'Donnell projects his own toxic behaviour onto Cléirigh, see here. For reasons why O'Donnell received collegial support for his toxic behaviour, see here.

O'Donnell Judging CLÉiRIGh As A Flaming Psychotic Arsehole

On Mon, 17 Feb 2025 at 10:15, Michael O'Donnell wrote to Sysfling:

Chris,

...and I am talking to you, not to that parrot your have trained to say what you want it to say (note when I put David or John's messages into ChaGPT I do not get anything close to what your version produces. You have trained it to put down whatever message you put in. If you put your own, or Halliday's texts into it, it would be just as critical).

Please stop being an arsehole. You are not trying to "defend" the group from dominating voices. You are just trying to fuck over people you don't like. And yes, for a full list of the people you don't like in SFL, I can look at your various blogs. I know I am on it.

You are not God's appointed protector of Michael's word. He would have been appalled at how you are behaving. He built by supporting others, not by attacking, and certainly not by attacking in such an idiotically annoying way you are doing. You are not even brave enough to put your responses in your own words, you have to hifr brhinf [sic] the "authority" of am AI.

Please, argue with points made by the dominant ones that post to this list, but do it in your own words, and not in the psychotic way you are acting now. You are threatening this community, people are unsubscribing, while others are silent, afraid to enter the debate for fear of getting flamed by you.

You are NOT protecting the community, you are damaging it. Please, stop.

Mick

Blogger Comments:

KEYWORDS: arsehole, fuck, attacking, idiotically, psychotic, flamed

To be clear, O'Donnell was here objecting to CLÉiRIGh simply using ChatGPT to analyse the rhetorical strategies deployed by bullies in a Sysfling discussion. It can be seen here that it is actually O'Donnell who engages in the very behaviours he falsely attributes to CLÉiRIGh. For an understanding of the motivations and function of O'Donnell's hypocrisy, see the analysis at Projection.

O'Donnell Negatively Judging CLÉiRIGh for Using ChatGPT to Analyse Rhetorical Strategies

On Mon, 17 Feb 2025 at 06:18, Michael O'Donnell wrote to Sysfling:

Chris,

the only one  dominating  "the SFL community through intimidation"
is you. Every time anyone opens their mouth, you shoot them down with
your bazooka.
You are single-handedly destroying the community.

Mick

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, O'Donnell was here objecting to CLÉiRIGh using ChatGPT to analyse the rhetorical strategies deployed by bullies in a Sysfling discussion. O'Donnell rightly felt threatened by this sort of analysis. CLÉiRIGh was testing the hypothesis that toxic behaviour could not be eradicated by reasoned argument. O'Donnell was one of several who confirmed the hypothesis.

ChatGPT advises:

If you wanted to refine it further, you could make explicit that analysing rhetorical strategies is not the same as deploying them, which is where O'Donnell’s misrepresentation comes in.