Sean Middleditch

I’ve found a new big pet peeve.

“We…”

I’m just as guilty as many other at doing this, unfortunately. I’ll try to stop now that I’ve noticed the problem. Allow me to explain what this blight upon humanity is:

We need to work hard to fix this. If we put in the effort, we’ll reach our goal. They can’t stop us, because we are too good for them. We just need to cram for it. We just need to try really hard.

Any one of those sentence or some variation thereof can be found all over the place, on mailing lists, forums, chat rooms, live meetings, phone conversations, etc. Anything with a community of involved leaders and followers. The problem with “we” is that the person saying it is, more often than not, not the person who will be doing any of the work.

For example, the most recent place I’ve seen this problem is on the Ubuntu forums. A user, who I will bet my favorite hat hasn’t in any way shape or form done an ounce of development work on Ubuntu, said something along the lines of, “we just have to work really hard during the next six months to get this feature done!”

It seems so innocent. After all, the user is part of the community. Ubuntu is a community effort. The use of “we” thus sounds quite motivational and pure hearted to many. I see it as something else entirely. I see it as a freeloader giving the “rah rah let’s all work together” speech while expecting other people to do all the work. What that user **should** have been saying was something like, “**you** just have to work really hard during the next six months to get this feature done!”

Now, had the user said that, there would probably be a ton of replies telling the user to stop being a demanding, selfish jerk. Funnily enough, neither the intent nor the amount of effort put forth by the user is going to change.

The problem appears everywhere. Most of the places I see it is on Open Source development sites and in politics, but there are other places I’ve seen it. KANAR being one. “We just need to fix…” No, what the person meant was, “Someone who is part of KANAR and who isn’t me needs to fix…”

This is a great example of how democracy, or letting everyone have an equal vote, is absolutely broken.

Recluse voted to school board [USA Today]

I still maintain that there needs to be some way to make sure voters actually know what the hell they’re doing and who they’re voting for. I doubt that it will ever be possible to make a fail proof system. Our current system is obviously broken, however.

So intelligence, freedom, dignity, honesty, accountability, and true morality aren’t important to Americans. They elect a moron who trashes our freedoms, lost all of our dignity, has lied to the public continuously, refuses to be held accountable for his own mistakes, and has no qualms killing people for little to no good reasons.

What’s the upside? Kerry wasn’t a whole heck of a lot better. We didn’t lose the election. We, the people, lost long before the election.

Here’s hoping for voting reform sometime during our lifetimes.

Today I got a very interesting type of spam I’ve never seen before. It was a political advertisement. An anti-GW advertisement.

The message itself was what you’d expect from someone with the spammer mentality. As much as I absolutely despite GW as a president, the message made even me mad - at the person who wrote it. It’s filled with a number of incredibly questionable “facts” (I cannot verify many of them). I’d love nothing other than to see GW lose the election, but if he loses because people are voting based on lies, then democrary has failed.

My old high school’s motto was “democracy can only work when our country’s citizens are educated.” That doesn’t just mean that the citizens have a high school level (or even college level) background. It means that the voters have to actually know the facts on what they’re voting.

I have some friends who are voting pro-GW for the absolutely stupidest fucking reason I can imagine: Kerry seems softer. What the hell does that have to do with how you run a country? These same people call themselves Republicans despite that, if you ask them their opinions on all the major (and a number of minor) issues, they are more often against the usual Republican stances. These friends of mine (who are great people otherwise) are a perfect example of what that high school motto was getting at. They are a detriment to democracy. Their votes, which are based on falsehoods and bogus criteria, dilute the votes of people who are voting based on the truth and criteria that are related to what makes a good president. What could be worse than someone who votes Republican because they think they’re Republican, even though they’re closer to being a Democrat or Libertarian? What could be worse than voting for any candidate based on their party instead of based on the actual candidate, since even GW doesn’t agree with all Republican beliefs. The same is true for other parties and candidates; if you vote for Kerry because he’s a Democrat which you think you are, even though you’re closer to being a Republican or Libertarian, you’re part of the problem.

This spam I received simply infuriates me. Because I know that there are a lot of people who might be pro-GW, and for perfectly valid reasons (even if I don’t personally agree with them), who will get this or a similar message and change their opinion.

Leading the people like sheep to get rid of a bad ruler is just as bad as the people being led like sheep to vote for the bad ruler. Either way, the system stops being a democracy.

Damned spammers.