Thread by @JaniceBrauner

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Noah Smith’s excellent thread on why one should “BLOCK EARLY, BLOCK OFTEN” pastes a smile on my face. 1/25

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1162137368968646656

He’s right that engaging w/those who “use twitter as a combat zone” fosters contempt for opposing views & is counter-productive to the goal of understanding those views. 2/25

A newbie-on-twitter-me ONLY got on twitter as an experiment. I wanted to hone my writing skills & determine IF I could wax original & substantive enough in 280 characters to entice the kind of listener I value as a dialectic partner. 3/25

I also relished exposure to intelligent ideas-laden folks engaging in back n forths w/one another. Crafting arguments. Seriously disagreeing w/one another while keepin’ it substantive. Civil. Teaching through rational thought trains. 4/25

I plunged in. 5/25

On day one, I blocked an undisguised knuckle-dragger. If that’s what I wanted, I’d have turned on cable TV. IF I HAD cable. Eejits were/are clearly counter-productive to my goals. 6/25

I recognized that constant exposure to abusive discourse would leave me abraded. Worse, wallowing in the muck inevitably has the potential to transform one into a mud-slinger. Lotta presumably smart people on twitter confusing mud-slinging w/sophistication. 7/25

Not my cup of tea. 8/25

By day three, it became obvious that one had to craft one's own experience AND that, if successful, the experience had immense value. 9/25

Color me like a kid in a candy shop EXCEPT I’m older than Methuselah & wanna munch on an array of ideas. 10/25

The democratization of twitter is phenomenal. Few jobs afford the opportunity to engage in discourse at this level and diversity of ideas. 11/25

I’ve encountered true elegance. Some utter brilliance & lotsa paper-holding pretenders fooling themselves. Discovered the guffaw-pasting humorous power of memes when used to provoke laughter not shame. Learned a butt-load. 12/25

Started cursing more than is probably good for my soul.

Now my experiment is ongoing. Still never looked up what constitutes an admirable ratio but have engaged w/truly fascinating folks who paste smiles on my face daily. 13/25

Still don’t have a huge following and discovered that racking them up is f**king hard. Especially blue checks, many of whom talk about egalitarianism more than they practice it. 14/25

Still, I have a number of followers – blue check and otherwise -- who impress the hell oughta me. Got one last night whose work I have been reading for over a decade. And truthfully, the # of followers has never been the goal though it is a metric that has some relevance. 15/25

I reckon I should work up a profile. I only just put up a current profile pic from 2 wks ago. A hairdresser lent me her shades & snapped the pics of a tremulous exhausted overwrought me [story for another day]. 16/25

But I don’t know how I want to present myself to the world. My process of invention [in the rhetorical sense]. Leaning toward a “Wife of Bath” irreverence but who knows…17/25

Back to Noah and an idea provoked by his thread: familiarity breeding contempt…18/25

I moved overseas in 1980 and stayed hither and yon into the aughts. Color me amused to discover how many folks love cultural diversity FROM A DISTANCE and convince themselves that palate pleasing defines tolerance.

It doesn’t. 19/25

Those who live it up close and personal often experience it as a series of frictions that leaves them abraded. It takes a marvelous mindset to embrace the Good and dismiss the Bad. 20/25

MY saving grace has always been that a lifetime of exposure to relative Bads greatly expanded my reservoir of no-biggies. The tolerables. That and a lifetime of exposure to lofty heights of humor & dragging 5 chilluns round the world. 21/25

My functional motto: Getting one’s knickers in a twist over non-knicker-twisting trivialities is a waste of energy and a lost opportunity for a laugh. 22/

My youngest is still pissed over the time we got thrown off of a banana boat in Bahrain smack into a school of jelly fish. Upon surfacing, I was vaguely aware that they were stinging the crap oughta me BUT 23/

the sight of the other four with giant jellyfish draped over their heads and shoulders pasted whoppin’ guffaws in my innards. Couldn't. Stop. Laughing. Life got me back as I was the ONLY one bleeding from manifold welts, but the memory still pastes smiles. 24/

Circling back to the point.I wouldn’t want to dive into a pool of stinging jellyfish on a daily basis.Even for me, that’s a welt too far. And twitter can be like it with stinging barbs that leave one raw. Emotionally bloody.

SO, as Noah says,“BLOCK EARLY, BLOCK OFTEN”! 25/25

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