David McElroy

“They say if you scratch a cynic, you’ll find a disappointed idealist. And I would admit that somewhere underneath all this there’s a little flicker of a flame of idealism that would love to see it all — whoosh! — change. But it can’t happen that way.”
— Comedian George Carlin

I want to give up on this world. I want to give up on the human race. I go back and forth between rage and numbness about what I see from my fellow human beings.

I’m angry at the willful ignorance and delusion. I’m angry at the rampant dishonesty. I’m numb that people allow themselves to believe hateful idiocy — and I know there’s nothing I can do about it. So I swing wildly between two competing parts of my mind.

One part of me still clings to the belief that life can be beautiful. That love is real. That truth matters. That something sacred still flickers in this broken world. This part of me sees the way things ought to be and aches for those things. It dreams of deep, soul-level connection. Of a home where peace lives. Of a life anchored in what’s true and good and lasting.

But there’s another part of me that rolls its eyes and scoffs. That part has been hurt more times than I care to count. It remembers the idiocy, the lies and the self-deception of the masses who have given in to blindly following their passions and hatreds. That part of me sees a world that often mocks what’s pure and rewards what’s evil. And that part of my mind whispers to me, “You’re a fool if you keep believing!”

These two parts of me wrestle every day. The idealist still believes in love. The cynic keeps pointing to the scars and the new wounds.

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The Demopolis (Ala.) Times announced Wednesday that its latest edition is its last edition. Newspaper closures are so common today that it’s barely worth noticing — but the Times was the very last newspaper where I ever worked. So I noticed.

When I resigned as editor and publisher of The Demopolis Times — many years ago — I assumed I’d be back in another newsroom pretty quickly. Instead, I made an accidental career change and spent the next 20 years as a political consultant.

With the closure of The Demopolis Times, most of the newspapers where I worked are now gone. That’s no surprise, because the newspaper industry has been slowly dying for something like 30 years. But it’s sad to watch the demise of something I once loved and thought I’d spend my entire life doing.

I detested the time I spent running the Times, so I have no special love for the town or for the newspaper. But it feels a bit like watching the deaths of people I used to work with. And that’s gut-wrenching.

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What does it mean to be attractive? Why is one woman considered beautiful by almost everybody and another to be plain or even downright ugly? Why is one man seen as an attractive physical specimen and another seen as woefully lacking?

I’ve pondered this all my life, partly because I considered myself unattractive and wondered why. I couldn’t figure out why one arrangement of sizes and proportions and colors was considered an example of great beauty and others weren’t noteworthy.

I finally came to understand that some of it is biological and some of it is cultural. I don’t claim to have it all figured out, but I see that some standards persist over the centuries and others change with the fashions. And since a great part of it turns out to be subjective, I’ve been concerned about what various forms of media were teaching people to feel about themselves — based on arbitrary and fleeting beauty standards.

And just this week, I’ve realized that we have something new to worry about. With the rise of so-called “artificial intelligence” software, we are hard-coding current cultural preferences into software. And as AI software becomes more widespread and more influential, these subjective cultural standards are being injected into that software.

And more and more people are going to accept whatever this software says as objective truth — when it’s nothing but the collective biases of the people who trained the software. To test how this worked, I asked ChatGPT to tell me how attractive I am. And I was surprised by how it left me feeling.

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