Facebook Presence for Est Quod Est

Everything I've been doing online over the last year has been done on Facebook. And when I say everything, I mean upwards of 90%. Facebook is easy to interface with and it has become sort of a "one-stop shop" for people with limited time to catch-up on every level of news.

So now I decided to create a Facebook presence for Est Quod Est. Here is the address: https://www.facebook.com/Pauli1967 I'm going to link posts there, but I'm not planning to add any "extra" content, at least not right now. Everything there will redirect readers to the blog. It's really just a cross posting exercise. So if you aren't on Facebook, don't rush out and get an account for the sake of reading this wonderful blog.

In fact, I have thought about not linking to absolutely every post we do here to force people to spend time on the blog. For example, this post is not linked on the FB page. I am also considering linking to older EQE posts on Facebook since I feel that a lot of my Facebook friends would enjoy reading some of our observations on the blog.

I encourage people to get Facebook accounts even if they feel like they are "allergic" to social media. I have one friend who refuses to refuses to get one and, sometimes, I feel like I know more about what his kids are up to than he does. (Note: this is probably untrue....) But there are dangers involved with social media, and you can read about them all the time. So I understand the hesitation some have—it's warranted. Like anything powerful, misuse can be disastrous. For instance. But humans have been crippling themselves by livin' out loud for long ages before the arrival of social media.

"You didn't see that coming?"

Dreher-fan Jordan Poss writes a generally positive review of HDCSYL. But it is also quite honest, and he can't help pointing out several things with which I heartily agree. Excerpts:

Despite returning home, Dreher recounts that his relationships with family—especially his father and nieces—were terrible. I like Dreher a lot and value his opinions, but having read his work for several years now, he strikes me as a classic oversharer. Reading Little Way, I could only wonder, despite being moved to tears, what his family thought of such a soul-baring memoir. In my experience, a tell-all—even an affectionate, nostalgic tell-all—alienates people. This book gave me an answer: “I showed Mike the manuscript of Little Way before I turned it in, and asked him to let me know if he wanted me to make any changes. He did not ask for changes, but as I learned later, the book displeased him greatly. He thought I had used his wife’s death to tell a story about myself” (30). As a reader, I too had had a hard time escaping this impression.

We told you so, we told you so. Of course we all had that impression. The reason that Mike Leming thought Rod Dreher had used his wife’s death to tell a story about himself was that Rod Dreher had used Mike's wife’s death to tell a story about himself.

I really liked How Dante Can Save Your Life, but I still wonder about the propriety of what Dreher has chosen to share with his readers—especially considering that one of the sources of strife within his family is his previous book. Dreher writes with great feeling and sincerity but, as another reviewer has noted, the narration sometimes comes across as self-pitying, even in the later stages when he has learned how selfish he is and is striving toward greater humility. Even as he learns to let go of his bitterness and anger, he reminds himself over and over again of the incidents that made him bitter and angry.

Yes; he seems to love being bitter and angry. It's as if I said to Keith, "Keith, I have totally gotten over the time that you made fun of the space helmet I made for Halloween when I was 27 years old, and I hope that nothing will ever, EVER remind either one of us how much I cried about that at the time, and then got drunk and broke up with my girlfriend. But now that I've read Dante's Divine Comedy, I'm ready to forgive you ONCE AND FOR ALL for that and I will do so right after I pass out and take a 5-hour nap."

No need for facial tattoos...

...when a prospective employer can just type your full name into El Goog along with the name of your former employer and have a post featuring these "thoughts and rantings" returned. Short excerpt:

So, I will just write the truth and tell you all what happened.

Basically, I was screwed out of a chance to work for a rather nice trucking company.

Why, you say?

Because of a baseless and vicious accusation by a black lesbian woman.

I wouldn't think the blog author would mind my labeling this bit of over-sharing "thoughts and rantings" seeing that this is the title he has chosen for his blog address.

I wouldn't spend any time on CPA, but he did call my friend Keith a "clueless blowhole" yesterday which I wanted to counter by noting that Keith is not any type of hole, nor is he clueless.

CPA doesn't appear to be clueless either, but perhaps he should read this advice.

Exile (with leather armchairs)

My favorite humorist, Jack Handey, writes: "I bet the sparrow looks at the parrot and thinks, yes, you can talk, but LISTEN TO YOURSELF!" Listen to yourself. Good advice; probably should come right after Socrates's "Know yourself" in importance, advice which some people never take to heart.

People who write for a living (or as a hobby for that matter) should at least "listen to themselves". But they don't always. More often they parrot things that sound good to them.

I received an email from a reader with this link and this excerpt from an exceedingly long and rambling post:

Anyway, Orthodoxy is not just what you do on Sunday. It cannot be, and still be Orthodoxy. That is the point.

After eight years of living this life, I find the resilience it builds into you to be astonishing. And because Orthodox spirituality compels you always to search your conscience and to repent, I find that it has forced me to do some pretty painful, at times, growing in the spirit. It is possible, of course, to be self-satisfied as an Orthodox Christian, but to do so requires you to fight hard against the spiritual currents within the Church — which, I underscore, is less an institution and more of a Way.

Orthodoxy is weird. Incredibly weird by American standards. This is a strength, I find. If you’re Orthodox, you’re never going to really fit in to American Christian practice. You will always know who you are.

On the other hand, Orthodoxy is institutionally weak in this country. There are very few of us, and our churches are, for now, few and far between. Not all Orthodox churches are, well, orthodox. It is, sadly, too easy to find Orthodox parishes that are grim, closed-off ethnic clubs. It is too easy to find Orthodox parishes that are basically Mainline Protestantism with food festivals. No church is perfect, and never will be. My hope, though, is that in the time of exile, many American Christians will be drawn to the steady, faithful witness of Orthodox Christianity, and unite themselves to it, and strengthen the Orthodox Church.

That’s my positive case for why Orthodoxy is the best home for small-o orthodox Christians in American exile. What’s yours for your church? Remember the rules bounding this discussion.

The post mentions Roman Catholicism a lot, of course. How could it not? Even when Mr. Dreher is not bashing the church over hoaxes like Tuam, etc. he is dining out on being a "Catholic" writer, copping ideas from Catholic saints like "little way", planning a festival for an actual Catholic writer, Walker Percy and most recently, writing a book about Dante's Divine Comedy (nota—Dante was Catholic). I don't think I ever have seen evidence that he devotes as much time to Orthodox subjects in any detail, other than to say it's weird and otherworldly and really conservative as he does in this post, or when he gets embroiled in Church politics and cults of personality like he did awhile back.

I'm not interested in the whole "best home for small-o orthodox Christians in American exile" discussion any more than a "best home for small-o orthodox Christians in French exile" would. Let alone the "rules bounding this discussion". Isn't this entire life supposed to be an exile for the Christian by Christ's own words? "The foxes have holes..." remember that? Or read St. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians if you thought Christ was just being pessimistic.

I think that the best home for me in exile is the Roman Catholic church. This is because I believe the Catholic church is the one true church founded by Christ. It's my faith. But there are wheat and tares and they are in the Church together at this point. The Apocalypse of St. John starts off with condemnation of churches started by first generation Christians. So I would be horribly misguided to imagine that I would find the church in any age without major issues going one of one kind or another, or to one degree or another. And being called "vomit" or a "synagogue of Satan" qualifies as a high degree, I'd guess.

Aside from the implicit Catholic-bashing, what I glanced at in this post strikes me as a bit embarrassing in the same way as Miley Cyrus's antics (which, I might point out I also merely glanced at.) It's generally said that she is embarrassing because she obviously thinks she was the first human being to discover sex. In the same way, Dreher sounds like he thinks that he is the first to discover Christianity and how being a serious Christian is counter-cultural. But I'm pretty sure that there were a bunch of people who preceded us who discovered that in a much deeper way. This was due to the fact that the flames started at their feet. Agonizing seconds probably past by like hours before they died of smoke inhalation or severe shock to their nervous system. You can imagine that the burning martyr was truly longing for the homeland as one living in exile. You can be pretty sure he or she was not feeling like this. Exile? You decide.

My final observation is a question. What is the difference between this:

Not all Orthodox churches are, well, orthodox. It is, sadly, too easy to find Orthodox parishes that are grim, closed-off ethnic clubs. It is too easy to find Orthodox parishes that are basically Mainline Protestantism with food festivals.

and this?

Catholicism has the Magisterium and the Catechism, which are doctrinal rocks, but in my experience, so many American Catholics don’t submit their consciences to them.

Answer: nothing. So what is the point really?

Jimmy Kimmel takes out Kanye... again....

From the Mirror. This is too funny.

David Ryan to Working Boy: Shut Up

Here's a recent post near the top of the Google search for Rod Dreher by a serious boat captain guy named David Ryan. We'll do our part here to help keep it near the top. He has titled the post simply Rod Dreher needs to shut up.

He quotes Rod's musings about how he seems to be so distracted and has to blog about everything. My initial reaction to reading the first quote was thinking that there's a pretty fine line between laziness and lack of discipline; it's a distinction without much of a difference. Trust me; I know about all forms of laziness and lack of focus first-hand.

Here's Ryan's conclusion:

Rod, with as much love and charity as I can muster: You’ve identified the problem. Now stop talking and start doing.

No more trips to Paris. No more sportfishing. No more blogging. Travelocity now. Iona. Monastery.

Sit.

Be quiet.

You’re welcome.

All I can add to this is "Aye, Captain."

Mark Shea brags about his latest raise

This would be sort of funny if it weren't a grown man leaving the comment. The comment was left yesterday by Mark Shea on a blog called Coalition for Fog which was highly critical of Shea's positions but which had been shut down about 3 years ago.

Wow. Hard to believe it's been four years! And here the Coalition for Fog sits like the rusting hulk of the Bismarck on the floor of the blogospheric ocean. Good times! Good times!

Just thought I'd drop in and invite you all to celebrate the raise I got from Patheos since my traffic is going up. Salud!

Maybe somebody will find this site in a century or so when they are researching the self-destruction of American conservatism. I'll leave this note, sort of like a small commemorative plaque.

Mark Shea

Whenever I have good fortune, like a raise, I generally share my good fortune with my friends, not with those whom I dislike. I really wouldn't see the point of that, nor would most people, I imagine. Just a peek into a man's mind who's always raving about how he's just trying to bear witness to Jesus.

Just Stop

A friend of mine is just losing it on Facebook. Here's the thing: I really don't think she has any idea that she is. She is "living out loud" and making sure her "friends" get multiple angles of her dirty laundry.

I know she doesn't read this blog, but if she happens to maybe this will wake her up. Facebook is basically an information-sharing service as I've noted before, and posting amounts to broadcasting to subscribers (a more accurate word than friends.) This person has over 200 such and, unless I'm very much mistaken, she is imprudent to be sharing such information with at least half of them. Possibly most of them, at least those who make a lot of the comments to her dirty laundry posts which have the most commentary by far on her page.

She basically has two ex-husbands at this point, although I'm not sure she has formally ended her relationship with the current one. Recently he has been found guilty of a crime involving a female who is a minor, hence the breakup. It was painful to read her posts about this on Facebook. Wouldn't it have been better to send private emails if she really felt she must keep people informed of developments? By the way, my description is purposely vague and censored, but I'll say no more. Her posts are far more graphic than the newspaper stories and yes, there were newspaper stories.

Now she has let go with a rant about a horrible thing her first husband told her children to characterize her. This is basically like handing the football to the other team. Now everybody who is a friend/subscriber gets to be splattered with the grime of his boorishness. Everybody at her page already knows he's a loser if they know her, so why do this? Does she want attention? She's blasting this out to 200+ people, some of whom are children from the look of the pictures. When they see her at church or at family gatherings or on the street what are they going to think? "There's the lady whose life is like the soaps."

She needs to just stop.

I like what Kathleen said in response to the piece I linked earlier with regard to self-censorship, which is basically what I want her to begin engaging in. "It's a bit like abstinence -- self-censorship is the most reliable form of privacy. and actually Facebook presents an excellent means of teaching this skill." Well, people who know me know that I'm all for self-governance. But I believe people know not what they do, so I keep putting these posts out like cigarette warning labels.

(Yeah, I'm mixing topics here, but that's a choice cartoon, is it not? Source.)

Unhappy Friendings

There has been much ink, electronic and otherwise, spilled on the problems caused by social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, et al. Some points made are insightful and relevant in my opinion, hence my Living Out Loud posts. Others verge on Reefer Madness-like hysteria. So I try to limit how much I opine about social media. If you use these things in accord with their nature then I believe they cannot be very harmful. But it is possible that for many people, understanding the true nature of "social media" may be extremely difficult.

I think one of the problems with Facebook is the use of the word "friend". To become someone's friend on Facebook means that you're willing to share information on your Facebook page with that person. That's all. It doesn't mean anything more or less than that, and there is no alternate meaning. There might be a strong correlation between those who constitute one's real friends and one's Facebook friends, just like there is a strong correlation between religious people and people who protest against abortion. But to be religious and to protest abortion have two separate meanings. Likewise, a "Facebook friend" and a real friend are two very different things, and when the definition of "Facebook friend" is explained as I did above, it is not difficult for the reasonable person to see the difference.

By the way, this is why I prefer the LinkedIn.com site to Facebook. On LinkedIn, you "invite people to connect", you don't make a "friend request". Thus the terminology is much closer to the actual process which is one of granting access privileges.

Most people intuitively realize that posting things on the internet and letting certain people see what you posted has very little to do with friendship. So some might argue that I'm belaboring the point here. Really, isn't this obvious? But I think we need to go beyond intuition about this, especially if we are raising kids and have to explain to them, for example, why we don't publish family secrets or personally criticize someone on a Facebook page. As we know, what is obvious to adults is not necessarily obvious to children. And since social media was not around when we were growing up, our first impression of it will definitely be very different than that of our children.

To further clarify the difference between friendship and friending―that's the shorthand I'll use: an actual English noun for real-world friends and a stupid made-up verb for Facebook friendeds―is that there are many types of friendships between people in the world and yet really only one type of friending on Facebook. You are either friended with someone or you are not. Furthermore most of my friends are people whose friendship was never formally requested. For the most part, the question "Would you be my friend?" ceases to be cute around age 10 and begins to sound awkward and strained, to put it mildly. But this request is formally made in the friending process. And a friended person can see all of the friended's friendeds. This assuredly leads to problems among highschoolers. Imagine when Charlene finds out you're friends with Brittany. I mean... no one likes her. But the problem may be worse for older people. To take one aspect, I'll give you one word: photos. "Wow, she did not age well, did she?" Need I say more.

Thinking about the different kinds of friends one may have is what led me to write this post, along with thoughts about how someone with a propensity for "intelligence-gathering" (i.e., gossip) could glean quite a bit from your other friends' posts on your Facebook page. And those thoughts were initiated by a Facebook friend request from someone I know from long ago whose friend request I've decided to ignore. The ironic thing is that I wouldn't mind sitting down with this person―who happens to be female, not an ex-girlfriend―and drinking a cup of coffee and chatting with her. This would be a way to live charity, and I could fill up an hour or even two with innocuous conversation, although most of it would be listening to her run her mouth.

However it would be a disservice to myself and to everyone connected to me on Facebook were I to accept her request. When I knew her, she was an unrepentant gossip with a strong tendency toward exhibitionism, and the contents of the personalized invitation which she sent me demonstrates that she has most likely not changed. So it would probably be a disservice to her as well. Drinking a cup of coffee and making small talk with her would involve less sharing and be far less intimate than friending on Facebook, even though I barely use the service. I don't think I have to cite examples of the kind of stuff she was known for; everyone here knows her type.

I think that most mature users of social media realize these things. Let's not forget that it's up to us to point them out to the younger generation.

I make me laugh, part 3

Here's an old comment o' mine to go along with my continuing series on the dangers of "Living Out Loud":

I just got back from a trip to Pennsylvania and read that Hitting the Wall post. My first thought? A fat lot of good the HIPAA privacy laws do if your spouse blogs about your health conditions.

At some point this living out loud on blogs has got to stop. People who do it are going to regret it someday. My dad and I were just talking about how no one even knew FDR had polio. Now we've swung to the other extreme and we know every detail about some obscure blogger's life, if they are on sleeping pills, if they have diabetes, etc. merely because the blogger thinks everyone needs to know it.

I advise everyone to use email for personal things. If you want me to pray for you, I will, but send me a private email.

Don't blog your personal life! If you do, don't wonder why everyone is laughing at you. If you feel the need to tell the world how many hours you worked last week or the consistency of your last bowel movement, methinks you have a worse problem than constipation or diarrhea.

How many times can I post "I make me laugh" entries? How high can I count? My 6-year-old can count to one hundred, so he informed me yesterday and subsequently demonstrated. So if I get stuck I'll ask him.

Living out Loud: Just Say NO

Here's a cautionary tale which could act as a companion piece for my earlier post about Social Media Addiction. It might also go with something which I posted a long time ago.

By the way, don't forget to vote in the new poll if you have any thoughts regarding this.

Not just students, I'm afraid

Internet addiction is the pits, isn't it? Let's you and him pray for all our addicted friends.

In the United States a small private U.S. center called ReSTART, located near Redmond, Washington, opened last year in the shadow of computer giant Microsoft to treat excessive use of the Internet, video gaming and texting.

Know anyone in Washington who needs to be ReSTARTed?

David Carr on the "Obama Reality Show"

This NYT piece pulls no punches. My fave excerpts follow.

One of the downsides of having a president who is also Celebrity in Chief is that it creates the impression that the leader of the free world is part of a milieu that is more TMZ than C-SPAN. In an effort to remain connected to the social media world that was so much a part of his electoral victory, the Obama administration may be guilty of a very contemporary common offense: Oversharing.
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The president can’t be blamed for a few knuckleheads trying to game their way into his presence, but his shared love of the camera leaves him vulnerable to suggestions that he is too busy appearing as the president and not busy enough being one. And we all know that television shows — reality or otherwise — can jump the shark.

So the Big O's falling approval ratings could be related to standard media ratings, i.e., everyone is sick of his show.

Compare that to Mr. Obama’s outing to Five Guys, where he is filmed taking burger orders from staff members — “You want fries?” — and then sets off with Mr. Williams in the limo, sitting with jacket off and feet up on the seats.

I like that the current president gets out of the bubble, that he enjoys a burger, and is willing to walk back into the White House with a greasy go-bag for the staff. I’m not sure being able to watch it all unfold is good for his presidency.

“When he ran, the Obamas were pitched as kind of a reality show to the public. We’d hear about his dinners with Michelle and we felt like we knew them,” said Michael Hirschorn, a former executive at VH1 who now runs Ish Entertainment, which produces reality programming. “But now that he is in office, there is a danger of the mystique going away. The problem with social media and constant video is that it flows like water and reduces everything to the same level. Not much of it is special, and it all becomes content, even if it’s the president.”

Yeah, well I'm not a TV producer or anything, but I think what the TV-consuming public wants to see now is a big fight with Michelle Obama screaming at the Prezz, stuff like "I own you, mother-f___er!! You wouldn't be here without me!" That might help jack up the ratings again. Let Michelle be Michelle, I say. Let it all hang out. They could call it The Obamas: Reloaded.


Carr concludes by a brief contrast with Jackie Kennedy's White House tour. It's just long enough to make his point; any longer and he'd risk damaging Michelle in the comparison.

Mrs. Kennedy may have been impossibly glamorous and done her share of image management, but she had a chaste relationship with the camera and the public.

“I want to live my life, not record it,” she said.

In other words, Jackie had some class. Nuff said.



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Postmortem Rehab Begins

From CNN: "Kennedy called a man of quiet faith". Sure, I'll buy it. But was he quiet in any other aspect of his life? Or was his faith the only thing about which he was quiet?