Scare Tactics Have No Place in This House
Inclusion is closer to a problem than a solution
It’s not whether you win or lose the meme war, it’s how you play the game. Right now, the other team is playing harder.
Olympic viewers—myself included—were upset when an Italian woman boxer, Angela Carini, withdrew from a match against Algeria’s Imane Khelif, after less than a minute.
In the past, Khelif had failed sex tests and been precluded from boxing with women. The Olympics were happy to take Khelif’s word for it.
On Facebook, I posted a picture of the two boxers, with Carini walking off disappointed as Khelif tries to console her, with the caption “I Am A Man.”
It was flagged by the Facebook moderators. Sarcasm is not a high crime and misdemeanor. And it was hagged by a few friends, all progressive women, who said my insistence that only women compete in women’s sports amounted to “hate”.
One woman even threatened to sic naval intelligence on me. Flagged and hagged. This is life for the next 50 years if you’re not willing to walk away from fake friendships.
I went to two different high schools, one college, and have worked many different jobs in my 40 years.
That’s mostly who my 1,000 Facebook friends consist of—somebodies that I used to know.
Of those 1,000 people, I haven’t heard the voices of 900 of them in a decade. Are we really friends?
I’m not really a keep-in-touch kind of guy. I’m out of sight, out of mind. The buzz on Twitter/X is more my speed.
On Twitter, you make connections based on how you think, and how someone else thinks.
It’s not based on who sat where in 10th-grade chemistry class. If Twitter is a river, Facebook is a museum. It houses the Ghost of Friendships Past.
Some of those friendships are meant to stay in the past. You don’t need to “catch up” with people you love, because you never let them go.
The boxing dustup made me realize that this is not just a time for choosing. It’s a time of bright lines and scare tactics.
