Longboardism and jumping to conclusions

This cropped up http://longboardism.com/2012/10/igsa-bonelli-chance-gaul.html

At some race, some dudes crashed, some dude called Chance in the heat took the opportunity to give em both the finger.

The Longboardism article is a bit sad.

You can only comment on what you know. Seeing a picture is not always "worth a thousand words" as the article states. Those pictures that get shared around on facebook, with messages on them. Yeah, you know the ones. People seize on them without looking into the details because it suits their opinions on something. You often find out theres more to the picture than is immediately obvious.

A picture you could completely judge would be something like a dude kicking a child off a skateboard. Any person would know that there could be no reasonable justification for that action. Case closed. But what about this picture of Chance? Heres just some justifications for his actions.

• He's having FUN and enjoying himself.
• He may know the dudes crashing really well.
• The crash may not have been that fast.
• It may have been worthy of a little bit of mocking if it was paticularly "failsome"
• The dudes may have been out of order to him before (not suggesting they were)

See, that took such a small space of time to create loads of things that should prevent you reaching a judgement on the photo. Unless you have the answers, jumping to a conclusion is wrong. Jumping to a conclusion that suits your agenda, and then publishing it on the internet and potentially damaging somebodies reputation is not cool.

But then, you can bet on some of the responses to the article being as shit as the article itself. The people who are scared of words like "serious" and "professional" and "organised".

What is needed is for people who are more on the side of seriousness to respect those who arn't, and for those who are more on the side of not being serious to respect those who are. 

To simplify things.

GO SKATEBOARDING HOW YOU WANT (UNLESS YOU ARE BEING A TWAT)

LET OTHERS SKATEBOARD HOW THEY WANT (UNLESS THEY ARE BEING TWATS)

Easy.

Will