Greg Cohoon (drmellow) wrote,
Greg Cohoon
drmellow

Politics and Computing

Most of the email I get (outside of internal business email), I have access to both at work and at home (and pretty much whenever I have an Internet connection, in fact). However, I am subscribed to a mailing list where I only receive the email at my work address. This is a mailing list that is designed to be a forum where IT professionals, mostly developers, "gather around the water cooler" and chat about topics of interest. Generally, these topics are related to the IT world, specifically Java.

Lately, however, there have been a slew of political discussions sermons that have plagued the list. And I really mean plague. At first, and in years past, any political discussions were slightly annoying, but generally informative, and had more content than noise. Lately, it's just a bunch of ranting from both sides -- people preaching at (not to) each other. It's very distracting. And I think it's caused a handful of people who I loved hearing from either clam up or leave the group.

I got to work today to find my inbox filled over the weekend with about thirty messages from this group. I don't think any of them were related to anything in the IT field. Most of them were related to Rush, who has been in a bit of trouble lately. (For the record, I think the ESPN flap is undeserved, but the drug flap is hypocritical and bad news for him.) Ironically, this is actually a political(-ish) thread in which I'd be interested in participating, but before either side got a chance to say anything, the discussion was muddied with cheap shots. So my DELETE key got quite a Monday morning workout instead.

I've met a lot of cool people through this list -- and I've been part of the list longer than a lot of members have. I would hate to give up on the group over stuff like this, but.... Eh. I'll probably feel differently after another cup of coffee.
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