Ben Dubose AKA The Cat deleted his Twitter account?

The great thing about this website is that Clutch allows everyone to depersonalize, and give as much personal information as you want. Because the purpose is to BS about the Rockets, and I get the sense that @The Cat just wants to do that. Him, Bima, Clutch, and a few others are actually real people with real lives. So I feel for how weird it must get when you extend beyond this platform. When you are on Twitter, or Facebook or whatever, you are immediately stalkable, and a target for personal digs in order to get you to respond.

I respect Cat for wanting to expand further with podcasting, and writing, but completely understand if you just kinda want to BS about Houston sports, culture, and politics here in a safe space like I do. Life is too short to let something like twitter trolls affect your sports experience which is like the only escapism we have left it seems.

 

Dude all of that F'ing blows; sorry man. I have said it before but social media is probably one of the more underrated things that have been the worst thing to happen to society. People suddenly becoming keyboard warriors and armchair experts on every single thing. If you notice with twitter, it's easier to make jokes and make memes and insult people to get more people to follow you or people to retweet your stuff. It's all awful; as I get older, the more I realize I don't need Facebook or Twitter really and you can even see the data on social media that it causes more and more depression and sadness among young adults. It's a long winded way of saying you are better off not having social media even with all it's advantages. I hope you are well man

 

If you want to get into heated arguments online, best to do so under a hidden identity. Of course, that wouldn’t be a license to troll or personally attack others (not that he did so).

Good choice for him to get off Twitter.

 

Used to, the great J.T Gatlin does it now. I think Ben still does regular appearances though.

 

Good, hopefully Chandler Rome deletes his next. Those two are ANNOYING.

 

Why don't you lead by example?

 

My morale improved significantly when I stopped using Facebook around election time in 2020. I have never used Twitter.

It's sad that social media serves such a valuable role but also such a dangerous and poisonous one. It is the digital version of owning a weapon, but there's no way to train anyone on how to use it decently.

The days of being able to keep up with old friends and extended family and post vacation photos are pretty much gone. Now it's an army of misguided gullibles trying to save the world one fallacy at a time.

This fits with the Astros, too. Since they got busted for cheating, it's up to the raging Twitter-tots to bash anyone who supports the team - because Astros = bad so bashing fans = saving the world. It's beyond their mental capacity to understand that other teams have also been suspected and busted for it many times over the years. This isn't a defense of the Astros specific case but proof of people's bounded rationality that they direct all of their hatred towards the latest thing they saw a talking head on a video tell them about. One would think a more rational approach would be to look more broadly and try to find ways to eliminate this from baseball instead of just beat up on one punching bag (whose former managers are now... managing two other teams.)

 

As I see it, the root issue is how social media enables confirmation bias, and I'm not sure what the solution is.

We obviously see it in much more serious contexts, but let's use the Astros situation as an example. In addition to the fact that the 2017 system wasn't typically usable in the postseason due to extreme noise + multiple sign sequences, there's an enormous amount of evidence that it didn't help them, period. Yet, the popular narrative — and we hear it all the time — is that the Astros won a World Series by cheating. That's why drives the extreme overkill in the reactions, when it should be more analogous to the Patriots and Spygate/Deflategate. Yes, it's "wrong" and speaks to the degree of what they were willing to do to win, but it didn't materially change the outcome from what likely would have occurred, if things played out by the book. (Their success in 2019 and 2021 reiterated that, as well.)

But those studies get zero traction because they don't fit with the preferred narrative of the masses, and in the social media era, it's insanely easy to find "supporting" evidence for any theory you want to come up with. To this day, Jose Altuve — who didn't even use the system — gets the most heat. To this day, the 2019 walkoff HR against Chapman — which was as clean as it gets — is the "face" of the backlash, all because of a crackpot theory by a Twitter clown named Jomboy and some random egg account that pretended to be Carlos Beltran's niece. There was never an ounce of substance to any of it, yet most "fans" still believe it today, because A) it fits with their preferred version of reality, which is that the Astros weren't better than their team, they only won due to cheating, and B) these crackpot theories "feel" more legitimate when people have immediate access to thousands of others who confidently state the same thing. It's much easier for the real reporting to get drowned out in that environment.

From there, they lash out, because the world is a lot simpler if you can pretend that most people are good and noble and there's just a small handful of bad actors to make an example out of. In reality, of course, most problems are a lot more widespread and nuanced, and finding a solution requires hard work. Most people aren't interested in that.

 

You're safe. There was some "rapid expansion" during the Lin era.

 

thanks for sharing my brother! Love your posts! Keep inspiring brother!

 

Sorry to hear all of that @The Cat , short of the usual suspects, I would hope you are always welcome here.

 

Just here to say I roll with THE Cat above all these other p***y cats on twitter.

 

And the rest of us?

Are we:

• fake people with real lives?
• real people with fake lives?
• fake people with fake lives?

 

Who?








































Cares!

DD

 

Okay

 

Yes and yes.

In short: social media has allowed multiple realities to exist for everyone.

Also:, obligatory: this thread is not GARM material

 

neat?

 

Fake lives with Real people