Whatever.
It's pretty weak when somebody feels the need to gather a group to "defeat" one person.
As a general rule as a thread progresses, the ping lists tend to grow. I have had a number of disagreements with wagglebee on this thread and others. He did not ping his "posse", he just pinged a bunch of us who had responded to his posts, argued with him, agreed with him or whatever.
Maybe you should just respond to the post and not pay so much attention as to who gets pinged. This is a public forum and if you expect your responses to be considered private, then I'd suggest you use FReep Mail.
Entirely wrong on a couple of levels. If you'll check our membership dates we've been on FR a long, long, time, and we're friends. Mostly we know which friends will be interested in the same discussion and bring light on it. For example, you might find p-marlowe a bit more radical than wagglebee.
The other thing is that we're not interested in "defeating." Our aim is "conversion." :>)