Welcome to The Monkey House

For the last couple of years I knew it was happening, but I couldn’t help myself because I thought, and still think, it’s important. I know people get really annoyed at that one person, usually a dude, who just won’t let it drop. I have totally been that dude.

I speak of course of my unrelenting castigation of the President of The United States and those who enable his behavior on Facebook dot com.

In my defense I have my reasons.

1. I see Facebook as a journal. It’s a place where my thoughts and actions have been recorded in real time for over a decade. This allows me to revisit my thoughts and opinions and evaluate them in the future and hopefully learn and grow in the process. I’m a selfish person and part of it was all for me. Trust me there are a lot of angry expletive filled posts that were not labelled for public consumption and remain available to my eyes only. So we can all be momentarily grateful for my use, uneven as it has been, for the available privacy settings.
2. I care. The bottom line is I want the US, and more importantly her people to succeed and pursue life, liberty and happiness, and I think the current occupant of the White House represents a genuine threat to the long-term viability of the Republic. If a person genuinely believes that to be the case doesn’t he have an obligation to do something about it? I know posting poorly formed thoughts and rants isn’t much, but I think it better than grim silence. I may be wrong about this, in that case reason 1 outlined above becomes more compelling.
3. I like to discuss and debate. The best friends I have or have ever had are people with whom I occasionally disagree with strongly, but with whom I can engage in respectful and open-ended debate. The type of discussion that allows an idea to be taken apart, reconstructed, stretched, wrung out, reconstituted, fermented, and tasted. I’ve had my mind changed on many subjects through this type of discussion. I’m not the most thick skinned of people, so I’m pretty selective about people I do this with. I’m not likable enough to go around lighting fires everywhere and come out with plenty of friends. One hope was that every once in awhile someone would challenge me and we could start up a correspondence. A lot of subtlety and nuance is lost in written communication, but it also allows time to think, reflect, and elaborate, and if you’re not intent upon scoring a quick victory to “own” someone a bit of time can do a debate a fair amount of good. It didn’t happen much over the past 2 years, but I really wanted it to. Maybe its because we all agree and there is no defending the outrages I pointed out in my posts, but even I can’t believe I’m right that often.

Of course, the major problem with pursuing this design is that publicly shared posts wind up being served by the algorithm to other people, and all they want is to enjoy a few good memes and see family photos, and consequently I’m ruining any desire a person might have had to engage with me.

Also, Facebook’s business is dependent upon exploitation of relationships and private information so its pretty difficult to feel really good about sharing anything personal there. That’ts a whole different discussion though.

I was juggling these competing notions and desires and hit upon a potential strategy, turn on the time machine and head back to 2004 and fire up the old blog. Blogger as a platform is pretty obnoxious, and ultimately suffers from similar privacy issues, and I’m not doing badly so I figured I could shell out some money and buy myself a landing pad on the internet where I could keep my journal, spout off all I want, people could engage if they want, but not be bothered if they don’t, and I could deprive Facebook and Google of a few data points in the bargain.

Welcome to maximumkungfu dot com