Post
by hocus2004 » Sun Feb 27, 2005 1:43 pm
I would err on the side of common courtesy if push came to shove though.
What you say here makes sense to me, ES. Still, I think that common courtesy is a two-way street. Arrete is dissing our community in a big way with her "demand" that her name be removed from my web site, and I have to ask that common courtesy be extended to our board community (I mean the larger community, not just this site) as well as to Arrete, who is only one member of that community.
Please note the title of this thread. I refer to it there as "Our Web Site," not "My Web Site." The same is true of the book. I refer to it as "Our Book" on many occasions, not always "My Book." It's got my name on it. I get the royalties. But there is an important sense in which it is "Our Book."
How so? Well, the FIRE/Retire Early/Passion Saving community provided me with a lot of feedback over the course of several years that helped me develop the ideas that are the engine of that book. There were hundreds of fine people who provided me that help and I am grateful to them.
Arrete is dissing them. Because I told the truth about SWRs, she is now throwing mud on all the work that those hundreds of community members contribuited free of charge. If someone comes to the Motley Fool board and asks why there are so few on-topic posts there, she delivers them a lecture about how they should ask a question if they want to hear any on-topic discussion and how the in-crowd there is now bored with the subject of early retirement and how they can just find some other board if they don't like the way that one is run and other rude trash-talk.
This is not common courtesy on her part. Now, I am not saying that because she does that sort of thing, I am going to in a tit-for-tat style refuse any request she makes for me to make changes to my web site. I will consider her requests regardless of her behavior.
But I don't want to participate in games aimed at doing harm to our community. I love our communitty. If she sincerely wants me to make a change, she is going to need to provide a reason for her request. If she does that, I can balance the competing interests. If she is not willing to even be bothered to provide a reason, she doesn't get to first base with this boy. The community has given me thousands of reasons for putting its interests ahead of Arrete's, and, minus hearing of some reason to do otherwise, that's what I am going to do. Posters who appear to be motivated by a desire to do further harm to our community are not going to get the time of day from old hocus.