(Doing it best.)
Posted on 02/25/2015 3:01:20 PM PST by Chris Shugart Uncommon Sense
I always find it distressing when a Facebook friend of mine posts something appallingly stupid. It’s one thing when someone you don’t know does it. A total stranger who you’ll never meet is quickly forgotten. Someone you know isn’t so easy to dismiss.
It’s the same sort of unsettling feeling I get when I try to imagine the sort of people who buy those tacky commemorative plates they advertise in TV Guide. I realize there are people out there who have no sense of taste whatsoever. But I’m perfectly happy to remain in comfortable ignorance, knowing that I’ll probably never have to experience the creepiness of walking into someone’s living room and seeing a Prince William Royal Wedding plate adorning the mantelpiece.
On the other hand, when someone I know makes an attempt to inflate a weak premise by providing a link to some ridiculous article fraught with tortured logic and perverse moral equivalence, I’m no longer dealing with a nameless anybody. Gone is that element of anonymity that makes it easy to jump on faceless idiotic bloggers struggling for coherency. Instead, familiarity instantly inserts reality into the dialogue. And it forces me to acknowledge that everyone doesn’t think like I do.
The complexion of the conversation changes completely once you’re in an online exchange with someone you know. I feel obligated to tolerate my friends on things for which I normally have such a low tolerance otherwise. And much as I try to be polite about it, I’m not always so diplomatic.
I suppose there’s a bottom line to my dilemma. I’ll occasionally follow the advice of the late American philosopher, Rodney King, who asked us, “Can we all get along?” It’s a nice sentiment, but one I don’t always subscribe to. The iconoclast in me prefers to challenge the orthodoxies of others. It’s an effort that hardly ever brings about a good result.
There’s another saying which comes to mind, and it might be the best advice of all. It comes from Linus, from the Peanuts comic strip. “There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.” If I were really smart, I’d probably stick with that.
My wife, however, loves Facebook because she can converse with a lot of other relatives, mostly females, and learn about events happening in the family. I have scant interest in those mundane sorts of things.
LOL!
My sentiments exactly. I figure I'm on their list -- but at least they had to read through some Free Republic posts to get there...
Yes.
Get new friends?......
Once I see that a friend or family member has a liberal take on some issue, I quietly stop following them on Face Book. They never know and I live a calm life.
That description is totally unfair to ulcerated toad rectums.
I see it all day long.
Most of it I ignore but on rare occasions I tell them ‘You’re smarter than that.’ This statement keeps it from getting confrontational but also lets them know they are falling prey to lazy internet memes and mass media myths.
The use of private messages can be used instead of embarrassing a friend in public. Sometimes my brother posts stuff after one too many.
I am still waiting for my trip to Disneyland from Bill Gates and Walt Disney Jr., my 30 million dollars from a Nigerian banker, my hard-drive to evaporate because I didn’t forward an email to 50 people while I am baking cookies from a stolen Niemen Marcus recipe. I don’t have time for facebook.
Never been on Facebook; never will be.
The very first time I heard about Facebook and learned the “concept” behind it, I called it “a government monitored, if not government controlled, personal information mining operation”.
I solved this by not having friends
I suspect an ulcerated toad rectum must have hurt you very badly at some point in your life for you to feel such animosity towards them.
Comparing them to Nancy Pelosi? That is cold, man. Just plain cold.
Works for me.
” I don’t do Facebook, too open, too personal. FreeRepublic is just right. “
Dittos to you Ditter. My feelings exactly. Thank you Jim.
I am into genealogy.
What this means is I often spend time reading old small town newspapers.
One of the things that surprised me (while it shouldn’t have but I just did not think about it) was that they all have pages of local for want of a better term, “gossip”.
The newspapers reported on everything going on in town. Besides who is getting married, or new babies, there are also items on who is going where to visit whom. Or, who is in town visiting the family.
It dawned on me these newspapers were the 1900s version of facebook, or more likely, facebook is the 21st century of the small town newspaper.
Facebook allows people to share what is going on in their life even when they are hundreds (if not thousands of miles between them).
Facebook is just a tool, do some people use it poorly, of course. But it also provides a service that people want. You don’t want to use it, no body is going to make you. your choice.
I have a couple. Most of my Facebook friends are family or from church, who don’t generally post political stuff that irritates me, but I have a couple of friends who go off the deep end pretty regularly. I ignore a lot of it, unless it gets to be an every day thing. One of them is rabidly anti-gun; I don’t even own a gun, but after some event that set her off I finally got annoyed enough to respond to absolutely every anti-gun post with the actual study and the actual facts.
I’ve argued with her in real life so I was pretty sure she’d blow up, then drop the whole subject, so long as I stayed cool and insisted on facts rather than emotions, which seems to have happened. That, or she’s hiding her anti-gun posts from me (dunno if that’s possible or not).
Did the same with the other one when she was going nuts about Ferguson. Neither one has unfriended me, rather to my surprise, but they quit posting so much political stuff after getting swatted with enough facts.
My in-laws just unfriend me when I do that. Either way, not much of a problem anymore. :D
(Doing it best.)
I deleted my Facebook account over a year ago. Facebook initially was a fun way to keep in touch with old friends, but the Progressive Left destroyed it with their incessant propagandizing.
You must be young. All my friends are basically 45 years old with a few younger and a few older so I don’t have any lefty stuff going on and I have over 670 “Friends”.
“You must be young.”
I feel young, but 45 has come and gone for me.
I live in the Metropolitan NY area and went to high school in a wealthy largely Jewish neighborhood in the Philadelphia suburbs. Thus many of my “Facebook Friends” thought they were oh-so-clever posting “Being Liberal” memes every day.
To me this is like going to a high school reunion and handing out political tracts. I never had any desire to discuss politics on Facebook. I was glad just to see pictures of people’s kids and read about their vacations. I ended up feeling like I either had to argue with the endless barrage of Leftist B.S. or I would be agreeing with it by default.
Wife uses it and when she "shares" with me, I'm glad I decided to forgo the "pleasures" of intrusive social media.
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