The comment by Deadwood is obvious harassment. This comment should be deleted.

Rob

I will second the request that you two “take it outside.”

Rob – it seems that you are showing up in more and more of the comments sections of blogs I enjoy reading spewing your nonsense of death threats and a vast ban on honest posting on one thing or another. Please let me enjoy this blog in peace.

It’s not just the two of us, Rosa.

There are thousands of community members at the Retire Early and Indexing discussion boards who have expressed a desire that honest posting on stock investing be permitted on the internet. We have studied these matters in great depth and have developed important findings that middle-class investors do not hear about from The Stock-Selling Industry (for obvious reasons).

We are today facing the second biggest economic crisis in U.S. history. The financial pressures that have resulted are showing signs of doing damage to our confidence in our political system. People need a place to go where they can obtain independent and realistic advice about how to invest in stocks. The internet is the obvious place for people to go to learn about these matters.

I obviously am not responsible for the behavior of the individual who leads the Smear Campaigns. I was a friend of his in the days before we learned that he got the number wrong in his study,. I obviously had no way of knowing that, when our community learned of his error, he was going to spend the next seven years of his life going from community to community to make sure that no one was giving the accurate numbers to the many people who need to learn about them to plan their retirements effectively.

I think we all should be working together both to open the internet up to honest posting on these questions and to help middle-class workers gain access to the information they need to invest effectively. I think it is fair to read your comment as an expression of anger. I do not think it is fair for you to direct a portion of that anger at me. I am trying to help and I have been doing that for a long time now. (I can understand you feeling some anger at Anti-Crank. I think it is fair to conclude that he is not participating here with good intent.)

Rob

You, sir, are a total flake.

Rob, I am done here and consider you to have been handily proven a serial liar unless and until you respond in the positive to back up your claims with specifics:

Bennett: “I had heard talk about abusive internet posting before I put forward my first post at the Motley Fool board… The death threats against me appear at that site to this day.”

Link, please.

It is a threat.

It is an intimidation tactic.

I look forward to the day when personal finance bloggers unite to insure that this sort of thing can never happen again.

We have done wonderful work in the Retire Early and Indexing discussion-board communities over the past seven years. I am proud of that work and I am proud of each of the thousands of community members who contributed in a positive way. I don’t believe that any of us should offer any apologies for the good work we have done. We should hold our heads high, continue the learning process, and share what we know with our friends and neighbors and co-workers and fellow community members regardless of how it makes those who have engaged in abusive posting feel for us to do so.

Do I feel compassion for those who have ruined their reputations because they had come to believe that none of the rules of civilized society apply on the internet and that there was no chance that they would be held accountable for their behavior? I do. But I am clear in my mind that allowing the current situation to continue is not a fruitful way to give effect to those feelings of compassion.

I will post honestly re what the historical data says about safe withdrawal rates or I will post not. That one is non-negotiable, Anti-Crank. If you check the Post Archives, you will see that never for three seconds have I done anything to suggest to anyone that there could ever be any give whatsoever re that one. So I sleep at night secure in the belief that this was not my doing.

I have the right to post honestly and I intend to exercise it. I encourage all other community members (including those who believe in Passive Investing, to be sure) to do the same. Your intimidation tactics repulse me. But they do not impress me. They are low tactics. They are the sign of a weak hand. The studies should have been corrected on the afternoon of May 13, 2002. Had that been done, we would all be in a far, far better place today than the place we now find ourselves in as a result of our collective decision to instead travel a very, very dark path indeed.

Rob

“John Greaney… put forward death threats. My wife was extremely alarmed…”

Once more, Mr. Bennett, I repeat the same request as I started with:

Please provide a specific link to the specific credible threat.

If you cannot, then I would, if I were you, drop the constant repeating of such lies, before someone with far less patience than I have decides to sue you for your obvious, willful, repeated, and damaging slander.

(And no, Mr. Bennett, that is not any sort of a threat — just in case you decide to make this post the topic of your next attention-seeking podcast. It is merely the best advice of one with obviously better judgment than you exhibit.)

You are talking as if the rules of civilization that applied for thousands of years before the internet came into existence applied today on this wonderful new communications medium, Anti-Crank. The reality is that these rules, and the laws that were employed to give them reality, do not apply to discussions held on the internet today.

I put a post to the Motley Fool board on May 13, 2002, showing that the Old School SWR studies get all the numbers wrong. John Greaney is the author of the Old School study published at his web site (www.RetireEarlyHomePage.com). He did not like it that hundreds of members of that community expressed a great interest in exploring these issues in depth. He tried a number of different abusive tactics to block the discussions, all of which failed. Ultimately, he determined that his only hope was to cause all community members of intelligence and integrity to leave the board. To do this, he put forward death threats. This worked.

Were the death threats “credible”? I did not personally believe that Greaney was going to come to my house and kill me or my family members. My wife was extremely alarmed, however. She had the responsibility to take care of two small children and I think it would be fair to say that someone who would be willing to degrade themselves to the extent necessary to put forward death threats at a public board has more than a few screws missing. So, yes, the death threats were credible to her. They certainly intimidated her.

They intimidated lots of other people too. FoolMeOnce was one of our best posters. He said on the day of the death threats that he felt that the board had become a place where he could no longer participate in good conscience. There were hundreds of community members who gave a recommendation to his post. So we lost hundreds of fine community members that night, people who have given large amounts of their time without compensation to help us all learn about early retirement. The threats were credible enough to cause what was once the most successful board in Motley Fool’s history to be burned to the ground.

After that, those threats and similar intimidation tactics were credible enough in the eyes of my fellow community members to cause half a dozen other boards (boards formed by people who wanted to be able to discuss early retirement on indexing issues in peace) to be burned to the ground as well.

So I oppose this sort of thing. I have seen what it does to the souls of the people who put forward the death threats and what it does to the souls of the people who sit quietly while they are put forward for this sort of thing to be tolerated. I do not tolerate it. I cannot put an end to it by myself. But I can speak up against it in appropriate circumstances. So I do that. And I believe that we will see the day when legislation will be passed protecting us all (including the Goons, to be sure — Greaney was a much-loved figure in the days before the death threats and I consider him a friend to this day and I urged him in the strongest possible language not to go down this dark path) from this sort of ugliness. It has no place in internet discussions of money issues, which should be about learning and sharing and forming friendships, not self-destruction and the destruction of others.

I am obviously not the only one who feels this way. Set forth below is a link to an article at my site that contains 101 snippets of posts of community members who have expressed a desire that honest posting on investment topics be permitted once again at the Retire Early and Indexing discussion boards. The 101 posts are of course only a tiny sample of the total number of posts that have been put forward expressing this desire over the first seven years of our discussions.

http://www.passionsaving.com/investing-discussion-boards.html

Many, many good and smart people want to use the internet for positive, life-affirming purposes, Anti-Crank. The way it is. Deal with it.

Rob

Please provide specifics on at least ONE specific, credible threat, since your linked post states:

“I have seen threats [plural] to kill me, my wife and my children”, yet that article does NOT provide any specific quote, any url, any link, any pointer, or any other specifics to allow one to verify your claim.

Claiming such a threat exists is NOT ‘documenting it, especially if you did not report it real-time as it occurred, supposedly back years ago when you were allowed on Motley Fool board. Credible threats cause people to contact the authorities right away, not many years later because they are frustrated with their still-born career as a financial author without credentials or credibility.

The reason I ask for this goes right to what you mention in your podcast — intent. Are you intentionally fabricating, or are you merely mistake on overly sensitive or misremembering.

Rob, anyone can be excused for misremembering. But once their attention is drawn to the error, and once they are allowed the chance to correct the record, then the right thing to do if the claims cannot be supported is to say those three little words. Don’t you agree?