Dear Dr. Babooner,
Two years ago I found a childhood friend on Facebook. Delighted, I sent him message after message until he finally friended me.
Now that we know each other again, I am appalled. While I recall us being compatible as 8-year olds, his current political views are so far from mine that seeing his knuckleheaded posts in my Facebook News Feed makes me feel like I am stuck in his basement on a rainy afternoon, playing with his stupid toy soldiers in a pointless game of mock war where we blow things up for no reason and gleefully attack defenseless civilians and I can’t leave because I have to wait for my mom to pick me up but she’s getting her hair done downtown and won’t be here for another two hours and it’s too far to walk home.
Now that I think of it, maybe we weren’t compatible as 8-year olds either.
Dr. Babooner, I’m a noncompetitive and tolerant person. My ideas are no better than anyone else’s. I’m willing to be friendly and open with all people, even if we don’t agree. And I’d like to think that my philosophy of acceptance, my devotion to clear reasoning and my general aura of non-insanity can gradually change people’s hearts until they think about things in exactly the same way I do, no matter how wrong they were at the start.
However, I really, really want to instantly and permanently “unfriend” this new/old acquaintance so I won’t be exposed to his moronic ideas every single day. If I have to read another one of his rants, I’m afraid I’ll become a screeching, spittle-soaked lunatic, shouting for a posse to visit equal parts justice and humiliation to his unsuspecting head. And if I do that, how can I hang on to my self image as a non-judgmental person?
Sincerely,
Seeing Unsympathetic Political Epistles Rouses Inklings Of Rage
I told S.U.P.E.R.I.O.R. to spin the rationale. Rather than telling yourself you’re dropping this “friend” because his ideas are unacceptable, tell yourself your doing it to spare him the stress of having to read your own “incorrect” thoughts. That way, you can remain tolerant and nice, while he stays a shallow and unredeemable dunderhead.
But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?
Trail Baboon 
i think you should block him verily. before you do you should send him borowitz link
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport
then block and defriend and giggle all the way to sleep at how much fun it is to be you tonight
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“FB gives you new ideas about how to waste your life.” A direct quote that about says it all.
Apparently I am as bigotted towards FB as the GOP is about all of life. My warts live! I know so many people who love FB. I just find it overwhelming.
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Rise and Shine Baboons!
Dear SUPERIOR:
THis kind of experience is so disappointing. One of the things I don’t care for on FB is that it makes me face the present reality of people I remember fondly in the past. Clearly not everyone ripens into a lovely old age.
Enjoying pictures of my cousin’s granddaughters or my nephew’s son or my high school friend’s flock of chickens is why I visit FB even once a week. Then when I find a bunch of unsolicited political or religious opinions on my page, it ruins the experience. During the last election I found myself resetting preferences for certain people. I am still his/her friend, but his/her posts don’t land in my feed.
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Excellent, Dale. I love the “Seeing Unsympathetic Political Epistles Rouses Inklings Of Rage”. In the car last night I was telling Teenager about my FB conundrum; as always, she is singularly unimpressed by my cyber-concerns. “Just unfriend him”, she said. “If it took him two years to see your message, it will probably take him two years to figure out you unfriended him.” Out of the mouths of babes!
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perfect
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Create custom lists to filter the news feed. I have a few – one for really close friends and family, and then different lists for different groups of friends. Makes it easier to dip in and see just the posts from my fellow Baboons and not all of the pictures of puppies and cartoons posted by that one friend who really likes puppy pictures.
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What is it they say about life imitating art? I just got through all my work emails this morning and came across a big announcement about our new “recognition platform”. (I work in an “incentive” company so we’re big about recognition.) But I swear in reading through the description it’s just another version of Facebook, but for my company — individual profiles, avatars, badges, etc. etc. . AARRRGGGHHHHHH, I can’t escape!!
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I suppose you could start barraging him with what he would consider ultra- liberal hogwash to the point he would unfriend you. Then you could feel satisfied and indignant at the same time.
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Yes, but then I’d have to actually post something to my FB wall/news feed (I don’t even know what it’s called these days) and that seems way more effort than I want to put into FB.
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This is why I think you can probably unfriend this guy and he will never notice. And clearly, he does not give a rap whether or not his stuff is offensive to you, and cannot be bothered to find out.
I’ve so far had a good experience with FB, as the old friends I’ve found so far seem just like they always were and have grown up to remain fine liberals. I also have a largish contingent of family members, and they are a mixed group politically, but everyone is pretty repectful. There’s just the one cousin who for reasons unknown to any of us has gone pretty extreme-him I have “hidden”. I mostly just like to keep up on what everybody’s kids are doing and such-I already know his political and social views, don’t need daily confirmation, thank you very much.
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Good morning. I am on FB, but only use it to get the posts of a friend in Bulgaria, and entries from The Sustainable Farming Association, plus a few friends, relatives, and a few groups. I hardly ever respond to anyone’s postings and very seldom post anything there myself. I might make more use of FB if Trail Baboon wasn’t available. As it is, I don’t have much time for participating in FB because I prefer spending my time here. I am very grateful to you, Dale, and the participants in this blog for creating and maintaining this space on the internet that provides me a very good place to interact with other people on the internet.
I don’t know what you should do, SUPERIOR. I don’t think anyone has the right to load up your FB with a lot of unwanted messages. If you can’t unfriend or block the person who is sending you unwanted messages, you could just ignore them. Computers are very efficient machines. You can quickly skip over those unwanted messages. It shouldn’t be too hard to ignore those messages because we all live in a world where we are over loaded with messages that we have to learn ignore or we would go crazy if we didn’t.
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Jim – you can’t believe how hard it is to ignore such awful posts, all of which come with pictures/graphics. Makes Michelle Bachmann seem kind of tame.
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Speaking of MB–and I think she’s the most inflammatory topic on this blog–I hope her many enemies have noted how much hot water she is in. She has some serious legal trouble. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving girl!
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I posted an article about MB’s trouble on FB this a.m., but am now regretting posting anything political at all. I think most of my friends agree with the things I’ve posted, but I’ve got one of those right-wing types too. Fortunately he doesn’t post too often.
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Krista, don’t worry…. if he’s really hot about your stuff, he’s probably already blocked you. I personally like to see all your posts!
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Oh, no! That sounds very bad. I suppose there is nothing you can do to get that person to stop sending those messages. Maybe Captain Billy and his crew could pay that guy a visit.
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If they’re really that bad, report them. There’s a place to click in the upper right hand corner. I do it all the time. Unfortunately, I have a lot of friends who are gun crazy or just plain inappropriate. I don’t like seeing that stuff, but I don’t want to block them either. I’ve hid a lot of stuff too, but the stuff that truly offends gets reported.
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Alana, as Anna alluded to above, you can filter for each individual FB friend which post you allow to show up on your wall. It takes a few seconds and is easy to do and solves the problem of unwanted post.
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It’s all very ulta right-wing kind of stuff…. Obama is a Muslim, Obama is a communist. Serious gun rights. Anti-anybody-who-isn’t-a-Christian. I suppose it wouldn’t surprise me to find he’s a member of that awful Westborough (sp?) church — his posts are in that vein.
I did take advice that Anna emailed me and blocked his stuff for now. But the whole experience has made me think. And it’s made me extremely glad to had found this baboon family!
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I wonder if it would be better to report that person, as Alanna says above, or it would be best to have Captain Billy handle this situation. What happens when you report bad behavior on Facebook? I think Captain Billy could bring the problem to an end by staging a raid that would include any computers found among the booty removed.
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I don’t want to report anybody…. it’s one of the hardest parts about the whole democracy/constitution thing. He is actually entitled to his opinion, no matter how nasty and morally bankrupt I think his opinion is. At least he’s small scale. If we start sending out Captain Billy after those that we violently disagree with, there are a whole bunch of other folks who would be on the list first!!!
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Obnoxious as those posts are, vs, I suppose that people who hold those views probably find some of the liberal posts offensive as well. Toward the tail end of the presidential campaign, a friend of mine, a very liberal friend I might add, posted such inflammatory stuff, some of it inaccurate, that I cringed; if I, who share her political views, cringed, I can only imagine how someone who doesn’t felt. I challenged some of those posts in a private message to her which upset her so much that the unfriended me. Apparently her attitude is if you don’t agree with everything that I say we can’t be friends, an attitude she’s entitled to but that doesn’t make sense to me. I regret that she unfriended me because she consistently posted some very interesting and thought provoking stuff, but I don’t regret challenging the tone of what she posted.
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I had a friend request from someone I barely knew in high school, and since she was using her married name on Facebook, I had to go to her page to find out who she was. She had all kinds of Tea Party drivel and Obama-bashing prominently featured, which, upon reflection, I regard as a favor of sorts, because it meant I didn’t have to spend any more time considering her request. Clearly this woman was not my friend. So maybe it’s not a bad idea to post some wild-eyed left wing propaganda just to ward off some potential contacts.
Around the election there was some pretty wild-eyed stuff circulating, too – like the post advising people to call the FBI if they had any suspicions about voter suppression. I can’t remember which of the organizations was behind that one, but they seemed intent upon proving that liberals can be every bit as hysterical and paranoid at the Tea Partiers.
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Well, S.U.P.E.R.I.O.R., I’m supposing that curiosity was the reason you looked up this childhood friend in the first place. Now that you’ve ascertained that he has evolved into a person whose views are different than your own, you’re no longer interested in maintaining contact with him. Do I have that right? In my view you’re burning all bridges by “unfriending” him; it might be wiser to leave the door ajar by simply blocking the posts you don’t want to see on a daily basis.
A handful of my Facebook friends are students from the alternative school where I worked before I retired. They were troubled high school kids then, many in conflict with the juvenile justice system. Common denominators for most of them are that they come from unstable, broken homes where drug and alcohol addiction, poverty, and violence were rampant. Now adults, some of them are amazingly resilient and have established families of their own. It’s very clear to me that I don’t share many of their political views. It’s disappointing to see kids I came to care a great deal about spew racist, homophobic and generally stupid remarks as adults, but that disappointment is tempered by my knowledge of what shaped them. I’m not likely to influence them with my posts, but by not “unfriending” them I leave that possibility open; by simply blocking most of their posts, I have the option of visiting their pages when I feel I can handle a small dose of what’s going on in their lives. Call me a hopeless optimist, but I see it as a positive thing that they have reached out to befriend me on Facebook, and I’m not going to squander that opportunity.
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PJ – if you’re an optimist, how can you be hopeless?
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You’d be surprised how many people consider me hopeless, Edith, but you’ve got a point.
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I think S.U.P.E.R.I.O.R. has voiced the crux of my dilemma with a couple of people I have unfrended: “how can I hang on to my self image as a non-judgmental person?” The reason I hung in as long as I did was that I was learning tolerance, letting myself hear “the other side”. But ultimately there were a couple of extremely disturbing things that made it clear I wanted no more contact. These were not hard to let go of, though – people I barely knew in h.s.
I was ready to just remove myself from FB, but now that I’ve found how to control what I see in the News Feed, I may stay a while longer.
A “triple-A” day, Dale – Another Amazing Acronym…
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Morning–
S.U.P.E.R.I.O.R.— that’s funny, Thanks Dale.
Oh, yeah, just unfriend or block them. I do it all the time. I don’t post much stuff either and if they’ve got the time to count their friends and figure out it was me then I will tell them I disagree. But 99% of the people don’t know.
I sure wouldn’t know if someone ‘unfriended’ me. Unless I was specifically looking for them for a business reason.
Advertising / marketing your own agenda is a big plus (and minus) for FB. But this entire ‘social media’ thing can’t be ignored anymore.
Thanks Anna for the tip about setting up groups; hadn’t considered that idea.
Working tonight. Public meeting here at the college by the local TV station regarding DMC– Destination Medical Center.
Might be interesting. May have to unfriend some people after that! Haha–
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I guess we shouldn’t be too quick to restrict anyone from giving their opinion, even if we strongly disagree with them. I think we need to pay attention to what they are saying when they are encouraging destructive behavior. However, apart from signing some petitions against some of this stuff, I haven’t done much. As good citizens I think we should find ways to discourage and put a stop to the things that are advocated in some of the inflammatory rhetoric.
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The older I get, the less i think of unasked-for opinion and the more i think of the essential courtesy and restraint involved with not dumping opinions on those who don’t ask for them.
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Well said!
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Hey Steve – how is your houseguest doing today? Less rude than yesterday?
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Catherine came over today to take Lexie for a run. Lexie’s been a sweetie since then!
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However, Steve, there are times when one should have something to say. Certainly there are lots of times when it doesn’t help to give an opposing opinion and I am in favor of courtesy and restraint. That doesn’t mean that we should always avoid giving an opposing opinion and I think there are times when we need to speak up.
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Perhaps we need a new acronym on the trail? I’m suggesting UFO (unasked-for opinion) for those times when I can’t muster the courtesy and restraint needed to prevent me from offering an unsolicited opinion.
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Yes, PJ, you could warn us by telling us a UFO is on the way. I have no problem with unasked-for opinions probably because I also tend to issues some UFOs myself. The UFO warnings could be sort of like the Ethel Merman warnings Dale and Jim Ed issued on the Morning Show. I think a UFO every now and then is good to shake things up just as Ethel Merman’s loud delivery provided a break from the usually less loud music that was commonly heard on the Morning Show.
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This is so late maybe nobody will read it. My disregard for UFOs is becoming a central conviction for me. But let’s make a distinction. I am particularly uneasy about UFOs that are overtly or covertly critical of the person you direct them to. If you have an opinion that is purely positive and not critical of someone, maybe you should offer it. But I am also aware of the way people lob critical comments at each other claiming that they do so with good intentions. That is a thin, lousy defense for trying to push someone else to do or think what we think they should.
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Steve, I don’t think anyone on this this blog is even coming close to showing a significant lack of courtesy or restraint in what they say so I don’t think that a problem at least here. As far as other settings go, I am only referring times when it might be good to speak up when someone is being extremely nasty or advocating things that so far out of line that they could cause very significant harm. I’m not in favor of hurting anyone by pretending to have good intentions when that really isn’t true.
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I think we agree, Jim. I wasn’t referring at all to advice offered on this blog, which is never nasty or even obliquely critical. I’m talking about the way friends or family members tell each other what to do or what to think, something that they might do while “meaning well” but something that virtually never has the intended effect.
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Well, if we can’t have a UFO acronym, how about an ” unfriend” button. 🙂
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I recently found a very old friend on FB and, after glancing at her page and noting the “Vote No” poster and some similar things there, I requested her friendship. Her response was so fast it was dizzying – evidently we were on FB at the same time. We chatted awhile and got reacquainted. It was very nice and I’m glad to have her back in my life.
I’ve been on the fence about FB. The data gathering aspect of it bothers me, even though I have nothing to hide. Every time I sign on, thinking that I’m going to find out how to close my account, I catch something from someone I know and really like and think I’d miss it if it wasn’t there to help me stay in touch. I’ve backed off the political stuff quite a bit since last fall, but one or two are simply irresistible. I really like the Bill Moyers links. I think they’re thought-provoking.
One of my friends is on the city council of a nearby large city – no guessing, please. He was posting comments that (his city) should start charging fees to bicyclists using the Sakatah State Trail in order to improve it. Most people understand that the trail is owned and managed by the State of Minnesota and that tax dollars pay for it. I confronted him about it and some other posts he put up and he unfriended me. It hurts to be unfriended. It shouldn’t, but it does.
So, S.U.P.E.R.I.O.R, don’t unfriend people. Block them but don’t unfriend them.
It’s raining ice outside now and I have to go to work.
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I confess to not loving the whole data gathering thing myself, but on the other hand, I do take an unseemly amount of delight in the fact that Google often markets the wrong stuff to me.
Our household favorite is when a barrage of chain link and other types of yard confinement companies start marketing to me after I’ve done a good bit of searching about fencing. Foolish mortals, I’m looking for foils, sabres and epees!
And then there was the week I was searching for puppy training info and suddenly new baby and maternity stuff started appearing in the side bars……
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Should be worried about the weaponry, mig? Or are you taking up fencing as a sport?
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s&h has been a fencer for about 2 years now. He enjoys it, but has no interest in competing. One of the coaches at his club was the coach for the US Women’s Epee team that won bronze at the London Olympics-very exciting stuff, but the subsequent bombardment of “fencing” ads still makes us laugh.
The algorithms the ad folks may work for most people, but not for weird people like us.
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Fencing is a great sport. Was on SIU’s fencing team eons ago, and really enjoyed it.
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I got on FB mainly to keep “in touch” with my kids and it’s been great to “chat” with one of my daughters on there. I’m sure we are closer now than we used to be, mainly because there’s something about the typing notes back & forth that makes us feel free to be really honest. Of course, I have other friends besides my own kids, but not very many. I try to say very, very little about politics and other volatile topics, instead keep it light. And I’ve unfriended quite a few people – I always give them quite a bit of time before I do that, but I’ve done it because of the conservative political views one person spouted (example:”Give me your reasons for NOT voting for Obama” – and then dozens of hate-filled comments. Ugh.) I’ve also done it for an old friend who was in a similar place in life – kids grown & getting married, grandkids, etc. When he had an event like that, I would congratulate him, but when I had an event like that, he NEVER said one word. It became obvious that he really didn’t give a damn about me anymore so I unfriended him. I suppose that’s not very nice, but after a couple years of it, I had had enough. So, S.U.P.E.R.I.O.R, my advice is to give it a little time and then, if you haven’t changed your mind, un-friend away.
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I sometimes worry that people may interpret my scanty participation in Facebook as evidence that I don’t give a damn about them. That’s really not the case. I just don’t like Facebook very much and don’t check it very often, so I’m generally not there to post comments in a timely fashion. The people I have as Facebook friends are few, and they are people I genuinely care about, with the exception of three or four shirttail relatives that I don’t know well. I hope no one unfriends me.
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That’s what I originally wanted with Facebook, just people I care about, but I never said no to a friend request if I knew the person. Live and learn.
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This post may show up twice since my first attempt simply disappeared before hitting “Submit”. I rarely go to FB as I’ve not kept up with how to navigate on the site. My daughter-in-law has over 2500 “friends”. When I want to peek at what’s happening in her busy life, I just go to her FB page. Unfortunately, doing so makes me feel as though I have no life at all by contrast!
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With 2500 “friends,” is your daughter-in-law a well known folk musician or something?
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Actually, she’s one of the best actresses in Minnesota (won the coveted IVY best actress award 2 years ago). Her name is Stacia Rice – she starred in Jane Eyre 3 seasons ago at the Guthrie and has her own small theater company called Torch. She’s also just about the most grounded and authentic human being I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing.
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Wish I had seen the Jane Eyre production…
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I saw her in Penumbra’s “Black Pearl Sings.” She’s very good. Glad to hear that she’s a well grounded and authentic human being to boot.
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