A couple of points to make here:
1- You are entitled to your opinion. My question is, did you bother to go look at the site in question? Or, are you just going from the banner ad?
From the site itself
As the designer of the shirt and it's concept, what are my views? Who cares? Did you come here to talk politics or buy a cool shirt? Well, if you want to know, I didn't come up with the idea to be pro-war or anti-war. It's just a friendly satire of the concept of Bush taking on the "bad guys" around the world. In fact, I'm sending him a shirt to show I don't mean any hard feelings. I got the idea thinking about a shirt I saw years ago called the "Hitler World Tour" shirt, which listed the dates of his conquests, along with countries such as Great Britain and the United States listed as "Cancelled." I'm not making a political comparison -- it just seemed a neat twist that I could put on the "War on Terrorism."
As for Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest, I don't believe that peace happens by accident. I also don't think the United Nations can really represent the will of the world so long as there is veto power by any one nation, even ours. Thoreau would demand consensus if HE ran the show, but as nice as that sounds, almost nothing would ever get done. The alternative is the capacity for minority governments to be outvoted all the time. The democratic process is a Catch-22, but I don't think I can come up with a better plan.
The real question is whether we as a nation want to be (or should be) our brother's keeper around the world. As the strongest military and economic power in history, we have the greatest responsibility for the future of mankind. Nobody has to like it -- in fact, it's the main reason people THINK we are arrogant or domineering even when we're not. Not all our motives are going to be humanitarian or altruistic, and we should be careful not to assume we know what's better for the citizens of another nation. But we can't pretend that freedom or justice are all in the eye of the beholder, in some fog of cultural moral relativism. Whatever evils we do not condemn, we risk America being seen as enabling or even approving of them.
Besides, we can't just stay home while planes fly into our buildings either, right? What can we do? What should we do? My solution? Ease off the Orange Alert for a few minutes and buy a T-shirt. And when you're done, pray for peace, fight for liberty, trust no one, and believe in something.
- Ken
(the guy who made the cool shirt you really want to buy!)
2- The shirt is a parody, based on a speach by GWB. No where on that site, is there any shots taken at the World Trade Center tragedy, nor those men and women fighting over seas. If anything, I see it as supporting those people.
3- Making a 'buck'.
Whoever let the 'Axis of Evil World Tour' add run on this site has no sense of taste at all. Is there nothing Americans won't do to make a 'Buck' ?
Ok, I am not getting rich off this site...if anything, I'm going broke running it. I contribute a very large portion of my time to maintaining things here, and almost all of the expences come out of my pocket. How much? Around $4-5,000 a year.
But Bob, you have all these sponsors. Yup, and alot of them are comped as part of design packages, or hosting signups etc.
This server is costing me $300 / month. Add in to that the $15/year domain name, $85/year for the software..etc. Its getting expensive.
(Aprox $4k per year minimally, not counting in time, etc). Add in the additional costs of promotion (google advertizing, flyers, cards, teeshirts, mailings to schools, etc) and I'm constantly in the red.
While I can get cheeper server space, the amount of 'upstream' support is phenominal!. The server costs are of course partially subsidized by my hosting business, but MT is responsible for almost 50% of the 'activity' on this server.
(Over 130 accounts... MT is using the 1/8th of the hard drive, and 33% of the alloted bandwidth.)
Now...I can think of a few questions folks may be thinking:
1- What will he take? A better question is "Who WONT he take?"
- Adult adverts.
- Anything thats against our basic policies.
- Popups/unders - I've already turned down 2 offers in the $2kper month range to allow popups.
- Most non-MA ads. (The Bush ones also done by a friend of mine, so is an exception to the rule.)
2- How can I help offset the costs?
- Buy a shirt. (They are $10 ea now, plus shipping Small-XL available)) (ok, yes the powder blues not 'macho' but you can always give it to your girlfriend.)
- Host with me. The package and price is competative.
- Sponsor a forum.
- Refer web design or hosting clients to me. If they mention your name, I'll send you a kickback. At least $10 per client.
My biggest concern is making sure that theres always enough $ in my pocket to continue to have MT up, running, and actively maintained.
Simply put folks, you have the right to be offended, but I have to cover my expences somehow. I asked folks about if they would pay and got a huge "No", not even $5. So, I need to rely on advertisers to offset the expences.
If I thought for 1 minute that the Bush shirts were 'wrong' I wouldn't run the ad, regardless of how much cash they offered. But I don't, nor does the majority of the staff. (Some don't like it either. Thats their right.)
