What the heck is going on here? Techno, you are being slammed for no reason at all. All the rest of you, think about what you are defending. You are defending dishonesty. You are backing deceitfulness. You are standing up for arrogance, self-righteousness, hubris, and rudeness.
What is so hard about this? It is not a difficult philosophical question. Trevor put up a website. It was called teaparty07.com. That name by the way came from a lot of discussion on this forum. We all voted on things and decided it. Then he designed the website. The website states its purpose is to promote the Boston Tea Party and to send out informational emails about the status of the Tea Party. That is all. Simple.
People then took Trevor and the words he had written at his word and honor as a person. They told friends about the site, they advertised it, they wrote articles about it, they sent it to professional bloggers to spread the message and the word.
Techno and others have also worked tirelessly to spread the word on Myspace since the campaign refuses to do in one minute what is taking us weeks to accomplish.
llepard (sp?) spent eighty thousand dollars of his OWN money to put an ad in the paper and to help promote the Tea Party.
Articles have been written about it, people have included the link in discussions after news articles, they have asked their friends to sign up, their family, the co-workers. People have spent money on fliers about it, spreading the word about the Tea Party wherever they could.
Newscasters have even discussed the Tea Party.
Then, after all of this, Trevor, decides, to hell with all of you and your trust. I am going to do whatever I want with the site. I am going to change course with it. Not only that, but I am going to derail all of your work, and do whatever I can to sabotage the 16th. I, on my own, am going to take all of those email addresses that were given to me on faith that I would promise to send them nothing but information about the tea party, and use those addresses to promote something that I want to do.
What is so hard about this? He lied. He tricked people. He scammed people. He used people's email addresses for a purpose beyond the consent for which they were obtained. He hurt every person that promoted that site. He has been rude to us all. He has acted like a child who doesn't have to care about others and can dump all over any time he likes.
Now, all of us who have spent hundreds of hours promoting this find that our efforts have been hijacked. Sadly, we trusted Trevor not to change the entire direction of the donation drive and like idiots we worked hard to get his website out there. Now, we have to re-double our efforts, go back to our friends, co-workers, family, and tell them please, we are sorry, ignore what that guy said, that is not our goal.
People who wrote articles will have to write retractions and/or write new articles and tell folks, sorry, I don't know what happened. I never expected you to be spammed like that. I don't like his idea and I don't promote it.
People will have to send out new emails to everyone on the Myspace pages and say, no, please don't go to that website I suggested, it now has a new purpose that I do not support.
I can't even imagine the pain that the guy who bought the ad in the paper must be feeling, the betrayal, the sheer cruelty of tossing all of his money out the window (or some of it) to support a site that then changed its direction in mid stream.
If you folks can't figure that out then you need a moral compass.
One of the most basic tenets of life is DO ALL YOU AGREED TO DO. It is a very simple concept. Trevor broke it. He broke the golden rule for those of you to whom that is important - he treated others in a way I doubt he would want to be treated himself. He LIED to people about the purpose of his website and he tricked people into giving them their email addresses and then used them for his own personal reasons.
None of this has anything to do with the additional money drive. It has to do with a man's character and his moral fiber.
I don't care why he did it, I don't care what his motives were, he lied and cheated and I am one of those people that spent many many hours and thousands of emails and letters to editors, and wrote replies in newspapers all to promote a website that I now have found out has done something I disagree with and would NEVER in a million years have worked on if I had known that Trevor was going to trick us all like that.
Say what you like, but to defend him?
And Techno - Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this thread. It was needed because people unfortunately have been blind to any of Trevor's faults and automatically pardon his actions for some unknown reason. Perhaps they are his friends, perhaps they have not thought it out, but this is not a difficult moral issue.
Lying is wrong, umkay? Trickery is wrong, umkay? Hijacking a project that hundreds have been working on to change it to whatever you feel like is wrong, umkay? Being rude is wrong, umkay? Must I go on?
I am sorry to go on and on like this, but this madness has to stop. His actions are not defensible. They are deplorable. If he is willing to apologize, promise not to do it again, I am sure that is all it would take to appease an awful lot of people. However, I see no such direction from him, I see threats and attacks at people who have been duped by him.