In June of 2004 I put an essay entitled "Social Progress" on the FrostCloud Forum and forgot about it. (It was essentially the same as , and had also been published on the website.) In November of 2005 I checked to see if anybody had reacted. One person said that everything I claimed to have written had been lifted from the writings of a Paul Rosenfels. He remembered having read it before on the web somewhere. As soon as this rumor was unleashed, there followed an avalance of comments saying, in effect, "Gee, what a creepy thing for that guy to do."

At first I thought I should ignore all of this. But since some of the readers had made positive comments about my contribution I thought they deserved some explanation. So I wrote: I haven't been to this forum for awhile, partly because I was in the hospital and partly because of other pressing responsibilities. But I was surprised to learn today that I had been accused of plagiarism and that this accusation was assumed, without evidence, to be accurate. The influence that Paul Rosenfels had on my life and my thinking is something I'm very proud of and which I have worked hard to credit on the website I built for the Ninth Street Center (http://www.ninthstreetcenter.org) as well as on Eserver (http://eserver.org/gender/rosenfels), which keeps his complete works online for anyone to read for free. So if after all these months anybody is still interested in this thread, let me try to shed some light on this controversy.

I was Paul Rosenfels' lover and best friend for the last 19 years of his life, which ended in 1985. Together we founded the Ninth Street Center in New York City in 1973, which has ever since championed his work on what has since the Enlightenment been called the science of human nature. I was not his intellectual equal, and it's fair to assume that the ideas I champion are in substance those that either he taught me or those we both learned about at the Center by applying the insights he had already acquired. But I am no carbon copy of the man, no matter how great a figure I regard him. I have my own way of speaking and my own way of writing, examples of which can be found on my website, http://www.hannotte.net and that of the Ninth Street Center.

Paul's work is deep and philosophical, and no commercial publisher ever expressed the slightest interest in it. It's hard to see why anyone in his right mind would want to plagiarize it, but if anyone knows of an instance of this I'd be curious to learn about it. And if I have plagiarized Paul, this will be easy to check. Just take a sufficiently large phrase from my essay and google it. Since all Paul's works are online at Eserver, the original will immediately pop up and the fraud will be exposed.

The truth is that Paul always thought that if I was to have a voice in this world it would have to be a very different kind of voice from his. He was writing for philosophers and scientists. I try to write for the average educated person. His writing is extremely formal and exact, while I strive for informality and use images from everyday life to make my points. I'm very proud that my little essay, which has been posted on a few other sites beside FrostCloud, has met with some approval here. Thanks to those of you who felt that accusations should be questioned before being accepted.

I will be glad to respond to personal emails about this.

After I posted my response, the FrostCloud furor seemed to evaporate in a cloud of frost. Only one comment appeared after that, a single word: "Interesting."

In 2007 I met Rachel Bartlett online and we eventually mentioned FrostCloud in one of our chats: Having a forum can be very stressful.

I had read that FrostCloud thread while researching everything I could find about you on the web. The FrostCloud incident is pretty inexcusable in the times of Google. I loved the "Oh I feel so used and betrayed" statement — fast technology, fast jumping to conclusions, and fast emotionalizing. And everybody joined in without thinking or checking: The electronic equivalent of mob violence.

People first need to come up with constructive methods for using new technology (not typing in all caps, as this is perceived as the equivalent of screaming online, for instance). Hopefully in a few years, people will google first before claiming to have been used and betrayed.

Users on both English and German Wikipedia had given me a similar treatment — deleting my work instead of improving it, while speculating "this rachelbartlett might be spamming her own cause" instead of just sending me a message and asking me.

Publishing essays people can think about on their own is probably the best method at the moment. Everybody can reach us by email, or join the online chat group if they need personal and immediate responses. The first response to my essay was very positive and made me think that I had started a useful dialog. But after the crank started screaming, all the lemmings signed on and it went downhill. One person reminded them that not all rumors are true, but he was ignored. Even more sadly, after five pages of chatter, not one person was capable of engaging the issues I had raised. FrostCloud claims to be a forum for ideas important to all of us, yet not one person turned out to have any actual interest in social progress.

I consider the people who condemned me, like the people who erased your Wikipedia work, to be cowardly children. They have been taught to be afraid of strangers. Anybody who thinks differently from what they've been taught is considered an enemy to spread lies about. Not one of them thought to honestly express their doubts to me personally. I would have gladly answered them. Only little children who haven't learned how to control their fears behave like they did. They weren't interested in intellectual stimulation, only in "acting out".

Whenever I feel that I should have tried harder to convert the Frost Cloud bumpkins to our cause, I try to remember the words of an old friend: