I don't want to talk to you!

estimated read time: 20 minutes

If you stop and think about it, what idiot ever thought social media platforms were a good idea?

Actually, that's an easy question to answer.  I don't think social media designers made their platforms with civility and manners in mind.  They made them with profit being the only goal.  Get users to tell all about themselves, collect the information, and sell the information to advertisers.  Think Mark Zuckerberg and his family of social media platforms that began with Facebook.  But that's another article for another day.

Many of us act surprised when we post something online, and then someone reacts negatively to it.  Somehow, we trick ourselves into believing we have something important to say, others will agree and tell us how wonderful and thoughtful we are, and before you know it, we'll join into a virtual group hug and break into a chorus of Kumbaya.

Then we're smacked in the face with reality.

Sometimes we type something that isn't quite right, insensitive, or plain wrong.  Sometimes, it's not that what we type is even worthy of consideration, but how we type it, namely the tone, simply rubs someone the wrong way.  They comment.  Feelings are hurt.  The conversation is disrupted and it becomes all about the flame war.  The behavior started more than forty years ago...even before the old Usenet groups.

As social media platforms grew and the flame wars became infernos rivaling the depths of Hell, platform developers came up with a solution: the dreaded ban button or even the more dreaded mute button.  Instead of human moderators deciding what was civil and what was not, the user could simply make the troll, agitator, or jackass disappear with the click of a button.  One button killed the offender.  The other simply shut them up.  Either button, in effect, accomplished the same thing.  The offender disappeared.

Could you imagine if we had those buttons in real life?  We might not need divorce lawyers anymore.  Coworkers and bosses would be banned from coming within shouting distance of you.  Hit both buttons at once, and Grandma putt-putting along in her 99 Oldsmobile would instantly disappear from your lane.  Ahh, the perfect life, but we know the buttons would be doomed to failure if they ever existed for reals.

Social media developers weren't worried about whether or not the buttons actually worked, though.  They only wanted to absolve themselves of potential lawsuits from dissatisfied customers using their platforms.  So they plopped either one or both buttons in for us to use.  

And the customer's choice created more problems.  The big problem, of course, is the choice that leaves a lingering question.  Why did I get banned?  We know that some people are only comfortable in their own little echo chambers, but being banned still smarts.  Being banned is being rejected, and no one likes rejection.  It's personal.

The game, of course, is bragging to those in your echo chamber how you showed those idiots the back door as you gave them a swift kick in the ass.  The actions cement your group as being different. Set apart.  Even better than those you banned or muted.  We learned the practice of separating ourselves from the "others" back in school when we began breaking off in academic circles, clubs, sports, and other cliques.  Old lessons die hard, I reckon.

I've been banned plenty of times from various platform users.  When I have discovered the ban, I simply ban them back.  Maybe later, they'll decide to unban me, but I won't.  For me, banning is permanent.  It sends a clear message: I reject everything about you.  It's not that I take your banning me personally.  If you can't take the time to talk to me, then you aren't worth talking to...ever.  Permanent banning is my way of showing a certain level of mutual respect, which is none.

There are only two people who banned me who stick in my mind.  The first is Captain Kirk, himself, William Shatner.  He had a blue check by his name so I figured he was the real William Shatner.

At least I can brag that I get banned by the best, but I am still confused.  I never interacted with him online in any capacity.  I found out I was banned when he came through my feed (I believe it was on the old Twitter platform), and when I went to reply, I got the message I was banned.  Since I never talked about his work, Star Trek, or to him personally, I was, and still am, at a loss of why he banned me.  I reckon I'll never know because I banned him back.  And it's a lifetime ban, not that he knows or even cares.

That brings me to my most recent banning on Facebook, that platform that even Grandma in her Oldsmobile is abandoning.

By now you're probably thinking, "Get to the point, Drunk."  

Point taken, but let me say this.  We're at a good point if you need to go get another beer or glass of wine.  If you don't drink alcohol, now would be a good time to go get your favorite beverage.

Now let's get down to the nitty gritty of why I am telling you this story. 

Like it or not, social media platforms are public stages.  Public stages are dangerous places.  In real life, it takes a small army of security officers to protect the performer onstage.  Some need an armed SWAT team.  We're talking politician level public stage performers here.

In the virtual world, the only protection we have is our rights to privacy, the bane of social media platform developers.  The more famous one is, the harder it is for them to protect their privacy.  Some of the difficulty is their own fault.  Most of it is privacy laws that deal with the virtual world in a 1920s mentality.  And the biggest problem is the number of people who lack the respect, manners, etiquette, ethics, and morals to interact with the performer in a respectful manner, if at all.

And that brings us to Dan Satterfield.  Normally I would link his social media page since we're talking about him, but since I'm not praising him or relating a factual story (other than he really did ban me), I'll leave the chore of finding him online to you, the reader.

Ok, so he banned me.  Problem is I don't know why.  I interacted with him twice.  I know one time I asked him a question about what he posted.  I didn't challenge him or insinuate he was wrong.  He posted something about the weather I genuinely didn't understand.  The other time I can't remember if I asked him a question or simply liked what he posted.  The third time I was about to interact with him, he had posted something that I thought his conclusions couldn't validate.  In fact, I read his conclusions as being a good example of bigoted thinking.  I wanted to point that out, but that's when I discovered I was banned.

Of all of our local weathermen, Satterfield was my favorite from the time he first came on air around 2012.  He wasn't a Stu Kerr, but then again, I don't think any weatherman around can compare to Professor Kool, himself.  Mr. Kerr was one of the last weatherman to bridge old school with new school and all the fancy satellite gadgetry the old school weathermen never had.  

Today, the weatherman have more fancy gadgetry, advanced satellites, and AI - and are usually more wrong than ever.  Satterfield was pretty good as a weatherman, wrong more than right, which is to be expected, but he did bring something to Delmarva that made him stand above all the other weathermen.  He brought it with him from down south, if I remember where his previous job was correctly.  I don't know if he just started doing it, and shocked executives at WBOC decided to make it their policy, or if they just let Satterfield "do his thing."  

What did he do?  He simply stayed on the air anytime a tornado warning was issued, and wouldn't cut to regular programming until the warning expired or was canceled.  

Back when he started this practice at his previous station, latch key kids were a real phenomena.  Today, parents of latchkey kids would be arrested for child neglect, but that's another story for another day.  Suffice it to say that Satterfield recognized many children were coming home to an empty house because both parents were at work.  When a tornado warning was issued, he'd instruct the children to turn up the TV real loud, put a helmet on, climb in a tub or closet, and cover themselves with as many blankets and pillows as they could grab.  And he kept reminding them not to come out until he gave them the go ahead.

That's something worth remembering a weatherman for.  I don't know if he had an experience with a tornado as a child, or he has unlimited empathy for children and knew what they needed, but that effort, alone, puts him up there with the weathermen worth remembering.  I'm sure there's lots of kids who are now adults, who will remember Dan Satterfield in the same vein I remember Stu Kerr.

Unfortunately, I'll remember Dan Satterfield as an educated person who meant well, but prone to bigoted thinking.  And while I know we're all prone to bigoted thinking (it must be human nature), when the bigoted thinking makes its way to the public stage, it needs to be called out for what it is - flawed thinking.

Before I get carried away, I reckon I need to define "bigoted thinking."  For me, and yes, feel free to disagree, bigoted thinking is when one relies on tropes, stereotypes, and labels to make sense of the world around them, and forgets people are individuals...not tropes, stereotypes, and labels.

Bigoted thinking has become the norm.  How many times have you heard, "Democrats want open borders?"  I can say to you that if I got naked, I can still honestly claim more than 21 times.  Lots more.  Political partisanship is nothing but bigoted thinking today.  Quite honestly, I don't have enough fingers, toes, and body parts to count them all.

And the bigoted thinking is not limited to the uneducated or ill-informed.  Dan Satterfield is a textbook example.  Let's take a look at the bigoted pattern he has drawn on his Facebook page.  Because I don't wish to incite a rush to his page that will keep the poor old man busy banning everyone, as I describe what I find, I'll post a screen shot of a typical post that backs up my claim.  I am not going to link anything to make it easy for anyone to visit Mr. Satterfield for the sole purpose of trolling him.  Trolls should be confined to existing under bridges, and beaten daily anytime they try to come out from under their bridge.

That said, I started my search for the reason Mr. Satterfield banned me.  Since I knew I only had two neutral interactions with him, his reason couldn't have been because of something I had said.  But what else could it have been?

It didn't take me long to find my answer.  He made a box labeled "Climate Deniers," and started throwing republicans, especially MAGA republicans, the uneducated, and rednecks in the box.

First step of bigoted thinking completed.  Make a box, label it, and start tossing people in.

"But One Drunk Redneck!" my faithful readers, all three of them, might exclaim.  "You don't have a car, truck, or fish on your Facebook page...and not even on your blog!"

True, very true.  But I do talk about fishing a lot, and drinking beer.  I reckon that was enough for Mr. Satterfield to ban me.  I doubt he actually visited my page or blog.  He saw my name, thought, "Matches a climate denier description," and hit the ban button.

.

Now let me make it very clear here.  I'm not a climate denier.  I'm a bit smarter than my pet oyster.  In fact, I'm a bit smarter than a Maryland blue crab.  Ever go crabbing and put your catch on ice?  You get home and throw your catch in the steamer.  The crabs have gone into some sort of stupor because of the ice so they sit in the steamer, all calm as it slowly warms up.

As they come out of their stupor, you hear a little bit of crab legs shuffling.  Listen closely and you might hear the conversation inside the steamer.

"Hey Dan, is it getting a little warm in here?"

"Yeah Jim-Bob, it is.  But this warm up is a lot faster than in past years.  I think something's up."

"Nah, probably normal cycles of the Bay."

The crab feet shuffle gets louder and a bit more frantic, and then suddenly quiets down and stops.  The crabs talked about the problem, but didn't do anything to get out of the steamer fast enough.  

Moral of the story: Climate deniers are about as smart as a Maryland blue crab and they're going to get cooked in the end.  I think I can safely say I'm a little bit smarter than the crab.

Bigoted thinking doesn't stop at making a box and labeling it, though.

Turns out the label on Satterfield's box includes a much larger group.  Not only is his box of idiots worth banning filled with climate deniers, but also anti-vaxers, sovereign citizens, conspiracy theorists, and bots, which is an undefined class so far.  But Mr. Satterfield sums up the label on his box nicely.  Uneducated hillbillies aligned with MAGA and supporting trump belong in his ban box.  For the record, I fit none of those descriptions.

What's interesting, though is how he recruits others to follow his bigoted thoughts.  As he clearly defines who he bans, notice how he calls for his readers to follow suit, even if it means banning your own family.

Why do bigots try to recruit others to their side?

That's a question for a sociologist to answer, maybe even psychologists.  I have an opinion, though.

Like I said earlier, we learn socializing behavior very early in life.  By high school, we learn the value of cliques - the in-crowd versus the outsiders, the athletes versus the geeks, the academically smart ones destined for six-figure a year careers versus the burger flippers destined for an assistant manager retirement, or the good-looking, potential future prom Kings and Queens versus the ugly, potential future models for the Gnome Garden Collection.

Most of us outgrew the clique mentality before we even graduated high school.  And, as Dan Satterfield proves, some of us carry it with us well into our senior years.

Now, I could go on with more examples of his posts and how his posts follow the bigoted thinking model.  Usually, though, the head-on, analytical approach of formulating an argument falls on deaf ears.  Think back to your school teachers or college professors.  

The more I dug into Satterfield's Facebook timeline, the more I realized I could write a full textbook on the twisted mind of a bigot. I don't have the time to write it; you probably don't have the time to read it.

"But wait One Drunk Redneck!" one of my three faithful readers will scream.  "What was the post you were going to call him out on?"

I figure I bored you this far, going a little further won't hurt.  Here is the post Satterfield made, and I discovered he had banned me when I tried to respond to it:

There are a couple of things that Satterfield gets wrong here.  The obvious is that the chart does not compare Rehoboth to the "Seaford, Laurel area."  It compares two very specific zip codes.  Laurel is not in the Seaford zip code.  Since Satterfield brags how smart he is, he shouldn't have made that misleading statement.  While I might categorize meteorology as a soft science right up there with horoscopes and fortunetelling, academia does not.  It is a hard science.  As a hard scientist, Satterfield doesn't get a pass for his mistake.

He then draws the conclusion that because the Seaford zip code is primarily "farm country, low income and low education levels. Strongly republican," that is the reason for low intent to vaccinate against COVID.  

Like, wow.  Most intelligent people who aren't bigots would relate the lack of "intent" to get vaccinated to the fact that Seaford is younger, less economically affluent, and about two-and-a-half times more likely to lack health insurance.  There are no free vaccines, and depending on the product, a vaccine costs $103-$252, a steep price for someone who is barely getting by paycheck-to-paycheck, and feels they aren't at risk for severe complications if they get sick. 

In another post on COVID vaccines, he claims:

For the record, the CDC says that getting a vaccine doesn't mean you won't get sick, nor does it protect others around you from catching it even if you are vaccinated.  Since I'm not going to pretend to be educated in the hard sciences - and, no, that doesn't mean I'm an idiot, contrary to what this bigot Satterfield will try to claim - vaccinated or not, I'm probably going to get sick.  Since I'm not in a high risk category, I probably won't need hospitalization, much less die.  And even if I am vaccinated, I can still give it to someone else, even if I don't know I'm sick.

What this means is educated people would expect the results the survey he posted gave.  Only bigots would claim the uneducated republican farmers are stupid enough not to get vaccinated for COVID.  And even more stupid for believing the unvaccinated might kill a chemotherapy patient.

But wait.  I'm going to throw in a bonus here, and the added information won't cost you a dime.

Astute readers might catch that this isn't even a real survey; that is, no one took a poll of either zip code's population to measure the vaccine hesitancy.  I don't know about you, but I would've expected a hard science, educated professional to catch that.  Satterfield probably did, but conveniently forgot to mention it.

What this study is, is a modeling study.  Dan Satterfield should be very familiar with modeling studies.  His career depended on them.  And usually they were less than accurate in the long run.  

Simply put, weather models use millions of data points, including data points measured around a specific forecast area, and use advanced algorithms based on mathematical descriptions of atmospheric laws of physics to predict what tomorrow's weather will be.

What the study Satterfield posted does is interview about 16,000 people from a small representative sample of zip codes based on a few hundred demographic factors, and then predict a very human response of intent through all zip codes nationwide, intent that can't be explained with laws of physics or mathematical equations.

Weather modeling does have a lot of science, physics, and math justifying its existence. And the weather models' forecasting is pretty high for the first day or two's worth of predictions, but fall off quickly to a more generalized prediction that something will happen after day three.  Exactly what, in measurable terms, is a bit more uncertain.

Social modeling doesn't have the hard (and measurable) data, the hard math, and the deterministic laws backing it up like the weather does.  And there's plenty of room for human bias to enter the data, and in interpreting the results.  That doesn't mean social modeling studies are useless. Most are based on sound statistical models.  But I wouldn't plan an outdoor wedding based on a social model that predicted most people wouldn't be inclined to go to a wedding in the month of February.  I would plan it based on what the weather was predicted to be.

No sense dwelling any further on it.  Satterfield fell victim to his own bigoted thinking while interpreting the social model of intent.  Political affiliation wasn't a demographic the researchers considered.  We know nothing of the education level (or other demographics) of the people interviewed.  Concluding dumb republicans and idiot MAGA people in Seaford is why vaccine hesitancy is so high in that area compared to the Rehoboth area is simply flawed thinking, which can be easily shown to be caused by bigoted thinking.

Once I figured all this out, I zeroed in on who these bots are that he bans.  

Turns out, no one can tell for sure who is or isn't a bot unless they take the time to notice a pattern, much like I'm doing here with Satterfield and his pattern.  There are a lot of "Content (or Digital) Creators" running around polluting the social media platforms, but that doesn't translate to "bot."  And with the increasing advancement of AI technology, it is getting harder and harder to spot "AI slop" vs real person.  It will only get harder as each day passes.

Bots are looking for a home with high engagement, high engagement meaning consistently over a hundred unique comments per post.  His high number of followers might attract a bot or two, but his low engagement would probably have them moving on, blocked or not.  Most likely, he's not blocking bots.  He's blocking people who rely on AI to generate content.  That conversation is for another story on another day.

Actually, that would be a good conversation, and I should consider it for a future post.  Does the carpenter build the house or does the saw and hammer get the claim to fame?

Like usual, I digress, but the bottom line is Satterfield most likely isn't banning bots.  He's still banning people because what they have AI write for them fits a stereotype he decided he doesn't like.  And in the box the bot goes.  When you dehumanize people and start calling them bots, it's a lot easier to throw them in the labeled coffin you made for them.  That's what bigots do.

One thing I learned though as I dug into this story is I have a lot of people to ban, at least on Bluesky.  I came across a post by Satterfield that he was on Bluesky.  

Oh, wait a minute.  Maybe I should explain to Satterfield how I can dig into his Facebook timeline even after he banned me.  Bigots aren't too bright, you know.

Satterfield banned One Drunk Redneck, a Facebook page created by a real person who is a satirist wannabe.  Satterfield isn't smart enough to figure out that One Drunk Redneck, in himself, is a satirical character.  I'll let the smarter rednecks out there explain it to him

Who he didn't ban was the person behind the page.  That means I can freely take a look around his timeline and measure just how big of a bigot he is.  I can then let my character, One Drunk Redneck, take care of the rest.  And if someone shares this with Satterfield (remember, he's banned One Drunk Redneck and One Drunk Redneck banned him), and he gets really confused, I have other characters to confuse him further.  My pet oyster has already made her debut.  In a couple of weeks, H. Erectus will make his.  More characters will probably follow...maybe not.  But in the world of One Drunk Redneck, who knows?

The only satisfying result of this exercise for me is I figured out why Satterfield banned me.  When I discovered his post that reminded his followers they can find him on Bluesky, I thought that since I'm there, too, maybe I should look to see if he banned me.  He did.

What?  I didn't even know he was on Bluesky, so my banning wasn't even a question of maybe he saw me visit his account or something.  So just as I had to dig in to discover why Satterfield banned me on Facebook, I had to dig into Bluesky to figure out why I was banned there.

Turns out Bluesky allows moderation lists.  In other words, Bluesky encourages the high school practice of forming cliques.  I could create a moderation list of Jackasses to Ban, add Satterfield to the list of barnyard animals I don't like, and you could come along and subscribe to my list.  Subscribing means you would automatically ban Satterfield and all those other poor barnyard animals I added to my list.  And the cool thing is, every time I added or deleted any barnyard animal from the list, your ban list would change accordingly...and you don't have to do anything.

The best I can figure out, subscribing to a ban list is how Satterfield ended up banning me on Bluesky, as did forty-seven other people, forty-seven people I have no idea of who they are, and, quite honestly, don't care to know who they are.  They're all bigots.  I don't associate with bigots.  Eventually I'll get around to banning them all back.

Look.  There's no denying the world is warming up.  Don't be a crab and get cooked while you debate it.  And that's if being unvaccinated doesn't kill you before global warming does.  Quit calling alternative energy sources a "green scam."  Vaccines save lives, in the order of billions of lives.  Don't pretend otherwise to make excuses why you won't get vaccinated.  You should have medical rights to make stupid (and smart) medical decisions for yourself.

Satterfield should retire to a quiet nursing home devoid of computers and social media access.  His career peaked when he started his tornado warning preemption of regularly scheduled programming.  Let's remember him in his better days and let life return to its regularly scheduled programming.

 

 

 

For your listening pleasure

  

Posted by One Drunk Redneck