liberty2897
09-26-2012, 11:06 PM
I've been happily using Linux as my OS since '97 at work and home. Although Torvalds definitely speaks his mind, I don't think I ever heard him speak about politics before. I'm glad to hear he isn't supporting Romney
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/torvalds-calls-romney-fing-moron
"He really seems to be a f***ing moron," Linux creator Linus Torvalds wrote of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney late last night on Google+, using two fewer asterisks than you see here.
But then voting season comes and reminds you that all those Americans that are individually sane and normal tend to be collectively crazy and very odd. And that's when you really notice that you're not in Finland any more.
That's when you also notice that the whole US voting system is apparently expressly designed to be polarizing (winner-take-all electoral system etc). To somebody from Finland, that looks like a rather obvious and fundamental design flaw. In Finland, government is quite commonly a quilt-work of different parties, and the "rainbow coalition" of many many parties working together was the norm for a long time. And it seems to result in much more civilized political behaviour. ...
So you couple a polarizing voting system with a campaign that has to make simplified black-and-white statements, and what do you get?
Ugly, is what you get.
Most of the time I really like living in the US. But voting season sometimes makes you wonder.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/torvalds-calls-romney-fing-moron
"He really seems to be a f***ing moron," Linux creator Linus Torvalds wrote of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney late last night on Google+, using two fewer asterisks than you see here.
But then voting season comes and reminds you that all those Americans that are individually sane and normal tend to be collectively crazy and very odd. And that's when you really notice that you're not in Finland any more.
That's when you also notice that the whole US voting system is apparently expressly designed to be polarizing (winner-take-all electoral system etc). To somebody from Finland, that looks like a rather obvious and fundamental design flaw. In Finland, government is quite commonly a quilt-work of different parties, and the "rainbow coalition" of many many parties working together was the norm for a long time. And it seems to result in much more civilized political behaviour. ...
So you couple a polarizing voting system with a campaign that has to make simplified black-and-white statements, and what do you get?
Ugly, is what you get.
Most of the time I really like living in the US. But voting season sometimes makes you wonder.