How To Bea Social Commentator

In just three easy steps!

Pick any political or economic philosophy that has been discredited by mainstream society. Communism and fascism are the easy choices, but other possibilities include colonialism, militarism, socialism, libertarianism, religious fundamentalism, monarchy, despotism, feudalism, or anarchy.
Find three ways in which your society is similar to a society that is associated with the system you picked in step 1. Anyone can find three ways in which one society is similar to another, but if you are lazy, you may decide to stop after finding only one or two.
Write an essay pointing out those similarities between your society and the "bad" society, then conclude that your own society is illegitimate and hypocritical, and therefore does not have the moral authority to continue whatever policies you want stopped.

Adherents of this technique are sure that it works. Whatever the social issue is (war, poverty, injustice, health, education, religion, race), this technique will lead to discussions that are insightful and enlightening.

This same technique can also be used for other kinds of commentary. Don't like a new programming language? Find the similarities between it and COBOL. Don't like a development methodology? Find the similarities between it and the techniques used on some failed project. Don't like a software vendor? Find the similarities between it and Standard Oil or Enron.

Go ahead, try it! Anyone can do it, without the need for real understanding of the issues or difficult thinking. Just look around, and you will see plenty of examples.

A good place to hone such commentary is TheReformSociety. So long as you observe its screwy PatternForm ...

Santayana said (in effect), "Those that do not study history are doomed to repeat it." The Schrader Corollary to Santayana's Maxim is, "Those who study history are doomed to stand by and watch it be repeated -- in real time." Please don't try to whitewash the legitimate observations made here or elsewhere about historical patterns cropping up again. Fascism springs to mind for some reason. -- MartySchrader

Some who study history see it being repeated everywhere they look. They observe similarities while ignoring or dismissing the differences and complexities. Authors who use the "three easy steps" to generate OffTopic wiki pages are worthy of all the mockery we can muster. -- KrisJohnson

Comparing different systems is of great importance to understanding how they work. Often that will involve noting that dissimilarities aren't relevant to the properties under consideration, or are not enough to change the fundamentals of how the situation works. A lot of garbage can be created in this fashion, but that's also where most valuable discussion comes from. It isn't the basic concept that's the problem, it's that it can and frequently is poorly applied. But it is a bad idea to mock an approach because it can give wrong answers. -- AnonymousDonor

Unless the mock is meant in jest, which I take this page to be. It's not a serious argument against social commentary, is it? -- BrentNewhall

Just curious, but do we have any "social commentary" on wiki other than "sloppy"?

Most of the text we have suffers from the shortcoming mentioned above, namely that it looks at a very small amount of the source data. This is to a fair extent, however, because wiki is not really an appropriate forum for conducting in-depth sociological analysis. So we get some discussion here that is consistent with more accurate stuff, and some which is just blaring of poorly conceived ideas. It would be helpful, I imagine, if people in disputes brought new evidence to the table, whereas complaining that what has been brought isn't enough (as above) is not especially useful. So, yeah. Wiki has very little in the way of complete social commentary, but in places can be a decent guide to it.

Additionally, many of the social issues we discuss here have relevance to the technical decisions we need to make as technologists, managers, and users. It is unkind to simply dismiss out of hand those discussions that are not well formed or well informed without attempting to bring fresh insight and understanding to light. Should some Wikizen happen to make a statement you find dumb in the extreme the correct response is not, "Get a life, loozer!" It is, "Perhaps you were not aware of this," and proceed to educate the offender. This is how Wiki works. Also, WhyWikiWorks.

But I also see no reason why there shouldn't be some lighthearted poking-of-fun at repeated patterns of erroneous argument. This, too, can be part of educating the offender.

I don't think it can. Just curious, but do we have any "lighthearted poking-of-fun" (though the above is mockery, plain and simple) on wiki that has served to educate the "offender"?

How would we know?