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Politics and technology blogs don’t mix

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I’m going to rant for a moment, so you may want to leave if you aren’t in the mood.

I’m sick and tired of seeing political tirades mixed in with technology discussion on blogs. When I go to a blog that’s all about, say, marketing Web services, or developing Cocoa software for Mac OS X, or running Ruby on Fedora Core, or whatever, I want to read about those topics. Why the **** do I care what they think about George W. Bush? Why am I in the least bit interested in their opinion of the latest NSA program exposé? Who died and made them Political Commentator Extraordinaire? Who says they know anything about what the hell they’re talking about?

Politics is an extremely complicated subject, just like computer programming or graphics design. Let’s put this in reverse, and imagine some dude working for a senatorial political campaign who learned how to use a PC in high school and just got a new Mac. Should we be interested in his opinion of the OS X microkernel architecture? Should we appreciate his views on how Universal Type Identifiers aren’t as useful as file extensions? Should we acknowledge the importance of his claim that Windows has a better network stack?

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Let me tell you right now: if you think you are qualified to comment on politics, you probably aren’t. Very few people are, in fact, which is why it’s hard to find really, really good political blogs. Most people just talk out of their collective asses and demonize people they hate instead of talking sensibly and rationally about real issues.

So, if I see one more “Bush sucks” or “I hate Ted Kennedy” style nonsense on one more technology blog, I just might go bang my head against a brick wall. With luck, I’ll pass out and not have to read that crap when all I’m interested in is what the guy had to say about Javascript associative arrays.

P. S. My pledge to you is that The Idea Basket will NOT become a political blog, EVER. If I want to talk about politics, I’ll direct you to another Web site. I promise. :)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Site Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Politics and technology blogs don’t mix”

  1. Rob... Says:
    May 18th, 2006 at 1:06 pm

    The difference is that the decisions that policitians take affect all of us and hence we all have an opinon. I’m one hundred percent convinced that

    My solution is to have two blogs: one for dev stuff and one for personal stuff :)

  2. Jared White Says:
    May 18th, 2006 at 6:48 pm

    Rob: yes, politicians and what they do affects us all, but using a mostly technology-related blog as a soapbox isn’t the appropriate forum, IMHO. As you say, it’s great to have a dev blog and a personal blog. Problem solved. :)