I was going to say the same thing (and I guess I just did).
What’s up with that anyway? Of all the relatively minor things that alienate me from super religious people, it’s this tendency. It makes me think of screaming, spit flying from their mouth into my eye, and Flavor-Aid laced with cyanide. I just want to tell them to calm the fuck down, dude. Your YELLING makes baby JESUS cry.
Oh! Can I play?
I’ve got a friend from high school that I friended on Facebook and in the intervening ten years he’s apparently turned into a raving loon. He’s constantly posting these ridiculous news articles while shouting how “independant” he is. But strangely, 90% of the articles he posts are critical of Obama. He posts the absolute stupidest stuff and when people call him on it, he gets all defensive and starts mocking them for being naive. You see, while he might not believe everything he posts, he’s seeking “the truth.” Even if the truth is posted by Glenn Beck, it’s important to examine everything.
Worst of all is the fact he’s a borderline truther. He doesn’t outright believe the government blew up the towers, but every once in a while he’ll post some truther bullshit, sigh, and say “We’ll probably never know WHAT REALLY happened that day.”
Of course we know what happened you dipshit! A dozen terrorists crashed into the top floors of a giant pair of skyscrapers and the resulting explosion made the buildings collapse. This is not rocket science, the entire world saw what happened live. Jesus Christ…
And I haven’t even gotten into his ravings about the economy (that are based on a complete lack of understanding in how money works because he’s never held a job) and the presence of phonies in the world (because not having a job is somehow the MOST NOBLE THING EVAR!).
I really should just defriend him.
You’d think that wouldn’t you? It’s odd he wouldn’t just post that stuff on his own page and let it go at that.
The sister I mentioned used to forward some things to me a couple of years ago. I corrected the facts on one sent it back mentioning bearing false witness. They stopped coming. Even at that we’ve never let our political differences come between us.
Or him
Yeah, I really don’t get that examine everything attitude. I have an old friend who defends Beck and I don’t get it.
Here’s the part that makes it really bad-- this guy spontaneously moved to Iowa to be with a woman he met on the internet. It went really badly, she kicked him out and he was stranded there, broke. Four of us chipped in to buy him a bus ticket home. He never repaid us, but claims to be eternally grateful. Yeah, but not grateful enough to stop harassing me. What an asshole.
You were more patient than I would have been.
This is a beautiful way of describing how I am feeling about this.
I told her that this was basically what she was doing. I said, ‘‘You might be at war with me, but I’m not at war with you.’’ I asked her how she would feel if I posted anti-Christian screeds all day long. She stopped responding to my posts because she didn’t want to argue. She said she had no idea I was a Buddhist, and I said that was my point (she didn’t know because I don’t talk about it obsessively to the exclusion of all else.) I feel badly because I don’t think she intends to hurt anyone’s feelings (she honestly seems baffled that I would take offense at these comments), but I woke up this morning pissed off, and I’m just tired of feeling pissed off about someone that really is a very minor part of my life. We live states away, it’s not like we’d hang out every weekend or anything if she was nearby. I’ve always been a little weak when it comes to people and their best intentions. I’m thinking of just writing her a letter of apology and defriending her.
I can defend him: it’s not so bad to be a Scientologist if you were born that way…wait, I’ll come in again.
This thread illustrates why acquaintances from the past should remain in the past. I don’t really understand what people get out of staying cyber-connected to people who they no longer have anything in common with, who they never see in meat space and whose conversation they don’t enjoy. I think people have some misplaced sense of obligation in this regard – a reluctance to be “rude,” but really, it’s the people posting crazy screeds on your own pages who are being rude.
Yep, right there.
When I joined Facebook, old names from the past started popping up like crazy, and I accepted every friend request I got. I’ve since un-friended more than half of them, and I doubt they’ve even noticed.
It’s not even about being rude, really. If someone I knew briefly 20 years ago likes to post 37 updates a day about what her 8-year-old is up to, well, OK. Fine by me. It just means we have nothing in common and I don’t need her family newsletter cluttering up my home page. Nothing personal.
Friends are people you actually do things with, share experiences, do favors for, accept favors from.
Facebook Friends are not the same thing.
The vast majority of my Facebook friends are not only absolutely fine, but have been wonderful to welcome back into my life. There was only this one guy, who was actually a friend IRL, who has been behaving badly. I did not friend him out of obligation; I friended him because we were actually friends, and I just happened to not know he was a right wing nutcase because it never came up. Somehow, being online removed the polite veneer that kept him from getting in my face about it in person. I know for a fact that he never would have transgressed my boundaries this way in a face to face conversation. It’s bizarre, really.
And now he just seriously compared Obama to Hitler. :rolleyes:
Good god, this was someone I had a lot of respect for in high school because he seemed so genuine. Everyone knew where they stoof with him and he was liked by everyone.
I wonder if he has some sort of mental disorder. I really want to defriend him, but the morbid curiosity of wanting to see just how crazy he’ll get will never let me pull the trigger.
I recently cut off contact with an old friend/ex I knew in college. There were certain things she felt that she was above questioning on. It wasn’t just that she was right, but that no was even allowed to say anything about the subject.
Her son was one of these subjects. When she talked about her son, she was just stating fact, nothing was up for discussion. Unfortunately I did not learn this rule until after I had broken it. She mentioned that she got some homeopathic teething pills for him. When I sent her something about how homeopathy is complete bullplop, she blew up at me. I had no right to question anything about what happened with her son, who did I think I was, it was her son, etc. She didn’t mention anything about homeopathy, it was all about how I didn’t even have the right to question anything she thought about her son.
The TSA was another. She worked for them for a while, and thought that without them thousands of terrorists would blowing things up every single day. She claimed that the TSA had caught hundreds, maybe thousands of terrorists, but couldn’t say anything because of national security. She also said that no other source, including the media & government reports, didn’t have as much credibility as her, because she worked for them and she knew. Any questioning was met with hostile rants on how America needed the TSA, and they should be allowed to do whatever they want without oversight, after all, this was about security.
The last time, she called me a liar, that I had to be making things up because she didn’t think they could possibly be true. It was the last straw, and I told her that I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. She sent one final hateful screed about what an asshole I was for not accepting everything she said at face value.
I had a friend like that from high school, that I met up with again a few years ago after he found me on Facebook. His family always tended to lean Republican in their politics, but when I met him again, he started talking about how Fox News was the only legitimate news source in the country, how great a journalist Bill O’Reilly was, and how the rest of the “mainstream media” never gave conservatives a fair shake. Mind you, I’m a newspaper reporter and part of that “mainstream media.”
And then he asked me if it was true that most reporters were unapologetic shills for the Democratic Party. I answered honestly and said, that yes, a lot of journalists do tend to lean Democrat in their personal politics but that they also try hard to not let their personal feelings get in the way of doing their jobs, and they just report the facts, regardless of whether that casts the Republicans in a negative or postive light. He apparently only heard the “lean Democrat” and took this to mean newsrooms are just infested with liberals who are going to do whatever it takes help out their Democratic cronies.
I’m still friends with him, but I try to avoid talking politics whenever possible around him.
No greater trust exists in the world than between two people who barely knew each other in high school and haven’t seen each other for 20 years.
I’m officially weird. Long ago, I had a facebook profile for about ten minutes and hated it. I’ve been inspired by this thread to go check it out again. Why? WHYWHYWHY? I have no answer.
November 13, 2007 was the last activity I had on facebook.
I used to hate it when it was just college acquaintances. I think it got more interesting once more people I actually know started joining.
What do you get out of it that you can’t do through email or phone calls? I’ve had several friends send me invites to sign up, but they’re the only ones I’d want to talk to. There are lots of people I used to know that I have no interest in hearing from again.
It’s actually really convenient when you need to get hold of someone fast. Three of the people I saw in Michigan on my recent vacation wouldn’t have happened without Facebook.
I sort of like it as a ‘‘slice of life’’ sort of tool. It’s one thing to catch up with friends about what’s going on in their lives in a general way, but quite another thing to catch little glimpses of their day-to-day existence. I think it’s kinda cool.
If you’re not interested in that sort of thing, well, then, I don’t really see the point. It’s just another way of keeping in touch.