Stop the madness

Last week a work email thread exploded into a huge spam clusterfuck. Here's the setup;

Hundreds of people are added to an email group. This group is added to an automated notification system that alerts users when there are network issues. The network is massive - nation wide. Therefore, we start getting quite a few of these emails and they are irreleveant to the vast majority of us.

One person "replies all" and says "please remove me from this thread". That's all it took before dozens of people were doing the same. Even when asked to stop, and given instructions on how to unsubscribe - the replies just kept coming. What was even more amusing were the people that replied all to say "stop the madness" and ask other's not to reply all. They don't seem to understand that in their attempt to stop the reply all spam, they are simply adding to the spam by doing the reply all.

This was my very favorite one;

_____________________________________________
From: blah blah
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 2:45 PM
To: blah blah; VA WAN Notifications
Subject: RE: HOW TO GET REMOVED FROM THE LIST

Please stop the madness and follow the instructions as per Janet's email.

Notice how perfect that is. She's asking people to stop the madness by referring to somebody else's email that gave people instructions on how to stop the madness, thus all she did was add to the spam and offered nothing new. She was, after all, trying to cut down the spam but did the complete opposite of that.

Now, normally I just delete everything, or create an outlook rule so that the emails are automatically deleted, but I simply could not resist that one. So, I wrote the author back. Note, I did not "reply all", because I'm not a complete retard.

____________________________________________
From: me
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 3:07 PM
To: Dummy
Subject: RE: HOW TO GET REMOVED FROM THE LIST

I wonder how many "stop the madness" emails need to get sent "reply all" in order to stop the madness.. so more people don't send more emails asking more people to stop the madness by replying all.

Better still.. replying all to ask people to refer to somebody else's email that was sent in reply to all in order to resolve the issue of the largest single spam episode I can remember, makes perfect sense.

Sadly, I didn't hear back from her.

Which raises another point I've been thinking about.

Now, I work in a large IT shop. Everyone is supposed to be super smart, but for some reason there are still a lot of complete retards. So, you stop and think, "hey.. if that's a computer engineering field and there's a lot of retards in it, does that mean there are retards in every field?".

The answer is yes, yes there are.

Does that mean you may go to a doctor and he's a complete retard? Yep. Does that mean your lawyer may be a complete retard? Oh yes, very possible.

Does that mean that members of the main-stream media are complete retards? Now there's the rub.

A lot of us that consider ourselves to be in the "reality based community" wonder why it is that the media does something like this.

PART 1—STILL CRAZY: Al Gore was right about global warming—way back in the 1980s. He was also right on internal combustion. And oh yes, he was right on Iraq, in a prophetic speech in September 02—a speech Joe Klein praised at the time. In a rational world, this would make Gore a reigning star—but we live in the world of a millionaire press corps, and we suffer, every day, from its judgments. On Friday morning, Michael Kinsley heaped torrents of praise on McCain, who was wrong. But how does the pundit corps treat Gore, the man was actually right on Iraq? On this weekend’s Chris Matthews Show, one empty scribe turned to another (Joe Klein), who then said what they’ve said all along:

KLEIN (5/21/06): You know, there’s a big question here. If you read Al Gore’s speech just before the war in Iraq where he came out against it, it’s a brilliant speech. If you saw Al Gore delivering it, he looked like a madman.

MATTHEWS: Kathleen, you wrote a column recently—I like the phraseology—you said Al Gore is “one slice short of a loaf.” (Group laughter) I mean, that’s like they say up in Massachusetts, they say things like, “He’s got a few shingles missing from the roof.” What’s your point? Is he a little nutty, are you saying?

So how does one go from being "right" to being a "madman"? I keep wondering about how it is possible that the media keeps beating the McCain saint drum when the facts are completely flipped from rational observation?

How can this be?

Occam's razor. The media employes a bunch of really stupid people. I mean - really so fucking stupid that if it weren't for making up a bunch of bullshit, and looking good in front of a camera, they'd be homeless, whacked out coke whores. I know it's hard to believe, but trust me. When you work in a scientific field, and you see a number of people who couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag, you realize that no profession is exempt from stupid.