Flogging a dead horse

Last week there was a post by David M. Thornton at LinkedIn on The Official Toastmasters International Members Group titled This Person Gives Three Reasons Why She Is Not A Toastmaster. So far it has generated almost 50 comments by upset and angry Toastmasters, including a half-dozen by David defending himself for posting about that slide show.

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at that situation. Jeanne Trojan had posted Three reasons I’m not a Toastmaster at Slideshare way back on February 27, 2011. The next day she blogged about it at Outstanding Presentations, where I made the first comment. I linked to my April 25, 2011 blog post titled Taking potshots at Toastmasters International. Jeanne now has another web site that doesn’t even bother to link to that 2011 Slideshare, which already has a huge list of comments. Adding to them now is a senseless waste of time (the Wikipedia definition for Flogging a dead horse).

It would make more sense for defensive members to restrict their Bing or Google searches to recent articles or blog posts about Toastmasters. In Bing you just can click on Any time and click on Past month, or select a Custom range. In Google, click on Tools and change from Any time to Past year or Past month.

Making negative comments about Toastmasters International is an obvious way for a speech coach or writer to get noticed. I have posted about some of them. The most recent is Charles Crawford who I blogged about on January 22, 2018 in a post titled Toastmasters International misevaluated, and again on January 28, 2018 in another post titled Toastmasters International misevaluated again. On July 3, 2016 I blogged about Jane Genova in a post titled Making a mountain out of a molehill about getting a refund from Toastmasters.

A very subtle put down of Toastmasters I recently found skirted British defamation law by

not even mentioning us. In the Spring 2017 issue of The Speaker magazine (from the Association

of Speakers Clubs, the ASC) their National Vice President Eric Baker proclaimed on page 6:

“My understanding of other organisations that offer club membership is they do not all ask people to redo a speech even if it did not reach the required standard. So at the end of say ten speeches someone receives a certificate which is worthless because unlike our system there is no guarantee a member has improved!”  

If you are not familiar with the ASC you can read about their genesis from TCBI here.

The graphic of a dead horse was derived from images of a horse and cart wreck and a cat of nine tails at Openclipart.   

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