This from the guy who posts pictures of his dinner:



He's just been on vacation (in fact we saw several pictures of his food that I didn't bother telling you about). But this one cracks me up. I imagine him on a highway in a taxicab, bumper to bumper traffic, suddenly thinking "People are going to want to know about this!", and whipping out his iPhone or whatever people use to post remotely, and picking out a message with one of those little styluses, or however they do it now (I'm a little behind the times on handheld devices, as you can see).

This could be a Monty Python sketch.

Ha! Here's the kicker. Someone replied to him:



This is definitely a Python sketch. They need to come out of retirement even if only to do this one bit.

NOTE TO MODULATORS:Any way we could change the title of this thread to something a little less harsh? Something like "It Came From Facebook!"?

Something quirky about Facebook that I've never mentioned before. As you know, most of these comments have been about Facebook users posting without saying anything. But for those people who do say something, would you like to take a guess at what a lot of them say?

Homilies, that's what! Facebook is Homily Heaven. People who post actual content frequently post homilies. They post them in text form. And they post decorative pictures of homilies, that are, I suppose suitable for printing off and hanging on your wall, next to the "Bless This Mess", and "If you love something, let it go free..." signs.

Here are a couple of recent examples:



This one is less than an hour old, and already has three "Likes", even though it doesn't make much sense if you think about it.





This isn't a criticism. At least they're posting something (and those two middle ones are jokes, which I post plenty of myself).

But it does raise etiquette questions. What kind of response do they want? Do they want you to just click "Like" and say nothing? Or do they want comments? If I replied to that first one by saying that it was bad advice to disbelieve in anything you couldn't see, or to ignore things until they've happened, would they welcome the discussion? Or be annoyed? Around chessninja, the few survivors are pretty much okay with being questioned or challenged about something they've said, but a lot of people are not. Even if you're polite about it.

What a load of bollocks. That's a recipe for living in ignorance. May as well stick your fingers in your ears and close your eyes and say "La la la la".

I've just tried to rename the thread and the software won't let me, it seems. I click on 'Rename topic' and a message pops up saying 'Action completed' (or something - I did it a couple of minutes ago and can't remember the exact message!) before I've had a chance to actually change the thread title. Could the other moderators have a go, please?


Ha ha, I do this! I try to keep it non-cheesy, though, and I sometimes throw in some theological controversies for the sake of balance - about sermons being a stupid way of teaching people to live Jesus-like lives, for example (with reference to the World Religions thread here!).


Hmm, I think if someone's posted on Facebook then any comment is fair game. So forget etiquette; just think about whether your comment would cause offence, I guess. In the same way that you'd think about the content of an email, a letter or a conversation.

Usually when I think about what would cause offense, I go by how well I know the person. If they're people you know casually, but never traded ideas with, or if they're friends of friends that you don't know at all, it's hard to gauge. I think if you say something publicly that you have no right to complain if someone else takes a different position. But egos are so fragile sometimes. It seems that several people I know just assume that there's only one way to think on every issue, and that all good people agree with them. If you disagree with them on an issue, it's not just that one issue, you're shattering their whole self image.

Is it worth my time to even try to challenge that? If we judge the War Against Ignorance using Aquinas' Just War Theory, you need to have a reasonable possibility of victory to fight it, don't you? Even if everyone else agrees that the other person got mad over nothing, if the result is that they did get mad, but nothing was accomplished, is it worth it?


OR maybe I'm selling them short, and they could handle being disagreed with better than I think they could. (or better than they act as if they could). I could give a few examples for people to try to judge, although they might belong in The Rhetoric Thread or Politics 2 more than here. It's an odd thing, but my conservative friends post mainly about their family, their activities, the things they like doing, and my liberal ones post mainly about how much they despise anyone with a different viewpoint. I don't know if this is indicative of Left vs. Right in general, or just a comment on the specific people that I know.

Just a warning in advance that if I do this, it's going to be tilted much more against the Left than the Right, because I don't really have any Right Wing Facebook friends who do this kind of thing. I knew one woman who railed a lot about Obama, but she seems to have deleted her account entirely and disappeared.

Speaking of cheesy, here's a really typical homily just posted (by someone I haven't quoted before).

It's a picture of a kitten hugging a bunny with the caption "Family doesn't always mean blood. Thank you God, for friends."

Okay everybody, 1, 2, 3: Awwwwwwww.....

But that gets me thinking about cheesiness in general. What makes this cheesy? I mean, if push comes to shove, I would have to say that I don't disagree with the sentiment. So, what's wrong with it?

Good question, and it took me a few minutes to come up with the answer. What's wrong with it is the total lack of context. If you say this thing to the right person at the right time in the right situation, it's great. But saying it to everybody, for no specific reason kind of strips the meaning away and makes it just warm and fuzzy for warm and fuzziness' sake. Like, if somebody said to you "YOU are like family to me", that's great. But if they just said "I'm not saying you're like family necessarily, just that it's POSSIBLE for people who aren't family to seem that way." Then you start to say Say so what?

You see that a lot with bumper stickers too. People sometimes have stickers that insult the other driver for something or other, and which would be really funny if the other driver was actually doing something wrong. But when you say it to everyone, it doesn't mean anything. You know, like you've seen stickers that say "Lead, follow, or get the #$%& out of the way." That might be a good thing to say to somebody in FRONT of you (i.e. somebody who could never read the sticker), who was going much too slowly. But it makes no sense to say to the guy behind you.

Aye, egos are fragile... As long as you address the argument, not the person, then I think it's fine to disagree with a Facebook post (unless you know / suspect that this will cause grief, then just leave it, I'd say).

I think I'm with you on the War Against Ignorance thing, but there's perhaps a danger of arrogantly going too far. I mean, picking up on statements that friends have made is likely to be fine but if I started commenting on the status updates of people I've not beein in touch with for ages... I wonder how that would be received!

Oh, and I agree with your comment about lack of context except that I suspect plenty of apparently context-free Facebook comments actually do have a context for certain of the commenter's friends. It might be a coded message - 'Thanks to my friends for all your help - you know who you are'.

Finally, just for you, Petrosianic, I'm going to post a really trivial Facebook status update!

I would add that the nature and tone of your comment should be appropriate for a public forum. FB is a public forum and your comments are preserved forever.

Facebook is a little better about that than some. Like here, you can't edit your comments after an hour. But on Facebook, you can delete them months or years afterwards.

On the other hand, comments there are like chessgames.com. Very clunky and hard to find older comments, unless you can google them or something. You're constantly having to click "older posts" links to go back just a little farther.

But here's an interesting Facebook-related story:

Feds: Ohio animal-rights activist offered $850 for random fur-wearer to be killed

News of the Weird. An animal rights activist created a page on Facebook to advertise for a hit man to kill anybody who walked past a playground wearing fur. The idea was that she was going to be on hand to distribute anti-fur leaflets afterwards.

She created this page under a false name, thinking that would protect her. Somebody reported it, an FBI agent contacted her and she tried to hire him for the hit. I guess she's never heard of IP addresses and the like. A false name probably wouldn't have saved her if the crime had happened. If people found the page and connected it with the crime, they probably could have traced it back to her.