Banned Super Bowl ads? It’s a new way for you to cheaply play victim

By David McElroy · December 4, 2013

Random recent thoughts that never led to longer pieces, sometimes because of time constraints:

I’m amused by the dishonest games that some companies and political causes play today related to Super Bowl ads. Here’s the new way to get attention. Make a cheap 30-second spot with a controversial message that you know the NFL will reject. (There are plenty of mainstream bidders for those ads, so the NFL doesn’t need to take a chance on causing controversy that it can avoid. Any savvy media buyer can explain this to you.)

Then submit the ad to the league and wait to be told that it’s not the sort of ad the NFL wants for the Super Bowl. After that, start yelling loudly about censorship and then get outraged people online to all share your banned” ad — an ad that nobody else would have watched otherwise. This way, tons of people see your ad and you’re not required to pay $4 million for an ad that you couldn’t afford anyway. Smart, huh? Yes, but very dishonest.

A gun company is doing it this year. PETA was doing it as far back as 2009. And others have been doing it since then. Some might see it as just being smart, but I see it as really dishonest, because the people who are complaining about being banned had no intention of spending $4 million to ran an ad. (Most of them almost certainly had no ability to spend that kind of money for 30 seconds of air time.)

Trying to write something that’s completely honest and true is difficult, because ego and “spin” try hard to get into the way. The more honest and true I can be with my words, the more simple and clean they feel to me. When my ego has an agenda, the words seem convoluted and slimy, even if they’re persuasive, like what you’d expect from a used car salesman. Writing anything that’s completely clean and honest is hard, but when it happens, it feels as though I’ve cleaned something on the inside. I wish I could feel more often that I’ve successfully done it.

I’ve recently realized that one of the biggest reasons I look forward to making a lot of money is that it will give me the ability to patronize the rare artists who I actually care about supporting in a semi-serious way. I don’t care about the trappings of wealth that matter to most people, but the idea of being able to underwrite the production of an album that would otherwise go unrecorded or a film that I want to see produced is a powerful incentive.

Once a narrative gets established, it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. Everybody “knows” it’s true and keeps telling the same story.

Some marriages remind me of the old movie, “Weekend at Bernie’s.” The marriage is dead, but somebody keeps dragging the body around and pretending it’s still alive.

It’s interesting to realize how much of our judgment about other people is made from subtle clues we’re not fully conscious of. We notice some little thing about a person or situation and draw tentative conclusions, possibly unconsciously modifying the conclusions as more subtle clues show up. We decide things about people — whether we like them, whether they’re trustworthy, whether they’re safe for us to be around — and we’re rarely aware of why we really think those things (even though we justify our opinions in an after-the-fact way).

We sometimes come to unfair conclusions about people this way, but the truth is that our unconscious heuristics are right far more often than they’re mistaken.

For some people, life is mostly a long series of con games — a desperate attempt to get their need of the moment filled without real reciprocation. To them, things such as love and trust are to be unconsciously faked, partly because they’re afraid and partly because they don’t know how to really love or trust. Like emotionally undeveloped small children, they simply manipulate people into giving them what they need in the moment.

Unless they ever learn what’s important and take dangerous emotional risks, all they’ll ever do is con people around them — people who trust them and who believe what the glib false exterior is telling them. I feel sorry for people like this, because they’re more like scared animals backed into a corner than they’re like those who want to hurt anyone. Many of them even feel guilty for how they live. But they don’t know another way to live, so life is painful, exhausting, pointless and dishonest.

A simple look at what I’m eating tells me how well I’m doing emotionally each day. If I’m eating good foods, I’m doing well. If I’m eating junk, I’m probably in a dark place emotionally (or heading there). It’s a bit like a sugary mood ring.

I don’t like empty cliches or most expressions of dogma, whether they’re about politics, theology or most anything else. When you say some version of, “This is the complete truth and I’m here to educate you,” you cut off discussion and connection with others. You put yourself above others. And when you do that with cliches, you preemptively cut off discussion in a pious way that makes it clear you don’t welcome thinking and insight. The worst part, though, is that those most likely to use these cliches and dogma have never honestly questioned their own assumptions, so they’re likely to feel superior to those they’re lecturing, even if they’re lecturing in good faith.

The more I think and feel and experience, the more I realize that all I can say is, “This is what I’ve experienced, so this is what I currently believe truth is.” What I believe in a decade — or five years or maybe even six months — might contradict some of what I believe is truth today. But all I can do is to share what I believe to be true — and be ready to change my mind when I discover ways in which I’ve been wrong.

The passions that motivate us seem to run in packs. When one of them disappears, the others all seem to follow. I never used to understand what artists meant when they spoke of a muse that motivated them. But I understand now. A muse is just a passion — most typically a deeply expressed love for someone else — and that passion attracts other passions.

Collectively, they can ignite desires and capabilities that bring out the best and most visionary in a person. That seems to be why a muse enables a writer or other artist to find something inside that has been hiding. The muse doesn’t bring anything that wasn’t already there, but the presence of the muse is the passion that lights an internal fire that makes the artist manifest what he’s really been hiding all along.

So I’m not sure that any great art or great achievement happens without a muse to light the fire of passion.

If you think fast food wages are too low, then don’t take those jobs. If you are worth more than what fast food jobs pay, someone will offer you money appropriate to the value you can bring to a job. If you are NOT worth more money, then improve yourself and become worth more. Those are your choices.

Complaining that someone should pay you more than the value you provide just makes your look like someone who doesn’t understand voluntary exchange. No one owes you a job or a living. It’s your business to make yourself worth employing at higher wages.

I’m very aware of evil and injustice in the world around me, but I don’t usually waste my time anymore on angry arguments and unwinnable fights — which do nothing positive for me or others. This seems to confuse some people. I’m more interested in finding loving ways that good people can safely live in peace than I am in defeating and arguing with those who try to stop us.

It’s a longer-term strategy, but I believe it will actually work — and it’s an approach that lets me enjoy the good that’s in the world instead of just being obsessed with the evil.

People who are actively fighting the coercive state are fighting on the government’s terms. I don’t fight the state. I’m simply waiting for what I see as its inevitable collapse. Every empire eventually crumbles. Some are entirely destroyed and some stick around as shadows of what they once were.

I think it’s dangerous and counter-productive to try to bring the coercive state system down. The smart alternative is to plan for how to take advantage of the point in history when it’s time for change and opportunity is everywhere. Until then, I see “political activism” as a waste of time. But everyone has to pursue what makes sense to him.

One of the saddest aspects of modern digital life is that it seems to make many people feel that they absolutely must refute everything they don’t agree with.

The control that almost any person or group has over you starts in your own head.

Facebook frequently serves to remind me why I stay away from large groups of people as much as possible.

I’m suffering from “outrage fatigue” from all the posts on Facebook and Twitter constantly telling me to be angry or outraged by something or other.

If you’re posting links to insane theories about a conspiracy between NASA and “the mainstream media” to cover up something vaguely nefarious about the comet ISON, you’re way too nutty for me.

I keep seeing articles that purport to explain how to hide from the NSA. I just want to live in a way that the NSA won’t care that I even exist.

And, finally, did you know that the cast of Star Trek: the Next Generation sang “Let it Snow”? They did. Seriously. Well, sort of. You’re enjoy it if you’re a fellow nerd.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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