Interesting article by Laurie Graham on her Sunday Growler blog about how to react to Facebook “friends” posting left-wing messages, particularly anti-Romney stuff. (You can read her post here.) Same thing happens to me frequently. It’s inevitable, given that some of my “friends” (and friends) are, inevitably, either current or former BBC employees. But given that some of my “friends” seem to be intent on entering the Guinness Book of Records for having the most contacts, do they seriously imagine that all of us share their political opinions? |
| John Kerry |
A six-month silence followed, until he needed my help with something or other.
I just can’t imagine a right-winger doing that. For instance, my conservative Facebook friends never post anything even vaguely political. When I signed up to the service I had vaguely intended to post snippets from my ball-bouncingly entertaining posts, but rapidly realised that I’d have to unfriend a number of people I quite like remaining in touch with (albeit in an ambient sort of way) or risk offending them. But some of them don’t seem to feel any such qualms: one of them keeps posting articles about what liars Romney and Ryan are, and although I’m strongly tempted to respond with a volley of abuse, my innate good manners will prevent me from doing so (for a while, at least – I'm beginning to feel distinctly David Bannerish).
Of course, here on my blog, I loudly trumpet my political views. But no one has to read them. Social media’s different, because it's like standing at a bar and having lots of people you know popping over one after another to tell you about their holidays, or what their kids are up to, or to recommend a book or a record they've just heard. What you want when you're nursing a drink is an entertaining bit of chit-chat - you don't want to be hectored, challenged or preached at. It’s a bit like those clunking political messages currently being remorselessly inserted into The Archers – they come across as inappropriate, insensitive and, well, rude (and they're driving my wife - a life-long fan - up the wall).
The problem, of course, is that Left-Liberals are so blithely and un-self critically convinced of the rightness of their facile, self-pleasuring opinions that they assume anyone who doesn’t share them is either mad or evil – or both. If they like you, they assume your conservatism’s a temporary affliction of which you’ll eventually be cured. (In my case, it’s definitely terminal.)
Anyhow, this may all soon be beside the point - my son tells me the young are turning their backs on Facebook in droves. Definitely time to contact my broker and sell those shares.
I disagree. As an Army Officer who has served in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Iraq, and Afghanistan, I have found myself becoming more what you would call "left-wing" - one's colleagues being killed in invasions justified by non-existent weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaida tends to do that.
ReplyDeleteLife's rich tapestry includes people with a variety of formative experiences, and, consequentially, political opinions. Facebook, and the internet environment, reflects that reality. You have the right to disagree with people's opinions, however inarticulately they are expresssed (i.e. the unfortunate 'a$$hat reference). I respectfully submit however, that neither you nor I have the right not to be offended: if we disagree with the posted opinions of people with whom we are "Facebook friends" (noting the subversion of that term in the social media era), we have four options:
1. Ignore them and carry on living our lives.
2. Comment on their post and engage in debate, of the sort which informed the 1787 constitutional convention and enabled the flourishing democracy of which America is so proud today.
3. De-friend them, in so doing making a de facto declaration that our egos are so fragile and our intellects so weak, that we are unable to countenance viewpoints which differ to those we ourselves hold.
4. Hide certain friends' status updates, so that they do not appear in your newsfeed. Personally, I only use this to suppress the tsunami of lobotomised games (Farmville, et al), but it can be used as a form of personalised political censor. This is the solution I commend to you. Google "Hide certain friends' status updates" for info.
:-)
Some interesting points, Anonymous.
ReplyDeleteAs a right-winger who worked for a left-wing organisation for 18 years, I’m surprised to be told I can’t countenance viewpoints which differ from my own – I’ve spent most of my adult life listening to opinions I don’t share, and I have plenty of left-wing friends.
I’ve been accused of many things, but not of having a fragile ego or a “weak intellect”: I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty robust sort of cove with a fairly good brain – but, then, we’re often wrong about ourselves.
There are plenty of political views which I find highly offensive – and I have a perfect right to take offence or not: that’s my choice (or have I misunderstood your point here?).
But of course I’m not actually objecting to people expressing left-wing opinions. What I’m objecting to is where they choose to air those opinions. When I fancy a political ding-dong, I visit websites which pretty much exist for that purpose – there are plenty of them: Facebook is the last place I’d go for political debate. I don’t want to hide friends’ status updates – I'm interested to know what they’re up to. And I don’t want to defriend any of my contacts, because I like them all. As for ignoring the political stuff, well that’s a bit like trying to overlook the fact that the acquaintance with whom you’re having a pleasant chit-chat occasionally lets out an enormous, noisome fart, but doesn’t seem to realise they’re being discourteous: I just wish they’d stop.
I’m genuinely interested to know why colleagues being killed in invasions based on incorrect intelligence would make you more left-wing? Not a facetious question, by the way – genuinely interested to hear the views of someone who’s spent a lot of time risking their life because of political decisions. It’s just that a Labour government decided to send you to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, albeit at the behest of a right-wing American President.
I've been anti-Facebook since an incident in which one of my children's 16th birthday party was advertised on it by a Facebook friend and 140 people turned up instead of the planned 30. I've since been tempted to join simply to do the same to the parents of the unspeakable little oik whom I had to eject for threatening one of the invited guests with a knife. I know where you live punk! So just un-Face yourself Scott, or whatever the technical term is.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous: I'm not sure I'd accept that opposition to war is a left-wing position. No one has ever suggested I'm of the TGMOO tendency and I've argued - Falklands (yes, UK interests at stake), first Iraq war (less clear but justifiable on grounds of wider international interest) Afghanistan (No, not our fight, no identifiable mission goal, no exit strategy, have you read a single history book Tony?) second Iraq ( No, for same reasons, only more so plus the predictable US cock-up factor). I didn't need to be on Facebook to lose lefty friends over the first two and American friends for the other two. In my experience, most British Army officers are far more anti- war than the politicians who decide when to engage. That is not a political position. It's based on an admirably pragmatic view on what is worth putting young British lives at risk for and what is not.
Sunday 12 August 2012: as a favour to some friends, we have put up a couple overnight who now appear, breakfast time, Moss kitchen.
ReplyDeleteNever met them before, they tell me that they both used to work for the BBC and that the BBC is the only trustworthy news organisation in the world. No.2 daughter detects tensing in the muscles but I decide that I can't just burst out laughing, those friends are good friends and I can't do anything to sour their relations with these people in the kitchen. No.2 daughter makes diplomatic comment about something, possibly coffee.
We manage minutes of engaging conversation about English market towns which somehow causes the couple to tell he how awful the British Empire was. I remonstrate slightly but fail to point out that the blood-soaked British Empire is the progenitor of the BBC they love. No.2 daughter points out that it's probably time for my tablets.
They are genuinely lovely in every other way as far as I can tell, I liked them a lot, but what on earth possessed them?
No.2 daughter gave me a copy of Velvet Glove, Iron Fist by Christopher Snowdon, a worldwide history of the anti-smoking campaigns.
ReplyDeleteOnly half way through but can't recommend it highly enough.
The first Europeans ever to smoke tobacco were Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, two crewmen in Christopher Columbus's ship, when they put ashore in Cuba in late 1492. The natives called the pipe they smoked a "toboca" and thus ...
Columbus denounced is men as savages for smoking and the minute they got back to Spain the two of them were banged up by the Inquisition for seven years. Smoking was a heresy – according to the Book of Benson & Hedges? – and should be banned.
This love of banning things, I suggest, is another left-wing foible, of which more anon.
First a bit of background. In 19th century America, real men smoked pipes or cigars. Cigarettes were for effeminate nancy-boy pansy foreigners. Thomas Edison, a keen cigar-smoker, refused to employ cigarette-smokers. Ditto Ford and Kellogg.
The Puritanical streak in the US that preached temperance took in tobacco along the way. We'll ban anything anyone seems to enjoy seems to have been the rule.
They had the wind taken out of their sails during WW1 when General John J Pershing said: "You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco as much as bullets" and promptly cabled Washington for thousands of tons of it, now.
Never mind Pershing, here's Carry:
"Born Carry Arnelia Moore in 1846, Carry A. Nation's story is perhaps the oddest in the history of the temperance movement. Her mother was insane and believed herself to be Queen Victoria. Her father was little better; he responded to his wife's regal fantasies by building her a golden carriage. Carry was a keen and active member of the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League but her first husband, it later transpired, was not only an alcoholic but a smoker and a Freemason. She left him and went on to marry David Nation from whom she acquired the memorable moniker of which she was immensely proud and which she regarded as a symbol of her destiny as the saviour of America. Standing over six feet tall and convinced that she had conversations with Jesus, Nation had an awesome propensity for violence which included, but was not confined to, thwacking courting couples with her umbrella and laying waste to saloons.
"At the age of 53, she felt compelled to charge into a drugstore that was (illegally) selling liquor and, accompanied by another WCTU member, smashed a barrel of whisky with her sledgehammer. With the wind in her sails, she moved on to a nearby town where she attacked three saloons with hammers, rocks and billiard balls all the while shouting "Smash! Smash! For Jesus' sake, smash!" Swapping the sledgehammer for the large hatchet that became her trademark, these spates of anti-saloon violence soon became regular events all over Kansas. She waged a continuous, raging campaign against smokers, drinkers and Freemasons through her publication The Smasher's Mail and offered a policy of direct action she called 'hatchetization' as the solution."
(more to come, slightly more to the point ...)
...
ReplyDeletePoor Carry spent the last 20 years of her life in a lunatic asylum.
Snowdon documents how ASH was set up in the UK with government funding and access to the government PR machine while being treated as a naturally-occurring grass roots organisation.
"ASH then appealed to the British Medical Association to take a harder stance on the smoking issue. As a direct result of this pressure, the BMA announced its new position in 1984, dismissing the argument for freedom of choice by portraying smokers as helpless victims of the voracious tobacco industry's advertising campaigns.
"The era of public health was at hand. Increasingly, doctors emphasised prevention over cure. Gio Gori's safer cigarette project represented the final attempt to find a technological solution to the smoking problem. Thereafter, modification of behaviour - the 'quit-or-die' approach - was viewed as the only answer. From the 1970s, changing people's habits became the overriding aim of a resurgent public health movement which did not limit itself to the issue of smoking - where abstinence was clearly the best advice - but to controlling salt, sugar, fatty foods, alcohol, poverty and environmental pollutants; all of which were regarded as medically suspect.
"This was a momentous shift in emphasis for a medical community which had until recently believed in treating the sick and leaving the well alone, but it was one which, in large part, was forced upon them as the number of genuine medical breakthroughs dwindled ...
"Fitzpatrick is one of a number of writers to have pinpointed the World Health Organisation's Alma-Ata conference, held in the USSR in 1978, as the start of the socialisation of medicine. It was here that the definition of health - previously considered to be the absence of illness - underwent a radical revision. The WHO now defined health as 'a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being' and called it 'a fundamental human right' ...
"[1981] Inequalities of Health had been commissioned by a Labour government that had since been voted out of office and it received a cool reception from Margaret Thatcher (who pointedly released it on a bank holiday). Those who advocated the redistribution of wealth on the pretext of creating 'health equality' were given short shrift on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s and, lacking the power to implement their policies at the highest level, many of them drifted towards the public sector where they found an opportunity to influence attitudes at a gentler, but sustained, level.
"When the long winter of the left finally ended in the mid-1990s, these activists, campaigners and social reformers would re-emerge with a far-reaching public health agenda. For the time being, however, both the British and American government were uneasy about intruding too heavily into the private habits of their citizens, and that included smoking ..."
True? False?