dwasifar's daily gripe

People cry at funerals.

This is so obvious that it really doesn’t need any pointing out.  But I’ve been having conversations with people about why we do that, and the more I hear about the current way of explaining it, the more offended I get at what I see as trivializing of grief.

The modern theory, with us in the popular understanding since about the 1970s, goes like this: You’re sad when someone dies because you’re feeling sorry for yourself – sorry that they won’t be in your life any more, sorry because you’ll miss them.  You can’t logically be sorry for the dead person, because that person is gone and there’s no one to be sorry for (or they’re in the afterlife and not gone, so there’s no reason to be sorry, if that’s your belief).  So you must actually be sorry for you.

I think that is a huge load of self-centered self-help-book crap.

When I have dealt with the death of someone I knew, I felt sad and sorry for the person who died.  It never had anything to do with my own loss; I can get along on my own, that’s just how things are.  I was sad that that person didn’t get the chance to live out his or her life, missed out on things, got cut short.  Sad for the person, not for myself.  And yes, I know that the person is gone and there’s no one there to feel sorry for.  I know that consciously, anyway.  But for a while, when someone dies, you feel different about it.  It takes a while to adjust to the person not being there any more, and during that time you’re going to emotionally react as if they were not gone, because your emotional state hasn’t adjusted yet.  How long is it before you stop unconsciously expecting the dead person to walk in the door?  Certainly that lasts a lot longer than it takes to have a funeral.  So even though you know consciously that the person is gone, your emotional sadness and sympathy for that person still seem to have an object.

The idea that sadness over a dead person is all based in selfishness, that we are only sad because of how that person’s death negatively affects us, takes one of the more noble and powerful human traits – empathy – and just wipes it out of consideration like a dry eraser on a whiteboard.  It reduces empathy and genuine compassion for others to the self-centered whining of a child who has dropped her ice cream cone on the sidewalk.  It cheapens us, paints us as small and mean and petty to the core.  I think we’re better than that; not all the time, but sometimes, and more often at those times.

You might think this is all just conjecture, but I have two pieces of evidence in favor of my position: tearjerker movies and media tragedies, especially those involving children.  People watch a tearjerker and cry when someone dies.  Even grown men can be brought to tears if the movie is skillfully done.  So where do these tears come from?  The popular explanation that we cry for our own loss has no answer for the tearjerker movie.  Not only is the dead movie character someone you’re not going to miss in your real life, it’s not even a real person at all. Similarly, when the news reports some child dead or missing, people are moved to sympathetic reactions in droves.  For what?  If grief were purely selfish, why would thousands of people care about a dead child whom they had never met and will never miss?

This has bothered me for a long time, ever since someone tried to explain away my grief over a dead friend this way in 1982.  It offended me then and it offends me now, and I’ve had a long time to think about it in the intervening years.  Every time I hear it, I want to retort: How dare you trivialize my sadness that way?  How dare you try to take away one of the bonds that make us human, and replace it with glib Oprah self-esteem nonsense?  Maybe you’re self-absorbed enough to make someone else’s death all about you, but not everyone can be so shallow.  So speak for yourself and leave me out of it.

In case you’re wondering after reading this, no one close to me has recently died.  But some people are getting close to it, so it’s been on my mind.

Everything I publish here is covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. Basically this means anyone is free to use it, share it, or adapt it as they like, as long as they credit me for the original work and don’t use it commercially.

I bring this up because I had a plagiarism issue arise recently, for the first time in almost two years of blogging here.

A reader notified me in the comments of one of my Ubuntu how-to tutorials that he believed someone had “ripped me off.”  I followed the link and found an article in a forum that was clearly my work with a little bit of rewording and some spelling errors added.  Same structure, same paragraph breaks, same sentence sequence, and the code sections were letter-for-letter identical.  When I was a kid, students used to copy articles from the Encyclopedia Britannica and just change words here and there to make it not identical.  I imagine kids today do it with Wikipedia.  Anyway, it looked like that, and there was no attribution given; the guy was presenting it as his own work.  So I posted a message in that thread complaining about it and giving a link to my original article.  The writer shot back with indignant claims that he had never seen my article and didn’t appreciate being accused.  We knocked it back and forth for a post or two and then I finally said, I’m not buying it, and other people can read both links, look at the posting dates, and draw their own conclusions.  Five minutes later the entire thread was gone.

That would probably have been the end of it, except that I shortly discovered the guy had also posted it to a different area on the forum, and that post was still there.  So I sent him email saying, look, this stuff is CC licensed, all you need to do is add attribution and everything will be fine.  After sending that, I starting getting tired of the whole thing.  I figured, screw it; these tutorials are meant to help people, and even if he is a jerk, his derivative work is helping spread the information.  So I sent him a second email telling him I was letting it go and he had permission to use the work.

And that probably would have been the end of it, except that he couldn’t let it go.  I’m guessing he saw my willingness to compromise as evidence that I had doubts, and he fired back with a big ol’ hate-mail full of indignant blustering and threats.  He reiterated his claim that his work was original, and that he had never seen my article before writing it.  He told me he had just visited my blog and was upset about the “defamatory” comments he found there.  He claimed he had removed the first thread so that it wouldn’t sully his reputation.  (My feeling about that is, if he really believed the articles were unrelated and I was full of shit, then he should have left the thread in place with the link to my article, and everyone could have seen how full of shit I was for themselves.)  Then he started yammering about bringing attorneys into it, to sue me for slander and defamation of character.  He instructed me to direct any further communication to his attorney, without actually telling me who that might be.

This is always where things get funny.

First of all, it’s my experience that threats to sue are almost always empty.  People who are going to sue you just sue. The rest is just talk.  But even if he were serious, people have no idea what the law actually allows for when it comes to these kinds of civil cases.  They think you can just sue anyone who says anything bad about you and win.  Actually the bar is much higher.  First, you have to prove that what was said about you was false.  Then you have to prove that the person who said it knew it was false, and said it maliciously.  Finally, you have to prove actual damages.  It’s not enough to claim your reputation was damaged; you have to prove that you suffered physical or financial loss as a result.  This guy doesn’t know any of that.  He doesn’t even know the difference between slander and libel.

He’d have a hard time with any of those requirements.  First, he can’t prove it’s false, because it isn’t.  Therefore I have a right to say it.  Truth is an absolute defense against charges of slander or libel.  And even if it weren’t true, it would still be hard for him to show actual damages from a couple of forum comments that were only up for a few minutes before being deleted, or comments on my blog that don’t name him specifically and contain only a dead link to the deleted thread.

Anyway, back to the story.  I was sick of the bluster and bluff from this blowhard and decided to play my ace.  I sent him back an email informing him that although he was still free to use his adapted work, he should stop jabbering about lawyers, because I had his IP address, and my server logs showed that he had accessed my article five days before he posted his. Thus, his claim never to have seen my article before was a provable lie.  (Yes, I know someone’s going to say something about dynamic IPs; I don’t want to go into how I know that’s not the case here, but I do know.)  I advised him to shut up and go away and be happy I was letting him get away with it.  I have not heard anything since.

The bottom line is that this guy tried to pass off my work as his, got caught, lied himself into a corner, then tried to bluff his way out.  Didn’t work.  I’m not surprised at how it went down, in retrospect; after reading some of the things in his online profile, I should have known this was not a man who would ever admit a mistake even if he was walking around with a bucket of shit stuck on his foot.  I’ll admit to one, though: it was a mistake for me to offer a compromise.  To someone like that, a compromise offer is seen as admission of weakness.

I find myself analyzing my own reactions.  Why was I so protective of my work?  What did it matter if he swiped it?  It’s not like it cost me money.  I would have been fine with it if he had followed the attribution requirements of the CC license.  At least some of it was Flame War Syndrome, wherein internet arguments spiral out of control with astonishing swiftness.  But there has to be more to it than that, or I’d have led off less aggressively than I did.  I’m not really sure.

One final note: the user comments on the article in question, including the link to his adaptation, have been removed now.  The link is dead, which makes them comments about nothing, and I don’t want people getting curious about it after reading this post, finding them, and tracking him and his other posting down.  That’s not what this post is about.  I don’t want to reopen the issue with him, but it is an amusing story that I think was worth telling, and it illustrates the larger point that CC licensed work is still licensed.  You don’t have to pay me, but I want my damn attributions!