I joined the
Weihrauch Owners Forum yesterday and posted in the '
Welcome Lounge' folder where you can introduce yourself. I put a link in to the blog and edited my signature there to link to this blog as well. This morning I got a message from site Admin:
Hi mate
I have deleted the links to your website...reference to hunting whilst not being quite up to scratch accuracy wise...wishing to take potshots at Pheasants with a catapult and while you yourself don't advocate using a pistol for vermin control/hunting in the blog reference is made to it.
We have to look at the big picture and how airguns and airgunners are portrayed in airgun forums and no-one wishes to add fuel to the anti's fires, hope you understand and continue to be part of this forum.
Admin
Several members of the forum had greeted me in the thread itself and so this morning I added this reply:
Hi all,
...and many thanks for your greetings. It's nice to be welcomed on board.
I was rather startled this morning to find that my first post here had been edited - a link I put up to my blog had been removed and the same link in my signature had been deleted. Perhaps it was remiss of me to put a link in my signature? After all, I'm a newbie here and I have no idea whether or not there's a policy to forbid links in signatures or to ban external links completely. I've had the same link in my Airgunbbs signature for about a year so I assumed - perhaps wrongly - that this would be OK here. If that's not the case and there is a blanket ban then I apologise.
I received a PM from a forum admin saying that the link had been removed because the content of my blog would, in effect, 'add fuel to the anti's fires'. I have to say that this saddens and baffles me a little. I take the question of hunting ethics seriously and this is something I've treated - I hope - in some depth on the blog (or at least as far as my abilities allow). I write 'question' of hunting ethics because I do think that this is a field in which there are genuine questions - rather than hard and fast answers.
I'm aware, of course, that hunting is a practice that is itself 'under fire' at the moment. I suppose I think that the discussion is already lost if we as hunters adopt as our own the 'standards' - the false standards, I would say - that the so-called 'anti's' judge us by. We make a rod for our own backs in this, I would say.
So I would invite any forum members who were so inclined to visit the blog and - if they find anything there that they disagree with or find contentious - to engage in discussion with me and the other blog readers there. (Obviously, I won't include a link to the blog now but I write there under the same pen name as I have here.)
Best regards,
HH
Good for you, i think people can be too politically correct at times.
ReplyDeleteWell said Hubert,
ReplyDeleteNow if that had been my reply upon the forum me thinks that the factory bred profanities used would have given them much more to edit away at, making their jobs worth day I suspect. So congratulations on your controlled and well thought our reply.
Regards,
John
It is a shame that they felt your link would upset other people and provoke a reaction. That is what it should do, so that each side can have their say and argue their case, rather than just not do something as it might upset someone.
ReplyDeleteI find people in many different areas who are so afraid of a reaction that they go overboard in providing that same reaction they fear.
ReplyDeleteI don't have much use for them.
And Good Lord, life doesn't wait for you to be perfect - we're all learning as we go, whether it's shooting rabbits or flying in the arctic or interacting with friends and neighbors.
That was a very calm reply to a rather hysterical person; congratulations on not provoking their insanity further!
Well done Hubert, spot on.
ReplyDeleteRegards.
Well said Hubert... I can only imagine the response that would have elicited from some of the forums I frequent.
ReplyDeleteFrom the standpoint of an American- the antis are very much going to try to hang the whole lot regardless of how conscientious we are in our public discourse.
Thanks for the very interesting post.
You know. Any club that would have me as a member... etc.
ReplyDeleteLife is way too short to waste on that sort of thing. There are other airgunning forums.
Just my opinion, of course.
Let's all hide what we do! Yeah, that's the ticket.
ReplyDeleteBaffling.
HH
ReplyDeleteI'm going to ban myself from your blog, just as soon as the much awaited air pistol review arrives.
SBW