Ceremonial Magic a ranty

There's a thread running on UKP at the moment, a thread I'd like to get involved in but I don't fancy the pedant brigade dissecting every statement I make.
You wouldn't have a discussion with someone in a face to face manner by quoting everything they said back at them would you?
And yet it seems to be the way that discussions on UKP run.
So I'll ramble on here instead. And if people want to disagree then they can come up with their own points instead of picking others apart.

Someone on UKP has asked "Can you mix Witchcraft and CM?"
Well the short answer from someone who has successfully done so it yes.

And the larger rant is this.
A little bit of basic Google Fu (or even reading proper books) will show that Gerald Gardner was in correspondence with Crowley. I believe that Gardnerian Wiccan is heavily influenced by Crowleys CM. If you take a knife collecting submissive or a wordy egotist you can see how each one shaped the Central tenets to fit their own purposes.
It shouldn't really be a surprise, Ive read up on Alex Saunders, according to his Bio "King of the Witches" he was caught taking pages from the Lesser and Greater Books of Solomon out of the Library where he worked and was copying them (predating bittotrent and limewire by decades)
And then there's Anton LaVey the founder of the Church of Satan who based his system on Nitzchian philoshipy and the 6th Enochaian call.
I'm not saying every system can be traced back to what we call CM far from it, and there's just as much CM that has taken from other systems of magic too. Just a little credit where credits due, instead of all this infighting about traditional systems, lineage, and attacking other systems to gratify some kind of guru ego.

Oh and CM is pretentious too. Nope I would say pretentious people can be attracted to CM if they like dressing up in Robes and comparing the size of their Wands. People who are missing the point and are attracted by the bells and whistles of CM. But there's no monopoly on that, there's the Heathens who see Heathenry as a drinking club with horns and axes, or people who think wearing a lot of black clothes and silver jewellery makes them a good occultist.

Is CM dangerous?
Well my answer to that is, being a Magician (note I dropped the Cermonial there) is like being a Motorcyclist on the roads, it requires a little more discipline and knowlege to ride a bike on the roads safely than it does to drive a car. There is more of element of risk but the rewards are greater too.