Facebook and Twitter, lion and leopard

Find them on Facebook and Twitter!--as if these two are the Coke and the Pepsi of the social networking world. More like the Coke and the 7UP, actually. Google trends on searches for the terms "facebook" and "twitter", respectively, with "youtube" added in for additional perspective:

Over half of all US adults have Facebook accounts. By contrast, just 1-in-9 use Twitter.

Perhaps Twitter is the new Facebook? Twitter is seven years old. In human years, that constitutes youth. The virtual world's aging process has more in common with dog years, though. Twitter isn't novel.

Facebook's IPO was underwhelming (for outside investors, not so much for the company itself). Twitter's was great (for those looking in from the outside; the company left billions on the table). Twitter, however, doesn't have a larger market presence as a consequence. To the contrary, Facebook's market cap is more than four times Twitter's.

Twitter isn't a high-brow version of the proletariat's Facebook, either. From Pew Research last year:

Heavily urban, heavily NAM. Twitter is certainly hip. And it's convenient for lazy, cash-strapped media outlets that are able to replace something approaching actual journalism by simply copying a celebrity's half-sentence tweet and passing it off as newsworthy.

What else should be expected from a platform with such space constraints that users might as well be limited to rap's contemporary lexicon, though?

Pew doesn't break down the racial characteristics of Facebook users, but unlike Twitter, Facebook usage increases with education and income, so it's presumably icier than Twitter's sunny profile.

To Twitter's tweeting there is Facebook's essentially identical status updating. To Twitter's re-tweeting there is Facebook's essentially identically sharing. That basically summarizes everything Twitter does. As noted, Facebook does the same (with wider reach), but only in addition to about a bazillion other things to help its far more numerous users navel gaze or whittle time away candy crushing it.

Parenthetical disclosure: I have no employment or shareholder connections to either company, I find Mark Zuckerberg's open borders advocacy more obnoxious than Jack Dorsey's standard but not especially agitating SWPL tendencies, and I have user accounts on both sites.

Door's open, come on in

As ridiculed as the slippery slope argument against same-sex marriage (polygamous/incestuous/bestial marriages will be next) has been by its proponents, there aren't many serious reasons to maintain that the definition of legal marriage will then, having expanded to include those of the same sex, stay put forever after. And so the institution will reclinate back to its own past, the only ubiquitous purpose it represents becoming legal (and by extension political among the upper crust) in nature as was often the case in antiquity.

Divorce rates show that contemporary marriage isn't about lifelong commitment. Open marriages show that it isn't even about serial long-term commitment. Same-sex marriage shows that it isn't about procreation. Be prepared, as Jeremy Irons suggested, to be shown that marriage isn't about romantic love, as a father marries his son to hand junior the family fortune free from government confiscation. Polygamy will show that marriage isn't about a special devotion to one other person, as marriages of convenience already illustrate.

Better contact the financial planner to see whether or not we should get married, whatever our situation and whoever we may be. Perhaps the next step after that will be to annul any differentiation in legal or taxation status marriage confers and be rid of the whole mess forever.

Pride as a deadly sin? Hah!

++Addition++OneSTDV responds, pointing out that "pride" is not a semantically ideal descriptor for what might be better characterized as gay self-assertion. Gay pride parades are not billed as a celebration of the artistic commitments of gays (thanks for reducing putative supermodels to emaciates objectively less attractive than many of the next door girls I know!), but instead an unsolicited broadcasting of the bohemian bacchanalia one should expect when both parties involved in the sexual union have Y chromosomes.

He also asks the following:

But is this concept even rational? Can an individual completely removed or essentially inconsequential in bringing forth these accomplishments rationally feel pride?

A separate issue is whether or not that question is necessarily relevant. When French military commander Henri Gouraud said something to the effect of "Behold Saladin, we have returned," after putting down an uprising in Syria, was it rational for the French troops to beam with pride at the 'accomplishments' of their forefathers in having established the Kingdom of Jerusalem 800 years earlier? Probably not, but that pride presumably carried with it inspirational, beneficial (from the colonial perspective) consequences.

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Apparently, there was a "Pride Parade" on the main drag just off the University of Kansas' campus last week. On my facebook news feed, I noticed a friend had a status update that read "Yay pride week!" She's bisexual with a healthy libido--the kind of girl who screams to be bedded, not an ugly, serious LGBT-activist type. So I commented:

White pride, huh? I'm glad you don't hate everything about yourself ;)

I was making an inside remark from our time together, and as I knew would be the case she didn't take any umbrage from it at all, but several other comments expressed very predictable disgust at the idea, justifying my comment in a general sense. Those responding with hostility (all white I think, though I know none of the people who generated them), clearly were appalled by the idea of embracing a white racial identity.

Their collective opinion is shared by most people in contemporary American society, at least in public. Pointing out that vociferous, in-your-face adulation of sexual deviancy is more acceptable than a public proclamation that being of European descent is nothing to be ashamed of is hardly insightful on my part, I know. But the fact that "pride" is short-hand for gay pride, the most acceptable variety of self-celebration whites allow themselves to engage in, reveals the pathological nature of today's Western popular culture, which embraces and gladly cultivates a bohemian image (as the nearby typical photo from another gay pride parade illustrates) our forefathers prudently found themselves perpetually at war with, while disdaining a celebration of the dead white males that societies everywhere (most especially our own!) should be venerating.