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by giles_bowkett 6344 days ago
here's the fucked up thing about Arrington. I'm not surprised this happened to him; I think everybody should pay attention to the fact that this happened; and I think it will happen again, because when he speculated about the spitter, he assumed it was some entrepreneur. it never occurred to the guy that anybody but a slighted entrepreneur would want to spit on him, when in reality many more people do. but that's not the fucked up thing. the fucked up thing is that with all of that information, I was AFRAID to post my opinion about this, because what if Arrington discovers who I work for and takes revenge by ignoring our products. think about how fucked up that is. the guy doesn't know very much. his posts often have huge technical inaccuracies and other bad information. and I'm scared to OFFEND him in a random comment on Hacker News, because he might retaliate for me expressing my honest opinion, and my company might get fucked because of his whims. so he has all this influence, and pretty much every time he discusses tech that I know details of, he gets shit wrong. that's what's fucked up about Arrington. I guarantee you there are people reading this whose opinions on the subject we will never know. and that's probably why he got spat in the face. somebody who could normally have just said what was on their mind didn't have that option, got wound up all tight, and went a little bit crazy.

but Kathy Sierra, some misogynists went a little bit crazy. we can't tolerate this kind of thing, no matter how much this particular target deserved it, because it creates a dangerous atmosphere. so although I think anybody who is upset that this happened is a fucking idiot, and anybody who was surprised is probably too stupid to spell their own name, we need a way to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and part of it involves tuning out idiots like Arrington instead of letting them amass all this ridiculous inappropriate influence in the tech world.

2 comments

I think anybody who is upset that this happened is a fucking idiot, and anybody who was surprised is probably too stupid to spell their own name

You sound like a delightful person to be around.

The gist of your entire tirade is that Michael Arrington doesn't deserve the influence he has because he often gets technical details wrong, ergo he deserves people spitting in his face.

Are you kidding me? It's his blog, he can do whatever the fuck he wants with it. If he doesn't want to cover your company because he judges that you're an asshole, how does that give you the right to assault him?

In Australia, we have a phrase for this kind of attitude.

It's called "Tall Poppy Syndrome"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome