How Drupal Helped Attack Sotomayor or Drupal: The An Equal Opportunity Offender
By Alex Kessinger on
Find me on: Google+, Twitter, and email
\ 
\ \ Tools are not the end all be all. Some people can use shitty tools in brillant ways, like the photoshop guy. In a way what you thought was a shitty tool, isn’t. Still, I find that people who choose bad tools, are bad people to work with. When I was a student I had to deal with this everyonce in awhile.
As a student who had computer skills, thats what they were, computer skills there was no differentiating them, just computer skills, I was often asked for help. I was working with a large team of people. It included at least 4 different departments, and we were working with a team at San Francisco’s City Hall.
The project was started for a number of reasons, probably one of its weakness was that it wasn’t defined narrowly enough. One of the reasons was to create a groupware platform, that lived on the web. It was going to be everything to everybody, a warning should have popped into my head right then, but I was young and naive. I suggested Drupal. They came back with Microsoft Sharepoint, and another close source portal.
I will admit at this point in time I was a bit of zealot for open source, I wasn’t being pragmatic. I railled against anything but Drupal. Even though I was being a bit over zealous, I still think Drupal was going to be there best shot. They could have got alot of what they wanted done using Drupal, and they would have been apart of a great ecosystem where they could get help. In the end they chose to go with a hosted platform, and I chose to leave the workingroup.
What does this have to do with being offensive, and taking down supreme court justices? Well here it is. I was reading this article, The Story Behind, The Story. What caught my eye was the JCN Network. I wanted to see the website of these people, I knew it was going to be bad, and funny looking. It wasn’t.
It was a straightforward, good looking, clean website. Not flashy, but it was on message. I don’t agree with there message, but its clear. It occured to me that this site might be running on drupal. There is this site, http://isthissitebuiltwithdrupal.com/.
\ 
\
so back to my point about choosing the right tools. Its not the tool that makes the man, but the man that makes the tool, right. Well mayby, but when someone comes to me and is telling me how great frontpage extensison are because I can publish my website directly to the server from my computre. I laugh in there face, and now I run as far away as I can because they aren’t intrested in what I have to say, really, they aren’t intrested.
The people that militant liberal people hate, are choosing the better tools, and its working. Large national movments are based on more then tools, obama didn’t win because he had a facebook page I know, but in the trenchs these things matter, and the smart conservatives are choosing the good tools. If I was a liberal, I would be looking at this and saying , “hey mayby they have somethign there.”
to comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829441