Monday, December 03, 2007

Gettin' Political on Facebook

I've been trying to avoid being political on Facebook. Instead, I've been just using it to see what friends are up to (example: "S.E. is totally relaxed") and let them know what I am up to (example "David is in from shovelling snow.") When people invited me to join the group for the weird voting method, I didn't join even though I agreed we should try it. But today one of my Facebook friends, who clearly doesn't know me well, asked me to join the group called Do NOT support "The Golden Compass".

I clicked "ignore". Then I did a search on support Golden Compass and found a group called Support The Golden Compass. I clicked join, then I sent an invitation to the guy who invited me and where it lets me leave a message I wrote: "I loved this book".

I did. The sequels got too dark for my taste, but I still found it refreshing to be reading a serious fantasy series that wasn't disguised religious theology. Didn't it bug you when you found out that the Narnia books were designed to make you believe in Christianity? Shouldn't Christianity be able to stand up for itself without a fantasy series having to prop it up?

Since I was getting all political, I joined the Fair Copyright group too.

But that's going to be it for politics. I'm too busy with Astronaut Love Triangle, Propeller Dance and the Maple Leaf Brass Band to do any more.

8 comments:

Linda said...

Just surfed in from a link on Urban Pedestrian - I laughed when I read your post because I got a group email from a girl in my office about "not" supporting this book. Something about bending people's will and subversive brainwashing. Pah! Whatever. I haven't read it yet, but will and will wholeheartedly support it too!

Anonymous said...

Gee, Dave, you used to be such a radical!
What happened?

Eric Promislow said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
accidental altruist said...

How do you feel about Leslie Hall and her Gem Sweaters??

David Scrimshaw said...

AA, I'm so out of touch, I don't even know how I'm supposed to feel about Leslie Hall. But I do not feel she should be subject to torture.

Eric Promislow said...

Here's what I was wondering, didn't like what I wrote, and left that "post deleted by author" splat on your blog...

Would Human Bingo work on Facebook? Does it solve the problem where you'd like to poke someone, but think it would be rude if you didn't have some pretext? How would you solve the lack of locality? Can you push people's yes/no answers on to their wall? Would some people get addicted?

I think the answers are yes, yes, that's the tough part, yes, and yes, but most people only for a while.

David Scrimshaw said...

Hi Eric,

Did you know that "human bingo" is the top search string that brings people to my blog?

I'm not sure that a situation where "you'd like to poke someone, but think it would be rude if you didn't have some pretext" is actually a problem.

Maybe it's just an indication that you shouldn't poke them.

Eric Promislow said...

David, I gather you're not convinced that Human Bingo should go net-wide. And yet if they can do it with tag (http://www.manhunt-vancouver.com/), Human Bingo seems like the obvious next step. OK, the analogy isn't perfect, but I'm not ready to let go yet.

I figure I'd need about 100 different attributes for each city. Let's start with Ottawa, Vancouver, Toronto, Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston. Also I think I'll need two age groups -- some items would probably be more applicable to people under 30, others over 30. Of course most items would be universal, and some items would cut across locations.

Hope you don't mind if your readers submit their items here, since I'm not too up on this net thing. At least I've done my part to help keep your blog at the top of the search list.