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?
to cool the bedrooms, rather than running an expensive central air-conditioning unit to chill the whole house while people are sleeping.