Guilt By Association

This afternoon I was reading an article about John McAfee, wanted in Belize on the suspicion he had murdered his neighbor. If that last name sounds familiar it means you have owned a computer in the last decade, as John McAfee was the creator of McAfee Anti-Virus Software. McAfee has been living in Belize for the last few years while apparently also slowly going out of his mind. Reportedly he had been very active on drug message boards about trying to figure out a way to purify various hallucinogenic drugs while also becoming increasingly withdrawn from the outside world, mostly mingling with local, barely-legal young ladies and employing multiple armed criminals for security purposes. Now he is refusing to turn himself in because he is convinced the police will kill him as soon as he is taken into custody and saying he had nothing to do with the murder. In fact, he claims the people probably intended to kill him and just went to the wrong house because he has be mingling with some bad gangsters. Not exactly the kind of company you would expect a guy who used to work for NASA and once had a personal fortune approaching $100 million to be keeping. I can't tell if the guy is crazy or legitimately right be paranoid, but either way the entire time I was reading the reports I couldn't shake one thought from my head, "I bet he's guilty, because his product sucks."

I can't speak for anyone else, but I find McAfee Virus Software to be somehow both annoying and useless. The problem comes from the fact that their programmers are probably developing this software using computers which have endless supplies of memory, which is not something your average computer users has at their finger tips. Thus, every time the program wants to either scan my computer for viruses or download more programs to ward off harmful programs, it pretty much brings all other business on my computer to a halt. I have tried my best to clean up any unwanted programs and files from my computer to help speed up this process, but considering there I can run multiple other programs at the same time and it doesn't cause my computer to crash, it really can't be anything but this stupid anti-virus software which, oh by the way, does a really crappy job of stopping viruses before they infect my computer. I could forgive it taking up all this memory if it at least worked, but it does not. (For those of you wondering why I don't simply delete it, I often wonder that myself. I guess it is because no one has come to me with anything which works better and part of my brain thinks crappy anti-virus software is better than leaving my computer totally exposed.) The point is, I have not enjoyed this product and lay my lack of satisfaction at the feet of its creator.

Now, you may be wondering what crappy software has to do with a person's guilt in a murder investigation. Well, I like to think that I am the type of person who doesn't randomly judge people until I have had a personal experience with them, but at the same time I am willing to admit that once I have come to a decision on you, there is almost no chance you will be able to go change my mind. Also, I have the bad habit of basing my opinion on things which could very easily be seen as petty and that decision will extend to anything associated with you. This is the same reason I am hesitant to see movies made by certain actors or directors whose previous movies were terrible. This type of bias is exactly why I am always writing posts about how companies should be very careful who they choose as their celebrity endorser, because for every 3 people who are convinced to use a product just because an actor tells them to, there are probably 2 more who will never touch that product because that actor was in a movie they hated. The point is, humans are capable of forming fully-formed opinions based on partial information. Thus, in my mind it is totally plausible that a person who could knowingly sell such a terrible product could also lose his mind while taking drugs and kill his neighbor.

The good part is that I can take some level of comfort from knowing I am far from the only person who does this kind of thing, even though usually this kind of name recognition is a positive. Mostly, it comes in the form of sports fans who refuse to believe that someone who once starred for their favorite team could have gone so far off the rails in their post-playing days. It also appears in the entertainment industry, as seen by all the people who ignored years of evidence and instead thought Michael Jackson was the victim of a global conspiracy. But it can even appear in lower forms of entertainment, as everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame. That is where I see this kind of instant opinion-forming to be really dangerous. This country's judicial system is supposed to be based on the principle that all people are innocent until proven guilty, but as more and more people achieve varying levels of fame, it will only get harder to find jurors who won't go into situations without already having a form an opinion on the defendant. This is why I would never go on a reality show - you would hate to spend years in prison because a couple of the jurors thought you were a jerk after you gave the team they were rooting for a detour during an episode of "Amazing Race". So, I guess the moral of the story is this: while you should always avoid committing a crime, if you have ever been on TV you really need to be on your best behavior. And if you name a product after yourself, make sure it doesn't suck.