Fool’s Equality

Posted on April 3, 2004 in IRC/Chat Micro-blogging

Reading Incomprehension seems to be a common impairment on the net. Rare is the person who will admit that it was he who misread the instructions. The rush is always to blame the writer. For a recent example of this — where the instructions are spelled out so clearly that if they were a photograph you could fly a plane into it — see the twelfth comment here.

Another thing that gets me is the tendency of the eye of many readers to skim over warning messages such as appear in the comments for this site. My blog policies explicitly state my copyright. Yet in the past two weeks, I’ve had a handful of people scoop up photographs, poems, and whole articles off of my site. When I point out the law and my blog policies, they get pissy and call me “rude”, sometimes in public on their blog.

It reminds me of the folks who just can’t handle it when they use the N-word and someone objects. The attempt is always to shift the blame to the person who protested as “an opponent of free speech”. They forget the Golden Rule which perhaps needs this restatement: respect the boundaries of others as you would have others respect your boundaries.

I am not a government nor a corporation. I am a human being.