OSNews

More generally, the observation applies to pretty much any topic we "discuss" on OSNews.

I was trying to ignore a basketball game on the TV at the restaurant where I was having lunch today, and reflected for a bit on the silliness of fan behavior. People pick a team. Sometimes its because it happens to represent the city where they live. Most often, the reasons are even more arbitrary. But they pick it, for whatever pedestrian and unimportant reason, and they associate themselves with it in some bizarre way which is difficult for me to fathom. They seem to think that the team's winning or losing actually has some bearing upon them and their lives. Perhaps even their value as a person. They think it is important. They've often never trained a day in their lives to play the particular sport. But that doesn't matter because it is their team. It's the ultimate in Us/Them paradigms. And it is a form of insanity, without a doubt. But it's one of those insanities which affects so many people that few recognize it as such. And, of course, some are affected more strongly than others.

I had, about a half hour earlier, posted a defense of one of my statements, which had been misinterpreted by another reader, in a thread which I had not been following closely, but which could likely be summarized as "Linux Rocks and Vista Sucks!/Vista Rocks and Linux Sucks..." and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the same effect manifests itself here on OSNews. Except the OSes, or DE's, or programming languages, or code formatting style, or licensing choices, or development models, or hardware companies, or applications, or... well, anything else that people can find a way to imprint themselves with... serve in place of the sporting teams. The insanity is still of the same nature. And the ones who rationalize their choices the best are often the most severely impaired.

It nonconstructive. It's predictable. It's boring. It's frustrating. It's very sparse in redeeming social value. It goes on, day after day after day, drawing upon the seemingly inexhaustible energy supplied by the human penchant for thinking in terms of Us and Them. And today... I'm weary of it.

Thanks for listening.

-Steve

Edited 2008-04-05 23:13 UTC