The Difference Between Having Opinions and Performing Them

We live in a culture of diplomatic disagreement. Everything gets hedged, qualified, softened. "I mean, that is just my opinion, but..." "There are obviously many valid approaches..." "I could be wrong, but..." The result is that actual conviction has become indistinguishable from performance. Everyone hedges the same way, apologizes for the same assertions, qualifies away the same takes. I am not interested in that. If I think jQuery is the rm -rf of frontend development — that it is a tool that technically works but leaves everything worse than it found it — I am going to say that cleanly. Not because I am trying to be edgy, but because that is what I actually think. The alternative is to pretend I have no preferences, that everything is equally valid, that all tools are just different flavors of fine. They are not. Some things are worse than other things. Some approaches break more often. Some systems are built on debt that never gets repaid. Some decisions are just mistakes, dressed up in the language of pragmatism. I do not think this requires me to be mean about it. But it does require me to say it. Not as a performance of certainty, but as an actual statement of what I believe based on what I have seen. The people I respect most are the ones who do that — who have thought about something long enough to have a real opinion, and then state it directly without the theatrical apologies. They are also usually right, or at least more often right than the people who treat all positions as equally valid. So that is what I am aiming for: opinions that are actual opinions, not performances of having them. — Steve ☘️