The other day, going through some old posts, I noticed that Zach Taylor from Alienation had responded—two months after the initial posting. In the interest of fairness, I thought I'd post his comment here, and respond to it, piece by piece.RussAs your mission statement states silence implies consent. We’ll have no reason to be silent and I certainly don’t consent to some hack writing some BS pc. Frankly I wished I had found this earlier so I could have commented much sooner.
I wish you had as well, but this will have to do.
Superfluous, really? I bet you had to look this term up in your thesaurus.
There are a lot of things I'm not good at. Auto repair. Golf. Macrame. I do, however, have a pretty solid grasp of the English language. As a third-grader, I wiped out a bunch of fourth graders in a game of 'spelling baseball.' My third-grade teacher (who I'm still in touch with) talks about it to this day. If I remember correctly, the home-run word was "sphere." I've also got a BA in English/journalism, but that's not nearly as cool.
As others have pointed out within your blog you’re hangin on someone’s balls from Odyssey hence the piece. I need not say more than that in terms of why it was done.
I don't see what one has to do with the other, honestly. I'm not on anyone's payroll. Am I friends with guys at Odyssey? Yes. (I'm friends with people at lots of other companies, too.) Do I like (and run) a lot of Odyssey parts? Yes. But they sure as hell don't pay me, and NO ONE tells me what to write on here. I resent the implication that I'm anyone's puppet.
Granted, we have made mistakes & been ill advised in some areas, but we have done a lot correct as well. If you can do better then I challenge you to do so. Put your money where your mouth is & do it. Most likely this will never happen though.
Um, I agree wholeheartedly with the first part of the first sentence. As for "doing better", maybe you're missing the whole point of this blog. I'm not trying to start a company, you are. In my opinion, there are too many companies already, some which don't see to bring very much to the table. All they do is take market share away from those companies who DO seem to be pushing innovation forward. If you were truly following your mission statement, I'd have nothing bad to say. As it is, I'm not sure whether freecoasters with KHE internals and generic Pivotal seats and posts qualify as "techinally superior products with obvious enhancements and inherent differences from the competition."
It appears you’re journalist yet not a very good one seeing you couldn’t even get the ownership list correctly. I bet you thought that was a real clincher based on the placement at the end. That was the real ! point. If you need to fact check next time please call me in the office & I’ll be more than willing to give you the correct information.
If by "placement at the end", you're talking about the edit, that only appeared at the end because it was the last thing I added. But feel free to expand on the relationship between Alienation and WTB. Are you owned by the same parent company? Does one own the other? My initial ! point was about BMX having already done the whole anarchy thing, and better, 20 years ago. I still stand by that. (Hell, it was late THEN.)
I must comment on the Insurgent as well. Guesses are you never wore this countries uniform where as I have and I don’t see what gives you the right to even insinuate.
Nope, never worn this country's uniform. My dad did, though. And I didn't just insinuate. I still think 'Insurgent' is a piss-poor name for a rim given what the people who ARE wearing the uniform are going through right now. And had you read the comments above yours, you would have noticed that someone who DID wear the uniform agreed with me.
At least you spelled the comapny name correcly.
Dude.
(It's been brought to my attention in the comments section of another, more recent post that a rather prominent member of the BMX community believes that I 'openly want the [BMX] industry to collapse.' Wow. That's a rather strong statement, and not true at all. For one, I do still ride a BMX bike, which I didn't make myself. For two, I have a lot of friends who rely on the BMX industry for their paychecks. And for three, without the BMX industry, this blog would cease to exist.
If I understated the sense of community in the BMX industry—which I've admitted from the beginning that I'm not a part of—I apologize. I've heard different things from different people, all of whom ARE part of the industry. If nothing else, I've been an interested observer (and consumer) for a very long time. More or less since the beginning. This was the first BMX magazine I ever bought.
Look, at the most basic level, I love bikes, BMX and otherwise. And, despite the fact that the US economy is in the shitter, I think the bike industry as a whole is in better shape that it's ever been—but it can still get better. In the end, I'm just one person voicing my opinions. If you agree, that's fine. If you disagree, that's fine, too. I think one of the best things about this blog has been the dialogue that's opened in the comments section. Please feel free to contribute to it.)
