TechCrunch is awful, but there's no excuse for the spit in the face incident. I don't give a damn what lousy, fabricated article TechCrunch might have published to precipitate that. It's disgusting and totally uncalled for.
Don't treat Arrington like some soulless mythical creature. He's a real person. He's susceptible to being offended enough to get pissed off at people and to rant even when he's been in the business for a long time.
Can you imagine how low you'd have to be to fake an incident like that just to get a few hits? Arrington has his faults, but he's not a showboater.
(Also remember that this article was posted while he's taking a break from TechCrunch entirely. Don't blame him for this story.)
I don't think that anyone is treating him as a "soulless mythical creature", I am interpreting this as people viewing Michael Arrington as a person of low morals/values.
There's a tendency to assume that people that aren't you are heartless and will do things you never would do yourself. That's very rarely the case. In this case, assuming Arrington would make a huge drama for nothing, claim somebody did something they didn't, and leave the scene just to get some hits is treating him like somebody who's a tad inhuman.
yes, but don't you think if someone spit on you, that you would have at least chased them down to kick their ass? I mean the guy must have been pretty close to land a hit.
I've always found statements like this baffling. In my school there was very little picking on. The kids who did one thing did their thing, the other kids did the other. The whole era of bullying disappeared when we all turned 14 or so.
Mike is running a start-up. I can respect that. He sacrifices a lot of quality to be the first man on the scene: I don't like that, but I'm impressed as hell at his track record. He has a history of being a socialite and a bit of a jerk, neither of which I like, but at the same time that doesn't make him a bad person, just a person period.
I spent my high school life fiddling with computers, writing, and talking to teachers, and I had incidents of bullying myself. The whole "picked-on pickers-on" idea is a false dichotomy.
Well, what would you answer aggression with, then? Some aggressors may be turned aside by reason, but what about those who just, for instance, dislike your face? If you're not in a position to flee the situation, what are you going to do?
I just ignore stuff like that when it happens. I've been lucky enough never to have to be in a situation where I've had to do anything more.
I got my black belt when I was something like twelve, though, so if necessary I'd do what I had to then get away. But I don't like the thought of violence: I'd never find it necessary. People drop things if you ignore them.
I don't know if it really happened. I don't much care, either. But if I remember correctly, the title of the article in question was 'Some Things Need to Change'. That's hardly linkbait.
The linkbait accusation is also a little odd coming from someone who submits practically every linkbait TechCrunch article that shows up in the RSS feed.
Don't people realize that more than one person writes for TechCrunch. Erick Schonfeld was the sole author of the Last.fm TechCrunch article. Arrington had nothing to do with it and is still on vacation.
<i>TechCrunch is awful, but there's no excuse for the spit in the face incident.</i>
that's silly. I swallowed some water but there was a fly in the water somehow, it was wriggling, so I reflexively spat and your face just happened to be there. that's just one of many great excuses for spitting in somebody's face.
more seriously, there might or might not be any excuse for it, but if you thought it was anything but a matter of time, that's unrealistic. the appropriate response is just blogging that they're full of shit, but inappropriate responses still fit in an overall system of cause and effect.