The Strength of One’s Convictions

The old limerick don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the communist party was running through my head the other day. It must have been a bastardized version of the line from The Producers (1968) because I cannot find an original reference to it. The thing that got me thinking about the limerick was that I am certain there are communists who believe it with the same conviction as those who believe abortion is murder or the earth was created only a couple thousand years ago. Now there are some conviction that I just cannot accept as being in any way logical and there are those that I can accept as having some internal consistency. Then I realized that my convictions are just as crazy. Convictions like that open minded people would believe in liberal ideals. I am not sure if there even are open minded people. Just people who figure they came to their conviction through rational thought. Another one of my convictions is that I don’t think I should have to pay for anti-virus software. I mean, if someone is selling defective software that could damage the users computer or allow identity theft then isn’t it there responsibility to fix their software? So my compromise was to use a free anti-virus program. Specifically AVG’s free program, which was recently at version 8.5. Then I got a pop-up message saying they were discontinuing support for AVG Free 8.5 and that I needed to upgrade to version 9 for like $50. WTF was my first response. I don’t want to pay for anti-virus software. Maybe I should finally ‘be a smarty’ and switch to Linux. But I figured I would look to see if there was another free anti-virus program available. Well, there was and interestingly enough it was AVG Free 9.0 which you can get here. I understand commercial efforts, but it still pisses me off when they try to scare you into spending money. Well not me. And Micro$oft shouldn’t expect me to run out and upgrade to Windows 7 any time soon either.

Grumble … grumble … grumble …