Alright let’s give this a try, trying out a new voice dictation app to make writing a little easier.
It is been a couple weeks since I’ve written anything of meaning and it’s because I have had something weighing on me for a little while now. After much soul-searching and talking to my friends about this particular problem, I have been encouraged to bite the bullet and go for it. Damn the consequences!
Over the next few weeks the website will be including more and more meaningful blog posts. Don’t worry, there will still be the same amount of fun loving content, just with more serous content sprinkled in from time to time. This has me more then a little worried because recently it has come to my attention that my beliefs/thoughts are wrong, bigoted, racist and inappropriate according to certain people that I once believed to be my friends. When I start losing friends because of an opinion or my thoughts on a subject, it really troubles me. My criteria for friendship has always been one to include a “thick skin” and a willingness to hear differing opinions.
I have friends from every walk of life; straight, gay, transgender, black, white, brown just about whatever race on the spectrum you want to name, really. My friends vary as do the stars in the sky. And i am lucky to count them as friends. Not that i have never called them all assholes when they need to be called assholes. But I love them and i would protect them at all costs. I’m literally in the epicenter of an amazing group of people where I have absolutely no judgement on their lifestyle but I tease them wholeheartedly and I expect them to tease me back with no limitations on where we can go to make a joke.
Okay now we have the fun stuff out of the way like how I’m a wonderful person and all that bullshit; let’s get to the meat. I am a libertarian conservative; meaning that I think you should be able to do whatever the hell you want as long as A, I don’t have to pay for it and B, it doesn’t hurt anybody. If you want to be a Christian awesome! You wanna be an atheist, awesome! You want to be a Muslim and not blow up buildings, awesome! I literally support you doing whatever it is that you think is best but don’t make me pay for it and don’t hurt anybody end of story.
But I find myself in this weird situation where my Facebook and social media accounts are literally flooded by a wall of what I consider hateful posts. I have friends right now who literally have each other blocked. These guys are long time friends with each other and I don’t understand how do we get to this place where two friends don’t want to know what’s going on in the other person’s life?
For a long time I have looked at something like my Facebook wall as a challenge to be open and willing to hear other people’s ideas, to do my best not to tunnel down and only see the things that I want to see. We are in real danger of blocking out every thing that doesn’t support our own believes. Having somebody question our thoughts and beliefs is the key to making us stronger as individuals and as a group as a whole. If we cannot defend our thoughts and our beliefs with either facts, reasoning or logic then we don’t deserve to have those thoughts.
And you can’t use the argument of you’re a racist. You’re a bigot. Those are not factual statements for most people. I got in an argument with an individual today telling me that Jar Jar Binks was a symbol of racism in Star Wars. A few weeks ago there was a joke being circulated about how the trailer for the new Star Wars movie was anti white and white people should boycott this movie. One it was a joke, two everyone is going to Star Wars, three stop circulating bullshit!
Sorry I got a little ranty right there….
I am trying to cultivate an audience/brand as it were, for people who are interested in my thoughts/jokes/material. When I look at something like the postings on my Facebook Timeline, there are a huge number of comments and posts that I agree with and a like number that I don’t agree with. Every once in a while I will reply on a post as long as I feel is safe to do so. Meaning it is one of the people’s posts where I feel they understand and respect me regardless of what I say or how i say it. Because sometimes what I say is going to come out harsh.
Fact of 21st century communication via the written word: Text removes emotion. As a species we have developed the ability to gather meaning from facial gestures, word inflection, body gestures and more all those things are gone in text conversation. Literally all we have is smiley faces on emojis, which often don’t get the job done.
The reason I’m writing this is simply to say the next time someone posts something on one of your Facebook comments give them the benefit of a doubt. If they reply to a Twitter comment give them the benefit of a doubt. When you get a text message or an email, anything that does not come across with these additional cues give the person the benefit of the doubt. The friendship you might save is yours.
What can you expect from samiusgurobo.com in the future? Looking at the kind of posts that have garnered the most traffic, feedback and conversations, there is an audience out there who wants to hear these thoughts from me good, bad or indifferent. So what you’re going to see is all those times that I try to get introspective or up on my soapbox on the different podcasts (of which if you are a podcast listener thank you very much. You are obviously wise and beautiful beyond your years. ) I will be trying to flesh those thoughts out here.
If you like this post let me know, I appreciate it. If you hate this post, let me know I appreciate it! I’m not going to ban people for having opposing ideas or worry about negative feedback. I’m just going to try to write about the kind of things that annoy me and hope to exorcise these thoughts out of my system. You’re going to hear more about my childhood and all about the things that make me tick. The thoughts i push down as i make it through the day. And yes, its that political time of the year/s. You are probably going to hear about the kind of things that make me want to vote for a particular politician or the reasons I won’t go for a particular politician. All this and dick and fart jokes, I promise.
Much <3s
Samius – the voice dictation app does a much better job of spelling & grammar 😛
Also regarding “Text removes emotion” http://xkcd.com/1601/
I have a different, but closely-related issue on my FB. I’ll be writing about it too, once I figure a way into the article that makes me comfortable.