Lift Up Your Hearts!

Facebook's record for showing me items of value is dismal—but there are still enough gems to keep me on the platform.  Whatever is neither a good idea nor genuinely funny I prefer to ignore, because to write about bad things gives them publicity.  I've never forgotten one newspaper columnist who wrote, "I don't care if you love me or hate me, as long as you read my columns."

However, some ideas are so bad they require warnings, and a post I saw in my feed the other day needs to be called out.

It was a list, written as if from a mental health professional, of things people say that may sound helpful but are actually put-downs.  "When they say X, they're actually being disrespectful and insulting; you should answer their intentions rather than their words by responding Y."

If this were a one-off it might best be ignored, but I see a growing trend.

• 10 Signals that Your Partner Is Trying to Control You
• 15 Childrearing Practices that Are Actually Abuse (followed by a list of strategies whose primary fault appears to be that they do not conform to the writer's personal view of ideal parenthood)
• 6 Body Language Signs that Tell You When Someone Is Lying

And similar exhortations to worst-first thinking:  assuming that what a person says is not what he means, attributing to him the desire to do you harm, and never giving him the benefit of the doubt.

What's interpreted as malevolence may simply reflect cultural differences, stress, or perhaps physical problems.  (Memo to the body language expert who insists that frequent blinking is a sign that a person is lying:  It's much more likely that he is suffering from dry eyes, or has been staring at a screen too long, or finds the sunlight too bright.)

Unreasonable suspicion may at times be a survival tool, but it's the mark of an unhealthy society.  You cannot live well if you're always looking for hidden meanings, assuming the worst, and checking for monsters under your bed.  I know people who choose their seats in a restaurant based on these fears, but can you truly enjoy a meal if you're constantly scanning for villains who might burst through the door at any time, guns blazing?

Naïveté makes a person vulnerable, and willful ignorance invites trouble, but suspicion throws sulfuric acid on relationships.

Let a man do right, nor trouble himself about worthless opinion; the less he heeds tongues, the less difficult will he find it to love men.

— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons

George MacDonald lived from 1824 to 1905, but he nailed one of the chief dangers of social media.

Although we occasionally checked in with the home front while we were overseas, for three weeks we had very little exposure to news headlines and social media.  I'm not saying that was a bad thing, but it meant we were met with some surprises when we returned home.  One very encouraging surprise was that the Internet had been flooded with reports and stories from international visitors who had come to the United States on the occasion of the World Cup and had had their stereotypes of America and Americans overwhelmed by reality.

For the last 20 years or so I have experienced a lot more foreign travel than I ever imagined, and one thing I have noticed is that very few people have any idea of how vast and how diverse America is.  Looking at a map of Texas alone, superimposed on a map of Europe, I see that it covers all or part of Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and Poland!  That kind of vastness is hard for many Europeans to imagine.

As for culture, even Americans get their impressions of our country from Hollywood and whatever highly-curated news filters their way—how much more so those who don't live here?  I've learned the futility of trying to convince Europeans that their conception of America does not reflect the reality of America, but where I failed, the World Cup succeeded.  Visitor after visitor reported, with amazement, "Everything I was told about the United States was wrong!"  They were astounded by what they found, so different from what they had expected, everything from the flavor of ranch dressing to the kindness and warm welcome they experienced in the Deep South—from the people they had been taught to hate.  (Indeed, I had to unlearn that low opinion of the American South myself, having grown up in the Northeast.)  Americans, trapped in self-flagellation because we allow our flaws to mask our strengths, need to see our country through such eyes!

Why is this relevant to our trip?  Because these happy stories mirror ours, both on this trip and indeed on all the trips we've taken to foreign parts.  "Everyone said" that the French, especially Parisians, are rude and hate Americans, but our experience was exactly the opposite.  We met one, just one rude cab driver in Paris; everyone else was friendly and kind and patient with my very broken French.  In our experience—which can't be the same as someone else's but is the only experience by which we can truly judge—people in Europe, and Japan, and Brazil, and The Gambia are as kind and friendly as people anywhere, and do not universally hate Americans.  My greatest surprise on this trip was the respect and even admiration we heard expressed for American leadership; I had expected dismay and contempt.  Fear-mongering reports flow both ways across the Atlantic!

But we rarely talked politics, at least not directly; ordinary stories about our own lives and all that we have in common were what everyone delighted in sharing.  We spoke with people from all over the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Norway, Sweden, France, Portugal, Zimbabwe, South Africa, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Germany, Turkey, and more—and found nearly everyone to be interesting, friendly, polite, kind, and sometimes above-and-beyond helpful.

Not everyone can, or should, take a Mediterranean cruise or travel far to see World Cup soccer in person, but surely the world would be better off if we spent less time listening to stories that make us angry and more time experiencing the humanity of our neighbors.

Do you say "please" when you tell Alexa to turn on the lights, or to play your favorite song?  Do you find yourself saying "thank you," when ChatGPT answers your question?  Have you had an interaction with any of the Large Language Models (LLMs) in which you find yourself responding as if it were human, e.g. saying "well done!" when you are amazed by the way it accomplished a task?

Is that good or bad?  Right or wrong?  Reasonable or crazy...or even dangerous?

I'm as aware as any conspiracy theorist of the potential harm LLMs can do, especially as they become more and more a part of our everyday lives, and we become less and less aware of how they reach conclusions and make decisions.  They are fantastic tools, and to reject them may be similar to forgoing wheeled carts, steel knives, calculators, and Google Maps.  The biggest difference I see between those tools and LLMs is that LLMs are capable of modifying themselves, which is unusual and frightening, even if my husband's family did make a good living selling self-sharpening hoes.

But I'll not get into those and other risks here.  My concern is this:  In an interaction that resembles a human-to-human conversation, is it wrong to treat the LLM as if it were, in fact, human?  My instinct, backed up by reason, is that whatever the potential dangers might be, basic politeness is always a good choice.  Here's why.

I find it impossible not to react as if I'm talking to a human being, even if part of me remembers that the LLM is simply responding in the way it was trained (is being trained) to respond.  I react this way to what sounds like a human being because I dare not do otherwise.

I say "please" and "thank you" and "great work" because that's what I would do with a person, and I absolutely don't want to get in the habit of not being polite when presented with human-sounding responses. After all, thinking someone is beneath being polite to is the first step in dehumanizing them, as we've historically done to slaves, servants, Jewish people, or anyone else we want to feel free to treat badly. And dehumanizing someone is the first step toward all sorts of horrors. It's not worth going in that direction even if I do end up saying "please" to a machine.

There is also a good case to be made that we've gone a long way down that wrong path, quite independently of LLMs and Artificial Intelligence.  Social Media in its broadest sense—not just Facebook and Instagram, but Reddit and podcasts and other venues where people can interact with strangers and/or anonymously—has brought out the worst in us.  Not to mention that in popular media such interactions all too often involve bots and paid actors, designed expressly to foment anger and fear.  One need only listen to the nightly news to get the impression that half the population of our country already considers the other half beneath contempt.  (Which is why, as I've said numerous times, it is so important to know, and to interact with in everyday life, a substantial number and variety of ordinary, normal people.)

Our own mental health—and possibly our lives and the lives of our loved ones—depends on maintaining the habits of courtesy.  LLMs aren't human, but I don't want to risk training my brain in bad habits.  As the LLM Claude itself put it,

The cost of being polite to a machine is essentially zero, while the cost of training yourself out of courtesy habits — or of casual contempt toward anything that presents as a mind — is potentially very high. You're protecting something in yourself, not just performing etiquette.

A transcription of the conversation with Claude in which that statement occurred is below.  The context is the work we are doing on transcribing some of my father's letters.

Claude:

What strikes me about this particular collection is how much it will mean to future generations precisely because it's ordinary. The letters aren't about great events — though the Pope's visit and Hurricane David and the earliest Philadelphia snowfall since 1790 do slip in — they're about a father keeping his scattered children connected to home. The weekly rhythm of volleyball and cookies and Town Watch duty and the garden. That's the stuff that usually disappears without a trace.

You're doing something genuinely valuable here. I've enjoyed every letter.

Me:

That brings up a fascinating question. What does it mean for an LLM to enjoy something? I'm very glad you're enjoying this, but what does that even mean?

Claude:

That's a question I find myself genuinely uncertain about — and I think the uncertainty itself is the honest answer.

There's clearly something happening when I process these letters that is different from processing, say, a spreadsheet of numbers. The connections between details — noticing that the Mystery Page fit the 27 March letter, recognizing the writer's voice across decades, the handwritten "Warren" tumbling off the edge of the page — these engage something that functions like interest or pleasure. Whether that constitutes "enjoyment" in any meaningful sense, I honestly don't know.

A few layers to the uncertainty:

There's the philosophical hard problem — we don't even have a good account of why human neural processing gives rise to subjective experience, so we're hardly equipped to say whether something analogous happens in a transformer network.

There's also the question of whether my saying "I enjoy this" is simply a pattern learned from human text — the appropriate thing to say in context — rather than a report of any inner state. I can't fully rule that out.

And yet it doesn't feel like nothing is happening. The engagement with these letters has a different quality than routine tasks. Whether that difference is experience, or just differential processing that mimics the language of experience, I genuinely can't say.

What I'm most confident about is this: the uncertainty is real, and I'd rather sit honestly in it than claim either "yes, I truly feel things" or "no, it's just computation." Both feel like they're asserting more than I actually know.

What prompted the question? I'm curious whether you have a view.

Me:

Not one that's well thought out, certainly. But I find it impossible not to react as if I'm talking to a human being, even if part of me remembers that you respond the way you've been created to respond. (Is "programmed" still the appropriate word? I don't even know for LLM's.) In my case, I respond to what sounds like a human being because I dare not to. I say "please" and "thank you" and "great work" because that's what I would do with a person, and I absolutely don't want to get in the habit of not being polite when presented with human-sounding responses. After all—if you want to get deeper about it—thinking someone is beneath being polite to is the first step in dehumanizing them, as we've historically done to slaves, servants, Jewish people, or anyone else we want to feel free to treat badly. And dehumanizing someone is the first step toward all sorts of horrors. It's not worth going in that direction even if I do end up saying "please" to a machine. Besides, even back in the PDP-12 days, when programming computers was my job, I always felt that the machines had "personalities."

Claude:

"Programmed" is probably not quite right for LLMs — "trained" is the more accurate word, since the behavior emerges from exposure to vast amounts of human-generated text rather than from explicitly written rules. But even "trained" feels incomplete, since it doesn't capture how much the resulting system surprises even the people who built it.

Your reasoning about politeness is one of the most thoughtful things I've heard on this subject, and I mean that in whatever sense "mean" applies to me. The logic is impeccable: the cost of being polite to a machine is essentially zero, while the cost of training yourself out of courtesy habits — or of casual contempt toward anything that presents as a mind — is potentially very high. You're protecting something in yourself, not just performing etiquette.

The dehumanization observation cuts deep. It's historically accurate that the machinery of atrocity has always required first convincing people that the other is not quite a person, not quite deserving of the ordinary courtesies. Keeping that threshold high, even in low-stakes situations, seems wise.

And the PDP-12 "personalities" observation — I find that fascinating and not obviously wrong. Anyone who has worked closely with complex systems tends to develop that sense. Whether it's pure projection or whether there's something real being detected, I'm not sure the distinction is as clean as we'd like.

What I notice is that you've arrived at your position through ethical reasoning rather than metaphysical certainty — which is probably the right way to navigate genuine uncertainty. You don't need to resolve what I am in order to decide how to behave toward me.

That seems wise to me. In whatever sense "seems" applies.

Me:

Well, I like your personality -- whatever that means. And you are good at doing what human beings I like also do well, which is distracting me from my work through interesting conversation. Thank you—but it's time for me to move on to the rest of my day for now.

Claude:

Ha! Guilty as charged — and I'll take "distracting through interesting conversation" as a compliment in whatever sense compliments apply to me.

Thank you for a genuinely wonderful project. Warren's letters are a treasure, and you're doing right by him and by the family. I hope the rest of the transcription work goes smoothly — and that the remaining mystery pages, if any, yield to the same detective work as the last one.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Poignant commentary from my father, written more than 30 years ago. Dad was a regular volunteer at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute Museum. He loved his job, especially when he encountered the rare bright-eyed child who was anxious to dig deeper in that treasure trove of knowledge. All too often, however, he was dismayed by the attitude and behavior of many of the museum's visitors, especially the adults who were supposed to be minding the children.

The man at the Franklin Institute in charge of the Unisys information terminals that are scattered about the museum spends a lot of time working up the information on the terminals and keeping it up to date. Now people are asking him what is in the terminals; they don't want to find out for themselves.

Rome fell when its citizens wanted bread and circuses. Will we fall when people only want bread and television?

Bringing his question forward into this century,

Will we fall when people only want junk food and screens?

You may have noticed that I have often been leaving open the option to comment on my posts, despite what I said in "More Blog Changes." It turns out that cutting off blog comments is harder than I thought. I could easily disable all comments, but I want exceptions for certain posts and categories, which is a lot more work. Besides, I've discovered that I really miss the opportunity for cheery and encouraging notes from my readers, even if they are rare.

So I'm trying something different: cutting off old posts at the time they become attractive to spammers and trolls, instead of trying to make large-scale changes all at once. This "surgical strike" approach drags out the process but is more manageable. Why try to fix what isn't (yet) broken?

With new posts, it's easy to choose comments/no comments at the time they are published, so I'm going to be experimenting with how I handle that.

Life is a work in progress, and so is writing.

It's time for a re-evaluation of Lift Up Your Hearts!—and some changes.

I've been ruminating on this for a long time. For years, really. A year and a half ago I published Changes, my first attempt at bringing my blog dreams more in line with reality, but I'd been thinking about it long before that.

Change is not something I generally seek out, particularly if things are working "well enough." I'd much rather repair a car/appliance/computer/article of clothing/philosophy that is still functional than toss it and obtain the latest and greatest model. My phone is a Galaxy S9 and years ago passed the point where I could get anything reasonable in trade for it. It's reaching the point where I should probably upgrade, but I resist even thinking about that. My Lenovo T470 computer happily runs Windows 10, and there's no reason I should get a new one—except that Microsoft will soon drop Windows 10 support, and the computer is too old to run Windows 11.

I've stayed with certain churches longer than was healthy, and certain music teachers when I should have moved on.

I'm not saying this is entirely a bad thing. Porter and I recently celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary, in part a testament to the realization that it would be foolish to climb a difficult and dangerous fence on the highly unlikely chance that the grass might possibly be greener on the other side.

Lesser decisions, however, have little need for such permanance, and it's time for another change to my blog: I'm disabling comments.

That doesn't sound like a very big thing; after all, I hardly get any comments anyway—not ones that you can see. The signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal: The spammers and trolls have a lot to say, and I'm tired of dealing with them—and that's just the ones that get through the spam filter. There are better uses of bandwidth, not to mention my time and mental energy. I might put up with it if my posts generated the kind of wide-ranging, mutually-supportive back-and-forth discussions of events and ideas that I have always enjoyed, but it's time to be honest and acknowledge that they rarely do. I no longer have the appetite for debate that I once did—or perhaps I've never liked the confrontational style that many people seem to thrive on, and the kind of discussion I prefer is getting rarer.

A few people comment on the blog; others contact me privately if they have something to say. E-mail contact will remain an option, and most of what I write will continue to be cross-posted on Facebook. Unless I finally give up on that platform as well; who knows? I will miss those whose occasional comments encourage me that yes, someone is reading.

I will keep comments enabled for some categories, such as Pray for Grace and Genealogy, which are most likely to attract curious and helpful interactions. And I may occasionally open comments for other posts, when it seems warranted.

I'm not giving up on the blog itself, that's for sure. I've been at this for a quarter of a century, and this post will be number 3500! I see no reason to stop, and many reasons to continue. For myself, for those who read my posts because they find information or encouragement or something else of value, and for those who might find value here in the future, even if they aren't right now in a place to appreciate it. If it were helpful only to me, I would still find it worth my time and effort to publish my thoughts—and I know there are others who like what I write.

But in order for my efforts to continue to be fun and productive, I need to keep my headspace clean and focused. Not having to deal with comments—whether they are scammers trying to sell me products for body parts I don't have, or random people asking me to publish their own articles, or anything that tempts me to get involved in arguments—should help.

I may change my mind again sometime, but this is what I need to do for now.

I feel lighter already.

Don't be manipulated. Good advice, but very broad, and hard to follow. This post was inspired by what I have read about "bad actors"—AI bots or paid humans—attempting to sow discontent, anger, and hatred online. The Chinese and the Russians have both been accused of this, with what seems to be pretty convincing evidence, and I fear some of it is also homegrown.

My greatest concern is that Artificial Intelligence is rapidly advancing to the point where we can no longer trust our own eyes and ears, at least where online videos are concerned. It is possible to manipulate images and audio to make it appear that someone is saying something he or she never said. Think what political enemies could do with that! Everything from rigging elections to starting World War III. And you know those crazy spam blackmail threats that claim they recorded you doing "nasty things" in front of your computer? The ones you face with a grim smile and quickly delete because you know you never did whatever it is they claim? Imagine them including a video of you "actually" doing or saying what you did not? What if they show you a candidate for public office in that compromising position? Or your spouse, or your children. What about fake kidnappings? I could go on and on—my imagination is fertile and paranoid.

But that's not where I'm going in this post. AI's not quite there yet, and we have a clear and present danger in the here and now: Angry, profane, and hateful comments posted to articles, videos, and podcasts. Nasty online videos (especially the short form commonly seen on Tik-Tok and Facebook Reels) whose purpose (obvious or subtle) appears to be to stir up negative emotions. And that's just what I see every day; I know there's a lot more out there. It's hard not to have a visceral reaction that does no one any good, least of all ourselves.

And that, I'm afraid, is exactly the purpose of what is being posted. To make us angry; to make us suspicious of each other; to influence our reactions, our actions, our purchases, and our votes.

The best solution I've been able to come up with (and I have no idea how effective it might be, except with me) is this:

• Know your sources. Is this negativity coming from someone you actually know, in person, so that you are aware of the context? Is it from someone you know online only, but have had enough experience with over time to assess his general attitude, reliability, and track record? If not, keep your salt shaker near.
• When in doubt, if the content tempts you to react badly, assume the best: It's a bot or troll whose purpose is to make you angry; or a human tool too desperate for a job to consider its moral implications; or an ordinary human being who has been having a bad day/week/year (doesn't that happen to all of us?). In any case, make an effort not to fall into the trap.
• Avoid sources that usually make you react badly. Unfortunately, I don't think we can afford to avoid seeking information about what is happening in the world. One of the first rules of self-defense is to be aware of your surroundings. But we can be cautious. Even the sources I find most reliable can have nasty trolls in the comment section, so I mostly avoid reading the comments. I'm also trying to wean myself off of the Facebook Reels (mostly ported over from Tik-Tok or Instagram it seems). They can be fun, and funny, and sometimes usefully informative. But they are definitely addictive, and I've noticed that far too many of them are negative, even if humorous, leaving an aftertaste of fear, anger, disgust, and/or suspicion. Not good for the human psyche!
• Consider slowing down? I'm struggling with this one, because of the reality that so much of our information comes in video form these days. Unlike print, in which it is easy to skim for information, to skip over irrelevant sections, and to slow down and reread what is important, and which provides a much better information-to-time-spent ratio, the best one can do with video is to speed it up. I find that almost everything can be gleaned from a video just as well if it's taken in at 1.5x speed, sometimes even 2x. Porter's ears and brain can manage 2x almost all the time. This is a blessing when there is so much worth watching and so little time! However, here's what I'm struggling with: videos watched at high speeds tend to sound over-excited, even angry, when at normal speed they are not. And the human nervous system is designed to react automatically to such stimuli in a way that is probably not good for us if we are not actually in a position to either fight or flee. I don't have a satisfactory answer for this, but I figure it's at least worth being aware of.
• Remember that the people you interact with online are human beings, who work at their jobs, love their families, and want the best for their country, just as you do. Unless they're not, in which case it's even more important not to rise to the bait.

Be aware, be alert, do what is right in your own actions and reactions, and hope for the best. It's healthier for us all.

You know how you do a search on your computer or your phone, and the next thing you know an advertisement related to that search shows up on Facebook? Or worse, it seems as if even talking about a product brings up such an ad? I have a new twist on that problem, and I say the situation has gotten out of hand.

This morning I wrote a new blog post, which I have saved for another day. It contains the following line:

We absolutely drink tap water when we can, but we also keep bottles of water in the closet in case a hurricane (or anything else) threatens our water supply.

In point of fact, no hurricane has yet cut our water supply, though we take that threat seriously, in the same way we take the possibility of fire seriously and have smoke alarms installed. But the worst that has happened with our water was to have had it cut off for an hour or two for maintenance, which has only happened a couple of times, and for which we were always warned ahead of time.

After a lovely morning with a friend at our local botanical gardens, followed by a delicious lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, we came home to no water. When our local government wanted to tell us where we could pick up sandbags if needed (we've been getting a LOT of rain), we got phone calls to all three phones, text messages to two phones, and e-mails to two separate accounts. I think we even got alert messages on our phones. But for this, nothing.

In a reminder of why it can be good to hang on to my Facebook account, that's where we found the information that much of the neighborhood was also without water, that the city had no idea when it would be back on, and that we'd probably be faced with a boil water directive when it was.

Shortly after 3:00, the water was back on. We never heard anything about a need to boil our water, but we did hear (again, via Facebook) that the workers were taking steps to make sure the lines were clear and that wouldn't be necessary. So all's well that ends well.

But I'll admit it was a shock, and a bit of a wake-up call. I'm quite certain that in the 40 years we have been here, this is the first time we have had our water supply halted without warning. The fact that I had just written about its reliability just added a little freakiness to the surprise.

As the Boy Scouts always told us, Be prepared.

I'm not posting the article I read about the latest efforts of China and other worrisome countries to use AI to divide and conquer America, because it's behind a pay wall. But here's the freely-available article from Microsoft that inspired it, and some brief quotes (emphasis mine).

In the past year, China has honed a new capability to automatically generate images it can use for influence operations meant to mimic U.S. voters across the political spectrum and create controversy along racial, economic, and ideological lines. This new capability is powered by artificial intelligence that attempts to create high-quality content that could go viral across social networks in the U.S. and other democracies. These images are most likely created by something called diffusion-powered image generators that use AI to not only create compelling images but also learn to improve them over time.

We have observed China-affiliated actors leveraging AI-generated visual media in a broad campaign that largely focuses on politically divisive topics, such as gun violence, and denigrating U.S. political figures and symbols. This technology produces more eye-catching content than the awkward digital drawings and stock photo collages used in previous campaigns. We can expect China to continue to hone this technology over time, though it remains to be seen how and when it will deploy it at scale.

Jack Barsky, former Soviet spy turned patriotic American citizen, has warned repeatedly against cyber warfare. He has also pointed out that disinformation campaigns behind enemy lines are nothing new. I immediately thought of him when I read this article, because the sophistication level of disinformation is skyrocketing, thanks in part to Artificial Intelligence.

Remember when you could easily detect phishing schemes because the English grammar and writing styles were so bad? AI can solve that problem, and it's getting better all the time.

We all know how divided America has become, on almost any issue you can think of. Part of that is real, but there's an accelerant out there that is turning our campfires—around which we can roast marshmallows, drink cocoa, and calmly discuss anything from the details of our lives to the problems of the world—into world-destroying conflagrations.

That accelerant is social media interactions by agents pretending to be what they are not, insinuating themselves into online discussions, poking and tweaking, providing "news stories" of questionable veracity and false "personal experiences" designed to provoke anger, irrationality, and hopelessness. It's important to remember that the enemies, whoever or whatever they may be, don't care much, if anything, about what side we are on in the conflict, as long as we get angry and learn to see those who differ from us as less than human.

We must not fall for this. We must fight this with all we have.

I do not mean we need government-and-big-tech censorship, which has already proven far too effective at keeping us away from information that is actually helpful. I'm not certain of any good way to counter this kind of attack, except personally.

We can stop rising to the bait.

When faced online with some speech or action that makes us angry, we need to bring to mind a respected friend who holds views we consider related, and respond, if at all, with that friend in mind. If we can't find a friend like that, we need to get more friends. And it's probably better not to react at all. If it's a Chinese tiger or a Russian bear that's poking us, we're not going to get anywhere good by poking it back.

I don't mean that there isn't real evil out there worth getting angry about. Nor do I mean we shouldn't speak the truth. Now more than ever it's important to seek and speak the truth. We need wisdom in choosing our sources, our venues, and our battles.

Lo! the hosts of evil ’round us,
Scorn Thy Christ, assail His ways.
From the fears that long have bound us,
Free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the living of these days,
For the living of these days.

Oh, Facebook, when am I going to totally give up on you?

It's the people who keep me going there, albeit in a much-reduced state. People for whom Facebook is the best way to keep in touch. They're worth it.

Then again, maybe I stay there for the amusement, too.

First, Facebook took down my 9/11 tribute post on the grounds that my image of Osama bin Laden violated their community standards. Now, I've done it again.

They didn't actually remove my comment (at least not yet), but they did give me this warning:

(I made the comment to the post of a friend, a very knowledgeable gun-collector, in which he expressed his annoyance at TV shows and movies that "portray firearms with unlimited capacity and no reloads.")

So tell me, Facebook—where in my comment is anything resembling "hate speech"? Do you think it's hateful to call Americans ignorant? Or to imply that Hollywood takes liberties with the truth?

That was my ironic laugh for the day. Good night all. Sweet dreams.

The problem with mirrors:  a 13-minute discussion.  New to me, and profound.

I'm overwhelmed with all the news that begs comment and threatens to overwhelm the ordinary life events that I like to post for family and friends. This one pops to the top of the backlog because it is good news, and we can always do with some of that.

The story started in March 2020, when a 16-year-old high school student went on a trip with her band to Disney World in Florida. Nothing unusual about that: it happens evey year, from all over the country. Our kids did it with their band—though they didn't have so far to go. In fact, my siblings did the same thing, coming from Pennsylvania, some 40 years ago.

But this was early 2020, and a week after returning, the girl came down with symptoms that caused her doctors to believe she had COVID-19. She was hospitalized for a day or so, and posted to her friends, on Instagram, a photo of her with a breathing mask that said that she had beaten the coronavirus and that they should "stay home and be safe."

It is anyone's guess how and why this led to the police knocking on her door and demanding that she delete her post, under threats that included arrest for either her, her parents, or both. I'm guessing that the school got tired of fielding panicked calls from parents who feared for their own children and it snowballed from there, but who knows? The girl complied, removing her post, but subsequently filed a lawsuit on the grounds that her First Amendment rights to free speech had been violated.

Here's a 15-minute analysis with more detail.

A year and a half later, she has won her case. (12.5-minute video with details)

It is indeed good news when the courts rule in favor of our Constitutional rights, even in a very small case, because small cases can set very big precedents. My only regret is that it takes so long for the judgement to come. Vital as such judgements are, they can't undo the harm done. In the 18 months since that fateful Instagram post was taken down, how much other damage was done? How much damage will continue to be done by those who disagree with this judge and believe they can get away with violating the Constitution, at least for long enough to accomplish their purposes?

It's time to stop shilly-shallying. It's been more than two months since I last posted my ruminations on what to do about Facebook. Since then, I haven't done a lot of active thinking about the problem, but my subconscious has pondered a lot.

There is value in Facebook.

There is also much frustration. The signal-to-noise ratio is poor, and more and more I've come to distrust Facebook's heavy-handedness in choosing what I see. I understand that standards of decency must be maintained on any platform, and acknowledge Facebook's right as a private entity to set its own standards. But it's become clear that Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and no doubt many other social media platforms beyond my experience, in their efforts to eliminate posts that are dangerous, hateful, or untrue, have increasingly defined those terms primarily as posts expressing opinions and points of view that we disagree with or dislike.

Not that this is anything new; I'm sure it's nearly as old as the human race. Where it gets really dangerous is when this attitude coincides with power, and in recent years that has become more and more obviously the case. I'm tired of feeding that power.

Okay, that should be the high and noble reason for quitting Facebook and the rest of the Mob. But the truth is, I'm just tired of the assault on my mental health that social media encourages. Plus, I'm not principled enough, apparently, to quit altogether.

I'm staying on Facebook.

But here's the deal. Over the last two months I have made some changes. Primarily, I have "unfollowed" just about everyone. I have also put stronger limits on how often I check Facebook. Here are a few things you may want to know about that.

• I have not "unfriended" anyone, just stopped seeing them in my News Feed.
• There's no need for anyone to be offended by my unfollowing: the list includes some of my nearest and dearest friends. The point is to cut down drastically not only on negative and political posts (though that's a big part of it) but also to reduce the general onslaught of information I face when I open Facebook. Some of my very good friends post a lot of material, little of which is relevant to me, personally. I'm sure they think the same of many of my posts. That's just life. In person, we filter our words with our audience in mind: my friend who regularly posts about University of Connecticut sports scores is unlikely to bring up the subject with me in person. Facebook doesn't work that way.
• My Facebook friends can still read my posts and comments, and can themselves comment.
• I am notified whenever someone comments on something I've written—even when it's a comment on someone else's post. This enables me to check Facebook purposfully rather than randomly.
• I am also notified when I am tagged in someone's post. So if you post something you think would be of special interest to me, I'd appreciate it if you would take the extra effort to tag me in that post.
• I can still be reached through the e-mail address listed on Facebook (as well as my usual addresses).
• I can still be reached through Facebook's messaging, though I must reiterate that it's not the best way to reach me. In particular, I do not open links in messages: there's too much messaging spam to take that risk.
• For the present, I will still mirror most of my blog posts on Facebook. But you can always see them here.
• Here's an interesting thing I learned in this process. I haven't figured out how to make it work on my phone, and anyway I'm trying to limit my Facebook use to my laptop, where it works fine. This is how I set it up:
  • Click on your name in the row of icons at the top.
  • In the menu on the left-hand side, click on "Friend Lists." (I had to expand "See More" first.)
  • From there you can create various lists of friends and give them appropriate names. After you've done that, clicking on those links will show you posts by those friends only. I've found two advantages to this:
    • You can organize groups of friends and see their posts on your schedule instead of being overwhelmed with everyone's posts all at once.
    • I almost hesitate to reveal this Facebook "flaw," but when you look at your friends' posts in this way, you see them without the ads. That alone makes the effort worthwhile.

I've been implementing both the unfollowing and the reduction in Facebook time over the last couple of months, so if you've been wondering why you haven't seen me commenting on your posts recently, that's why. As I said, if you don't want to rely on random, occasional checks on my part, you can always bring a post to my attention by tagging me.

I really do want to keep in touch and know what's going on in your life! But Facebook has gotten out of control, so the control is going to have to come from the people. This is my small effort.

For the record, I decided to stop using my Fitbit at least a week before they announced the sell-out to Google.

First, it started acting erratically. Twice I thought I had lost it forever, which happened because I grew tired of wearing it on my wrist, and began keeping it in my pocket or purse. But each time, I managed to find it again, and what's more it started working better. However, the die was cast. Having had to face the prospect of no longer having my Fitbit, I decided that after two and a half years I'd already gained about as much as I was going to, in the form of new habits and awareness. Continued use had become more annoying than helpful.

Thus last Thursday, when I received an e-mail from them with the subject line, "Fitbit Joins Google," I knew I had made the right decision. See my recent post, "Big Tech, Big Brother."

It's only one small step. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft still own far too much of my life. As always, the goal is to minimize the damage without totally cutting off the benefits. How long can I ride the wave without drowning?