Celebrities – Thoughts from August 21, 2022

I was reading some of my old Thoughts papers in which I referred to people asking for money as “bums” and asserted that most of them were alcoholics and drug addicts. In the same sentences, I would say I’m a Liberal about most things. I now know that people don’t choose to be without a steady place to live anymore than the mental illness that led to how they were living. Not liking to talk to anyone is not an excuse. My own mental illness created an extra layer of anxiety for me. They were dealing with many of the same problems I was dealing with, but they didn’t have the support that I had. Left on my own, I could have been in their position. They weren’t “bums” back then and people living on the street today are not “bums.”

I was listening to a podcast with a scientist who was pointing out that individuals should be in charge of their interactions on the internet and not corporations. He blamed the technology as many people do. He is a scientist in a field that doesn’t deal with technology. Any opinion he has about technology comes from ignorance. People blame Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms for allowing the horrible behavior that takes place on them. They assume horrible people use the same methods on each platform and it is easy to stop them. If it were easy, the companies would do it. It makes more sense to please your customers then piss them off. Non-programmers don’t understand the amount of data that is collected every second. If he thinks they have people that can monitor this information as it’s happening, he’s even more out of touch with technology.

Penn Jillette and other celebrities say they got off Facebook because of the negativity on it. I’m here to tell you I don’t see negativity on Facebook because I have removed the negativity from it. The people I see are not negative and I don’t follow negative pages. I have removed almost all pages that talk about the news. Only positive friends and pages about tigers, cats, writing, animation, art, and other forms of entertainment are in my feed. Negativity is not entertaining to me. Celebrities are rarely technologists so they don’t understand how to use Facebook. When celebrities first got on Facebook, they didn’t realize that friends meant people you actually know. They accepted all friend requests and reached the 5000 friend limit. If you are famous, you should have a separate personal page and public page.

Celebrities use Twitter, but they don’t understand how to use that either. It’s easy to understand the basics of typing a few words and sending that to the world. That is the problem with Twitter. It allows you to express simple thoughts, but doesn’t allow you to develop the thought to completion. My Thoughts papers allow me to do that. I don’t blast them to the world immediately so I can put them fully into context before other people see them. Many celebrities get into trouble because they don’t understand how out of touch with reality they are. If they would stick to expressing how appreciative they are for their lives, they would get in much less trouble with us regular people.