Well, it's been an action-packed week in the duplex domicile of the disabled, the humble habitation of the hobbled, and the residency of the reluctantly reclusive. A week that began with a bank holiday Monday, saw record high temperatures midweek, and will end with a return of English Premiership Football after an international break has also seen some intense happenings within the house as well as without.
One of my oldest and steadfast friends, Kelly Lipke swung by with his 3-year-old daughter Anneke and spent a couple of days and nights gathering some strength to rendez-vous with his sons Toby and David and thereafter set out for Lloydminster to catch up with his sister Nadine. That sentence was tiring to type, but trying to keep up with the energy level of a three-year-old is positively exhausting. Those who have watched me babysit will know that I turn into a neurotic bag of quivering paranoia any time I'm near small children. My imagination immediately populates my mind's eye with every possibility of injury, harm, perturbance, damage, distress, distension, or misfortune available. Anything smaller than a tennis ball can be ingested, with horrible results. Anything sharper than a toothbrush is obviously a decapitation hazard. Anything flexible and longer than an arm's length? Strangulation. Fifteen minutes of me watching a child usually ends with me hyperventilating in a foetal position under a blanket in a corner of the room, trembling uncontrollably.
That being said, I want to get to something that my old chum Eoin Kenny mentioned in a recent Facebook post regarding the regulation of discourse, discussion, dispute, and debate within that forum. Essentially, I've grown tired of the anxiety generated by people lashing out with ad hominem attacks, illogical argumentation, gaslighting, and overgeneralized association. I've given up. I don't even make statements any more. I just cut and paste links to primary sources of information and (perhaps unadvisedly) assume that facts will take precedence over opinions.
I'll get to my brief and wonky analysis of Facebook argumentation right after my listing of musical tracks that played during my last shower. Why? I need another shower because it is becoming a hygienically categorical imperative, and I can't be trusted to keep two sets of musical tracks chronologically accurate. So let me get this out of the way, and I can move on to the more entertaining stuff.
Random Track List
- I Want You to Want Me, by Cheap Trick
- Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa (Sad Song), performed by The Commitments
- Get Back (The White Label Mix), based on The Beatles
- Goodbye Train, by Big Sugar
- Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by the Alan Parsons Project
Right. That's that done and dusted for posterity.
The Art of the Argument
This is all totally hypothetical, and any geographic areas or persons or individuals mentioned herein is done solely to provide colour to examples that exist only in the world of ideas.Arguments begin without much provocation or inflammation. All it takes is a meme, a phrase, a chart, or a graphic that can be spun to advance some form of agendum. Most people that use Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms have their favourite pet interests that they have internalized to the extent that any perceived criticism of whatever politician, musical artist, charitable organization, medical condition, etc. is transformed into a personal assault, and is treated as such.
This means that the agora, or marketplace of ideas, is excluded from the dialogue before it even begins. The battle lines of defensive outrage have already been drawn, and any transgression is met with maximum viciousness. The corresponding effect of people being ready to leap screaming into any conversation involving whatever they personally champion is the trolling effect. If one understands that a person is a die-hard, quivering-lip fanatical devotee to the musical warblings of Stan Rogers, that kind of emotional investiture creates vulnerability. A troll is therefore someone who sees instances of hysterically irrational advocacy as prime targets for half-hearted provocation in the hopes of ridiculously hyperbolic responses.
In the example listed above, a troll might post something like "Stan Rogers never really believed the works of the Group of Seven to be authentic." in the hopes that Stan Rogers aficionados will fly off the proverbial handle and lose track of all reason and dignity in an effort to sully and rebut the troll's assertion. Evidence, documentation, and logic become secondary to the objective of troll and victim to humiliate and to retaliate, respectively.
Most interchanges between people over social media have degenerated into this model.
"I like butterscotch ripple ice cream."
"Goddammit, you snowflake liberal rudy-poo candyasses just won't leave Rutherford B. Hayes alone! Why do you have to second-guess his every decision, just because he lost the popular vote to Sam Tilden? Why doesn't the MSM cover voter suppression in 1876? Nineteen! Nineteen!"
I thought I would just like to document some of the ways dialogue used to operate back in the day when ICQ and MySpace were still going concerns.
Again, completely hypothetically, I'm going to throw out an assertion, and then respond to it in different ways.
Posit: "Cincinnati sucks. I hate that place."
Educational Contradiction
"Surely you can't hate the whole city. I mean, look at the size of your baseball memorabilia collection. Surely the Cincinnati Reds of the 70's have some value. What about the name? The great semi-mythical hero of the Roman Republic must deserve some merit."Six Degrees of Association
"I find it hard to believe that you would hate something so intricately associated with Dr. Johnny Fever."Apples Never Fall Far
"What's the difference between Cincinnati and the rest of Ohio? Akron, Toledo, Columbus, Dayton — you can't hate ALL of them."Faux Agreement
"Well, I know that it's not exciting as Cleveland. In fact, there are a lot of river cities in the midwest with better food, culture, architecture, and civic engineering. I might even call the place a mediocre backwater. But isn't hate a strong word for such a weak place?"Personal Revelation
"I never liked Cincinnati myself, until I received an e-mail telling of a brave little girl who was diagnosed with leukaemia at the age of five years old. She needed multiple courses of chemo- and radiotherapy and was kept in the pediatric intensive care ward, away from her family for days at a time. Her family was forced to remortgage their home after they had exhausted all of their personal loans and lines of personal credit. The last I saw, her family had raised over $7500 by crowdfunding efforts and the prognosis looks good. The people of Cincinnati seem to be generous and warm-hearted, and unworthy of hatred.""Goddammit, you snowflake liberal rudy-poo candyasses, always talking about health care!"
That's it for me. I think I may have over-extended myself on this particular epistle, so I am going to abruptly draw it to a close. Until the next time, goodnight England and the Colonies.
—mARKUS
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