David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Free phone wasn’t worth keeping,
so he traded it for $8 worth of beer

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I hadn’t heard from Ben for weeks, so I didn’t know whether he still wanted to buy the old car I have sitting at home. I haven’t driven it for three years, but I kept it for a long time simply as a backup. Eventually, I kept it simply because I hadn’t gotten around to doing anything with it.

Ben caught me one day a few weeks ago as I got home. He wanted to know whether the car was for sale. We talked and he agreed to come back some evening before dark so he could try to get the car started. We wanted to coordinate our schedules by phone in the coming days, but he didn’t have a cell phone.

I finally saw Ben again this evening. It was after dark, so we couldn’t look at the car tonight, but he told me I could call him on his cell phone now.

He still couldn’t afford a phone, but he explained that someone he knew traded a “free government phone” to him in exchange for $8 worth of beer.

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Money isn’t evil, but obsession with it brings out worst in us

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They were a picture-perfect couple who seemed kind and loving. They both worked in careers that involved helping other people. They talked a lot about their faith and about “doing the right thing.” They seemed like wonderful folks.

But when they got in the middle of a business negotiation in which I was involved, their nice words went out the window. Their masks fell off. They were suddenly greedy and grasping, trying to scrape every last dollar out of a deal — even if that meant cheating the other party.

I’ve seen this over and over. Money doesn’t change people, but it does unmask who they really are. When they discover money is involved, you find out what their real values are. You find out how little they’ve meant the sweet words of love and happiness.

I’ve seen another example of this ugliness in the last few days. I’m no longer naive enough to be surprised by it, but it still hurts me. It still saddens me. It still leaves me wondering what sort of monsters we become when money becomes our god.

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It’s wrong to silence anybody, even a nutcase like Alex Jones

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Alex Jones is a nutcase — and that comparison is an insult to every other nutcase in the world.

I have no idea whether Jones believes the insane things he says or if he’s just playing to an audience of gullible misfits in order to make money. I halfway suspect he believes much of what he says, but that he plays up certain stories because they attract attention.

So if I had to make a guess, I’d say he’s equal parts madman and showman.

Jones is a slimy opportunist with more than a few screws loose, but I have a serious problem with any social media platform that bans his rants because of “hate content.” (What exactly is hate these days?) Over the last week or so, we have seen Apple, Spotify, Facebook and YouTube kick Jones off of their services.

These companies have no problem with nasty, hateful and vulgar content in their music catalogs or other posts. What makes the rantings of a madman so different that these media companies have decided to ban him? This is “virtue signaling,” not something which is going to “stop hate” or any such nonsense.

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