Sometimes they drag me back in
That’s where I stood until this morning, when my FB friend Reverse Slope posted this:
Bill Kristol. Another fool I’d more or less stopped paying attention to, having gotten him off my chest back in the early 2020s when I got over my embarrassment that he and I had graduated from Harvard College the same year. Beyond that there’s no point of comparison. I wouldn’t trade a day of my life for his. Since then I’ve dealt with him as he deserves, as a topic for satirical humor and contextual background for more serious analysis. (You can find instances of these in the portion of this post called “Below the Fold.”) I think I added a ‘Like’ to Reverse Angle’s long list of them and then I chanced to read the long thread of comments following. Big mistake.
I discovered they’d been hijacked by another TDS ‘conservative’ Independent I’d crossed swords with several times over the years before finally withdrawing from a conversation that was going nowhere because it was never a conversation, only me feeding the battery of another mechanical scarecrow.
If he’d simply repeated his litany of a few unacceptable because misrepresented facts and gone about his business, I would have too. But he didn’t. According to his usual custom, he felt compelled to turn the whole thread into a forum for his hatred of Donald Trump. The last time I’d made an issue of this with him was on the eve of the ‘24 election, when I wrote a post aimed directly at the the so-called Trump haters who were so superior to him they’d prefer to risk the election of drunken socialist mediocrity by refusing to vote for Trump. I referenced him by name in the title. There could be no better evidence of narcissism than his. I had little to no respect for George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney when they were nominated, but I wrote extensively in support of their candidacies, all of which I had lampooned in the past, because their opponents were detestable and dangerous: Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama. My ego could take it (and did — a longtime Instapunk friend, among other solipsists, denounced and defriended me as a hack for supporting Romney in 2012). The post was titled For Ruggles and Other Stay at Homes.
After the election, I sparred with him a couple times, during which exchanges he was most proud of my error in describing him as a RINO because he was not a Republican but an Independent (no dates cited).
My objection this time was that he wasn’t just disagreeing vehemently with Reverse Angle. He was browbeating other commenters and determinedly twisting the thread into another excuse for attacking Donald Trump. This last objective was achieved by taking direct aim at Reverse Angle and insisting that he answer for questions not on the table.
When I saw that he was succeeding in this, I decided to offer my own response:
Yes. I know this is a waste of time. It’s not as if I don’t routinely address the troublemakers in public and social network forums. I try not to do as much of that here anymore unless there are larger interesting points to be made. The decision not to get into one-on-one polemics is not an act of standing by while Rome burns. It’s that my usual space for that kind of grunt-level engagement is Facebook, and my usual approach is satirical humor meant to provoke thought, not end it.
Getting into it with Ruggles was impulsive. This post is as much me blowing the whistle on myself as a reminder to all the social networkers out there that nothing is ever achieved by debating people who leave facts, logic, and civility on the floor before their aiming lunges and parries made of namecalling, repetition of mass media propaganda as facts, and reinforcing the overall assault with allusions to their own superior intelligence and judgment.
Just prove what I said about my ongoing participation in the cut and thrust via Fecebook, here’s a sampling of the kinds of tools I use there. I won’t show much in the way of dates because context is usually enough to identify their timing.
Below the Fold…
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