>It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what. - A quote by Stephen Fry

Well, as a quote it's quite uninsightful.

Would you say the same thing to a woman that said she was offended by you creepily staring at her at a conference or making sexist jokes in her presense? Would you say the "n" word to an African American and not care if he would be offended? It's just a word after all.

Offending people can be a real problem, not just some imaginary whine. That's because feelings are real too -- not just actions ("sticks and stones", etc).

>Free speech is one thing, but abuse of free speech is another. When you perform an action that negatively affects the sales of a company and if you expect to benefit from it, in return for which the company doesn't allow you, I think it's fair.

What exactly is fair about it?

Have you thought this through? If you live in a rural area where only AT&T has coverage, albeit spotty, and you tweet that "their coverage is dreadful here" should they cut you off from their service altogether?

What you basically say is that companies should be allowed to punish people (even paying customers), for speaking out about them?

>You can't say Mc Donald's sucks and eat a burger from them (that would be hypocrisy).

No, hypocrisy is saying one thing and doing another. In this case, saying "I would never eat McDonalds" and then eating.

Saying they sucks and then eating it, it's perfectly normal. Heck, I think they suck, and I've eaten several times from them. Lots of reasons.

For one, I was in a country were I ocassionally needed home delivery and McDonalds was the only chain that offered.

Second, sometimes it's the nearest fast food restaurant, or the only one in some small town.

Third, their food might suck, but you find the prices great, compared to the alternatives (or vice versa).

>Well, whether Mc Donald's should let you buy a burger from them AFTER you just said that is solely their choice.

No, they should serve someone who criticizes the same as any other customer. You might not be able to shout it inside their restaurants (that's their business), but they should have no right at all to refuse you based on what you say to your twitter or blog or whatever.

>And being a hypocrite and being offended doesn't give you any special rights either. Just saying.

You keep using that word, "hypocrite". I don't think it means what you think it means.

There was nothing hypocritical about what he did. The guy was scheduled to flight with EasyJet, noticed some bad thing happening a few days before related to the company and twitted about it.

Being critical of a service doesn't mean you are a hypocrite of using it. That's the silliest notion I've heard all day.

New Yorkers are critical of the status of their subway service all the time, but they still use it. And people are critical and complain about the products they bought ALL the time. That I find a fault with iPhone 4 and tweet about it, shouldn't mean Apple shouldn't sell me iPhone 5.

That is what moves a market forward.

What you're saying essentially amounts to people not being able to critisize products and services they use, for fear of being denied them by the company.

It's completely bollocks.

>Stop thinking of the airlines as someone else and imagine if it was YOUR company. Imagine if you ran a cloud services company and this guy wrote a blogpost about why your company sucks (which negatively affects your sales) and then bought a dozen cloud servers from you. I would have no problem in refunding his money and revoking his service with a polite smile and a "Sorry", if it was my company.

Are you kidding me? People talk about Linode and Heroku and AWS all the time, posting the problems they find using them, how this or that sucks, etc.

If that's your idea of running a company, throwing out customers who complain publicly instead of fixing the issues, then I wouldn't want to be your customer.