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9 Things I’m Tired Of Seeing On Facebook

November 6, 2013 By

mythbusters

The first thing I do every morning, while the rest of the family are still somewhere in Dreamland, is sit down with a cup of coffee and see what’s been going on in Facebookland while I’ve been sleeping. Within the first minute or so, as I’m scrolling down my newsfeed, I usually see about half a dozen things that annoy me. What’s worse is that I tend to get annoyed by the same things that annoyed me the previous day.

Maybe I’m getting old and jaded.

Or maybe people just keep posting the same annoying stuff, day in and day out.

Whatever the case may be, I want to vent about it a little bit. Here is my list of annoying things that I’m tired of hearing about.

1) The US Supreme Court has acknowledged that vaccines cause autism. The US Supreme Court has acknowledged no such thing. Here’s some intelligent, informed reading about that particular annoying topic. And just for the record, people who choose to vaccinate their children are not “sheeple”. The autism community, which already has enough problems, can do without that kind of name-calling.

2) Americans should be very afraid of the fact that the government can’t even put together a functional website, and yet they’re taking control of the health care system. Look, I’m not going to offer my opinions about Obamacare, simply because I don’t know enough about it. Maybe it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Maybe it will be an unmitigated disaster. I don’t know. What I do know is this: the fact that the website doesn’t work is not a predictor of the eventual success or failure of Obamacare. All it means is that the website sucks. This annoying thing is annoying because it’s yet another example of people linking two things that have little or nothing to do with each other.

3) Everything in your fridge is poisoning your family. Every day, I see endless posts claiming that this food is soaked in bleach or that food is really made of mushed-up alien brain. OK, not that last one, but you get the picture. There is so much food-related fear-mongering going on, and I’m just tired of hearing it. I always appreciate information that is valid, informed and balanced. I do not like quote-unquote “information” that serves no purpose but to scare people.

4. The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. I will never understand why we can’t just do what we can to stop the bad guy from getting the gun in the first place. Yes, I know that no system will ever be 100% guaranteed, but should that stop us from trying? Besides, you know what can stop a good guy, whether he has a gun or not? A bad guy with a gun.

5. When a celebrity dies it’s all over Facebook, but when a soldier dies no-one cares. First of all, there’s nothing wrong with people talking about celebrity deaths. Celebrities are a part of our culture. It’s OK for us to feel sad when they die. Secondly, I find that people are very respectful about the military, and fallen soldiers do get extensively recognised.

6. 97% of people won’t share this lame post that completely fails to raise awareness about cancer, child abuse or mental illness. I care about all of these things, but I don’t feel the need to prove it by annoying all of my Facebook friends. Anyway, where does that statistic even come from?

7. Asking your friends to change the settings on posts they see in their timeline will prevent Facebook from sharing your entire life with everyone in the world. As annoyances go, this is a pretty big one. The only person who can control who sees your posts is you. Not your friends. If you don’t want the public to see your posts, go and check your privacy settings. But if your friends make the change you’re asking them to make (which usually comes with a threat to unfriend anyone who doesn’t comply), all that will happen is that they will stop seeing your posts. Am I the only one who sees the irony in that?

8. Because cigarette packaging has gruesome images on it, fast food should come with pictures of obese children, and alcohol should have pictures from the scenes of drunk driving accidents. Here’s the thing. If you eat a burger, I’m not going to get fat. Your consumption of fast food has no impact on me. It is true that when people get drunk and then drive, other people can die. But drinking and driving is against the law. Cigarettes can kill people who are not smoking them when used exactly as intended, in accordance with the law.

9. It doesn’t matter that this heartwarming story is fake. It’s still inspiring. No, it’s NOT. It’s fake! Maybe – like I said earlier – I’m getting old and jaded, but I just don’t get how something that’s not true can be inspiring. If you want to inspire me, tell me a heartwarming story that actually happened. Like this one.

And yes, that story is true. I checked it myself on Google Maps, and on a site that everyone should bookmark for those occasions when they just have to share something they’ve seen on Facebook: Snopes.

What annoyances do you see in your social media feeds?

This is an original post by Kirsten Doyle. Photo credit: marksmotos. This picture has a creative commons attribution license.

 

 

Filed Under: Annoyance, Facebook, Hoaxes, Myths Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Dining With The Stars

April 19, 2012 By

I am participating in the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, in which I publish a post every day for the month of April, based on health-related prompts.

April 19 – 5 dinner guests: Who are five people you’d love to have dinner with (living or deceased) and why?

When I have people over for dinner, it’s always a very casual affair, from the planning right down to the execution. It usually starts when my husband or I casually mentions someone we haven’t seen for a long time. We call that person up on an impulse and invite them to come over that evening. And since we’re inviting this person, well, we may just as well invite that person. The more, the merrier, and all that. With the phone calls made, the husband goes out to buy alcoholic beverages to suit our guests’ tastes. I go wading in our big freezer and emerge with a giant store-made lasagna, those ones that take about seventeen years to defrost. I throw together a salad and make garlic butter for the bread. I’m not much of a cook, but I make a mean garlic butter. The guests arrive and we all dispense as quickly as possible with the business of eating. I get the kids settled into bed and then spend the rest of the evening drinking wine, which let’s face it, was really the whole point of having the dinner party.

My fantasy dinner party would have to be more carefully planned, simply because the people I would want to invite are kind of busy. You can’t just call them up and ask  them to show up at your house in the next two hours. You have to schedule their time, usually months in advance, and it’s a case of “your people calling their people”.

There wouldn’t be any frozen lasagna, and the whole thing would have some finesse to it. You can’t invite a guy like Nelson Mandela to your house and serve him frozen lasagna on the pretext of having a booze-up. No, I would hire a chef, a posh one who makes things normal people cannot pronounce and who knows what wine goes with what food.

My guests, assuming they all accepted the invitation (and, I mean, who wouldn’t?) would include the following five people:

Nelson Mandela. If you discriminated against most people throughout their early lives and then threw them into prison for twenty-seven years, they’d probably be a little bitter. It takes a very special kind of man to emerge from all of that and become a successful statesman, and to do it with grace, dignity and humility. Mandela is South Africa’s answer to the Royal Family, with one exception: everyone loves him, and with good reason.
What I have in common with him: we share a country of birth.

Terry Fox. The most iconic runner of all iconic runners, Terry Fox ran almost all the way across Canada with a prosthetic leg, while cancer was eating away at his body. His “Marathon of Hope” started a worldwide movement that continues to this day, more than thirty years after his death. If anyone had a reason to give up, it was him, and yet his absolute dedication to his cause and to his sport did not waver. His body was absolutely shattered, but his mind was super-hero strong.
What I have in common with him: I run for a cause.

Ed Mirvish. The world can be a peculiar place. Many rich people just want to get richer, regardless of the cost to anyone else. At the same time, a lot of the true humanitarians of the world are willing to give away what little they have for the betterment of their fellow man. Ed Mirvish was a rich old Canadian bloke with a landmark retail store and a near-monopoly on Toronto’s theatre industry. He had a truckload of money, and he kept giving stuff away to people who really needed it. While many rich people and corporations donate to charity for the purpose of making themselves look good in the public eye, Ed Mirvish did it because he really cared. You gotta love a guy who stands around handing out free turkeys to people who cannot afford Thanksgiving dinner – an annual tradition that has been continued in his memory.
What I have in common with him: I care deeply about making the world a better place.

Drew Barrymore. I’ve never been big on celebrities, but I confess to being totally in awe of Drew Barrymore. Like many people, I first saw her as the adorable child star in E.T. She shot to stardom so spectacularly as a child that her descent into a lifestyle of substance abuse almost seemed inevitable. It would have been so easy for her to live her life in the tabloid media by virtue of her addictions, but instead she went to rehab, sorted out her life, and established herself as an actress to be reckoned with.
What I have in common with her: I have overcome some intense challenges of my own – albeit ones of a different nature – instead of drowning in the events of the past.

Temple Grandin’s mother. Temple Grandin was a child with autism in the 1950’s – a time when autism was barely understood, much less known. She is now a highly successful adult, with a PhD in animal sciences. She done a lot of groundbreaking work in fields relating to animal welfare, and she is an outspoken autism advocate and educator. She puts much of her success down to her mother, who offered her unfailing support and mentoring throughout her childhood. It is a challenge to raise a child with autism in today’s world of IBI therapy and online support groups and autism advocacy everywhere. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for a mom back then, with far less knowledge and support to draw on.
What I have in common with her: I am the parent of a child with autism, who I would move heaven and earth for.

Who would be at your dinner party and why?

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisa_nichols/3288476050/. This picture has a creative commons attribution license.)

Filed Under: autism, Celebrities, Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, Overcoming Difficulty, Philanthropy, running, WEGO Health Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Life And Death: No Laughing Matter

July 23, 2011 By

People are already making jokes about it.

The first news stories about the untimely death of 27-year-old musician Amy Winehouse started circulating less than an hour before I started writing this post. Within about ten minutes of me first hearing the news, fan pages started to pop up on Facebook.

Amy Winehouse is dead, at least theres enough drugs about for everyone now (with a smiley face emoticon at the end)

Police say that winehouse’s death was unexplained LOL, at that point they were probably stoned on the drugs in her <profanity>

Screw Amy Winehouse, she was a druggy and had death lined up for her

Amy Winehouse is dead…..HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Now, I don’t know much about Amy Winehouse. I don’t exactly fall into the demographic that stays up-to-date on popular music. However, I do know that she was insanely talented, even though her music wasn’t really to my taste. I know that she was plagued by substance abuse problems. I know that she was young and had a lot of life ahead of her, and that she had tons of potential within her.

I know that her death is unspeakably sad.

These jokes that are circulating, these fan pages that are being set up, and the derision with which some people are treating this story, is a sad statement about how people have become so desensitized to tragedy that they can have a good laugh about it before the deceased has even started to cool down.

Or maybe it’s nothing new. This is not the first time I’ve heard jokes about a tragedy soon after its occurrence: the space shuttle Challenger disaster, and the death of Mozambican president Samora Machel in a plane crash, both of which happened in 1986, are cases in point.

I wonder why this is, why there are people can make light of events like this. One theory is that they just don’t know how else to deal with news of tragedy. There is some credence to this idea, and I saw it in action on the day my father-in-law died. There was a mix-up that resulted in the wrong funeral home attempting to collect his body from the hospital, and when my mother-in-law heard about this, she made a joke about the funeral homes fighting over her husband’s dead body, and she laughed heartily. I believe that allowing a chink of humour into the day was a way for her to cope with the initial shock of being widowed after almost fifty years of marriage.

In the case of more widespread disasters, I believe that sometimes people make jokes simply because they don’t know how else to process the information.9/11. Hurricane Katrina. The tsunamis in Thailand and Japan. The Haiti earthquake.

Sometimes, though, people are just plain insensitive. They don’t feel any empathy either for the deceased or for the newly bereaved loved ones. Or  – and Amy Winehouse’s death is an example of this – they somehow rationalize that because the person lived in a certain way that they do not agree with, it is OK that he or she died.

Here’s my thought on all of this: Yes, Amy Winehouse was a celebrity – a colourful one with a controversial life, at that – and therefore her life was, to an extent, public property. And yes, she seems to have died in an Elvis-like manner that is bound to attract a lot of attention and speculation.

But above all, she was a human being with hopes and dreams and feelings and loved ones. The fact that she had substance abuse problems does not mean she deserved to die. It does not mean it is OK that she died. Her life – and her death – deserve the same respect as anyone else’s. Her family and friends should be able to grieve for their lost loved one without the world making public fun of it all.

I hope against hope that we as a society can somehow regain some of the humanity and compassion that seems to have eroded.

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ups/2066092204/)

Filed Under: Amy Winehouse, Celebrities, Death, Facebook Fan Pages, Jokes, life, Respect, Tragedy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,