Pay for it. That’s how people live.

A man walks up to a couple exiting a movie theater. “What happened in the movie?” he asks. These poor people, being of uncommon patience and immune to weirdness, spend the next 20 minutes explaining the entire plot of the movie and answering his every question. “Thanks!” the man says. “I don’t believe in paying for movies.”

The man goes to a gas station and requests a gas can. The clerk gives it to him, and he goes to the gas pump, fills it up, and simply walks away. When the clerk calls after him, he shouts, “I won’t pay for gas.”

The man follows a patron throughout a bookstore, and waits until she has purchased a magazine. After she exits the store, he grabs it from her, and sits down to read the entire thing. When he has read every article, he hands back to her. “I won’t pay for magazines.“

Are you noticing a trend here? In any of these cases, the man is betraying a nearly pathological form of entitlement, bordering on theft. Most of us would consider this kind of behavior inappropriate at best, and bizarre by our societal standards. In some cases it would result in police interdiction, or perhaps a good psychologist.

Now consider this.

A newspaper publishes a story, and posts the link on the Internet. In the Facebook comment thread, a man asks what happened, and the editor, being of uncommon patience as well, explains in a short paragraph what they know so far and what they’re still trying to find out, and asked if he has any further questions…