I lost a friend this week - and I'm ecstatic
I’m probably that guy that posts way too much on Facebook.
As my wife would say, I’m “polemical”.
In the four days after the Christchurch massacre, I had four posts on my personal Facebook page denouncing fascism and fear-mongering.
To be fair though, I probably bang on about human rights and multiculturalism fairly often anyhow, particularly when it comes to standing up for my mostly-Catholic friends from Latin America.
But you see, denouncing fascism in the last four days has somehow become a different kettle of fish now that I’m standing up for brown people of a different faith – not that I stand for a specific faith myself.
Because, in the time I made four posts about Christchurch, a friend of mine had made 113 posts.
Yes, 113. That’s 113 posts on his open Facebook timeline – almost 30 per day – not including anywhere private he may have commented.
I went back and counted for reasons that will soon become clear.
But let’s give some context about why that’s a little concerning. This guy was previously the coaching and development manager for one of the largest sporting organisations in Australia.
He holds the highest professional coaching accreditation in rugby league and runs a sports forum that purports to tell the “truth” about my favourite sport.
We’ve known each other, I’d say, somewhere between 15 and 20 years.
His first post about the Christchurch massacre said: “Here we go. Mass shooting will be on telly the next few days. Thank God for Netflix.”
Fair enough, I guess. We all get fatigued by mass media events. A little heartless that it was all he could pull from a large-scale tragedy, but nonetheless. That’s the social media age.
Friday was a relatively quiet day for my friend, just the 17 Facebook timeline posts, seven of them denouncing the concept of climate change and another six that could be broadly described as anti-Leftist, variously taking swipes at Labour, the Greens, socialists et cetera.
He even suggested that socialists were controlling the Vatican through an elaborate financial web.
Clearly, being someone with an interest in environmental advocacy, who has helped translate the work of numerous university research teams, my beliefs don’t sit square with his.
But hey, each to their own. Play on.
Saturday was when things seemingly ramped up for my friend.
Having originally stated that Netflix was more interesting than coverage of a massacre, he curiously had 43 posts that day, more than half of which were pointed references to Christchurch.
They included 11 articles about previous killings carried out by Muslims, some of them gruesomely graphic, four posts that were pro far-right senator Fraser Anning, another post complaining about the widespread coverage, and a run-of-the-mill, garden variety anti-Islam post.
Although I’m not sure how, he still managed to squeeze in another seven posts about climate change denial, and another eight denouncing the various evils of the left.
What was interesting was that over the course of the day he began building momentum behind a theory that the Christchurch shooter was a leftist crony who was actually planted by Muslims.
He made four posts about it Saturday, then three more on Sunday morning.
When it was pointed out by somebody else that the entire premise of his theory – a Facebook page supposedly belonging to the shooter – was in fact a clear fake, he didn’t retract or delete the conspiracy posts.
He left them there, insisting the shooter was an Islamic sympathiser. One post was shared 50 times.
My ‘friend’ then bolstered his views by uploading seven more articles about previous Islamic terror incidents, and two broadly anti-refugee, anti-Muslim posts.
Without a hint of irony, he later saw fit to return to Facebook and share a post that said there was demonstrably no difference between climate change believers and the Nazis.
Yet the pièce de résitance was surely a YouTube video he uploaded titled Dangerous people are teaching your kids (“filling the heads of young people with dangerous nonsense”).
Ermm, no shit.
Still after three days, not one empathetic post towards the victims, or New Zealand in general, even though this guy would have coached New Zealanders by the thousands in his career.
Unsatisfied with his reach, my ‘friend’ then crossed over to his rugby league forum (which I have previously posted on) to remind everyone that “a vote for Bill Shorten is a vote for open borders”.
Which brings us to the crux.
By this stage we are at 86 publicly visible posts for my ‘friend’ in three days, and two for me.
I didn’t engage with any of his posts. It was clear it was a car crash to be avoided.
But on Monday I had the temerity to post two links on my own timeline that supported 17-year-old old ‘Eggboy’ Will Connolly, who famously planted a chicken’s best work on Fraser Anning’s nonce.
I made the reference that people who supported 17-year-old soldiers who fought fascists in World War II (of which my grandfather was one) should perhaps not be so critical of a teenage boy doing the same in 2019, minus the lethal force.
Hand-on-heart, I can say my posts were not aimed at any one person. And the ‘friend’ we’ve been discussing was not even a consideration, not even for a nanosecond.
Well, boy did he not like my support of young Will. How dare I post about this mindless and dangerous nincompoop?
Benevolently putting aside time from the further 27 posts he made on Monday, my ‘friend’ helped me see the light.
It was his opinion that I was unquestionably against free speech. He came on to my Facebook page to ask if I had a “communist manifesto” that told people how to think.
I replied that giving Fraser Anning free speech was exactly the same as affording extremist Islamic preachers free speech. Was he happy to let it go both ways?
Not that I necessarily oppose anybody speaking their mind, but we also have to recognise there are consequences to every action.
So how did my ‘friend’ of almost two decades, my previous work colleague, a source of rugby league “truth” respond to a heated, but reasoned debate?
He told me I had inferior intelligence because I was left-wing and it was pointless to argue.
Then he unfriended me.
So much for free speech.
I guess he won, 113 to 4.
Remember, just as he highlighted, dangerous people are teaching your kids.