Two years ago I made a decision to leave Facebook, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in recent years. AFter having spent roughly a decade on it, at that point I realized I was wasting too much time there. It began as a fun diversion, a fun way to reconnect & stay connected with old friends, a good forum to post pics from my tour groups, and later my family, not to mention some great boards for some of my favorite topics, such as Slayer and The Philadelphia Eagles. And of course, I loved the political food fights, and it being a a source to promote my blog!
I did enjoy it for a while, even though I had to place some limits on myself. One of the first lines I drew was turning everything off at 10:00 PM. I didn’t need whatever topics were flying going through my bed at the end of the night. After a few nights of spending hours going back & forth with political arguments I set myself to one comment on any thread per day. During the day I’d read whatever excrement the Lefties were throwing my way, write whatever responses I had on my lunch hour, and would post them when I’d get home from work before tuning out the threads until the next morning, lest I’d be tempted to respond. Even though nobody ever moves anyone’s opinions in scoial media, unlike Lfties I enjoy having my opinions challenged. And I liked getting opposing views to ensure that I was keeping myself educated as to what the opposing side believed. Sometimes things would get heated, but no more or less than would occasionally during debates over a few beers at a local watering hole,
Over time though, things changed. If I had to trace back to a starting point, I’d have to say it was when Obama was first elected in 2008. I’m not going into the reasons here, as they’ll be covered in tomorrow’s post, but I noticed that Lefties were getting angrier. Things got progressively worse until 2016, And for similar reasons. If Lefties were angry under Obama, under the Trump administration they became absolutely nail spitting furious. As much as they hated Dubya during his eight years, he was at least gentlemanly enough to just laugh and shrug off every smear and piece of venom that they hurled at him. And as much as The Radical Left hated McCain and Romney during their brief stints as their Emmanuel Goldsteins, nothing compared to the rage they felt ast the notion of having a Republican President who had the audacity to hit back at his critics. I don’t need to go into detail about how that spilled down to the Normals who committed the mortal sin of not hating Trump as much as The Radical Left does. But that’s not what drove me from Facebook.
This is the point where I’m supposed to write about some over the top moment, but that wasn’t the case. Lefties were getting angry that as their tone got nastier, I also modified my tactics. While I made a point to not draw first blood, I’d always keep political debates civil until the moment any Lefty crossed the line. At that point the gloves came off, but I restricted myself to matching their tone. It got received exactly as well as one would expect. My favorite exchange came when I commented on a Lefty friends’ post, and one his friends who I’d never met threw down. I don’t even remember what the original topic was, but with each post I’d drop I kept making the argument that Obama did more to hurt black Americans than Robert Byrd or Ralph Northam could have ever dreamed from under their Klan hoods. Like any good Lefty he ignored my facts and threw out some tripe. Finally when he decided he wanted to wrap things up he wrote a long paragraph with some typically lazy Lefty straw man arguments alleging Conservative racism and ended it with, “Now you aren’t an asinine racist, are you Brother Bob?” To which I calmly reiterated all of my examples of Obama’s racism, pointed out that one person in the discussion condemned all of it, while one not only refused to condemn them, but seemed to use his silence as approval. I finished by saying that there seems to be an asinine racist on the thread, and asked him if he agreed. I would have loved to have read his response (I saw he did in my notifications), but after he wrote his response when I tuned back in the next day he had blocked me. Not long after that our mutual friend (who had the odd habit for an adult male of somewhat regularly talking about me behind my back) unfriended me. Within the week a friend of 20 years who rarely made an argument that didn’t descend into personal attacks went into a rage and blocked me because instead of indulging his personal attacks and trying to reason, I just reworded his excrement flinging and sent it back his way. As Boomer Esiason might have said back in the day of ESPN’s awesome W.A.T.C.H. campaign, “The program is working.”
Far from burning me out, annoyng people who deserved to be angered was always satisfying. Interestingly, the worst ones were old friends of mine, and by the end the only people with whom I could consistently have intelligent debates with were a hardcore gay activist from San Francisco and a twenty something grad student Bernie Bro. Yes, seriously. And in the end, what ended things was me realizing that even with fewer people to debate I was still spending too much time just scrolling through my timeline to see what everyone was up to. Nothing painful, but I realized it wan’t he best use of my time. And as simple as that, I decided to stop. I allowed a few converstion threads to run their course, and then I dropped my farewell post. It wasn’t easy, as this was in the midst of the Kavanaugh WItch Hunt, and the weapons-grade Libtarditude being dropped was painful to not give the mockery it so richly deserved. But I knew I did the right thing, and I never looked back. And what a difference it made – immediately I was getting more things done, getting to bed at night earlier (mostly because I wasn’t playing catch up with my chores after spending hours on FB), and it felt great.
Unfortuantely, I haven’t been able to divest completely. Because my neighborhood and Little Bob’s school have good boards set up, I have to spend a little bit of time each day looking for breaking news, especially given the fight over getting Little Bob back into school. FB also has a great Philadelphia Eagles board, for which I turned off notifications given that the Eagles are no longer a part of my life. I still use FB to promote my blog posts, as some of you might have found this story. And I try to like or comment anyone who’s kind enough to take the time to comment on one of my posts, but please don’t be offended if I don’t do the same for yours. I try to keep out of the cesspool lest I let myself get sucked into some insane converstion. The rare times I let my guard down and scroll through my timeline, well, I get what I deserve. For every one or two cool things I see, I see 5-10 that are genuinely painful. Old friends who never posted anything political are now covid paranoid and calling Kyle Rittenhouse a White Supremacist. Friends who were mildly leftist are now frothing at the mouth angry and “Beautiful Mind” paranoid. One woman from my school days now lives in California, and while she never flaunts it, if you look closely at her posts you can tell that she and her husband have done incredibly well for themselves. Never political previously, she is rabidly anti-Trump, recently complaining that for the first time ever her taxes went up. I din’t have the heart to tell her that her grievance is with Gavin Newsome. not Trump. Of course I didn’t, and you get the idea.
I’ll leave you with a question about the anti-Trump hatred. Sister Babe and I are connected to many Leftists on Facebook. And while we’ve noticed that not all of them are angry, but we’ve noticed that there is a distinct difference between the calm versus the angry. Why? Tune in tomorrow for the second installment, Why Are Leftists Perpetually Angry?
https://twitter.com/SteveInmanUIC/status/1320439103691935747
Andy Tifa tries to sucker punch a Patriot and pays the price. pic.twitter.com/HzbGq0IuBP
— Steve Inman (@SteveInmanUIC) October 25, 2020
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Cross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog
