The 5 Categories Of Facebook Users

Having been on Facebook for many years, and observed people’s habits, my observation is that by and large Facebook consists of roughly 5 categories of people.

The Joker: This person spends most of their time posting things to make other people laugh, but not much else.

The Evoker: This person almost exclusively puts up comments about their moods and feelings, their life with family and friends, and photos of associative events. They thrive most on relationships and connections. 

The Thought Provoker: The person who uses Facebook for almost nothing else except posting opinions and having debates, sharing and citing the occasional link or meme if it helps them post even more opinions and have even more debates.

The Stud Poker: This person is the silent lurker who very rarely (often never) posts anything of their own, but vicariously feeds off the posts of others. Their absence makes you forget they are there, but you can be sure they are watching your every move.

The Pipe Smoker: The rare person who regularly and comfortably encapsulates all of the above, and offers the full package of variety.

Look at your friends list and you'll see most of them fit into one of those categories. 😆

My Top Movies Of Each Decade

 

I enjoy bringing to attention and recommending great accomplishments – and here I’d like to do so with movies. These are some of my favourites over the past decades; listed alphabetically, and with the director alongside. Hope you enjoy.

1930s

All Quiet On The Western Front – Lewis Milestone

The Bride of Frankenstein – James Whale

Bringing Up Baby – Howard Hawks

Gone With The Wind – Victor Fleming

La Grande Illusion – Jean Renoir

It Happened One Night – Frank Capra

M – Fritz Lang

Mr Smith Goes To Washington – Frank Capra

Ninotchka - Ernst Lubitsch

Swing Time – George Stevens

The 39 Steps – Alfred Hitchcock

The Wizard of Oz – Mervyn Leroy, King Vidor, Victor Fleming

Wuthering Heights – William Wyler

1940s

The Bicycle Thief - Vittorio De Sica

Casablanca - Michael Curtiz

Citizen Kane - Orson Welles

Les Enfants Du Paradis (Children of Paradise) - Marcel Carné

The Grapes of Wrath - John Ford

Great Expectations - David Lean

It's a Wonderful Life - Frank Capra

A Matter of Life and Death - Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Miracle on 34th Street - George Seaton

Orpheus - Jean Cocteau

Out of the Past - Jacques Tourneur

The Philadelphia Story - George Cukor

Rebecca - Alfred Hitchcock

The Third Man - Carol Reed

1950s

All About Eve - Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The 400 Blows - François Truffaut

High Noon - Fred Zinnemann

Night of the Hunter – Charles Laughton

Rashomon - Akira Kurosawa

Seven Samurai - Akira Kurosawa

Singin’ in the Rain – Stanley Donen

The Seventh Seal – Ingmar Bergman

Some Like It Hot – Billy Wilder

Strangers on a Train – Alfred Hitchcock

Sunset Boulevard - Billy Wilder

Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu

Twelve Angry Men - Sidney Lumet

 

1960s

L’Avenntura - Michelangelo Antonioni

A Bout De Souffle - Jean-Luc Godard

Dr. Strangelove – Stanley Kunbrick

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly – Sergio Leone

Inherit The Wind – Staley Kramer

In The Heat Of The Night - Norman Jewison

Lawrence of Arabia – David Lean

Psycho – Alfred Hitchcock

2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick

West Side Story – Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins

Z - Costa-Gavras

1970s

All The President's Men - Alan J. Pakula

Annie Hall – Woody Allen

Apocalypse Now – Francis Ford Coppola

Cabaret – Bob Fosse

Chinatown – Roman Polanski

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – Luis Bunuel

The Exorcist - William Friedkin

Five Easy Pieces - Bob Rafelson

The Godfather & The Godfather Part II – Francis Ford Coppola

The Goodbye Girl - Herbert Ross

Jaws – Steven Spielberg

Kramer vs. Kramer - Robert Benton

Manhattan - Woody Allen

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest - Milos Forman

The Out-of-Towners – Arthur Hiller

Taxi Driver – Martin Scorsese

 

1980s

Airplane - David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams

After Hours – Martin Scorsese

Amadeus – Milos Forman

Back To The Future Trilogy – Robert Zemeckis

Cinema Paradiso - Giuseppe Tornatore

Midnight Run – Martin Brest

Once Upon A Time in America – Sergio Leone

Raging Bull – Martin Scorsese

Raiders of the Lost Ark - Steven Spielberg

Ran - Akira Kurosawa

The Shining – Stanley Kubrick

 

1990s

American Beauty - Sam Mendes

Before Sunrise – Richard Linklater

The Bridges of Madison County - Clint Eastwood

The End of the Affair - Neil Jordan

Fight Club – David Fincher

Forrest Gump - Robert Zemeckis

Glengarry Glen Ross - James Foley

Goodfellas – Martin Scorsese

Groundhog Day - Harold Ramis

Magnolia - Paul Thomas Anderson

Naked - Mike Leigh

Pulp Fiction – Quentin Tarantino

Secrets and Lies – Mike Leigh

The Silence of the Lambs – Jonathan Demme

Six Degrees of Separation - Fred Schepisi

 

2000-2021

About Schmidt – Alexander Payne

Adaptation – Spike Jonze

Barney’s Version – Richard J. Lewis

Before Sunset - Richard Linklater

Closer - Mike Nichols

The Departed – Martin Scorsese

The Descendants – Alexander Payne

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Michael Gondry

Ex Machina - Alex Garland

Happiness - Todd Solondz

I'm Thinking of Ending Things – Charlie Kaufman

Little Miss Sunshine - Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris

Lost in Translation – Sofia Coppola

Memento - Christopher Nolan

Million Dollar Baby – Clint Eastwood

Mulholland Drive – David Lynch

1917 - Sam Mendes

No County For Old Men – Coen Brothers

Once - John Carney

The Pledge - Sean Penn

Sideways - Alexander Payne

The Social Network – David Fincher

Stranger Than Fiction - Marc Forster

21 Grams - Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Tyrannosaur - Paddy Considine

 

Films I need to watch that I’ve heard are excellent: There Will Be Blood and Synecdoche, New York

Racism's Overton Window

 

As many readers will know, there’s a concept called the Overton Window (developed by Joseph P. Overton) which suggests that in every generation there is a “window” of acceptable views, ideas, beliefs and political policies that are categorised as standard and expected, and that everything outside of that window is unacceptable and beyond the pale. The window gets shifted over time because when ideas outside of the window are considered at the extreme, the less extreme but still radical ideas start to become more widely accepted and move within the purlieus of the window.

Views go from so far outside the mainstream that few people accept them into the mainstream >> to radical >> to peripheral >> to mainstream >> to incontrovertible (whereby you’re now considered far outside the mainstream if you ‘don’t' subscribe to them, and could even find yourself in jail if you speak out against them). Here are some examples; In a few decades we’ve gone from climate change alarmism being a belief only subscribed to by a few off-the-wall crackpots, to a situation where if you don’t subscribe to it you’re seen as a filthy capitalist rogue who doesn’t give a damn about anything other than money. In a few decades we’ve gone from homosexuality being illegal, to the slightest intolerance of it being seen as a hate crime. In those same few decades, we've gone from thinking of 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 as dystopian fiction, to them being actual political realities imposed on us by the establishment.

Being the hot topic of the day, I want to talk about racism in terms of the Overton Window. Racism is best categorised as unfair segregation or hostile aggression on the basis of race. It is telling people they are not allowed on a bus; it's lynching; it's beating up, it's murdering people because of their skin colour or ethnicity - that is what racism is, and we can all agree that these things are bad. The trouble is, once something is rightly identified as bad, it becomes tempting for people to stretch its meaning and apply it a bit more widely to encapsulate their own cause. Then the Overton Window begins to shift, and it gets applied a little more widely still, then even further, until it means nothing more than 'disliking or disagreeing with someone who happens to be of a different ethnicity or skin colour', and then even further to become 'holding a different view to a view that's popular within a particular group'.

Once terms like racism, sexism, hate crime, misogyny and Islamophobia become more mainstream, people become readily tempted to use them even more widely for their convenience. Before you know it, it's possible to cry 'racism' if someone with different skin colour demolishes your argument; it's possible to cry 'sexism' if someone doesn't support all-women shortlists; and it's possible to declare that you've been the victim of a hate crime just because someone insulted your religion on Twitter (and worse still, perhaps, it's easy to find swathes of people getting offended on your behalf).

And once society is at that stage, it's scarily easy to descend into absolute ridiculousness, where things like the denial of the biological distinction between the sexes, the eroding away of a the concept of competence-based achievements, the refusal to believe that IQ makes any significant difference to success, the denial about the fact that many of the reasons for our struggles are due to our own bad decision-making, the differences between men and women are socio-culturally determined, etc are mainstream views, and to be outside of them is to be beyond the pale.

Social grifters
As I indicated in a recent blog post, it seems clear that most tribal groups that peddle extremist propaganda (whether that's extreme left or right wing movements, environmentalists, woke social justice warriors or feminists) are doing so because they want to seek attention, find some meaning and purpose in their life, assuage their own insecurities and moderate their own self-dislike. And in order to this, they have to artificially construct injustices that aren't really there, or inflate the ones that are already there into something much more severe and unrepresentative of reality. An analysis of radical extremism that fails to consider what the participants personally get out of it is an anaemic analysis - and it is absurd that people go about their business as though this consideration doesn't matter. It really does matter; because if you find what's lurking beneath their virtue signalling and agenda-driven search for purpose, you'll find something dark and horrible (I'm sure it's in most of us).

One way to look at today’s society is to say that we must still be in the throes of racism if mobs of people feel the need to the streets and pull statues down, and demand the removal of others. Another way to look at today’s society – a way that at least has some truth attached to it – is that we must have done an awful lot right to bring about the decimation of most racism if people have the luxury of having to focus on statues of people who died before they were born. As always, I expect the truth lies somewhere in between.

But there is something significant, to do with balance, that we are probably getting wrong about the racism matter. I think it’s partly in the misdiagnosis, and partly in the misallocation of attention. The misdiagnosis is that I think virtually all acts that appear to be racist are, in fact, only proximally identified. I think the distal, and far more prominent causes of apparent racism are built on more fundamental kinds of pain, weakness, fear, resentment and insecurity (often flavoured by national and cultural heritage too). In other words, when someone appears to show racial hostility, it is often only superficially to do with the victim’s skin colour or ethnicity – it is largely driven by the inner hostility and self-contempt of the perpetrator. If we looked for the hurt in the racist, we’d see damaged people who have not been given the sufficient education, diversity of life experience, love, guidance and opportunities to enable them to be better, more tolerant, less hostile people. Attacking someone by their label is the outward manifestation of an inner self-disgust – I don’t think it’s much to do with a genuine prejudice against skin colour or ethnicity. As Graham Greene observed in The Power and The Glory:

“Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

And that leads me to the misallocation of attention. Having regularly misdiagnosed racism, society then places almost all the emphasis on the victim, and almost none on the perpetrator. Don’t get me wrong, it is certainly important to create a society in which the victims of any prejudice are loved, respected, supported, valued and encouraged to thrive. But unless we begin to identify racism and prejudice for what they are, we won’t help the victims or the perpetrators to move forward, and we’ll remain mired in a false stratification that neglects to focus more accurately on the poison and on the medicine.