I have read through your short archive of postings and note that you have a history of distorting, misquoting, taking out of context and just plain ignoring what other people have written. You are doing this again here, attempting to fabricate a deeply personal argument on a subject you are hell bent on discussing by taking something I have written on another thread which makes no reference to you, to Damien Rice or to anything else you are now ranting on about, and attempting to bully your way into the lime light. I take note, however, at the way you read yourself into those comments without any evidence to back it up, relying instead on italics and quotation marks to give those same comments some spurious relevance. Yes, you were offered an opportunity to write an Op Ed, as are many people on this site and, by your own account, you were too lazy and unmotivated to do so. I think that says alot by itself. In light of your latest posting on this topic, yes, I do think your writing displays a bullying, hectoring manipulative tone. What I really don't understand is why you post on Cluas at all. Your only real interest is in discussing Damien Rice and there are many websites where you can do that, such as eskimofriends.com, quite happily. Instead you have embarked on an adversarial course where you keep your mouth shut, except with the odd comment on other strands, and then launch into long postings when someone says anything less than glowing on the topic of Dodi Ma. Its really quite boring and dull. For the record, and in a general sense, bands, managers, fan club operatives and PRs do attempt to use online discussion boards through unconnected aliases to pump an act and effectively manipulate opinion, giving the impression that the views are being expressed by geunine fans. Indeed, some fans resort to the same tactics themselves at times in service to their fave group. It is one of my jobs as a moderator to ensure that doesn't happen. I make no apology for it and, I have no intention of making any apology to you either, JMC105.

rev jules: "I have read through your short archive of postings and note that you have a history of distorting, misquoting, taking out of context and just plain ignoring what other people have written." i wonder why, since you took the time to re-read my posts, you still can't manage to support your accusations. there really should be some kind of code of conduct for users of this forum - your comments are totally unacceptable. rev jules: "You are doing this again here, attempting to fabricate a deeply personal argument on a subject you are hell bent on discussing by taking something I have written on another thread which makes no reference to you... I take note, however, at the way you read yourself into those comments without any evidence to back it up, relying instead on italics and quotation marks to give those same comments some spurious relevance." that's your argument??? you weren't referring to me??? very impressive! you know, you could have just saved a lot of time and said that straight away. of course, the only question is, just who were you referring to? and by the way, italics and quotation marks serve only to clearly identify words being quoted from another source, namely you. i rely on what i said. you prefer to rely on denying that you said anything at all. rev jules: "Yes, you were offered an opportunity to write an Op Ed, as are many people on this site and, by your own account, you were too lazy and unmotivated to do so. I think that says alot by itself." i shouldn't need to explain myself to you, but since you are hell bent on throwing more insults my way... at the time that you made your generous offer, i moved to the states for work. you'll have to forgive the fact that i was subsequently too busy to devote enough time to writing a piece for cluas.com. the fact that you feel comfortable calling me lazy and unmotivated really does, in fact, say a lot. rev jules: "In light of your latest posting on this topic, yes, I do think your writing displays a bullying, hectoring manipulative tone." no, my latest posting displays the fact that i am pissed off with your comments about me. it's interesting to recall what you said about my posts back in september: rev jules: "Thanks for your fiery, well argued contribution. It is postings like yours which make Cluas what it is.". and also the following exchange: me: "i don't want to come across as a beligerent troublemaker (too late!) - basically i've read a whole load of negative stuff about damien rice over the last while and this is the first time i've actually responded so... maybe it's been good for me to get it off my chest! rev jules: "And you have done that admirably well." now a few months later you call me a manipulative, hectoring (yet lazy and unmotivated) bully, not to forget the whole 'hidden agenda' conspiracy theory. makes me wonder why you asked me to submit a piece to the site at all? seeing as you weren't referring to me when you said "So I decided to offer the said posters in question the chance to write an op-ed on the artist since, I felt, if they were genuine they would accept. Guess what, they vanished from the site, as did their bullying, campaigning attitude." i object to the growing list of your insults. i find your refusal to accept responsibility for what you said both laughable and pathetic. at this point i would not expect an apology from you - in fact, i'm pleasantly surprised that my last reply survived the night.

Roysh. To me this is how this seems to have evolved to date: 1) Rev. Jules made a posting a while ago where he referred to the fact that he (among others on the moderating team, myself included) have suspected that people connected with some acts have made postings defending the act they are associated with, without declaring their association. Rev. Jules was careful enough in the posting to not identify by name any such act nor any such member who we believe has such an association. 2) Then a member using the alias JMC105 does the following: a) He/she decides that Rev. Jules was referring to him / her specifically in the aforementioned post as a person supposedly associated with an act, and... b) He/she assumes that the act being so defended was Damien Rice. 3) JMC105 then proceeds to choose of his/her own free will to ‘out’ themselves to all and sundry on this board because they believe that they are one of those that Jules was alluding to in his original observations. JMC105 does this via a lengthy post (that has since inadvertently been deleted by the moderator) in which a set of accusations outlined against someone (Rev. Jules), someone who never identified JMC105 publicly in the first place. 4) Rev. Jules reacts exactly as you would expect to such accusations and a tit-for-tat set of posts takes place. Two observations: -> Rev Jules articulated in his original posting suspicion about improper use of the board but was careful not to identify anyone one by name. -> JMC105 articulated in his lengthy posting accusations about someone on this board and chose to publicly identify by name the target of his/her accusations. I do not want to dissect the ins and outs of the accusations and counter-accusation, but in the context of my two observations above I just wish to say to JMC105 the following: You chose to present yourself to all and sundry here on the board stating that you believed you were one of those suspected by Jules as being (incorrectly you state) ‘associated’ with an act. It was your choice to 'out' yourself publicly, and to make some accusations in the accompanying message that you authored. An obvious consequence of doing so is that anyone named in your lengthy posting will likely react and defend themselves against accusations therein. That should be no surprise, this being a place where some strongly opinionated and articulate people are to be found. The moderator in this case (Rev. Jules) exercised discretion (in the posting about our suspicions on practices of some members) by naming no one. This discretion apparently was not appreciated by you and you chose then of your own free will to 'blow up' an issue you perceived. Once you had chosen to do so, the discretion of the moderator was - in my view - rightfully replaced with a more direct approach. As an aside: concerning the suspicion that Jules mentioned in his earlier posting about people connected with some acts making postings here defending or “pumping up” the act, I will go one further: We actually KNOW that this practice takes place on the board and what’s more we on the moderating team know exactly who some of these people are (and it’s all backed up with hard evidence, crafty feckers that we are). Anyway I’m sure everyone else is bored to the gills by all this now. So (cue collective sigh of relief) I am going to lock this topic now and anyone who wishes to continue discussing it with the individual members involved can use the ‘Email a member’ function at your heart’s content. Let’s get back to discussing music. Baby. eoghan

Below is a message JMC105 posted in another thread because this one was locked. I am going to keep this thread locked and - as I previolsuly stated - anyone who wishes to continue discussing it with the individual members involved can use the ‘Email a member’ function at your heart’s content. eoghan JMC105's message follows: the following message is the reply i was writing while rev jules' thread 'a note about making accusations' was being locked. nobody has complained that the thread was boring or irrelevant, so why lock it? is it simply to try to shut me up? why should i be forced to make my complaints in private? i have legitimate complaints, admin, and i want to address them to rev jules in the appropriate forum, which is the same one in which his 'discrete' claims were made. i would also suggest that rev jules is more than capable of fighting his own battles. your are entitled to your opinions on how this seems to have evolved to date, but they do not represent a satisfactory conclusion to this discussion. as you say, rev jules indeed made 'discrete' claims. what happened next was simple. i recognised that rev jules was referring to me in his comments, and took offence at his description of my behavior as a poster on this forum and of my motives for being here. what is ironic is that it is "discretion" and secrecy that is causing this debate to drag on and on. if there is evidence to support what he said, and for his subsequent claims that he was not referring to me (unfairly, i might add), why the need for such secrecy? there are no legal implications in anything he said. (by the way, admin, i did not "out" myself as anything. to be "outed", i would have to have been involved in the very activities that rev jules now claims i wasn't involved in!) it would be simple to end this debate, not by locking the thread, but by rev jules actually answering the questions i pose in the reply below. so, rev jules, you claim, repeatedly, that you weren't referring to me - i do not ignore your claims, i simply refute them. there is a difference. if you want me to believe that you were not referring to me, then simply answer the question i asked, (and which you subsequently ignored...), which was: who do you claim you were referring to? what singer/songwriter do you claim was at the centre of the topics in question? what poster took part in these discussions, was invited to submit an op-ed piece, and then "vanished" from the site? who is the unpleasant bully you wrote about? the series of posts you refer to are obviously still here somewhere, so point them out. on the question of my throwing offers back in your face, whatever the hell that means, it is obvious that i lacked the motivation to write an op-ed piece. i had so much going on that i lacked the motivation to do a lot of things, including spending time i simply couldn't afford to waste visiting sites like this one. that does not justify your calling me lazy, although it doesn't appear that you can see the difference between someone being lazy and someone being busy. rev jules, i have no desire to attack you personally. to put it bluntly, you are simply not that important. i am here only in response to the comments you made, because as a user of this forum i belive i should be entitled to defend my reputation. now, you complain that when i quoted some comments of yours, for the purposes of illustrating the point that your attitude towards my posts was quite different back in september, i chose not to include every word you originally wrote. surely you can understand that i selected the relevant parts of what you said and left out the irrelevant parts, purely in the interests of clarity and brevity. what difference does it make that after you complimented my posts, you then suggested that it was time to leave the discussion behind? could you not just have said "let's move on"? am i to take it that nothing you say is actually what you mean? you doubt that i have read or understood correctly. this doubt is seemingly a result of the fact that i believe your comments of feb 15, quoted earlier in this thread, were made in reference to myself. you say they were not. so i ask you again. what poster, what singer/songwriter were you referring to? what series of posts were you referring to? can you quote them or direct me towards them? will you answer these questions, or will you just ignore them again?