Greetings, friends. (XXII)

Greetings, friends. I forgot to wish everyone a Happy Groundhog’s Day. It was my mother’s favorite secular holiday — probably because the doldrums of February are the best time to throw a house party in between the winter holidays and spring break.

Yesterday, I shared a screencap of a Twitter post that swam across my Facebook feed, and got a stupid comment in reply.

The meme simply read:

“Everyone gets a plate before anyone gets seconds” but for housing.

This struck a chord with me, because I see housing as a basic human right. In order to be functioning, productive members of society, all human beings need a baseline of needs met: Housing, clothing, food, health care, and education.

Anyone who doesn’t receive all of these in some form for themselves and their family is obliged by intrinsic needs to behave in an antisocial fashion, like Jean Valjean making off with a loaf of bread. It is useless to talk about “deserving” poor. Failing to ensure that everyone in our society has access to a basic modicum of these resources is a false economy, and makes our society worse off for everyone in turn.

Am I a socialist? So be it. I clicked “Share”, like you do.

Well, this really rubbed someone I was “friends” with on Facebook the wrong way, because the first response to my post was the following comment:

And nobody can write a 2nd Wikipedia article before everybody has written one? Where will this stop?

This comment sounds stupid, because it is. What makes this comment stupid is that it seems to draw a moral or functional equivalence between “being fundamentally secure from the elements in your person and effects” and “being allowed to post to Wikipedia”.

These two capacities are so far apart in terms of their functional relationship to human welfare that I can conceive of only two conclusions about the person who posted it.

1. Either they honestly believe in this blatantly false equivalence, or

2. They do not believe that these two things are morally or functionally equivalent, in which case they are responding in bad faith.

If the latter, then this is simply trolling, and therefore at best an effort to waste everyone’s time. Either way, I do not see that this is a person who can be reasoned with.

I immediately hid the comment from the post, and blocked the person in question, but not before John, Elle, and Eleanor responded to smack them down. I thank you each severally and together.

Anyway, I didn’t post this meme about housing rights to invite reasoned argument, much less trolling. For those of you who might be unclear about it, this meme is a not a discussion, it’s a statement of values, specifically social values.

I do not reasonably expect to rearrange someone else’s moral or social values via a social media post. I listened to a Beau of the Fifth Column episode this morning about a “pickup artist” men’s activist type who started frequenting feminist social media accounts in order to troll and neg them, and then suddenly had the light break across his brow when he realized that these were precisely the kind of hotties he was trying and failing to score with. But this experience is the exception far far far more than the norm.

But bad faith argument abounds on the Internet, cloaked in the guise of “reasonable debate.” This is bullshit. These people are trolls and you do not have to let them waste your time.

In the past, I have tried to refrain from blocking trolls or unfriending them on Facebook, in the hopes that someone who was making a joke in bad taste might consider repenting.

But this individual, whom I know to be a libertarian, and whom I know from an Open Source community that is notably full of toxic libertarians, is just being pissy and just wasting my time and outraging my friends. Fuck them. I don’t even owe them an explanation about why I blocked them.

Anyway, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I believe that human beings need to be able to live lives of dignity, free of gross material want and insecurity, as a basic prerequisite to participating in an orderly, democratic society. Which is what we all want. Right? Right…?

I will debate the means until the cows come home, but not the ends, because my values dictate what I think those ends should be. My values are not up for debate.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

I post to fortify the willing, not to persuade the ignorant.

And I won’t waste my time trying to educate or persuade the willfully ignorant. Nor do I expect you so to waste yours. Trolls do not deserve to waste our time and we do not owe them explanations.

If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. See you tomorrow!