[PLUG] This tiresome political debate

[Beldon Dominello <beldon@speakeasy.org>]

Reading the debates of Al Bore vs George Dubya is sad.

Darxus posted a thoughtful and well-written (I thought) plea to vote and
try to make a difference.  I posted a thoughtful and well-written (IMHO)
bit about creating new alternatives.  Just like Free and Open Source
software is a real alternative.  Has anyone responded to either of them
in a thoughtful manner?  No.  We want to argue over which of the two
corporate welfare whores is better.

The tremendous power of Free and Open Source Software were not born of
an argument over whether MSDOS was better than MacOS (or BSD was better
than System V), but of someone saying "They both suck, and I think we
can do better."

So how 'bout it?

"[Our] audience...is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly
ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the
anointed.  Personally, I like to imagine something the size of a baby
hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in
the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka.  It's covered
with eyes and it sweats constantly.  The sweat runs into those eyes and
makes them sting.  It has no mouth..no genitals, and can only express
its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the
channels on a universal remote.  Or by voting in presidential
elections."

                                                     -William Gibson,
"Idoru"


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