Spitting on someone, aside from being freaking nasty, mean, and frequently motivated by some type of bigotry
It's a figure of speech. This is just pedanticism that completely avoids the actual point I made.
Also, why do you- or whoever- get to have their feelings considered, but not OP’s? why do you feel like you- or whoever- is so entitled to another person’s likeness that they should just “Suck it up”?
Because it's the OP asking for advice on what to do in a certain situation. If it were someone else asking me what to do in the situation where they want to take a picture with someone that doesn't want their picture taken, I would tell them to suck it up and go home without the picture.
This is ignoring the simple reality that sometimes, that photo going up on the internet puts the person who didn’t want it up in direct, literal, harm. maybe their profession has some religious prohibition that there’s violation. Maybe there’s a stalker ex. Maybe they’re in some type of witness protection or secret agent.
Except they gave us a reason: "I'm a private person." Almost the first line of their post. The situation we were presented isn't some case where it's dangerous for them to have their picture taken. They just don't want it. If it is risky for them, absolutely just decline.
People should be respected when they say “no, I don’t want my picture taken.”
Absolutely. But he didn't say this, and explicitly said he doesn't want to explain himself. So I responded to their actual request.
It’s best to simply be candid and decline.
I disagree. I get not wanting to give your number out to a patient or see one outside of work, and in that case you decline. I think most would understand this and not be offended.
But this person just wants a picture with them, baring some ridiculously rare shit that they made implicitly clear is not the case, it's a simple, virtually riskless request and it's best to just make another person happy and take a picture with them.
Having your picture in someone else's album is such a non-thing that it just doesn't make sense to be this upset over it.
I swear this is like arguing that you don't want to say please and thank you because you don't like talking to other people. Just suck it up and do it, as it greases the wheels of social interaction and would clearly, at least in the case of the OP, make this person happy.
If you said no and they did so anyway, that would be disrespectful and mean. But telling you that it's the polite thing to do, and that you're just getting upset over what amounts to nothing, is neither of those two things.