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Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Nattering Nabobs of Negativism

» Things that Retard | Paul Murphy | ZDNet.com

This article starts out strong, but then slides into the same old sniffles that all of Paul Murphy's ZDNet columns seem to. (My thoughts while reading went from, "Wow, actual thought and content from a tech blog?" to, "You tricked me, this is less good than previously indicated.") But anyway...

The starts out strong part lies in the good and mostly contrarian argument that the woes of todays whiney liberals - SUVs, climate change, outsourcing - are a direct result of earlier selfishness. I know, you know, and the American people know that liberals are basically selfish, but I would imagine that few have really made the connection between the obviously selfish nimby (Not In My Back Yard) anti-isms of the '70s and '80s with today's policy decisions. Obviously, this is not the only cause of the mentioned problems, but a good argument, if I do say so.

The same old sniffles part comes in the last three paragraphs, when Mr. Murphy decides to apply the former argument to why 'Micro$oft' sucks so bad. Yes, Windows isn't really that good. No, Vista won't make it any better. But the same blather about the superiority of Unix and Linux from a confirmed member of the techno-elitist crowd gets old. I guess when virtually no one uses your favored operating system for anything but servers and a hobby, you tend to get a little testy!

2 comments:

Pookie said...

Ok I understand where the man is coming from. (I read the article) but it is unfair and inacurate to say that the liberals were the only people with the NIMBY attitude. Keep in mind, most liberals are all for nuclear power (less polluting).

mnthomp said...

In my recolection, I've never seen a pro-nuke liberal. While the 'less polluting' part is obvious to you and me, the type of pollution (spent radioactive plutonium) scares the hell out of the enviro-types, even if it will cut greenhouse gasses in half. And yes, there are some nimby-ist conservatives, but they are in the minority to the bite-my-shiny-metal-ass contingent.