If You Can't Write...DON'T

So I know that the Miss Musing scam is old news. We’ve all heard, gasped, shaken our heads and pondered the seeming inexplicable act of plagiarism and stolen identities. In the days immediately following the revelation that one of my dearest blog friends was apparently a fake, I was livid. I was pissed that she would let me talk to her and confide in her and share things with her in confidence. I was angry that she plagiarized so blatantly from other bloggers who deserved the credit in her stead. And I was all worked up to write a big, ranty blog about it…

But then the blogosphere lit up with that shit and I just thought it was too much. I let it slide. Everyone else had essentially said what I wanted to say (give or take a few expletives) and it was water under the bridge.

Until today. A little while ago I was minding my own business, procrastinating (as usual), and checking up on my Twitter when I saw a tweet from Alexa that made me irate.

Her message informed us that “the plagiarism continues” and this time it’s by some guy named Kyle from The Beat Goes On. Apparently he thought it was a good idea to word for word copy and paste Maxie’s post from April 21 THE VERY NEXT DAY on his own blog.

(Check those links. "His" post is literally word for word copied from Maxie's blog. What a whack job.)

This dumbass thinks that inserting his name in the last line in place of the original author’s makes this his own writing and perfectly applicable for passing it off as so. Naturally I left him a highly irate comment but he’s a comment moderator so I’m assuming it will never see the light of day. (Ugh. Douche.)

I will never understand why some people think it’s okay to steal other people’s work. Come on people, this is not middle school. We are all grown adults and we know what’s right and what’s wrong and clearly stealing someone else’s words, thoughts, ideas is WRONG.

Bottom line: if you are not funny enough, witty enough, clever enough, articulate enough, or good enough (in your own mind) to write your own material, DON’T WRITE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

(It’s days like these when I wish public stoning was still an appropriate form of punishment.)