Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
If the police had actual links, then they would have gone after someone. With that said, you can post the links here for all to see and then you will have all the support you could ever need. Go ahead and post the links. We will wait.
The policeman asked me whether I believed that you were actually going to kill me. I said that it was my belief that you were trying to scare me in an effort to shut me up. But I noted that my wife was afraid of what might happen when she took our baby out in the stroller. And that, by definition anyone who advances a death threat is a crazy person and it is not possible to say what a crazy person might do. So I didn’t put the odds that one of you Goons would follow through on your threat at zero. He was writing in his notebook while I spoke. So I presume that most of that is in the report.
I had lots of support on the day the death threats were made. FoolMeOnce started a thread in which he said that the level of integrity of the board discussions had dropped so low that he no longer felt comfortable in having his name appear at the board, so be was leaving. 50 people endorsed that post. So I had plenty of support. But there were over 200 endorsements on the post that Greaney put up in response laughing at the idea that he would ever hesitate to advance death threats if they were needed to keep the cover-up going. And in a few weeks FoolMeOnce and others who made similar comments were back posting at the board.
10 percent of the population is opposed to the Goon stuff. 90 percent is opposed as a theoretical matter. But 90 percent of the population believes that Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick is a real thing. Even though that group might oppose death threats in the abstract, they support the continued promotion of Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategies more than they oppose death threats. When that changes (I believe that it will change in the days following the next price crash, when people are able to see up close and personal where Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold always takes us), we will be able to do amazing things. But for so long as 90 percent of the population supports Get Rich Quick.Buy-and-Hold, it is going to be rough sledding.
Death threats are bad. Very bad. But death threats are one symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The core problem is the Get Rich Quick impulse that resides within all of us. The last 40 years of peer-reviewed research shows us how to overcome that self-destructive impulse. But as of this moment in time, most of us do not want to overcome it. So we tolerate things like death threats and career threats. The ordinary rules of human discourse do not apply when it comes to the survival of Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold investment strategies. All bets are off when someone evidences a desire to post honestly re safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
Anonymous says
Here you are, decades later, talking about death threats. Why? Because no one really believes you. You have been asked countless times to provide links, but you have not. Everyone is against death threats, but only if it really happened. You can easily bring this to a conclusion if you had actual proof, yet here you are again with zero proof.
Rob says
People believe me. I have talked to many people about this and no one outside of you Goons has ever questioned that death threats were advanced.
There are two things going on.
One, the story is so fantastic that people have a hard time figuring out what is going on. People have a need to relate something they hear to something that they have seen happen before. And this one is unprecedented. I pointed out an error in a retirement study and it has not been corrected for 19 years. It takes more than death threats for something like that to happen. A lot of people have to want very much not to know the realities of stock investing for something like that to happen. There is no other field of human endeavor in which something like this has happened. So it is hard to process.
Two, people don’t want to get involved. Lots of people have objected to the death threats. But most people do it once or twice and then drop it, People find the criminal stuff off-putting. So they feel that they would prefer to have someone else take care of it. When everyone feels that way, the bad stuff continues because it achieves its purpose of blocking people from learning what the research says,.
There will either be a change after the next crash or there will not be. I believe that there will be. I believe that it will make all the difference in the world for people to see what the relentless promotion of the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold “strategy” always does to people in the long run. But we’ll see.
Rob