- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Originally Posted by Matt Soell:
Platform Bigotry
Some of you out there are still under the delusion that ONE TRUE FLAWLESS COMPUTER exists, and you are one of the intellectually-superior people who bought one. People who bought the same brand of computer are brothers in arms, companions in your struggle against the OTHER PEOPLE who bought the BAD AND TOTALLY USELESS COMPUTER. And you spend a lot of time arguing the point in any newsgroup you can access (except the advocacy newsgroups, of course.)
Please stop.
The whole "My Mac/PC/Amiga/BeBox/Linux box is better than your puny little {insert computer name here]" debate is stupid. It's a result of living in a society which seems to be losing the intellectual capacity to handle grey areas. Black/White, Republican/Democrat, Mac/PC. No in-between, and no sympathy or even basic respect for people who don't make the same choice you did. Are we really so pathetic that we can't accept people who buy a different kind of computer? Are we really so starved for things to do that we must resort to flooding newsgroups with irrelevant blather trying to prove that one computer is better than the next?
So many of the postings I read on this subject (try as I might, I never seem to find a way to killfile all of them) are so vituperative that I have to wonder why the posters are so insecure. I suppose it's obvious, in a sense: anyone who spends two to five thousand dollars on a way-cool computer can get uncomfortable if someone accuses them of wasting their money on an inferior machine. But the freakish fanaticism some people display towards their computers mystifies me. It reminds me of those guys who spend a lot of cash on a flashy car and make a big show of it to others in order to compensate for certain...shortcomings.
Evangelism should not be totalitarianism. If you have opinions, you are entitled to express them. So is everyone else. Deal with it. If you feel the need to vent some sort of bizarre hatred for an operating system you do not use, please try to confine it to the relevant advocacy newsgroups.