The owner active or inactive is totally responsible for all feedback good or bad.
If your boss gives you a hard time and and one day you simply have had enough and beat him up is the boss responsible for your actions? "He was always yelling at me, I had to beat him up".
That's some pretty bad feedback, but I guess the boss is responsible for that since he's the instigator of the emotions, eh?
OR we can call bullshit what it is and that the guy made his own decision to assault the boss. Just because something is expected doesn't mean it should be excused. Stop making excuses for the poor decisions of other people, call them out on it and maybe, just maybe, the day may come when it isn't expected, a day far into the future where writing violent and deplorable emails are so socially unacceptable that people do in fact stop to think about what they're about to send before sending it, and the people that do send them out recognize the mistake they've made and apologize for getting caught up in the moment and acting like an asshole. Wouldn't that be nice, people not being assholes to each other? Not being excused from being an asshole because someone else was an asshole to them first? I think it would be nice.
edit: and just in case there was ever any doubt, I'm not
just talking about sending emails here, I'm talking about all bad behavior that people find excuses for. It's still customary to ask a woman who was just raped what she was wearing, suggesting that she is somehow responsible for the actions of her attacker. You walk through a bad neighborhood and get mugged and people say "well what did you expect?": I expect the exact same kind of treatment as if I walked through a good neighborhood and got mugged, I expect the rapist to be captured and punished in the same way regardless of whether the woman was wearing a full body or walking along the street naked, because bad behavior is bad behavior no matter where or why it happens or how common it is.
Yes it would be nice if everyone acted civilly and used the 15% of their brain 100% of the time..in a perfect world yes. The anger examples you cite here are a bit extreme though this behavior happens unfortunately. This ..thank St. Francis.. has not reached that extreme point. People are fallible creatures indeed. Sometimes I wonder if we are the most intelligent. It seems man needs nature but nature does not need man...oh so I rant.
What I am trying to convey is that when MONEY is involved and a product is promised this nasty behavior is to be expected...sad but true. I do not condone it but rather see it as a fact of life. You reap what you sow. I think Craig well deserves any nasty behavior because he himself is exhibiting the same. Again I do think he is directly responsible for this guttersnipe. I wish the world could be devoid of this type of behavior but I do not think it ever will. This is why the prisons are so overcrowded.
I really believe this and cannot fathom any other scenario. :wacko: Can we please agree to disagree?
You are confusing several concepts here, which is part of why this gets so weird.
The first thing is responsibility: If I do something bad (send a nastygram, rape a scantily clad girl, burn down your house, eat another burger), is there anyone else who is responsible for this action? My answer (and several others) is no. Never. You are always responsible for your own actions (the usual legal caveats of insanity and coercion excepted). It wasn't your boss, the nudity, the tv ads or Craig who did it - I did it, and I'm responsible. Being a human being, I am not controlled by instincts or spirits.
The second thing is desert: If A does something bad to B, does A deserve being treated badly by B in return? Often, yes. If I scam you out of a hundred bucks, I think I deserve being called a "scammer" by you. I might possibly agree that I deserve angry emails until the money is returned, or (and this is the societally acceptable option) being sued in a court of law. I wouldn't agree that I deserve to have my house burned down and my goldfish tortured. You may disagree, and we might enter into a discussion of desert - Consider these actions, what do I deserve in return? This does not change the factor of responsibility - You are still responsible for making a decision and weighing the factors of what is deserved and not. You may responsibly decide that a particular action is in order, and argue that this is indeed a proper course of action, because this is what the target deserved. It does not mean that the target "made you" do something, or that the target is responsible - Only that it is deserved.
The third thing is the descriptive/prescriptive thing. Are people idiots? Absolutely, to a great degree. Do people do stupid shit that means innocent people get crap for stuff they dont deserve? Sure do. This is a description of the world. It is, however, not a prescription on how to act - It is not the case that "People generally behave like idiots" leads to the the conclusion "Therefore, it is right and proper to behave like an idiot". If the behaviour of the masses was the gold standard for ethical behaviour, then there would be no need to discuss ethics at all. The world would also be a very depressing place. It is quite possible to acknowledge that people behave like idiots, and at the same time say that it is not OK that they do.
A fourth thing might be the treatment ocf ICP2 ltd as a company, in which all involved share in the doings. That might be a reasonable stance when you're dealing with Sony or IBM which are big faceless entities where you really can't assign individual responsibilites, but ICP2 is not that big. Most of us assume that ICP2 is more or less Craig, Debs and possibly someone more, and that they have rather different roles in the doings of the company - Craig being the one responsible for the doings of the company, whilst Debs is the one bending over backwards to help customers who are affected by Craigs doings. Treating them as equally responsible seems unfair.
So. I think nobody is surprised that Debs got a lot of crap fron anonymous internet jockeys. That is a too common occurence in the world to surprise anyone (descriptive). Most of us would probably agree, too, that the behaviour of Craig means that he could quite rightly have some crap coming his way (desert). Most of us would agree that Debs has been going above and beyond her duties (also desert, but of another kind). Given that Craig must reasonably have been aware of point one, we can say that it adds to his desert/negative karma/whatever that he has put Debs in the position of being mail front, and that means he has a responsibility for her being made a target. However, the responsibility of actually sending a nastygram to Debs is still the responsibility of the individual keyboard jockey.
I usually express this through my Two Rules about Everything:
