Steve Pavlina, the Internet Tough Guy.
You may have heard of Steve Pavlina, but most likely you have not. He is the shyster behind stevepavlina.com, a collection of canned "advice" to better oneself, quite specifically designed for the less intelligent among us. It contains such gems as "how to WILL a million dollars into existance", extensively explains how material reality and subjective representation are the same thing, on and on.
If you take the time to read through his stuff, it quickly becomes apparent Steve Pavlina is not actually an idiot, spouting kookiness like that 4-dimensional cube reality guy.
Steve Pavlina is, quite the contrary, a very sly shyster, who has done his homework well. If you pay a little attention, the careful craft that goes into every little lie is quite apparent. For instance : Personal Development for Smart People. Obviously most people are just dumb enough to think that while not out and out intelligent, they sure are smart. And after all, they've found Steve's page, all on their own (well, google helped a little). So guess what that makes them ?
The entire thing is peppered with such ****, artfully calculated to be just so. If you stood one millimeter taller, you'd see all the cogs and puppetry work, but Steve has dilligently taken average height measurements and knows full well what's the height the fence needs to be to ensure maximum fleecing with minimal effort. After all, fencing is hard work.
I've written an article exposing some of his more dangerous ploys, months ago. And yea, fine, I admit, ridiculing this latest wanna-be Aristotle. Can you say you wouldn't ?
So it produced some laughs, some "hear hear", some congratulatory emails, and I've forgotten about it.
Steve hovever hasn't. By the looks of it, he's been losing a lot of sleep over the matter in the intervening 6 months. In fact, from what I'm told, the word "zenofeller" is filtered out on his forum.
Think about that. "zenofeller" is so objectionable that none of the captive sheep are allowed to even type it down. Isn't this very impressive ? I don't know about Aristotle, but wouldn't Stevie Pehlivan make an excellent Adam Susan ?
I didn't particularly care, when people told me about that. However, here's the cherry.
Steve Pavlina has been going around, registering on random forums, and then spamming people with private messages. Here's a typical offering :
Sorry for PMing out of the blue. Here's the thing.
I wrote a book with a friend of mine. My husband keeps saying it sucks. I think he's just jealous tho.
He spends a lot of time on these boards, so I told him I'm going to pick a random person here, and ask them, and we ended up betting on it.
So go to
http://books.zenofeller.com/asylum/asylum_chapter1_b.html and make the call. Does it suck?
Thanks.
People have been following the link, which takes them to the e-version of Asylum, a book we (me & chet) have published in 2005. That's two years ago.
Why ? Why would anyone do something like that ?
O, you mean other than because they're deranged ? And they think they're Aristotle and reality is really subjective ?
I've been trying to figure the why out myself. This, by the way, has been going on for about a month. I didn't know what to make of it, at first. All of a sudden, there were dozens of people, complaining on my forum about being spammed.
At first I thought it must have been some random maniac. Then it turned out there's multiple people from geographically remote areas doing the complaining. It became clear somebody had been doing the spamming. But still, why ?
Who in their right mind picks up an old e-book and starts mass-messaging people links to it ?
I'll tell you who. Steve Pavlina. And I'll tell you why, too.
You see, after secreting bile for about six months, Steve finally came up with a way to have this article taken offline.
Here's the plan :
1. Pick up a list of forums.
2. Create an account in each.
3. Spam each.
4. Point out to each webmaster that the spam that you yourself sent links to zenofeller.com and ask them to complain to the service provider.
Hopefully, you will get a few dozen email complaints and an idiotic enough ISP to suspend service.
So far, three of my back-up providers (Servage.net ; Hostgator.com and Cirtex.com) have been idiotic enough to fall for this ploy, which has resulted in sporadic hourlong outages all through Thanksgiving week. Zenofeller.com is still on line, but it is well crippled, and certainly couldn't take much load at the moment.
Yes, admire the timing of it, too. Thanksgiving week. Sheesh.
But anyway, here's a few things : Zenofeller.com is never going offline. The article exposing Steve Pavlina is never going offline. Ever.
Steve Pavlina, however, might be going to jail.
45675 people named Bubba are looking forward to some sharing & personal development.
