Sometimes, There are Bloggers That Richly Deserve a Flogging

Here's the thing: While it's one thing to use photos of celebrities and politicians in snarky ways, it's not a cool thing to do it with just folk. It's especially not cool to do it in a snarky way that is sexually smarmy. And if/when the person whose photo you appropriated objects to your use of the photo, the minimal adult thing to do is to at least take it down. The gracious adult thing to do is to take it down and apologize.

This happened to a gun blogger, who found her photo used with a title of (her first name) and the word "porn". She objected and the scumbucket involved has refused to take it down.

Other bloggers are coming down on her side.

This gets into another issue, as Weerd discusses: Blog piracy. It's one thing to read something that someone else wrote and use that as inspiration for your own thoughts. Nice to give a pointer to who inspired you, but if it's your own thoughts, meh.

Link posts, where someone says "go read this" are fine, too. Hell, they're more than fine, they're how readership builds. I'd go so far to say that if you have a decent readership, you have a moral duty to link to new bloggers who you've noticed.

What is not cool is using a private person's image in a sexually smarmy and infantile way. (Also not cool, as Weerd noted, is to take the entirety of a post and pretty much pass it off as your own.)

The junior-high schoolish antics of the jackwagon in question gets to another issue for me, at least: The sexist crap of "male hobbies".

It's not just guns. It happens a lot in aviation. The fueling/parts/training places in airports are known as "Fixed-Base Operations" or FBOs. You get into an FBO's office by one of two ways, walking in from the flight line (the "air side") or from the street (the "ground side"). A woman who walks into a FBO from the ground side might as well paint herself with invisibility paint. A guy will be asked if he can be helped. Dealing with a new maintenance shop has sometimes required an extensive verbal smackdown to demonstrate to the mechanics that yes, I do know my own airplane.

I've walked into gunshops and I might as well have been covered with invisibility paint. When that doesn't happen, I've gotten the "kin we hep yoo, little lady" condescension. This has been going on since I first bought a firearm and it grates at me. One place I lived, I had a choice between buying stuff at a gunshop 30 miles away and five miles away; I'd go to the further one because it was run by a woman who made sure that women were welcomed and treated with respect.

I go pretty much exclusively to one gunshop where I live now over another for the same reason. Three years ago, I wanted to buy a Russian WW2 sniper rifle and I needed a gunshop to take delivery and do the transfer paperwork. I went in to ask one shop and, once I was able to blast the clerk away from his bullshit session, he gave me a hard time. The other shop said "no problem". I didn't know either of those places. I've not spent a dime in the first place and I've since bought three firearms from the second one, along with other shit.

This is a tough economy and it is not going to get better anytime soon. We may even be in another long depression. If you run a business that traditionally has mostly members of one gender patronizing your business and someone from the other gender walks in, it is in the interest of the survival of your business to make all potential customers welcome. There are women who shoot and fly. There are men who cook, sew and do needlepoint.

If you want these hobbies to survive and thrive, the base of enthusiasts must grow. If you don't like the idea of women shooting guns or flying airplanes, I respectfully suggest that you get over it.