Omestes's Journal: Rant against Dogma and Evangelicalism

I never write in this damn thing, how many damn "blog" things do I really need? But for once I think I have a rant that is fitting to post on /., well at least link to /., since I really don't feel like posting it again. I wrote a long rant on the Ethics of Evangelicalism on my blog, which was partly spurred by a conversation had here over evolution.

I've noticed that /. is inane advocacy central, we constantly pander our views, and irrelevant preferences as some holy objective standard that everyone should hold true, or be doomed to be an imbecile. Vi vs. Emacs; Mac vs. Linux vs. Windows; Libertarianism vs. Everyone Else; Right vs. Left; etc... It seems that on most of the issues discussed on /. there is no room for middle ground, and this is getting annoying.

What motivates someone to be an OS troll? Or to be a libertarian extremist (sure, they have points, but to take any doctrine as a literal truth is...), or one of those people who have to spam anti-war statistics and Noam Chomsky quotes in conversations about Microsoft's business practices. "Sure Steve Balmer throws chairs, but does he have GUANTAMAMO?!" Its like Slashdot is where logical fallacies go to have a nice night out on town.

Your opinion is your opinion, my opinion is mine. Thats it. You screaming that Apple pwns Windows, or visa versa, is like me starting a wholly war over the primacy of the color blue. Idiotic. Its a meaningless preference. Yes, there might be some cognitive dissonance going on, where you just plunked down a couple hundred or thousand dollars on your OS/hardware, and the years of experience becoming a self proclaimed expert, so you must justify this great expenditure of time and money. But really, step back, and ask yourself "who cares?" Windows is flawed, OS X is flawed, and Linux is flawed, and *BSD is dead. Fine. All of them also have some really good points too. In the end it boils down to a wasted fight over a silly and superficial topic. Its a damn string of 0's and 1's, nothing substantial or even that important, you should have something better to be doing (but then again the same can be said of even reading, participating on /.)

The libertarian extremists bother me more, along with the more preachy members on the left-right axis. Accepting a body of rhetoric whole heartedly is a more dangerous problem, than being an OS fundamentalist, since it can have real world effects. Please, people, stop and criticize your views, don't accept them dogmatically. If you can't find a single fault in your ideology, then there is a problem, since no ideology is perfect, or even close to it. Every position is right on some points, and wrong on far more.

I guess I'm writing this for the reason that I can't say this every time I run into the ubiquitous artificially polar dogmas that populate every discussion on /. No one reads these things, so I guess this is more catharsis than anything.

-AC

wholly war?

[theStorminMormon]

Just askin' ;-)

-stormin

Re:

[Omestes]

Trying to quit, thanks.