Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Did Jaime give you the contacts you asked for? No. She didn’t even acknowledge the request. She knows how important the issues are, and could have helped, but didn’t. If that’s not goonish, it’s certainly very disappointing.
I agree that it was disappointing, Anonymous.
Do you know what else was disappointing? My own behavior re these matters from May 1999, when I put my first post to the Motley Fool’s Retire Early board, to May 2002, when I worked up the courage to put forward my famous post noting the errors in Greaney’s retirement study (errors shared by every Buy-and-Hold retirement study). I was the most popular poster at that board. I knew about the errors from the first time I looked at Greaney’s site, which was prior to the formation of the Motley Fool board. I was a coward for those three years. I hurt my friends for those three years. All that I had to do to help them was to tell a simple truth and I was too worried about what would be done to me to do so. That’s truly disappointing stuff.
We all should be disappointed in ourselves. Every last one of us. That’s one of the arguments that I will be advancing on behalf of you Goons. You couldn’t do what you have done without the complicity of a big number of policymakers and economists and researchers and investment advisors and journalists and bloggers and ordinary investors. We ALL have goonishness within us, each and every last one of us.
The humans sometimes do disappointing things.
Those same humans also sometimes do inspiring things.
You have to try to catch them in their best moments!
Or else blot the bad moments out of your brain!
Someone had to speak up. Someone had to bring this crazy detour on the journey we have taken together to learning how stock investing works in the real world to a full and complete stop. Only a crazy person would volunteer for the job. I would have a hard time finding anyone for vouch for me as a non-crazy person but even I was level-headed enough not to actually volunteer for this job. I sort of got roped into it. You were there. You saw how it went down.
It’s my job today, whether I like the idea or not. I will make the best of it. I think it would be fair to say that I have no other options available to me.
Jaime has other options. Wade has other options. Jack has other options. Robert has other options. I do not.
Maybe that’s the difference maker. Maybe it’s not that I am more ethical than other people. Maybe it’s just that I am the only one with no other options. I won’t object too much if you tell the story that way. It seems to me that it is possible that there might be some truth to that way of looking at things.
In any event, here we are.
We are all just going to have to try to make the best of the situation as it exists, like it or not.
Is that not so?
Rob
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