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If you want to win a chess match, you have to play chess, not lecture the other players

By David McElroy · June 6, 2011

If changing the world were about winning debates, libertarians would have brought freedom to the masses long ago. The vast majority of libertarians I know are scary smart and can make convincing and rational arguments for their positions. The only problem is that changing the world has little to do with winning debates.

I have to confess that it’s hard for me to keep my mouth shut when someone makes what seems like a ridiculous argument. My natural instinct is to point out the flaws in an argument and to lay out the facts and logic from my point of view. I have to confess that this approach has never changed the mind of a single person I know. What’s worse, reacting in my natural way has made me look like a jerk a time or two. Or three. Well, OK. Way more than that.

Dale Carnegie famously said, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” In other words, even if you’re able to logically prove a point — and get someone else to admit that your logic is correct along the way — the typical person isn’t going to change what he believes in his heart. That’s a lesson that’s hard for hard-headed libertarians to learn.

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If the state didn’t wither away for Marx and Engels, is there really a post-statist era ahead now?

By David McElroy · May 25, 2011

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously predicted that the state would wither away after the working class seized power, although we saw in real life that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” created a stronger and stronger state. That’s because Marx and Engels saw the state existing simply to regulate class conflict. Since class conflict was going to be gone — with the “working class” clearly in charge — there would be no state. That was a fantasy at the time.

I keep talking lately about a post-statist world, and it’s time to be a little more specific about what that means. Am I predicting that all governments are suddenly going to cease existing? No, that’s not it. To make my point clear, I’m going to compare it to another controversial assertion that’s been made lately.

Nearly three months ago — following up on something he’d been talking about for nearly a year — Apple CEO Steve Jobs asserted that the computer industry has entered what he called the “post-PC era.” Outraged commentators screamed that he was crazy — because the PC was still the dominant computing device in the market. A few others got it. Eventually, I think everybody will understand what he was talking about.

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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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