tag archive: politics

Here’s Tugger, peering through the veil over this day. What does he see? What strange world lies ahead of us?

Warning: this is a dreadful post about dreadful politics. But don’t worry, it’s not substantive or useful, and I’ve obscured things with an overdrawn allegory that makes absolutely no sense.

There’s no need to rush into it. How about if we start with a cold beverage? Join me for happy hour — or a happy 30 seconds — with this 1980s Shasta pop commercial. (It subtly introduces my allegorical device in a non-partisan and inoffensive way.)

A couple of Augusts ago, back in 2006, Keir Thomas wrote an article about switching his office computer from GNU/Linux to Windows and then a follow-up article about the resulting criticism after the post made the front page of Digg and LinuxToday.

(What is it with web sites that don’t publish the year as part of the date on their posts? I had to go to the Digg post to figure out which August this was.)

Keir describes himself as an “open source” advocate and was a bit flummoxed at his treatment at the hands of the mob. I don’t remember the flavor of the original discussion (maybe I didn’t read through those comments), but I’m sure there were some of the knee-jerk flames you’d expect in response to this kind of admission, which …