Question 061: An UNsatisfied customer

TKDTutor.com receives nearly one million visitors (individual visitors, not page hits) a year (about 2500 a day); visitors affiliated with all martial art styles or just interested in choosing a martial art. After reading the information on the site, many visitors ask for my opinion of a particular art, school, or organization.
Thanks for the invitation to visit your school, but I think I will avoid any further contact with your organization and, when asked, will advise others to do the same.

My opinion can be proven wrong. When this happens, I change my opinion, apologize if necessary, and correct my written opinion. My opinion is influenced by facts, logic, and reason, not by threats and innuendos. In this case, my sarcasm in the questioned entry was not necessary, so I apologized and changed the section in question. The one word that so offended the organization and drew the threats was the word "mill" being used in context with their organization. My opinion of the organization being a mill (one that "recognizes" claimed rank for a fee) was not changed by the claimed legal threats, since they were baseless; however, there are some unstable people in the world and when they even hint at violence it is best to not deal with them. In the martial arts, we learn about escalation of force; to start with trying to reason with a person and, if that does not work, then we move to the next level, etc. Since this organization prefers to start with threats rather than facts, logic, and reason to defend their organization, I removed the link to the organization and severed communications with the organization. In this case, the bullies won.

NOTE: This organization was since disappeared.