License Withdrawn
March 9, 2007
7:45 AM CST
Note: This post does not apply to the vast majority of my readers. If you have shown some class and some manners on this site, it doesn’t apply to you. It applies only to a few jerks, and I’m sure they will know who they are.
After the “Rights & Wrongs” brouhaha, we set up a website wherein people could discuss the merits / demerits of the “wi-fi as property” issue. The site was set up, as the header stated, free from moderation and restraint, and with no rules of conduct. Sadly, however, the comments degenerated into ones like this one (posted, of course, anonymously):
Anonymous said…
Sorry Alan, but the du Toits come across as an extremely judgemental couple, and deserve bringing down a peg or two every now and then. They appear to make a habit out of finding fault with other people, when they should be concentrating on becoming financially self-sufficient instead of asking their loyal readers to bail them out with handouts so very often. Unless they are thick-skinned, their self-esteem must take a constant battering.
Mr du Toit would do well to seek the advice of, say, some Asian immigrants on how to succeed in a foreign country as an immigrant. He would, however, first need to rid himself of the racial bigotry that afflicts so many Afrikaners, and keeps them on the outskirts of mainstream society.
Just sayin’ is all…
March 8, 2007 11:26 AM
Where to start, where to start…
“Judgemental”
Guilty as charged. In many situations, I call them as I see them, with a definite position on the rightness or wrongness. Where I see gray areas, or areas which can be classified as such, I call them too. In every case, however, my position / judgment comes after much reflection and consideration; rarely do I make a snap judgment—and if I do, and am later proved wrong, I issue a mea culpa. One of the reasons why this site has attracted as many visits as it has, is because I try above all for clarity, and attempt to blow away the clouds of bullshit which obscure so many issues.
“Racial bigotry”
Yeah, I must be a racial bigot—which is why I was imprisoned for my opposition to apartheid in South Africa, where to go against the Afrikaner government meant literally risking your life. Fuck you.
“Becoming financially self-sufficient”
Okay, let’s open up the hood a little. I arrived in this country in 1986 with three suitcases containing clothes, a couple of books, and two cameras. I had, in total, $2,700 in cash. That was it. Two years after that, I was able to buy a house in the outer Chicago suburbs—a house which I lost in a later divorce—and had to start all over again at a new job in New Jersey. This time, in 1996, I didn’t have three suitcases: I’d graduated to a small U-Haul truck with a lot of books, clothes, a few guns, (the same) two cameras, and some power tools—and about $1,800 in cash. Most of the cash later went to move Tech Support and her two kids out from California. So we stayed in New Jersey, where I eventually quit my corporate job to start my own small consulting business. In 1999, we moved back to the Chicago suburbs, first to a rented house, and then, after a business start-up failed, to a rented apartment in Chicago, selling both our cars to save money. For all sorts of reasons, we moved in 2002 to Texas, where in 2003 we bought a modestly-priced house in Plano and two second-hand cars (a Ford truck and a Ford Taurus wagon, later exchanged for a second-hand Suburban when our kids grew to be giants). Our business consultancies had been doing okay, but I closed mine to homeschool the kids while Tech Support continued to run her consultancy. Money started to become tight, but we still managed, and we were even able to squeeze in a couple of unforgettable family trips overseas by tagging along on Tech Support’s business trips. Then came Did Today, which we started with all the best intentions in the world, but which failed because, in large part, some investors were frightened off because of this website. After the failure of Did Today (which cost us, rough guess, about $375,000 in lost earnings and savings withdrawals), I interviewed for a corporate job, and nailed it, except for the fact that my new employer was also frightened by this website and the opinions it contains, so the job offer was withdrawn. Worse still, Tech Support had resigned her consultancy gig for Did Today, and after my job fell through, she had to take a corporate job which paid far less than her consultancy work did.
So here we sit. Broke, myself unemployable by Corporate America, in debt up to way past our eyeballs, only one car (we had to let one be repossessed because of a cash flow problem), and bill collectors calling us daily.
And you think we need to be taken down a peg? Too late.
I don’t need to study what Asians do to succeed in this country. There is no “South African mutual aid society” which hands out low-interest loans. All I’ve tried to do is make my way towards the American Dream, all on my own. It’s proved harder than I expected, and I’ve had to eat a lot of shit along the way. (Occasionally asking my Readers for financial assistance has been one of those shit-eating experiences I could have done without. The blegs I don’t regret are the ones which provided new equipment and care packages for the Deuce Four Recon unit of the 1/24 ID—that would be the unit to which Walter Gaya and the late Adam Plumendore belonged—and from which blegs I never received a single penny for myself.)
Have I made mistakes along the way? Sure. Would I do some things differently? Sure again: hindsight always makes things easier. Hell, I could have stayed in the corporate world, earned that six-figure salary forever, and been sitting today in a bigger house than this one, maybe even in Plano, or somewhere else. However, I would never have met Tech Support, started this website, or had the ups and downs of being self-employed (and believe me, right now the downs exceed the ups by a factor of about five).
On the positive side of the ledger, we have the following: a happy marriage, a wonderful family life, three well-educated, self-assured and polite kids, and the certain knowledge that through all the work on the Nation of Riflemen, National Ammo Day and the writings on our websites, we may have made a teeny improvement to the society of my beloved adopted country.
So let me say just this, to Mr. Anonymous: you don’t know anything about me. You only know what I’ve allowed to be known, and even what I’ve written above isn’t close to a quarter of the reality.
Here are a couple of the mistakes I’ve made, which I’m going to rectify immediately.
1.) The people who’ve been assholes towards me and my wife, who’ve come to my various websites and used my hospitality to insult us, are gone—as is the Blogspot site which gave us an insight into your true character.
2.) Comments to posts on the Front Page have been closed, until further notice. If you want to talk to me, please use email and I look forward to continuing with many of you that way. I still get a couple hundred non-spam emails a day, mostly asking for advice on guns, so be my guest. If you have something negative to tell me, prepare to be fucking shredded. In public. Without the chance of a come-back.
3.) The “Private Message” function in the Forum, which was also used to badmouth us, is going to be turned off, permanently. “Private” means only that it couldn’t be seen by forum members. The messages could be read by our administrators, but weren’t—until last night. To those cowardly little shits who tried to sabotage us and spread their poison against us in our own Forum: thank you very much, and good-bye.
4.) Tech Support has persuaded me to keep the Forum open, so it will remain open, as the community we’ve built here isn’t going to be destroyed by these pricks —but tread extremely carefully when it comes to personal issues. This may come as a surprise to some, but when it comes to tossing people off the Forum for unpardonably bad manners, mine has been the voice of moderation: Combat, Chris and 308Mike can have hair-triggers when it comes to dropping the hammer on rude assholes. No more. They now have my explicit permission to be as twitchy as they want. (I can hear the sobs now: “shutting down dissent”; “echo chamber”. Yeah, whatever. Fuck you.)
From now on, you want to fuck with us, you do it somewhere else, on someone else’s dime. I’m sure you’ll find many allies among the websites infested with Leftists and Anarchists.
To the vast majority of my Readers who don’t fall into the above category, my sincere apologies for the interruption in service. Just as some assholes aren’t to be trusted with loaded guns and screw it up for all of us, some assholes aren’t to be trusted with a keyboard and the trust that they will behave like gentlemen.
Think I’m exaggerating? Try this post, also “anonymous”, from the Rights & Wrongs site:
Anonymous said…
“I still do not understand what conclusions Kim drew (or I drew) that is unclear.”
You need to replace “is” with “are”, Mrs.
The negative aspect of homeschooling, I guess!
March 8, 2007 6:02 AM
Nice cheap shot, fuckhead. Good-bye.
Regular posts may resume on Monday, when/if I’ve recovered my temper. Comments will be reopened when I feel like it.
Right now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range.
