PayPal Holds ‘ISIS’ Podcast Donation

One of the downsides to pouring all your time, blood, sweat and tears into releasing regular, online media is that the world has come to expect it for free. And since I refuse to plaster ads all over my podcast/blog or sell-out by endorsing things I don’t care about – yes, I will just have to suck it up thank you very much. But thanks to the prominence of Patreon and PayPal, many wonderful, generous people who find worth in the fruits of my labour have chipped in and offered their monetary support. Thank you, I’m truly grateful. So much so that I’m harbouring delusions of making this second job of mine my main job one day. I can’t begin to imagine what I might get done had I the free time afforded by being able to support myself through the podcast alone. Current projections suggest this may be viable around 2020. This brings me to an incredibly generous listener of The Godless Spellchecker Podcast called Marc. Marc made a contribution to the podcast via PayPal on the 15 June. This payment was, as of an hour ago still being ‘held’ by PayPal. The reason for this amused me, so I’m sharing it with you. Marc added a comment to his donation. In that comment Marc recommended that I check out the work of an individual currently trying to dissuade young Muslim men from joining ISIS. It appears the mere mention of this notorious acronym was enough for PayPal to change the colour of the flashing bulb in their control tower to red. As though members of ISIS sign off their money transfers with “This is for the caliphate brother. I proper love ISIS me.”

It was well worth the delay however (and potential of losing out completely) just to share Marc’s hilarious letter addressed to the powers that be at PayPal:

And with that, the funds were released after 15 days of detention. Now, what shall I buy for my secular caliphate? Stephen Knight is host of The #GSPodcast. You can listen to The Godless Spellchecker Podcast here, and support it by becoming a patron here.