Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
“We need to incorporate the new findings into EVERY conversation.”
That has been the core of your problem. Prior to getting kicked off the boards, you would fill up every thread with what you say are the “new findings” regardless of the topic or the opinions of others. People eventually grew tired of it.
“We all want the same things. ”
Uhm, no, I don’t think so. Again, it shows that you want to force your opinions on other people. You really don’t have any interest in a real conversation. Instead, you only want to people to agree with what you say as the “dear leader”.
“Whether you threaten to kill my wife and children as my “punishment” for doing so or not.”
You have repeated this line for many, many years, yet you don’t offer proof. Guess what. Someone made a REAL death threat against me approximately 10 years ago. Due to a work issue, I had to fire an employee. He did not take it well. I was attending a conference at a hotel in a major city. He was at the hotel (attending on behalf of another company). While meeting with other people, he walked up and told me that he “would get a gun and kill me”. I had actual proof of this threat and reported it to the authorities and that was it. I don’t use this story as a crutch like you do and I also have the ability to prove that it actually happened, unlike you do. My advice is to get your proof and report it, but stop using it like it makes you out to be a saint or is some kind of support for your position, because it isn’t.
My policy was to put up one post on each thread relating to the valuations topic. I didn’t “fill up” threads. I put forward one post.
There were times when people interested in the topic would ask questions. In those cases, I would respond to the questions. That’s a good thing. In most cases, there were also questions being directed to the Buy-and-Holders who posted on the thread, so the questions directed at me and my responses to them did not “fill up” the thread.
In a small number of cases, the issue being addressed on the Valuation-Informed Indexing side of things was of such widespread interest that the VII aspects of the question did indeed come to dominate the thread. But that was not at all common. And, when it did happen, it happened for the perfectly legitimate reason that interest in those questions was great. So, again, this was a good thing.
There were also times when you Goons would ask one serious question mixed in with lots of abusive garbage. My policy in those cases was to respond to the serious question while either ignoring the abusive garbage or asking those putting forward the abusive garbage to rein it in. Those threads did not get dominated by the abusive garbage because you Goons were unwilling to rein in your insanely abusive tendencies and because the site administrators were reluctant to take effective action. The problem there is that there is a lot of money to be made promoting Get Rich Quick strategies and Buy-and-Hold is the purest Get Rich Quick strategy ever concocted by the human mind. Once Valuation-Informed Indexing becomes dominant, this obviously will not be a problem anymore.
I would be happy not to post on valuation-related threads at all if only we had enough Valuation-Informed Indexers participating at every board and blog that my contributions were not needed. But it is important that there be at least one research-based post on every thread relating to an issue re which valuations plays a role. If people see a discussion and do not see any post coming from the VII perspective, they are misled into thinking that the Buy-and-Hold perspective is the only perspective that exists. That creates a dangerous situation. It is because millions of middle-class investors believe that Buy-and-Hold is rooted in something real that we are in an economic crisis today.
We can’t instantly make VII the dominant strategy. But we all need to work together to make sure that VII is represented at every board and at every blog and indeed at every discussion thread. It’s a bad idea to have me always being the person putting forward the VII perspective and I want to change this. The way to change it is to educate millions of people re what the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research in this field says. Once we do that, we will have thousands of posters doing what I do today.
But of course the Buy-and-Holders HATE that idea. It’s not Rob Bennett that you Goons hate. It’s the peer-reviewed research of the past 34 years. You oppose ANYONE putting forward posts that are rooted in an understanding of the last 34 years of research. You didn’t just post abusively in threads in which I participated. You posted abusively in threads in which John Walter Russell participated. And you posted abusively in threads in which Wade Pfau participated (in the days when Wade was posting honestly). And you posted abusively in threads in which Microlepsis participated. And you posted abusively in threads in which John C. Craig participated. And on and on and on.
There never should have been a cover-up. Bogle should have come clean within a few weeks of the day in 1981 in which Shiller published his peer-reviewed research showing that there is precisely zero chance that a Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for a single long-term investor either in this solar system or in some far distant one. The cover-up is contrary to everything our nation stands for. It had made Buy-and-Holders ashamed of themselves. And the greater the shame they feel, the more abusive they become when they see posts relating to the post-1981 peer-reviewed research.
I dd not create this dangerous situation, Reality. I have for 13 years played the lead role in trying to change it. Jack Bogle played the lead role in creating the dangerous situation. He is the lead Wall Street Con Men. Please take your beefs to him.
People eventually grew tired of it.
People LOVED the honest discussions we have re the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research. Thousands said so. I have articles at this site quoting many of the wonderful comments that were advanced saying so.
What people HATED was the insane abusiveness of you Goons. You need to be put in prison. That will end the nasty stuff and free the rest of us to learn what we very much need to know about what the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research shows us. I am sure.
it shows that you want to force your opinions on other people.
I want every investor alive on this planet to be aware of both sides of the story before investing their hard-earned money to finance their retirements. I will make it happen. Count it.
Instead, you only want to people to agree with what you say as the “dear leader”.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I learn more from people who find weaknesses in my arguments that I learn from people who pat me on the back. I LOVE reasoned posts from my Buy-and-Hold friends.
I do NOT love death threats. Or demands for unjustified board bannings. Or tens of thousands of acts of defamation. Or threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. Those sorts of posts get my Goon friends placed inside prison cells when they destroy the lives of millions of middle-class investors with their insane abusiveness. I HATE that smelly garbage. I OPPOSE the rationalizations engaged in by sites that tolerate such ugliness on the grounds that its an easy way to turn a buck to exploit the Get Rich Quick urge that resides within each of us. Not this boy. Find somebody else. No can do.
stop using it like it makes you out to be a saint or is some kind of support for your position, because it isn’t.
It absolutely shows the weakness of the case for Buy-and-Hold that you Goons employ death threats to block discussions of the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research in this field and that nationally recognized experts like Jack Bogle are too afraid of the emotional monster that they have created to do anything about the problem. I have NEVER seen a Valuation-Informed Indexer use a death threat to make his or her case. We use research because we have research that supports our case. The Buy-and-Holders often employ death threats and other insanely abusive tactics. I wonder why.
Buy-and-Hold is a con, Reality. That’s the core source of the friction. It’s a money-making thing. There has never been a sliver of support for this preposterous strategy anywhere in the peer-reviewed research. Wade Pfau checked that one very carefully. He was of course amazed by what he found. But the fact that your response was to destroy his career shows that his findings re this point were indeed backed by the data.
When the con has been exposed, we all will be freed to discuss the first true research-based strategy at every discussion board and blog on the internet. Good for us!
This is the biggest advance in the history of personal finance. I am proud to be the leader of the effort to open the entire internet to honest discussion of what the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research says.
I have a funny feeling that even Jack Bogle will applaud those of us who have fought so hard to open the internet to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates and other critically important investment-related topics once we all make it together to the other side of The Big Black Mountain.
But we’ll see, you know? We are all going to need to be patient enough to see things play out before us as we respond collectively to the next price crash and witness the grave damage it does to our confidence in our economic and political systems.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, my old Goon friend.
Rob
Anonymous says
I see ValueWalk switched to Facebook comments, so all of Sammy Soda’s goonish remarks have been deleted. Score one for Team Rob!
Then again, you’ve been using your replies to his comments as daily blog entries, and they are also deleted. Minus one for Team Rob.
Most trolls won’t post using their own Facebook name, nor do they care enough to create a dummy account. Why aren’t you bringing your own site up to this modern standard? Your goon problem would finally be solved.
Rob says
There’s a political site that I visit (HotAir) that switched to FaceBook comments. I thought it was an awful change. You get to learn over time where the different community members are coming from. So you know how to evaluate what they say. Now that’s gone. I don’t even read the comments at that site anymore.
I guess that the advantage from the standpoint of the site is that you don’t have to pay someone to administer the comments. I think comments are very valuable. I use them for feedback and I want to be able to learn from them. I think that, to administer comments effectively, you need to have deep knowledge of the particular niche of the site. So I have big doubts as to whether having the administration done elsewhere can be terribly effective.
I don’t feel that I have a “Goon problem” at this site. I have control here and can delete the truly abusive stuff. I leave up comments that add something and I am willing to tolerate a moderate amount of abusiveness to be able to have the stuff that people can learn from appear here. I wish that you Goons would be less abusive. We would all learn more if you were. But I believe in taking the good with the bad. And I have definitely learned a lot from my interactions with you Goons. So I do not regret permitting a good percentage of your posts to appear here (and I am of course grateful for those contributions).
I of course have a big problem with the abusive stuff that appears at other sites. But that is of course not under my control. I can complain about it and I have. But there is of course nothing that I can do about it other than to point it out and to complain a bit and to explain how I believe it hurts those sites to let you Goons intimidate people into not contributing as they would if there were less abusiveness.
You are right that I am bummed that the old Sammy comments are gone. It’s not a big deal with the ones that I have used as blog entries since the texts are provided in the blog entries. But I provide the links so that people can verify that the words that I put forward really do match the words of the post. And in many cases I only quote portions of a post and so I would like people to be able to see the context in which those words appeared.
So, yes, that’s a big negative in my eyes. There’s of course nothing that I can do about it. My sense is that this is indeed a trend. You call it a “modern standard.” I view it as an unfortunate trend. I value comments much more than most other site owners. I think that the time spent administering them is time well spent. But I seem to be in the minority re this one. I don’t get the sense that too many other sites put as much value on comments as I do.
Anyway, thanks for letting me know about this development. Baby, it’s a Facebook world!
Rob