Category Evil

Click on title to see all pages in this category.

The Worst Evil Of Them All

DigitalMillenniumCopyrightAct - Be afraid. Be very afraid.

True evil:

Meta evil:

Technogeek evil:

PulseLogic

And somewhat milder (CategoryConsideredHarmful):

I came across this page and smiled, for the pages selected here capture a certain style of wiki debate I enjoy. I strongly endorse the original creator of this page's choice of items to collect together. The name CategoryConsideredHarmful would arguably be more precise, but I am all for cool concise wiki names - a short if slightly misleading name for the category seems better to me. Anyone visiting soon sees what it is really about.

There used to be a number of objections on this page to the existence of this category. Somebody deleted them without a trace, so I'll try to summarize: What's the point of CategoryEvil, anyway? How is it meaningful to group things together based on somebody calling them evil? We might as well have CategoryThingsPeopleLike?. [Ok, done!] -- francis

CategoryWhimsy?

PleasePleaseDontCategorizeEveryPageOnWiki

You asked "what's the point of [this page]?", and I answered: whimsy. I just did it in less words, and now like the zen parable I have said too much.

Someone wrote "Why?" next to "MicroSoft" above. That depends on which meaning of Evil this page uses: the English meaning, the Hacker meaning, or the AD&D meaning.

My dictionary suggest the English meaning implies wrongness, and causing people harm. Certainly, Microsoft has caused many of its competitors (and even some of its customers and suppliers!) harm, but it is a matter of debate whether this is wrong, or merely a logical side-effect of something like "fair competition."

The Hacker meaning is entirely relative to the speaker or author, and merely indicates a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. So Microsoft is evil just because whoever wrote this page thinks that they're not worth the effort. It actually makes sense, given this definition, to say "Microsoft isn't good or bad, they're just evil."

The AD&D meaning is a character attribute, part of a tuple called an alignment, which represents the character's overall attitude. An Evil character won't bother to consider any consequences of doing whatever they have to in order to accomplish whatever goal he or she has - and if people get hurt, well, that's too bad. Interestingly enough, Evil characters don't explicitly seek to cause harm in and of itself - it would be a waste of their energy to do something that didn't benefit them in some way. [aka sociopath, or amoral, or a number of other unsavory things]

Of these three, Microsoft seems to fit the AD&D meaning best. Everything the corporation does is consistent with a Chaotic Evil alignment.