A trip through a few days worth of my Facebook posts shows that, with little effort, I can expose Proggies to ideas and facts they usually miss or ignore.
Of late, between paying work, family demands, and a touch of the blecchies (not the flu, thank goodness, but I wasn’t feeling great), I’ve been posting on my real-me Facebook more than I’ve been blogging. Blogging requires paragraphs; Facebook requires sentences, a word here or there, or no comment at all to introduce an article.
My two goals on Facebook are to entertain people, so they keep coming back to my feed, and to place before them things that they won’t normally see as they shuffle back and forth between The New York Times, The Washington Post, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and the usual mono-ideologues who make up their intellectual world. I try to do the latter in an entirely non-judgmental way, so that people will stop and think, rather than block and argue.
To give you a sense of my M.O., here’s a sampling of things from my real-me Facebook feed over the last few days, many of which you’ll probably recognize from Instapundit and other familiar sites:
I knew that Cape Town’s imminent water shortage was its own fault because it failed to plan for drought, despite living where they regularly occur and despite a population much larger than the last time a drought rolled around. That was the same problem California had with its recent drought (and may continue to have, because last year’s big rains, rather than heralding the end of drought seem to have been just a pause). What I didn’t know was that it was South Africa’s poisonous antipathy to Israel that prevented it from saving itself. Now, when I see Cape Towners lined up with little cans at communal fountains, I don’t feel sorry for them, just as I really didn’t feel sorry for Californians (myself included) stupid enough to live in a state that failed to prepare for inevitable dry periods.
Everybody loves MacDonald’s — even Lefties. That’s why, back in 1990, when the first MacDonald’s opened in the former Soviet Union, 30,000 Russians lined up for the chance to eat there:
Emotional support pets on planes are too often a scam. I adore my dog, who makes me happy, and I’d definitely be a less panicked airplane passenger if I held him in my arms, but he’s still not medically necessary, and most other so-called emotional support pets aren’t either. The way people have abused the service pet exception to animals on planes is especially bad because it’s making things so difficult for those people who genuinely need an animal at their side to help them navigate their world or to guard them against dangerous seizures and other serious ailments. And so I said on Facebook.
Sharyl Attkisson, one of the last honest reporters, explained that the Nunes memo indicates that the FBI violated Woods Procedures. So that my friends don’t have to exhaust themselves clicking over to the article, I explain that this means that the FBI isn’t attesting to its own probity, or even the probity of the person who assembled a dossier. It needs to make a colorable showing that the person who first voiced the information — the anonymous source — is credible. I added that I was interested in learning more about those sources. Since then, of course, we’ve had intimations that the sources are Sidney Blumenthal and friends, people so devious and untrustworthy that only the Clintons could bear their presence. I haven’t mentioned those last facts to my Proggie friends. [Read more…]