Re: Our Web Site

[JWR1945]

Hi ES and Thanks! I guess I'll work my way up through the ranks like the rest of 'em, but now I have a goal!

Beachbumz

Greetings beachbumz

BTW, what's a man gotta do to get a promotion around here?

I believe that happens at 50 posts. Or, you could just tell me what rank you would like and I'll make is so.

IIRC, ES made one of our posters a princess.

Have fun.

John R.

[JWR1945]

I stand corrected.

ES assigned the rank of Queen Bee to Kathyet.

Have fun.

John R.

[hocus2004]

I don't think I'll ever be a legend, but being a cadet surrounded by all this brass is starting to get to me.

I don't know how much this counts for, but I already think of you as an Information Seeker, Beachbumz. That outranks even Board General in my book!

[musicman]

I don't get to post here to often but enjoy the site and learn a lot. Thank you all the members here. After reading these posts I thought everyone might be interested in this from that other place.

I'm afraid jealousy does some strange things to small-minded people. I got news for ES. This "little board" has gotten a lot more posting activity than his board since it was established last summer when we took most of his best posters. But what would you expect from the guy who sold his board to JWR and hocus and brags about the SWR "Research" Board as an NFB exclusive - LOL! If I were him I wouldn't be so proud of hosting a discredited junk science board. Of course I seriously doubt that ES understands investing and math well enough to know crappy research when he sees it so maybe we should give him a pass on the "Research" board embarrasment at his site.

When I was over there I was the only one online. When I looked just now there were 20 members online here. Looks like es has a point about this fellow. Hope I'm not starting more trouble but thought you should see it. Back to lurking.

[hocus2004]

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.

[hocus2004]

All that's left is a vindictive liar who has nothing better to do than attack folks from his little message board

I fully understand the sense of betrayal that ES feels towards raddr. Still, I think that these words are not entirely fair. I think it is important that we get this exactly right and balanced if we are to move things in a good direction. So I am going to put forward a little bit of a defense of raddr.

Raddr reminds me of intercst. He is a guy who did lots of good research, got lots of praise for it, and had it go to his head. This sort of thing is going to happen on discussion boards from time to time. You don't have as many checks and balances as you would have in most other venues where people produce research. Neither raddr nor intercst was subjected to any tough questioning on their research for a long time. Their egos got out of control, and the behavior we are seeing today is the end product of that long-ago development.

Who is responsible for the egos of intercst and raddr getting out of control. Intercst and raddr are responsible, to be sure. But who else? I think the community is in part responsible in both cases.

Raddr began posting deceptively on the day he put up the "Out of Context" post. I had put up a quote from Bernstein in response to a question from Ataloss that made clear that Bernstein was in complete disagreement with the Ataloss position. Raddr put up a post saying that I had taken Bernstein's words "out of context." This was a 100 percent falsehood. There was nothing whasoever out of context about the quote.

I put up a post citing other sections of the same book in which Bernstein made the same general claim in somewhat different words. If he is saying the same thing over and over again, he obviously really means it. I even cited a second passage in which he used the exact same words to make the point. Bernstein felt that the point he was making in the words I had quoted was so important that he repeated the same words a few pages later to highlight the point. The quote wass obviously not even a tiny bit out of context.

Raddr should have been called on that act of deception. Nobody but me called him on it. So what happened? The next time he was in a tight spot, he turned to deception again. And then it happened again and again and again.

At this point he has engaged in so much deception that he does not feel safe posting on a board where there is a poster present who is likely to call him on his decpeptions. Both JWR1945 and I have reputations for posting honestly on the SWR matter. That is why we both were banned from the raddr site before we put up out first post there.

He gets the primary blame for that behavior. He is clearly in the wrong. But how about all the community members who failed to say anything when he first began posting deceptively? Had he been called on it then, he could have changed his behavior in a face-saving way. He could have said that he made a mistake or that he got emotional or whatever. He is in a far more difficult situation today. I think that is partly our fault. I think we should have called him on his deceptions a long, long time ago. That is what I mean when I say that he could have been saved before but that it is much harder to do it now.

Doing a hard right thing does not get easier by putting it off. This matter would have been easy to resolve on the third day of the Campaign of Terror. It got a lot harder by the third month. Now we are nearing the end of the third year, so it is harder still. Three years from today, if we are still at this, it is going to be a lot harder than it is today.

We have a responsibility to the raddrs of the world. We have a responsibility to explain to them the facts of life, to tell them that there are things you can do on discussion boards and there are things you cannot do. We dropped the ball on that one. He has a lot to answer for re his behavior in this matter. So do the rest of us.

[beachbumz]

I stand corrected.

ES assigned the rank of Queen Bee to Kathyet.

Have fun.

John R.

OK, now you've got me thinkin' hmmm....

[hocus2004]

I've tried to get the "ataloss" I used to know back here and let the water flow under the bridge. For whatever reason I see that's not possible

That was a Grand Slam, ES. I don't use the words "Grand Slam" lightly. That one landed on the roof of the factory six blocks away. I love you for that one, man. That was a thing of beauty.

That post has three things going for it: (1) It was straight shooting; (2) It was from the heart; and (3) It was smart as hell. That's the combination that works. You got all of that one.

You love Ataloss. That comes through loud and clear. That's why it has been so hard for you to call him on his nonsense. What you have been missing for so long is that by not calling him on his nonsense, you have been causing him to float farther and farther out to sea. You don't want that! You want him back here. You just did what needed to be done to make that possible. You did good.

I don't love Ataloss the way you do. But I want him back here. He put up lots of good posts here in early days, and I want the boards here to succeed, so I want him back here to make that happen. The point I am always making is that all that good stuff is just not possible unless he is willing to play by the same rules as everyone else. You don't help get him back by pretending that he can get special rules. It takes tough love to turn a situation like this around.

Now there is at least a chance that we can turn Ataloss around. That won't be his first reaction. But now the wheel is turning in the right direction. Now he is seeing that there are consequences to signing up with the Campaign of Terror. There's a chance that he will decide that he doesn't like the consequences, that the consequences hurt, and that he is willing to play by the rules to make the hurting stop. If he does that, we get him back!

It might not happen. But it might. At least we have something to hope for now.

The same is true with intercst, of course. People who think of themselves as his friends just heep giving him more and more rope to hang himself with. A true friend tells you the facts of life when you need to hear them. I have been intercst's best friend in this matter. I have been telling him the facts of life since the early days. If others would only have joined me at an earlier stage, I think he might have listened.

I hope that you have broken the spell, ES. You have done something important for this community. You won a good measure of respect from me with that post. I hope that a good number of others give you the appreciation you merit for doing what you did and give serious consideration to doing likewise themselves. You just showed us all the way back to having fun again.

[ElSupremo]

Greetings hocus

I fully understand the sense of betrayal that ES feels towards raddr. Still, I think that these words are not entirely fair.

Read that little snippet musicman posted and tell me if you still feel that way.

[ElSupremo]

Greetings musicman

When I was over there I was the only one online. When I looked just now there were 20 members online here. Looks like es has a point about this fellow.

Thanks for the kind words about our site musicman. Well, I guess we don't need go any farther in describing him than to point to your post. That says it all!

BTW, how is your little one doing? I hope it's ok to ask but you never responded to my last email a while back and I'd like to know.

[musicman]

Thank you for asking es. She is fine now. Just sent you another mail.

[ataloss]

If you want to do one decent thing for me out of respect for our past friendship, stop trashing this site because you hate one of the posters here.

I don't think I have said anything negative about the site overall. There are good posts and threads and some great posters. Unfortunately hocus2004 has free run of the site and uses it to promote his agenda (claims of victimization and anti-intercst jihad)

He even steps in to threads like the Marty Whitrman one to try to fan the flames of the disagreement between petey and bookm. There have been some interesting posts on the index board lately but if I post probably hocus will try to disrupt any discussion. It just isn't pleasant to post here.

I am not counting on this post lasting long on a hoco moderated board

[hocus2004]

Here is a link to the thread referenced by Ataloss:

http://www.nofeeboards.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=3322

[hocus2004]

Read that little snippet musicman posted and tell me if you still feel that way.

I still feel the same way, ES.

Raddr is not angel. But if intercst were removed from the various FIRE/Retire Early/Passion Saving boards, do you think we would be having a problem with raddr? I sure don't.

Raddr is a guy who put forward some deceptions to block reasoned discussion of SWRs and the intercst con, and then found himself needing to put forward deceptions to block discussions of the earlier deceptions, and so on and so forth. He's a guy who thought he was playing a little game and now has found the game has gotten out of control and is now coming around to bite even him. He's like Arrete in that way. And like Ataloss. And like you. And like lots and lots of others.

I wasn't paying close attention to what the priest was saying at Mass yesterday. That happens a lot with me. I'm a sinner. It's the way I'm built. I was Born to Sin is the way that Springstein might put it.

But here's the thing. There's also something in me that doesn't like sin, that likes to see me rise above it. I was born to rise above sin too. Like raddr. Like Ataloss. Like Arrete. Like you.

So what I suggest is that we all rise above this. I would invite intercst to the party too if there were someone who could put forth a proposal that sounded even a little bit realistic and that permitted him to be part of our club. My intellect does not stretch far enough to come up with such a plan, not after 33 months of this jizz-jazz. But if there is someone out there more creative than me, I'm all ears.

The short version is that we need to start acting like human beings again. We are not going to be transformed into angels. That ain't gonna happen. But we need to reach within ourselves and come up with some better behavior than we have put on display at the various boards for the past 33 months. In my judgment, the way to wave the magic wand and make that dream real is to revoke intercst's posting priviledges at the various boards. If you've got something better in mind, let me know.

What we must do is to cut ourselves loose of the deception nonsense. That's the poison we have been drinking for too long and that has put us in such ill health. That stuff goes. Starting....

...NOW!!

[ElSupremo]

Greetings ataloss

There have been some interesting posts on the index board lately but if I post probably hocus will try to disrupt any discussion.

I've told you that won't happen. Hocus has a right to his opinion just like you do. Of course there are boards out there that don't believe in that. You say it's not pleasant posting here? Well I don't see any difference between here and anywhere else in that respect. If you would agree to disagree and move on to better subjects, perhaps that would help make it more agreeable. Or you can just post at the other board where there will be no one to disagree with.

[unclemick]

My favorite attack mode is to always keep coming back to the subject of the thread - unless I of course lose it and default to kayaks - I may live to regret that one.

Anyone remember Bill Gates and Microsoft E-mails?

Heh, heh, heh - are we having fun yet or what?

[ElSupremo]

Greetings unclemick

are we having fun yet or what?

Hey that's my line!

[unclemick]

O.K. I'm still trying to catch up with all you 'old veteran posters'.

Heh, heh, heh.

[JWR1945]

This is the only place that I can post my research results freely. All of those other boards have their goon squads that try to block any discussion related to Safe Withdrawal Rates.

Even Dory36's Early Retirement Forum has an intensely hostile, disruptive element.

If you go back to the thread starter, you will find that people went out of their way to pick a fight with hocus. This is what people claim to be so objectionable. Their objection is simply that it was hocus who wrote these words:

I first began writing about Passion Saving in May 1999, on the Motley Fool discussion boards. The community of savers that I connected with there was a group of wonderful, smart, and generous souls. May I introduce you to a few of them to give you an idea of the sort of saving goals that work in the real world?

Here's a list of 20 of the greatest savers in the world, and the saving goals that helped make them become 20 of the greatest savers in the world. I've identified these savers by the screen-names they used for posting on the Motley Fool discussion boards.

I do not see anything at the NFB that comes close to being the kind of disruptive element that I see everywhere else.

I have confidence that if anybody can make discussion boards reach their potential, ES will pull it off. It will take time. But we are making great progress.

Have fun.

John R.