In this week’s round-up, 101 Centavos comments on the nasty diatribes recently promulgated at not one but two PF blogsites, Financial Uproar and Control Your Cash. I’ll refrain from dignifying these bullies with links, but if you’d like to read the offending posts, Centavos does link to them in the current Monday Morning Fish Wrap.
Financial Uproar proprietor Nelson is offended because he feels Finance Fox’s often derivative style amounts to plagiarism. What sets him off is a series of poorly done paraphrases that lack links back to their apparent sources. He works himself up into a fine state of high dudgeon, growing nastier and nastier as he gets more excited.
Much of the resulting rant is unjustified: you can’t copyright an idea, and so unless the person has lifted a very distinctive, original concept, simply rehashing the same thought is not really plagiarism. In the case of the passage Nelson thinks Finance Fox plagiarized from Financial Uproar, the accusation is specious: the allegedly lifted idea that you can have fun without spending money is so commonplace as to be an eye-glazer. Here in Editorland, we call that a cliché. If you’re going to spew clichés, you can’t be surprised when you run across the same clichés somewhere else. That something is commonplace is what makes it a cliché.
The name-calling rant is graceless and uncalled-for — to say nothing of potentially actionable. It makes for an unpleasant read, and it reflects as badly on its author as it does on its target. Actually, IMHO, it reflects worse on the classless author than on the victim.
However, in the Classless Department, Control Your Cash easily outclasses Nelson. Spewing mean-minded epithets, this site’s proprietor, one Betty Kincaid, slavers on and on and interminably on about an obscure blog called Plunged in Debt. Why? Well, she doesn’t like it that the site’s author, Catherine, went deep into hock to get a degree in biology (a subject Ms. Kincaid, a real estate lady, believes is worthless, evidently never having heard the term “pre-med”) (yes, I do use the word “lady” in a deprecating way here…wanna make something of it?). Nor, speaking of PC Nazism, does she like it that Catherine uses “hubby” as an affectionate sobriquet for her husband.
Having set up the flimsiest of all possible straw men, Ms. Kincaid proceeds to waste 1,724 words in tearing it down.
Her endless rant gets nastier and meaner and more pointless as it rambles on. One wonders if its author has had her rabies shot.
Then, as if to add further annoyance to this tedious exercise, she wraps it up with a plug for her own self-published book!
LOL! How cheesy can you get?
It is entirely true, as Mochimac has observed, that the PF blogosphere has pretty much run out of things to say. There are, after all, only so many ways one can repeat things like “get a job,” “get out of debt and stay out of debt,” “work hard,” “have a budget,” “live frugally,” “prepare for the unexpected,” and “save for retirement.” Those things have now been said in as many ways as it is possible to say them, thank you.
Those of us who wish to keep blogging in perpetuity do need to find some new subject matter. But thuggery is not that subject matter. This kind of behavior is nothing more nor less than mean-minded bullying. It’s not useful and it’s not funny. It’s just plain abuse.
Who needs it?
In a lot of ways, the two blogs you mentioned do often raise good points about other bloggers getting repetitive or saying things that just don’t make sense, but they lose me more often than not when they get into name calling. They could both be humorous and call out other blogs or advice on other blogs without getting into direct name calling. Therefore, I read them for the perspective, but usually only get about halfway through the post before they lose me. Too far.
With the Finance Fox situation, the evidence is awfully stacked against him, and I think a post he put up even admits as such. To some degree. Even though he did get name called, if he did steal content, I don’t feel bad, because that is a direct violation of someone elses hard work, and if you go to that level (or even passively let it happen by letting ghost writers apparently control your content, as was suggested in the ‘come clean’ post) then you are opening yourself up to whatever fallout comes your way. I’ll equate it to this: back in high school, one time I got caught cheating on a test. I made a cheat sheet and got caught. I had used it for one answer and the rest I didn’t need it for. Stupid, right? But, did he throw out just that one answer? No. I got a zero for the entire test. And that was completely justified. So, while I completely agree that name calling is out of line for people that they think write bad content, when it comes to name calling against those who are taking content (and making money off advertising across the whole site), it’s a little less shocking. I personally wouldn’t do it if I found my content were being taken because two wrongs don’t make a right, but I also would never use the name calling against the content taker as an example of where cyber bullying crossed the line. And let’s face it, the two blogs who you called out cross the line in plenty of other circumstances.
Just my two cents.
Yeah, I think Finance Fox probably was lifting content…or at least taking ideas to spin off new posts (which we all do) without rewording effectively and without bothering to link to the site that generated the idea. And that also is graceless.
It would be easy enough, though, to e-mail the supposed perp and suggest that he or she should acknowledge material or ideas taken from one’s website — possibly wielding the term “lawsuit” in the process.
As a print journalist, I had other reporters plagiarize my material twice. After the second time, I decided that the next time it happened, I would sic a lawyer on the perp and on the publisher (it is, after all, the editor’s job to see that plagiarized and libelous material doesn’t go to press).
As a college instructor, I’ve seen adult students plagiarize time and time and time again. There, one can only conclude that people get away with plagiarism so regularly throughout their K-12 and college careers that they think it’s OK. Sometimes they’re not even aware that what they’re doing is plagiarism.
There are better ways to deal with it, though, than by making yourself look like a worse blockhead than the word thief.
Wow. Being a sucker for a good fight as long as it doesn’t involve me (mark of maturity or exhaustion or something, once I would have jumped right in) I tracked down a number of posts. It was a good time. I have to admit I don’t really care if a stranger has an emergency fund or takes a $7500 vacation while in $40,000 of debt (though that did raise my eyebrows) I figured out some time ago, all on my own with no help at all, that the first is a good idea and the second, a bad one. Never occurred to me to share those insights with the world. Thanks for the fun, Funny.
Hey, I’m totally against mean-spirited cyberbullying, though wasn’t Finance Fox called out for plagiarism by other bloggers as well (Blonde on a Budget, Give Me Back My Five Bucks…)? In any case, maybe Financial Uproar shouldn’t have been so aggressive when calling out Finance Fox, but I also think that when plagiarism occurs, steps to stop it such as calling out the offender should be made. Just my two cents.
A trend we could do without – definitely.
Good on you for not linking to those posts (though I made my way over to 101 to find the CYC one – that one is beyond belief and should rot in a tiny corner of the internet).
Re: FF – initially I was sceptical as well, but it seems there are a LOT of instances of copy and paste that are hard to argue with. But as you say, none of it is particularly original anyway, so I am personally not super ruffled over it.
Agreed that FF seems to be indulging in some egregious behavior. But just because one sheep jumps off the cliff doesn’t mean we all have to!
An effective response to an ethical lapse, if that’s what we’re looking at here (granted, it very well could be), can be launched without recourse to incivility.
Indeed, I offer that the incivility in FU’s post (hm…what is he trying to say to us, anyway?) is as unacceptable as anyone’s plagiarism. And the gratuitous b!tchiness — another manifestation of incivility — in CYC’s out-of-the-blue rant is equally unacceptable.
It’s more than bad manners. It’s more than rude. It’s more than the current stylish affectation. It’s more than middle-school girly nastiness (and yes, the tenor of FU’s prose is middle-school girly, just like CYC’s).
In adults, it is antithetical to a functional, civil society. What we’re seeing in these two people’s tone echoes what we see on the national scene, a habit of mind that has brought us an ineffectual leadership — I apply that statement to both sides of the aisle — and that robs our nation of its place as a world leader and our citizens of their previously excellent standard of living.
How can we advise each of these roaring mice? Two wrongs don’t make a right? Two stupidities do not make a smart? A poisoned pen good sense does not make?
I made it over to the rant against Catherine via 101C earlier this week. Wow. Mr. PoP just blinked and said, “Why?”
As usual a well written well thought article. What a shame that some folks take to abusing the blogging “soap-box” instead of embracing and listening to opposing and differing views to everyone’s mutual benefit….wait this sounds like Congress….
Here’s what I have a problem with. You come on my blog and leave a comment that retold some story you had about a student plagiarizing. And then you retreat back to your corner of the internet, bash me (while getting facts wrong, like saying I accused FF of plagiarizing from me, which anyone who read the post knows isn’t true) without even the courtesy of a link?
It’s the internet version of saying nice things to my face, and then bashing me in your living room when I’m not around. I’d argue that’s a whole lot more immature than what I did.
While I do read them, I am not a huge fan of CYC’s use of the words “retard of the month.” As everyone who has ever interacted with me knows, I am not Mr. P.C. but that just strikes me as wrong…notwithstanding about half of them make me scratch my head and say nah they got it wrong and the other half of the time they are 1000% spot on.
As far as FF. I actually don’t think it is plagiarizing in the literary sense of the word but rather what is known as “Spinning Posts” which in my opinion in the blogging world is just as bad. It is the equiavilent of me taking your first paragraph and saying,
“101 Centavos links to two personal finance bloggers who were critical of another PF Blogger. I don’t want to link to them as I think they are bullies but the sites are FU and CYC.”
Is it plagiarizing? Maybe not, but still wrong especially when it is passed off as original.