digressica.com

Please bear with me. This post has two points, and it will take me a little while to get to either of them.

A pretty good chunk of the (minimal) traffic Digressica.com gets is due to the posts I’ve written about the Landmark Forum, which I find quite interesting. When I first booked into the forum, I scoured the net in search of balanced, informed Landmark Forum reviews, so I could have some idea of what to expect of the three-day course. So I’m glad that now I can contribute to that conversation in some way.

It always amuses me to see the extreme reactions people have to the Landmark Forum. It’s either effusive declarations of undying devotion and tales of miraculous transformation, or embittered rants about how it’s all about making a profit, it’s a cult, it’s manipulative, it’s Scientology reborn (!?), and so on and so forth. Whether the former or the latter, they’re generally waaaaaay off the mark.

Because I have a fairly balanced view of the Landmark Forum, of what it can actually help me accomplish and where its limitations lie, I find myself playing Devil’s Advocate whenever anyone talks to me about it. If they bang on about how crap it is, I always want to point out the good points about it. If they wax poetic on its virtues, I tend to roll my eyes and poke holes in their praise. (Maybe I’m just contrary.)

So… my first point is that, anyone who’s read my posts about the Landmark Forum will know that while I feel I certainly got a lot of benefit from it, I tend to take the whole thing with a grain of salt.

And – importantly – I am completely okay with any extreme opinions that people have about the Landmark Forum. Mind-bending cult that just wants to take your money? Cool. Best thing to ever happen to the world EVER, probably going to fix global warming and end poverty? Alrighty.

But it irked me to find this blog post, which quotes a post of mine about the Landmark Forum in full and introduces it by describing me, the author, as a ‘professional in crisis’ (erm… not really, cheers though) and a ‘prime sucker’ (ouch, that smarts).

And this is my second point. Even more than completely misunderstanding and misrepresenting me and my experiences, it annoyed me that this person (who writes anonymously) actually thought it was kosher to reproduce someone else’s original blog post in its entirety without their permission.

Bloggers, help me out here – am I justified in my annoyance, or overreacting? I have no problem with being linked to (obviously) and quoted from, but for fuck’s sake… PLEASE don’t copy and paste my work onto your blog because you can’t write persuasively enough or are just too lazy to come up with original content.

And especially don’t do it if you’re trying to illustrate a point I most assuredly don’t agree with.