Down the rabbit hole...

Over the past two weeks I have had the very interesting, and in some ways motivating, experience of dropping into an “Alice in Wonderland” world where things are not as they seem, people agree to battle and then run off at the sight of something scary, and arbitrary shrieks of  “Off with his head!” ring out on a regular basis. This is the world of conservative politics on Facebook, or at least extreme conservative politics.

The trip started because of a simple post by Sherry — no last name necessary. She asked a rhetorical and highly provocative question about the new health care bill that garnered from one of her friends the label “jackass” and listed the post as “asshattery”. Two things struck me about the exchange. First, the person who made the jackass-asshattery comment had summarily been defriended, so the original post was gone and he was no longer around to see what was being said. Second, and the only reason that I knew it had happened at all, was that Sherry took the offending post and placed it as her status, talking about how rude the post was, how she wouldn’t stand for it, and how he was now gone.

Fair enough, I suppose, although it seemed pretty in-your-face to defriend someone, then take their post and put it in your status. If someone calls you a jackass and you don’t want to be their friend any longer, that’s entirely up to you. Posting about it and calling the person rude, when the instigating comment was yours and was completely designed to evoke a strong reaction, seemed incongruous. Also, as neither the late friend nor anyone else was still able to see the original post (As I learned later, when you get defriended, everything disappears into that great Facebook in the sky.), there was no way for any of us to know if the post had been edited, selectively quoted, or kept in its original form.

So at this point I entered the rabbit hole by asking whether, just perhaps, Sherry’s post might be a little over-the-top. We soon went through the “It’s my opinion” phase and I suggested that we discuss, or debate the topic a bit. Things started out slowly — Sherry wasn’t interested in debating — but the deeper down the rabbit hole I got, the more cookies were laid on tables and the more potions I was asked to drink, the more disturbed, but interested, I became. You see, one of the very few advantages of being a citizen of a country while not living in that country is that you get to see things from a distance. This distance takes out a lot of the emotion. Not all of it, but a lot, and in my case it had made me almost completely unaware of how radicalized parts of the US populace had become.

In the past two weeks I was given direct, full-frontal exposure, with all the hairy and dangly bits in place, to something that I had thought was a caricature. I had Sherry tell me that President Obama was brainwashing children. I had her tell me that the new health care bill would cause children on Medicaid to get worse service than before. I had her direct me to a video claiming that President Obama was raising a private army to station in the USA. I had her tell me that YouTube and other internet sites were being censored to prevent the truth about President Obama from coming out. I watched her make a backhanded comparison of him to Satan. I had her tell me that he was subverting the Constitution. And, something that irritated me the first time I heard it and which continued to gnaw on me in almost every following post, I was told that President Obama is not listening to the people, that he was not listening to the citizens of the USA.

Let’s think about that last statement and the implications it makes. President Obama is not listening to the people, the citizens, of the United States. I’m a citizen, and I think he listens (More or less, but that’s politics…) to me. I think that he listens to a lot of people. In fact, he was elected with the most absolute votes in his favor in the history of the United States. If you want to look at percentages, you need to go back to President Reagan’s victory over Walter Mondale to find a win by a larger percentage.

The implication of this statement, then, is that the people President Obama is listening to are not citizens of the United States.

Ouch. And I just paid my taxes.

In any case, Sherry and I were discussing things and slowly I was beginning to get a picture of who she was. I showed respect. I stayed on-topic. I was consistent in my arguments. Sherry got frustrated — angry perhaps — with me on several occasions, but that happens. In some places we agreed, and in some places I even saw her make some effort to rein in the even more radical statements being made by some of her other friends. What made me break down and write what I thought really needed to be written, however, was not anger. It was a little smilie emoticon tacked on at the end of a sentence. The sentence said that if I posted anything further, it would be deleted.

Ahh, censorship. You can, of course, defriend someone on Facebook, which is exactly what Sherry did to me after I posted again. I would have much preferred her to have said that — “I don’t want your posts on my wall. If you post again, I will take you off my friends list because I don’t have the energy or time to deal with it.” What I got, though, was a long post that twisted my words (A common occurrence over the exchange…) and made some outright false accusations about me before ending with,

This is my last reply to this thread any other comments will be deleted I’m a woman I get the last say :)

Nope. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t piss on third base and then threaten to take your ball home if anyone complains.

So, I posted, and in the end I challenged her on her openness to the ideas of other people and on her censorship. I challenged her to leave what I posted up and prove my allegations wrong on both counts. She didn’t, which I expected, and which was why I kept copies of the three later and longer threads. I knew that she would either delete the last one, or potentially defriend me and therefore delete them all.  I hate it when I fail to give people the benefit of doubt and then they still prove me right.

So here are the copies. As you will see, we had already had a short exchange about censorship and the fact that it wasn’t possible on the internet. In my last post I reminded her of my position and wrote that if she attempted to censor me, I would be be forced to prove that it is impossible in a free world with an open internet. I like to keep my promises.

Thread 1: In which Peter learns a Joke and New Song

Thread 2: Where Peter begins to bow to reality

Thread 3: The light at the end of censorship