I posted the following on a forum many years ago and I’m re-posting it here because this is an election year and blogs should have political crap in them, right?

Partisanship. It’s all really just about how you divide up the money. There are some idealogical disparities thrown in there, mostly (I think) for entertainment value and as a distraction.

Democrats: social services, lowest common denominator, “safety net”, give the money to the poor (and/or lazy).

Republicans: corporate incentives, loopholes, contracts, defense spending, etc.

I think welfare is rife with waste and abuse. However, welfare is chump change compared to say, the missile defense program.

It is ironic that the welfare recipients don’t even friggin’ vote. But Dem dudes do get the votes from rich whiteys who feel guilty driving to the polls in their Bimmer.

What I do find interesting, at my particular local level, is the level of corruption on the Dem side in terms of kickbacks, shady deals, doling out contracts, etc. But that may just be b/c I live in a Dem controlled city.

I guess the summary of my little pile-on here is that, for me, it’s not Rep/Dem, it’s politicians and the incentives in the system. We have what we have because that’s just the way it’s set up.

And besides, do any of you wanna be a congressman? I sure as hell don’t. The system attracts a certain kind of person, shuffles them to one side of the aisle and the incentives push them to pass laws that make things more of what they already are: welfare teat-suckers and corporate fat-bellies. And between the 2 a gigantic pile of programs and tax codes…..

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Color in dialog is underrated. In general, I don’t like extra verbage that doesn’t aid understanding, but I do like to be entertained. I appreciate wit and clever interplay between words, meaning and sounds during a conversation. Likewise, I tend to make attempts at injecting some joy of life into my speech whenever possible.

So, for example, I like to make exclamations: very binary and abrupt qualifications of opinion as if they were Einsteinian fact. Early on, in my teens for instance, this would come across as “That’s awesome!” or “That sucks!”. Lots of people do that - it’s typical. Then there was lots of profanity introduced. As I moved out of dorms and into cubicles, profane outbursts (eg “Fucking fucktastic , ass-grinding compiler! Why the fucking Fuck won’t you build this shit-stained code?!”) were brought directly to the attention of my good friends in Human Resources. Gradually, as I tried to reach a bit further to both convey my views and dynamic sense of sarcastic cloy, I branched out - but not too far. At some point I latched on to “That’s retarded” (better would be, “That’s fucking retarded”, but then I get in trouble). Not sure why, certainly bereft of originality, but there you go. I also liked to call things “Gay” or “Gay with an H” (as in G-Hay - sort of an extended, over-wrought pronunciation). Later I added “Gaytarded”. I have hundreds of other of these little verbal punctuation marks, but these serve the example well enough. The common theme here is that certain people will take offense. Which is a shame for both them and for me.

Over time I have had differing views on this situation. The most obvious is that it’s fucking gaytarded for someone to take offense at words that aren’t even being directed at them. The possible exception could be those who are gay or retarded or who have close relations who are either and who have also made the analysis that the subject of my description is in fact being derided and therefore with that derision is being made an unfavorable comparison to the state of being either homosexual, cognitively impaired or both. The other view is more complex in a semi-introspective way. Why is it that it’s the offensive words that are the most satisfying? By that I refer to those times when you really want to expediently stretch the expressiveness of an idea or just give breath to some pent-up frustration. I could just as easily say “I find that unappealing or inadequate” or “This falls short of my expectations”. But for some reason it’s much better to say something vulgar and/or obscene that people involved in the conversation or just within earshot might find off-putting.

Much has been written of the word “Fuck“, so I don’t need to go into it here. But making that quick little guttural sound is just so very satisfying that little else can be effectively substituted. My grandfather used to say “Dirty Name”. Somehow he trained himself, probably with help from physical punishment at the hand of various authority figures, to utter that little phrase if he stubbed his toe or broke his pencil. I dunno how he did that. I much prefer “Fuck”, or “Ass-pimple” or “Shit-butter” or “Dick-puss”. Apparently when the world offends me by allowing me to drop a transmission on my foot, or fails to prevent me from cross-threading a bolt into an engine block, I need to be offensive right back. Nothing else will do…

I once read that spelling wasn’t really any kind of a thing until Webster invented the dictionary. Back in the day, people just put letters together based on the way things sounded or on some type of tradition. But that doesn’t explain words like “through” or “rough”. For those I guess it has to do with the Olde Inglish or whatever - welsh? I have no idea. But some type of Viking or isolated influence that has since been removed from our vernacular. So we’re left with a whole lot of weird words. Or is it “wierd”? I guess not since my Firefox spellchecker is underlining that one. It’s “i before e” after all. Except after “c”. And except when your writing about friends. So it’s all inconsistent. And I grew up as one of those annoying nerdy kids who aced the spelling tests and just basically always knows the right spelling and can point out when people write “there” when they mean “their” or my favorite, “then” and “than”.

Except that I’m also supposed to hate tradition and generally thumb my nose (what a stupid expression) at useless rules. Do I know what that person meant? Of course I do - if they had been speaking, there’d be little or nothing to clue me in to the difference in those words. So why the hell get uptight about it? It’s stupid.

So that’s something I’m working on - getting over the shitastic compulsion to notice spelling errors.

In parallel to all of that, I have been trying to bring in words like “thru”. Why must we type those extra bullshit letters? It’s dumb. I be done wit dat. I even keep that “thru” in proper documents. Of course, someone will always edit them out before they get published or shipped out to customers or whatever. But maybe one or two will slip thru, you know?

Now, I will say I’m not going to be about the “nu” or the “tru”. Maybe one day - baby steps. I also do have a certain sick sort of admiration for the 133t-speak and the loltok and the various other modern intarwebs types of dialogs that I see. Making shit up is good. And sometimes, making shit up that other people don’t quite understand is even better.

I once had to sit thru an entire full day training course on a piece of software. It was a requirements management “tool” for electronics and software. My company had paid millions for it. They also had to pay for these training classes - and then pay me to sit thru them. So, this software was crap (most is), but it had this really awesome feature. There was a big red button in the upper left corner. Seriously: big, maybe 5 times the size of any other buttons, and Red - nothing else was red. But the best part was that the poor lady doing the training had to devote a b ig chunk of the training course to saying “Please don’t click on that big red button”. She said it at the start, and she repeated it at various points. The button’s purpose was to run a query on the whole inventory of requirements. But it was keyed off of a dialog that you had to fill in. If you filled in nothing, then it assumed you wanted to search for nothing amongst everything. Sort of a logical divide-by-zero - which if you don’t recall 4th grade math very well, is an impossibility. SO the thing would just chug away and basically lock up the whole system. So “Don’t click the big red button”. When I got back to my desk the next day to try and get some productivity out of this new “tool” - you can guess what happened. I swear I didn’t mean to do it.

That was a way long-winded intro. The modern form of this stupidity are myriad websites that actually ask you to do really stupid things because they are too stupid or lazy to make their shit work correctly. Examples: Please disable your pop-up blocker, Please click the Trust this provider checkbox, Please set your security to Medium.

Because you did it. I suppose we can take “I just wanted to” to help us distinguish this sentence from the others that you may have given us where you were actually forced to remind us, or say to us or tell us something. “I just wanted to let you know that…. your hair is on fire.” Thanks for taking that extra time and using up those extra words that I got to read so that I could eliminate any confusion about the origins of your intent to inform. You might’ve just said, “Your hair is on fire”, and saved us all a lot of extra bandwidth.

I think it has to do with respecting your audience. As in, when we do this useless posturing, we think it is more respectful than just making the statement. Where did we get screwed up? It is much more respectful to just say whatever it is and not waste everyone’s cycles trying to get to it. SO, don’t ask someone if the sky is blue if you want to know what the weather is like. Ask what the weather is like! Don’t ask, “Are you free tomorrow night?”. Ask the person directly if they want to go ice fishing tomorrow after work.

If it’s true that “all I can say is, Wow!”, then I would’ve just said that: “Wow!”. But I had to add more words, right? Because it seems odd to respond to something (such a picture of something spectacular or a really clever post) with such a monosyllabic throw-away. And yet, adding the “All I can say is…” - is that really any better? Especially since you did add those other 5 throw-away words. Really, we didn’t need any of it. But you threw it out there. Yeah, please stop doing that.

This happens in face-to-face, but it is annoyingly prevalent on der intarwebs. You see it in comments on blogs and replies to forum posts. People want to chime in - I can appreciate and relate to that. It is self validating. I do it all the time. I’m doing it now. Just don’t do that for its own sake, okay? Look at what you just typed. Is it worth reading? Does it contribute? What is your point? If you have a point, then write that down. Maybe say, “That is the most interesting picture of a cat playing a banjo that I have ever seen”. Spark up a conversation.