I’ve sat through quite a good deal of talks on similar subjects, and I would like to say that yes, it is true. The people who give these talks certainly know what they’re talking about and feel a certain way about their topics. I too have some topics I feel strongly about, and now is my chance to voice my opinion on one of them.

There are several main flaws I find that consistently pop up with every single one of these speakers.

They don’t know what they are trying to achieve.

It’s very easy to say it’ll lead to something “better” and “brighter”, but why it is “better” and how “bright” it should be is certainly hardly touched upon. These are ignorantly shoved to Religion, whereeverybody believes differently and yet follow the same goals. Not one of them has been able to say exactly “what we want” – and then actually prove it.

I’m not saying that this is the form of a mathematical equation or something that can be parsed easily. I’m not even saying it can be communicated easily in any language. What I am saying is that what is a much more pressing issue is to 1) precisely identify a goal, and 2) ensure uniformity between our goals. In doing this, this brings me to point 2:

There is no practicality in their suggestions, or lack of them.

Again, it’s very easy to identify a problem. It’s also easy to communicate the problem to a (limited) audience. What the speakers don’t say is how to fix the problem, and if they do, they rarely consider how realistic and practical their approach is. This is because our minds are driven towards finding faults. We are exceptionally skilled at identifying faults in great detail. We then think we are clever and able to remove the fault, but instead all we are doing is hiding it. We’ve succeeded in hiding it so well that now we don’t even know what the root problem is.

In fact, look at what I’m doing now. I’m finding fault.

…continuing rather hypocritically:

Smart people don’t save us.

Too much faith is put into intelligence. This one does not appear as consistently through what I’ve heard, but it is an important point nonetheless. The majority of people in the world are stupid. This is a fact. It might sound arrogant but here I am simply stating it bluntly. Addressing such large-scale a problem as many of these speakers do must concern everybody in the world. This includes communicating the problem, communicating the solution, and carrying out the solution. In order for this to be done effectively, it isn’t how intelligent someone is that determines their effectiveness, it’s how wise they are. Wisdom is one of those funny words that cannot be defined precisely, and that’s why it is shunned when it comes to apparently “intellectual” problems. It is time to embrace wisdom, to actually understand the broad and bigger picture, and only then can something actually worth talking about be done.

What did this post achieve? Hardly anything. It’s a post made on a personal blog.

(Note: I apologise if this post sounded critical, a blog post isn’t the most effective medium for this topic hence why I write extremely rarely about it – oh, and if you enjoyed the first video, here’s another one you might like)

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KDE 4.2′s getting down on it.

Firstly. KDE 4.2 has been released. It’s what the buzz has been about in the Linux community these days. When will it be out? Will my distro release it on time? Well, happy to say that the #gentoo-kde channel went crazy about it and had the tarballs to begin working on about 2.5 hours before official release time. I’m running KDE snapshots so I personally won’t notice much of a difference except for some really awaited for bugfixes (such as the to-desktop glitch and the kmail+gmail segfaults).

In other news, if you want to tell your friends they have failed, you can now use FAILnation.com. If you need a free temporary file host online you can use upload.FAILnation.com, and if you need to paste text, you can use paste.FAILnation.com. Those who check my Twitter would already know about this though ;)

OK, I’ve given up on this post. I was going to share a bit more but that would mean not getting other stuff done.

Sorry.

Perhaps next time?

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