GOOD TRADING TO ALL
My Dear Forex Factory Friends and Fellow 4X Traders:
The trading week in our wonderful 24 hour a day market has finally ended and we have a brief day and one half before trading starts up again for next week to knock off, relax a little, enjoy ourselves, rest and contemplate and review the week that just passed.
In my case, I began this week by posting a gentle, affable post entitled “Good Trading This Week!” in which I announced that I had passed the 50 post mark and was now free to discuss goods and services more freely on the forum. I thanked all the people who had inquired about my prior posts. And I pointed out that one of the great benefits I derive from doing work like this – without being paid by others for it – is that other traders share information with me. I said:
“I benefit a lot from the time I spend sharing info with other traders. I get a tremendous amount of info, knowledge, references to websites I had no idea existed, corrections, suggestions, etc. from my fellow traders. There are other benefits besides just getting money from people or getting money to refer people. PEOPLE HAVE VALUE IN THEMSELVES. I believe that when you give to others, you receive in return. I think that's a law of the universe. So that's what I get out of it and it is of enormous value to me. I have a thousand eyes instead of just two out there. Each and every one of you knows something that I don't. Trust me on that because it's gospel. And while none of you is under any obligation to share it with me, many of you do, nevertheless. I find out about new stuff almost as fast as it happens when I never could all by myself.”
I cautioned again with great sincerity that if you give something a quick and sloppy once-over, you will get a quick and sloppy understanding of it and if you give it an in-depth look, you will gain an in-depth understanding of it and reminded everyone that it pays to learn how to use the instruments and tools available to us to help us trade correctly and to practice with them if you would like to get good results from them, and I closed by encouraging everyone to stay positive, avoid negative people and thoughts and to have a good week trading!
If you haven’t read that post, you might wish to do so. Because the rest of the story almost defies belief.
That post, written and posted here on this forum at the beginning of a new week of trading in a spirit of complete good will and sincere hope for good trading results for everyone here, generated a string of ugly, disrespectful, insulting personal attacks upon me of the most incomprehensible nature. There was absolutely nothing in that post that justified it. Read it for yourself and make your own judgment.
So severely did these people object to my post and all past ones as well that they threatened to launch an unscientific “straw poll” to have me permanently banned from the site, completely censored, shut up and removed, and they actually carried that threat through the very next day. This unscientific, negatively-weighted and insulting "poll" is present to the left of the list of threads. If you do take the time to review their comments, either there or in response to my post “Good Trading This Week!”, you will note that there is not one single word to be found in any of them that would be of any use whatsoever to anyone seeking to trade the forex. But there was a great deal of information – albeit general in nature – in my post that would be useful for that purpose. You be the judge.
I have put up 70 posts here since October on many different subjects as varied as “Trading In the Zone” to Market Club and spent untold hours answering PMs and private e-mails and bending over backwards to be of friendly assistance to anyone who seeks it without any ulterior motive whatever other than to help fellow 4X traders here if I can. I have worked hard on all of those posts to make them as informative, well-written and entertaining as I could. Even if the issue of banning me from the website was properly before the readership, a review of my entire contribution would be in order for a fair judgment to be made. But in this lynch-mob atmosphere, no shred of fair play or justice is to be found; no opportunity to present a defense is offered to me before the "poll" is taken; there is nothing but strong-arm directed against me personally.
As I was reading in total disbelief personal attack after attack launched against me without the slightest provocation in reply to my post, I was reminded of an incident that occurred to me when I was a young man and was back-packing and camping outside a small town in Canada during the summer.
Those people in that town let their dogs out at night and the dogs gather together in a pack and look for trouble. As I was walking across a large field far outside of town at sunset to where I had set up my tent, I became aware that I was slowly being surrounded 360 degrees by a pack of hungry dogs, three deep and more. The lead dog was an ugly, ill-tempered beast, snarling, growling, drooling and showing his teeth and coming closer every minute. It suddenly dawned upon me that I had innocently stumbled into what could very well be a life-ending situation and I was not at all ready to meet my maker right then.
However, I did not lose my composure and my courage did not fail me, thank heavens. The very, very worst thing you could possibly do in a situation like that is to try to cut and run. Nothing will stimulate an attack more readily than that. Those animals smell fear on you and it only makes them angrier, particularly if they are cowardly dogs in a pack. And if they drew blood, they could easily have gone into a bloodlust and I could have died in that beautiful field that lovely summer evening in Canada, literally torn to bloody pieces. There was not a soul around to help me or even hear me if I screamed. It was no joke.
So, instead, I put my hand on the handle of the large, razor sharp hunting knife I carried in a sheath on my belt, raised it an inch or two out of the sheath so that the lead dog could see the glint of the tempered steel of which the blade was made and fixed that animal with a stare every bit as malevolent as his own and I sent that beast a telepathic message as strongly and directly as I could, which was simply this: “No matter what happens to me here tonight, Mac, if you and your pack attack me, you personally will never live to see the sun rise tomorrow. I’m coming for you, buster brown, and I’m going to take you with me if it’s the last thing I ever do on this earth.” And I was not bluffing. I had no intention of departing this earth willingly that evening, and, if I had to, I had no intention of departing it alone. At least that vicious animal was coming with me and as many others as I could take with me. And I snarled and sneered right back at that ugly and cowardly beast and stared right at him just as hard as he was staring back at me. Suddenly, almost as if by magic, his tail drooped; he started to move back, he hung his head, he stopped snarling and growling and I walked slowly forward, one step at a time, with as much dignity as I could muster, and that part of the circle of dogs in front of me parted just like the Red Sea before Moses and I proceeded on to my tent unmolested and that pack of wild dogs dispersed in all directions. The incident was over in 5 minutes flat.
Other than that, it was a very pleasant and beautiful evening. I love Canada. Incredibly beautiful country. Great people. Great currency to trade! (But I’m not all that crazy about their wild dogs.) I chowed down, retired, and slept like a baby.
If I were just a reader of posts here instead of a writer of them and any one of you had written that gentle, good natured post and you were attacked in that way, I would be squirming with embarrassment, disgust and dismay. It would be exactly as if I invited some people over for dinner and when one walked in the door, some of my other guests rushed up to him and spat in his face without the slightest provocation or justification.
I will never launch a personal attack on anyone here or anywhere else. I will never fire the first shot. But I will not accept unprovoked personal attacks against me or anyone else and if you fire the first shot, I owe it to myself, to my family and to the memory of every man and woman who has given their life so I and everyone else can live freely in this great country of ours, as an American citizen, to do everything in my power to fire the last one.
In one of my completely pointless and incomprehensible posts these people proudly and publicly find so very, very difficult to understand, I stated that I draw a clear distinction between a person and their ideas. I may disagree with your ideas – even strongly and passionately –- but that does not prevent me from 1) liking you as a person; 2) respecting you as a person; and 3) realizing that you might be right and I wrong. I do not consider an attack upon my personal ideas as a personal attack upon me. And I do not consider opposing someone else’s ideas – even passionately and wittily -- as a personal attack upon them.
But launching a "straw poll" to have me permanently banned from this website, in other words, to attempt to sentence me to literary death here -- literary capital punishment -- is a personal attack upon me, and, furthermore, again as an American citizen who respects, values and cherishes highly the freedoms we have here and tries to live up to them every single day, I also consider it a profound insult to our national traditions of freedom of speech and debate. It makes us look bad before an international audience who justifiably expect Americans to live up to their national ideals and traditions. In my view, it brings a tiny measure of disgrace and disrepute upon our country, our citizens and all who have fallen in defense of her and her ideals.
I have disagreed strongly with people over many years, on the web and off, but I have never in my entire life attempted to, nor would I ever consider attempting to prevent people from expressing their views freely in speech or writing. If I cannot defeat their ideas myself in speech and writing, it is probably because their ideas are right and mine wrong and not because I lack for the wit or ability to do so. Even in as insulting a case as this, I would not advocate silencing my critics or removing the products of their negativity from public view.
Furthermore, because people are passionate in their writing does not strike me as personally offensive. We are grown up boys and girls here and it is not a teddy bears and lollypops world we live in, like it or not, and, as adults writing to and for other adults, there is no reason for us to pretend that it is. Libel, slander, and obscenity, yes, those things are objectionable. But passion in opposing or defending ideas is praise-worthy and exciting. I love a good scrap in print. There are some ideas worth propounding or defending with backbone, vigor and color. I never hold a grudge. When it’s over, it’s over.
There is just so much “Barney” -- that singing and dancing purple dinosaur on American public TV for kids -- that I can tolerate without upchucking. He’s fine for three and five year olds. I was three and five when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the President of the United States and Adolf Hitler was ensconced in a bunker in Berlin with his dreams of genocide, racial supremacy and world-conquest in ruins all around him and he put a pistol to his head, pulled the trigger, and brought them to a well-deserved and long-overdue end.
No matter how frequently I meet with and oppose the tyrannical intellect on the web, it remains incomprehensible to me why some people feel that if they don’t like something, everyone else must also dislike it, and no one else should be permitted to say it, write it or read it. It takes me ten seconds or less reading a post to decide if that writer has anything of interest to say to me, and, if not, I move on. I don’t clamor for their literary blood. The only censorship I do is of what I read and watch and listen to and I would not presume to attempt to censor what you may read, watch or listen to. Even if only 10% of the readership enjoyed my posts and profited from them, that does not justify removing me from their view.
If you do not like my ideas, if you cannot understand what I am saying, if my posts are too long for your taste, if you don’t like or cannot seem to comprehend my points or even figure out what they are, if you have nothing to learn from me, or you just plain don’t like me, you know what my avatar looks like. When you see it on a post, just ignore that post and move on. There are other people in this world and on this forum too. Someone else may have better taste than you; someone else may be smarter than you; and someone else may be more literate and educated than you and can understand what I am writing about and even enjoy it and agree with it or even be instructed by it to their profit. And they don’t need anyone to tell them what they may read if they wish to. They are perfectly competent to make that decision for themselves.
ABOUT LENGTH OF POSTS
This fight also erupts all the time after the Freedom of Speech debate arises. It is like the smoke that accompanies the fire. The computer here is programmed so that if you write any more than it can process in 30 seconds flat, it gives you a “fatal error” message, flushes your post down the cyber toilet, without even giving you a chance to edit it down to an acceptable length, and if you were not sharp enough to save a copy of it before you tried to submit it, you have to draft it all over again. I think that’s unnecessarily harsh but since I know how to save what I write before I endanger it, I don’t care.
I understand that many of you have severe time constraints and pressures. I understand the virtues of brevity and conciseness in writing. But I also understand that, at times, writing at length permits one to expound upon ideas and illustrate them colorfully and memorably. I would barf up my supper every night if all I could read on the web was telegrammatic in style, replete with all the trendy abbreviations and usually severely misspelled. There is room here for 30 seconds worth of copy as well as 2 seconds worth. There is room for Aristotle and there is room for Mickey Mouse. You are perfectly free to choose the content that best fits your style, maturity and intellect: If two seconds worth of Mickey Mouse meets your needs, Gezundheit! Go for it. There’s plenty of that around for you, even here. But some other people actually like to read. And the more literate and well-written the material they find to read, the better they like it. And for those who can’t find the time, one of the great virtues of the written word is that it sits there patiently waiting until you can find the time…and then only if you wish to find the time.
Your freedom to read, write and say what you please is intimately bound up with mine and vice versa. If they censor me here, you are next on the list if you dare to speak your mind and they don’t like it.
So I end this week in a very different mood than I began it. This is a mighty poor recompense for the effort I have put in here but it is what it is and I accept it as such. If my fate here really does hang on the results of this unscientific, poorly-drafted and malevolent "poll," prepared and presented solely by my enemies, without affording me the slightest shred of fair play or "due process," that is, notice and an opportunity to defend BEFORE the "poll" is taken, then so be it.
So long as we understand each other clearly, we can be, if not friends, then at least civil to one another on this website forex discussion forum. I launch no personal attacks upon anyone here and I want none launched against me…or anyone else here either.
I bear no ill-will toward the membership of this forum, the overwhelming majority of whom have had nothing to do with this, were not asked in advance if they approved of such a thing or given any opportunity to express an opinion about it. Therefore, regardless of the outcome of this so-called "poll," if you seek my assistance in good faith and I can be of any to you, I am happy to do it. I believe in traders helping traders. If I am cast out from here, there are at least 70 members who know my personal e-mail address and can supply it to you. I bear no grudges. When it's over, it's over.
"They drew a circle that shut me out.
Heretic! Rebel! A thing to flout!
But love and I had the wit to win.
We drew a circle that took them in."
Edna St. Vincent Millay
American Poet
Good trading to all.
hiyo
