A Response to My Facebook Newsfeed Today

If you’re unhappy about the supreme court decision, be a gracious loser, no need to be over the top and hassle people who disagree with you. If you’re happy about the supreme court decision, be a gracious winner, no need to be over the top and hassle people who disagree with you.

Facebook is a weird phenomenon with incredible power to make kind, reasonable people come off as very unkind and very unreasonable. Arguing in that kind of context has, in my humble opinion, a pretty low probability of substantively changing people’s minds. When my mind changes on things, it happens in a combination of reading books and having many face-to-face conversations.

That doesn’t mean no one should ever argue about politics on facebook, but most people shouldn’t because most people are terrible at it and they just shame themselves. I’m in that camp by the way. I get riled up, I end up having turf to defend, and I become something I don’t want to be, something very different from how I talk to people in person.

To anyone who wants to argue about politics on facebook anyway: please be very, very intentional about when and how you do that. Try very, very hard to be exactly who you are in person. Read your post out loud before you post it and delete it if it doesn’t sound like you. If you wouldn’t look a friend who disagrees with you right in the eyes and say it out loud, you will probably regret posting it.

Former Director of Training

Timothy Brahm was formerly the Director of Training at Equal Rights Institute. He is interested in helping pro-life and pro-choice people to have better dialogues about abortion through 1) taking care to understand what the other person means, 2) using more carefully-constructed arguments, and 3) treating each other with care and respect. He graduated from Biola University with a B.A. in philosophy and is a perpetual member of the Torrey Honors Institute.

Please note: The goal of the comments section on this blog is simply and unambiguously to promote productive dialogue. We reserve the right to delete comments that are snarky, disrespectful, flagrantly uncharitable, offensive, or off-topic. If in doubt, read our Comments Policy.