Rants and Complaints

[enviousdominous]

A not-so-new trend is becoming a favored strategy on part of those with a righteous attitude and a massive chip on their shoulder when it comes to having political influence on social media. It pisses me off that people are doing it on both sides, and it pisses me off even more that if you directly confront someone for doing it then you get sucked into a "YOU'RE ONE OF THEM" situation. That strategy is to assume that it's okay to lie, because the assumption of the other side is that they're not worthy of respect under any circumstance because of their depraved existence and thus lying about them is okay.

I'm sure that some of us have leafed through fact checking websites here or there, and have found that there's a lot of dishonesty on the internet. If one does enough research, there's even reason to question the trustworthiness of fact checking websites. We have to recognize that not all forms of misleading were intentional, and that any information from any source deserves more scrutiny than just the reputation of the source itself.

Depending on who you ask; President Trump is either the second coming of God or he's the absolute worst human being that ever lived. There's plenty to say in regard to any point of the love/hate President Trump spectrum, but I don't think that he's SO bad that it's permissible to spread lies in regard to him. I use President Trump as an example because of how polarizing he is, the bigger point that I'm trying to make is that unbeknownst to most on social media this type of slander isn't appropriate in regard to anyone.

A few popular lies being spread about President Trump:

Spoiler

I've seen prominent names in entertainment (Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Trever Noah, Patton Oswalt) make catty quips on TV and on social media stating that President Trump does not know the words to the US National Anthem. This is assumed because of a video that shows the President singing parts of, but not all of, the National Anthem. The thing is, there is a video out there showing that the President DOES in fact know the full lyrics to the National Anthem. From Snopes.com:


While it makes for good comedy to observe that the President who condemned the NFL players that kneeled during the playing of the National Anthem doesn't know the lyrics to the US National Anthem, it's also completely false and an unfair attack on the President's character.

Recently President Trump arrived at a Pennsylvania airport, and was greeted by a crowd of supporters who were hooting and cheering for him. His reaction to seeing this crowd of supporters? He gave a double-fist pump in the air. Now, this was on September 11th. One might argue that on that day, you're not allowed to show any excitement under any circumstance. I'm not really seeing that argument though. CNN reported that President Trump fist-pumped "before" arriving at a 9/11 memorial. Now, they technically didn't lie, though their cattiness was evident. He went to the 9/11 memorial after arriving at the airport, where CNN noted that he was somber but also repeated the mention about how he fist-pumped. Apparently people read that, or just up and lied with no justification, and started claiming that the President fist-pumped with excitement as he was arriving at a 9/11 memorial service. Beyond that lie, people started sharing images of former President Obama looking as somber as a sitting President should given the emotional weight of the occasion next to an image of President Trump fist-pumping with the caption implying that President Trump doesn't behave like a real President. Counter-memes (that's a thing now) showed genuine imagery of former President Obama laughing on September 11th (while not at a ceremony for those who were lost) next to an image of President Trump and the First Lady appropriately grieving those who were lost on September 11th 2001.

So, the basic takeaway for any rational person is that if you lie about your opponent then you have therefore given up the right to be taken seriously in anything you say, and you've played into their hands in that way. Apparently not many of us are rational.

I recently had to block a longtime friend from Facebook, because he went on an anti-Obama tangent and made the false claim that President Obama swore on a Quran for his inauguration, and furthermore implied that it would be wrong to swear on a Quran based on an uncited claim that it advocates lying. For the record, former President Obama swore on two Christian Bibles for his inauguration. So, a friend who a day prior I would have described as one of the most brilliant people I've ever met did a complete 180 and promoted a lie that contained a caveat that lying is wrong. This guy is in his 50s by the way, and had retired after honorably serving 24 years in the United States Air Force. Just saying, when someone tries to pull the "I'm always right because I defended this country" card, it's okay to call them out on that being bullshit. Respecting them doesn't make them God. When I called him on his lying, he went on a rant stating that it doesn't matter if he lied because former President Obama is still a (his words) piece of shit.

My overall point is, you still have to treat people fairly. That might sound like a bunch of weak-willed hippie mumbo-jumbo, but it keeps you from overstepping and promoting an idea that's false.

There have been times when I've stepped up to defend a cause that I felt very righteous about, and needlessly assassinated the character of people who merely disagreed with me without asking for their readily available explanation for their perspective. It's fun in a hedonistic sense to use all of the intelligent words we've picked up over time and make a big pejorative laced word salad that rips apart anyone on an opposing side of an issue, but in the long run doing that alienates any emotionally intelligent people on the other side who may have helped you have a broader perspective of the world.

Sometimes it's better to ignore if someone is needlessly throwing insults at you, and just ask them a fair question about their perspective in an effort to know more about them. Sometimes all you can do is tell someone to go fuck themselves and move on.

 

[enviousdominous]

Last month has been... trying. I've been getting bad information from people who should have known what information to give to me, and it's caused very bad things to happen in my life.

Something that would have made my experiences a little less stressful, would be if certain companies completely abandon the practice of automated phone lines.

Some things in our lives are like sicknesses that won't go away. We can't even seek treatment for them, because Google and everyone else are part of the sickness. Automated phone lines are one of them.

I recently had to change banks, for reasons that I honestly can't go over here and now. My original bank would have a real person answer the phone, usually after only a few rings. You'd get a warm greeting, and they would connect you to whomever you would need to talk to. This isn't a rare trait, every other bank I had been involved with did the same thing. I switched to a more ubiquitous bank, and they use automated lines.

This automated line startles me, in that it's not just the regular customer service line that's also an automated line. If you use my bank's app, it has a "contact us directly" option. This option doesn't contact anyone, it connects me to an automated line. I had to make five selections to get connected to the person I needed, who as it turns out couldn't even help me with my issue. Mind you; when I finally got put in line for that person, I had to deal with hold music and messages of "Your call is very important to us. Did you know that most problems can be solved by using our convenient app?".

This was very frustrating, and sometimes I like to wander over to Google to see if anybody else can relate to my issue. If you put "automated phone line" in any part of your search on Google or Bing or whoever, you get a laundry list of ads for companies that offer to initiate automated lines for your business. It's almost as if they don't even acknowledge the push button option system that automated lines use, they just brag happily about how great they are in every way. One link I found mildly criticized them for potentially being unresponsive to customer needs, but the other 90% of the article was more advertising for how one could utilize automated lines.

I then had to call the company that organizes how my paycheck is direct deposited, and they use an automated line as well. Their automated line uses the absolute slowest and most mundane voice for their push button menus also, and each option sounded extremely vague. I eventually figured out what options I would need to choose to reach a person, and that person told me that I had reached the wrong person. Fair enough, except that they then suggested that I call the exact same number that I had called and choose the options that I had chosen to reach the wrong person. Their explanation was something like "Well, sometimes people push the wrong buttons. I'm not saying that you did that Sir, but sometimes it happens". Whatever, fine. I had to call a few more times to figure out that these people couldn't help me, and also figure out that they literally had no idea of how to do anything involved with the website.

The bigger picture to all of this is that I'm pretty sure that nobody likes automated lines when they have to navigate them as a customer. They're great for businesses that want to prevent crank calls, or just not hire enough people to answer phones. I'm pretty sure that most people would rather speak to a person. Fine, except that the internet is controlled by the wealthy and they would rather that I don't present the idea that their money saving business model is a crock of shit. The easiest solution is to just inundate any online query into the overall quality of a company that uses automated phone lines with ads for those automated phone lines until the person asking just gives up and joins the status quo.