We seem to be part of an enormous psychology experiment. Will the citizens or any of their "Leaders" do ANYTHING now that they know that their government is defiantly and abjectly unaccountable and that a crime many levels of magnitude beyond the capability of the human imagination seems to be in progress?
https://twitter.com/Public_Citizen/status/1271099152706011137
Allow me to illustrate: $500,000,000,000 is $1M dollars per day for 1,370 years.
I enjoy spending time with many of the people on Facebook. I’ve also had to endure more than a few rude exchanges with other Facebook users. On several occasions over the past two years, I’ve reached out to a FB user from my city who seemed rude. I sent a private FB message and I wrote something like this: “Hey, I’d bet that we have a lot in common. Would you be interested in having a face to face conversation, perhaps over coffee?” Several people accepted my invitations and every one of these conversations was cordial and productive. Several of these relationships are ongoing. We don’t agree on everything, but these in-person conversations are well worth it. I get the gift of learning how to see the world through the eyes of another person and that’s always a good thing. Also, we inevitably find out that we have many things in common, just as Donald Brown established in his classic 1991 work: “Human Universals.”
Over the past couple of years, it seems that FB has become an even more contentious place. It is increasingly expected that people will preach at each without a willingness to be changed by new information. When I offer information or ask a question on FB, I often receive huffy pushbacks, accusations, ridicule and name-calling instead of open-minded fact-finding and a willingness to start the conversation by finding each other where we are. The bad behavior we see is clearly not how adults should be interacting, but I don’t place all of the blame on the FB users. The format of social media dehumanizes us to each other, making it easy to lash out at mere words on a page, distracting us from the reality that real human beings seeking connections are writing those words. This is more than a frustration. This non-stop boorish behavior is convincing us that it is impossible to have conversations with those who see the world differently than we see it.
With this in mind, I’d like to offer FB this free idea: Face2Facebook. Here’s how it would work. If you believe that someone is being rude to you on FB, click the Face2Facebook button and it will bring up a scheduling app for both you and “the rude person.” The app asks both of you to designate various times when you would be available to have a ten-minute video conversation through FB. When that date and time arrives, the app will encourage you to start by getting to know each other as people by discussing a bit about each other’s family, community and interests. Only then should you ask each other about the topic that gave rise to the contentiousness. If you are both brave, you’ll listen to each other with open minds, putting each other’s best foot forward. A timer will ding after ten minutes, at which point you can (but need not) say farewell to each other. The best outcome is that each of you will be reminded that you were communicating with another human being. You will be reminded that there was a person behind those words. Perhaps the app will ask you to rate each other on whether you were good listeners. After you complete the ten-minute video conversation, Face2Facebook will publish a public acknowledgement that the two of you reached out to each other and had a conversation.
Not that every conversation will be easy or fun, but isn’t this worth a try? Maybe that conversation will change how you think about a topic. Then again, that video might only reveal that that “53-year old engineer” was a 14-year old boy whose highest aspiration is piss others off. If the other person refuses to talk to you on a video, perhaps this could be indicated on their profile so that the FB community would see statistics regarding who requests conversations and who cowardly refuses to meet on Face-to-Facebook.
This is only a rough draft idea, not a polished app. I don’t know if this is really workable. I do hope that FB might consider something like this because we desperately need something to get us out of our social media downward spiral.
I'm receiving ever-more angry barking and name-calling instead of explanations from those advocating political positions across the entire spectrum. Also,it seems that we should give the phrase "I don't know" a formal official burial this year. The phrase has disappeared from social media, along with its siblings, humility and self-critical thought.
This post was inspired by this Tweet by Geoffrey Miller:
Interesting stats on Religiosity from Pew, published in October, 2019.
In my view, there are also many other forms of groupishness that I see as religious or quasi religious that are not considered by these surveys. I also suspect that as traditional religions melt away, other groups that don't look like traditional religions at first glance, but which have similar functions, take their place.
Bloodthirsty utopians have a plan. pic.twitter.com/Zl2epBsZGf
— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) June 5, 2020
This unhinged and dangerous hyperbole would drive out ALL investment and leave us with smoldering carcasses where there used to be imperfect but livable cities. Without police, who would you call when you are carjacked? Carjackings happen in my city neighborhood every couple months. Who is your female friend going to call when someone rapes her? Who will protect the firefighters when your house is on fire? Next time someone puts a gun to your head (which happens periodically in my neighborhood), is the solution to talk nicely with that hoodlum and reason with him? Why aren't we hearing uniform battle cries to reform police departments and demilitarize police departments rather than these disturbingly common demands to kill cops and abolish police departments? I thought that only Trump was capable of such nonsensical blather.
These messages seem to be the far left version of the Libertarian wet dream where all we need to do is abolish government and everything will automatically be great.