this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Yeah, I mean that's kinda of the whole conceit of Behind the Bastards, the host is explicitly and inherently calling everyone they cover a bastard by default, but if you listen to Ed Zirtron's appearances, he always just immediately wants to boil them down to a bastard as the root cause of their actions, when the literal entire point of that show is to examine what factors and backgrounds turn someone into a bastard.
Or again, I just can't understand why he would be flabbergasted by a company naming their alert system after an early engineers' tank top colour. Does he think all quirkiness and whisky should be outlawed from the workplace?
Yes, there's value in calling people bastards and scum and villains, but Ed Zirtron does it immediately, every time, which makes his judgement of them untrustworthy. There's the old adage that "if everything hurts when you poke it your finger is broken", in Ed's case given that everyone is always a bastard or a hero, it seems more plausible to me that he has some pathological need to boil everything down to simple binary systems.
There's quirkiness and [whimsy?], and there's needless obfuscation. 'Code Yellow' meaning 'Code Red' is dumb. Like I get it, it probably started as an equivalent to 'Code Wayne' and subverting expectations is funny, but it's a punchline from an old adult swim show more than anything. I get that Google HQ isn't a Hospital or the military, but sometimes clarity is important. More now because they're actively doing contracts for governments and militaries, not a scrappy startup. They became a trusted resource and are now cannibalizing themselves for short term gains.
Whimsy at the top of a company while their workers are protesting their actions isn't great.
If someone at a company tells you "code yellow" do you stop what you're doing and follow your drilled into memory code yellow training from school, or do you say "hey, what does code yellow mean?". They're not obfuscating anything, they've just got a company procedure with a quirky name.
Shitting on that just shows that you are looking for things to shit on them for, rather than being a thoughtful critic pointing out valid flaws.
I feel Iike the correct application of this analogy here is "if everyone you examine is a bastard, you're the bastard."