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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

who knows if that really happened, or if Arrington was just linkbaiting to make money

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.)

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'll assume Arrington is a nerd, like me, and that he's not the sort of person who'd kick anybody's ass.

Frankly, I think that people who react to aggression with more aggression are wasting their time and looking pretty stupid.

Not as stupid as the guy covered in someone's possibly HIV infected spit.

I fail to see how HIV came into this conversation.

you never know what the other person has, doesn't hurt to be careful in this day and age

Right now you're espousing rampant paranoia. First you suggest that he would make up a story like this despite no precedent on his part at all. Then you say that the proof is that he didn't react violently to somebody spitting on him. Then you say that he's stupid for not doing that because the spitter might have been HIV-positive.

I live in a world where people are innocent until proven guilty, people are all generally trying to do the right thing, the average man on the street doesn't like physically hitting other people, and most people don't have deadly diseases, and that the ones that do don't spit.

In breaking news, people in Europe get divorced, and HIV isn't transmitted through spitting.

> HIV isn't transmitted through spitting.

I believe you are correct. I have no clue whether vaksel is American, but I do think Americans (I'm one) have absorbed--been fed?--a fair amount of hooey about HIV transmission and how to be "safe." Keep in mind, if you're old enough, AIDS was/is "that gay disease" and something quite a small number of injecting druggies were getting--as the "need" for a War on Drugs was building. I'm sorry to report, Americans are a fearful lot.

If you absolutely KNEW that someone had HIV and they spit (say) into your mouth, wouldn't you worry about it at least a little bit? Even though you know it's silly?

I think most humans are irrationally fearful about things like HIV.

Sorry chap. Mike was the kid who was picking on you in school.

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.

We have to agree to disagree here. There are people who take reluctance to fight for weakness. And even if you are really the turn the other cheek sort, what if you are not the one being threatened, but someone close to you? Would you still find violence unnecessary then?

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.

Additionally, I dont actually see anyone blaming Arrington in this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491784

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.

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.

Arrington hired him and could fire him.

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