Intelligent Conversation

A friend of mine on facebook is bemoaning the impoverished state of intellectual discourse on facebook.  Most people, he pointed out, do not even attempt a reasonable argument, do not present facts or cite sources.  They go straight to the slogans, the basic talking points, and the personal attacks.

I’m a bit guilty sometimes of trying harder to make a clever comment than an intelligent one.  When you have a great one-liner, a zinger, it’s almost an irresistible temptation to let it fly.  But, I know what he means.  There are an awful lot of dumbasses on the internet.

Here’s the part  I don’t get, though, and anybody can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m kind of a technotard and at least a few years  behind the curve when it comes to application of new technology and so I’m actually not sure if I’m using facebook and twitter correctly, but doesn’t everybody sort of custom design their own facebook page?

If somebody leaves moron comments, you can defriend them.  If they are not actually your friend, but commenting on a friend’s status update, you can defriend that friend.  Of course, you may eventually wind up friendless, but any comments which do reach your hungry-for-intelligent-conversation eyes will be intelligent comments.

I can’t judge too much, though.  I have added friends more or less indiscriminately.  I  delete people for being  right wingers and maybe I’m a bit too harsh about  that, because conversations held exclusively among left wingers tend to get  boring and  I would enjoy more conversations with intelligent conservatives, but my experience (and everybody else’s) over the last decade or so would seem to indicate that “intelligent conservative” is an oxymoron.  Perhaps that is just the weight of numbers, the fact that the morons on the right, the Limbaugh listeners, outnumber and outshout everybody else.  So, I delete them but perhaps I am overzealous sometimes.

Anyway, my fantasy site, and maybe someday I will set this up and I would love to join it if somebody else does, is one where you have to write something intelligent and worthwhile in order to get posted.  It could  be hard to moderate that conversation, though, because everybody has a different idea about what constitutes an intelligent comment.

Whatever it is, though, it does not involve cats.