How this election has been going for me

I may have mentioned this before, but while I post a lot of links to political stories on Facebook, I don’t tend to do political status updates, and I don’t generally contradict other people’s posts, no matter how stupid or offensive they are. I feel that it is rude, though if someone is doing it to one of my friends I will jump in, because then it is against rudeness.

I have mentioned that philosophy on Facebook often, but this had not stopped people from commenting a lot, with mixed results. One conversation that I thought was going to get really ugly ended up being really civilized, and a different one ended up in one friend deleting me (possibly because he could not delete the other participants whom he was already not friends with, but there was no explanation).

Those two incidents were rare. I think part of this is that I don’t post really inflammatory items. I write stuff that I think lays out an issue well, or that is unlikely to be known, and if it tends to be more liberal in nature, at some point that should quit shocking people. My sisters will use words like “hate” and “vomit” in their updates, but that’s not my style.

I mention this because I find that I have been violating my own rules these past few days. Some of it is just that I see wrong or biased information, and it is easy to correct, and I do that. In one case it was well-received, kind of, and in another it was less well-received, but still civil. (She gloated over having already voted for Romney, but I wasn’t trying to influence her vote, and then she didn’t seem to know what the point was.)

Today I have done it twice. One was to put the following link in a thread started about how the president is just resting and playing basketball, and wasn’t there a little something called Sandy:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/83042.html

The other one was a response to a “joke”, supposedly posted by Tim Tebow, but it’s not. It says it’s a parody account, but I if he is truly going for parody, he’s not very good at it. Anyway, the tweet said “I’m predicting Obama will take an early lead tomorrow…Until all the Republicans get off work.”

The poster said about this “I can’t stop laughing. This just makes me feel HAPPY inside! That’s FUNNY stuff right there.”

Leaving out comments by other posters, which varied, here is how it went.

“Yes, there are few things more humorous than deciding that the people who disagree with you must do so because they're lazy moochers.”

“Oh stop getting all offended & see the humor!!!”

“My point is that it is offensive humor that reflects harmful stereotypes that allow people to feel smug about being jerks.”

“Gina, did you just call me a jerk?!?”

“I call that attitude that fake Tim Tebow's tweet is promoting jerky. I have not known you to be that way, but if you find this so great that you have to capitalize "happy"and "funny", that's the sort of thing that makes me comment when I usually ignore all the posts that I disagree with.””

“I just choose to see the humor. I truly hope you don't think I'm intolerant or judgmental of people's opinions that differ from my own. I choose to associate with someone based on the kind of person he/she is rather than political, religious or other beliefs.”

Maybe I’m wrong here, but to me this is too much like that picture of the White House rose garden being turned into a watermelon patch. Come on! It’s just a joke, and they really do like watermelons.

So, I’m just getting a bit sick of people, and losing my traditional equanimity over it. But it wraps up tonight, and then the plan is to go over how Republicans can be better. Because the people who vote that way aren’t evil—I know that. But they’re supporting a lot of evil, and not for very good reasons.

We'll start in the Marianas Islands.