Intellectual Hypocrisy

I believe I have mentioned before that I have a lot of friends with different political views than myself, and that most of them enjoy debating them as much as I do.  I do know one person, though, who drives me absolutely batty.  Earlier today she made a post asking people to list even a single thing that President Obama did good.  As most of her friends are hardcore libertarians, almost anarchical, there were a lot of "none!" responses.  Then I posted mine.  Now, I could have rattled off a few myself from just off the top of my head, but I wanted to do this right so I went through politifact's promises kept list and picked out things I agreed with that were good and things I knew that would line up with a typical libertarians view point.  All in all the list I made had 23 items, not including the repeal of DADT because someone had already mentioned it.  The response I got from her wasn't a critique of my list, in fact I'm not even sure she read it.  Based on her response she probably looked at one or two items and then typed "did you just pull all that BS off their campaign website?"  From there I highlighted a few things in the list that I knew she would agree with, like reform for drug laws.  Even then it was an angry "well its not good enough," befitting the current conservative all-or-nothing sentiment.  These posts went on for awhile, another friend posted a critique of my list, THANK YOU, and was willing to admit a few things he liked.  Having known him for something like 5 years now, this did not surprise me and I was glad he did it.  Fast forward to later in the day, I did something I had been tossing around my head for months now, I challenged myself to go one week without posting anything political or about religion.  It really had nothing to do with stuff that happened today and everything to do with the realization that not every one of my friends loves politics like I do and that sometimes I get a little post happy and flood the news feed with stuff.  I suspect there's more than one casual acquaintance that has hidden me from their feed because of it, though that doesn't bother me a whole lot.  So, all in all it is an exercise in restraint and an effort to tone it down a notch for my friends.

Incidentally, this blog was created as a way to channel said posting urges and I made a deliberate attempt to keep it separate from everything else I do in terms of usernames and real names and such.