David McElroy

As you scared of the police? If you’re a white middle-class suburbanite, probably not. If you live in certain lower-income parts of the country, though, you’re probably terrified at times. If you’re not scared, you should be.

The New York Post published video Monday that shows a New York City police sergeant threatening a group of men in Brooklyn. (You can watch the video below.) He tries to intimidate them with his gun, but he makes it clear that he doesn’t mind a little bit of criminal activity.

“You guys are hustling or whatever, I ain’t got no problem with that. Listen . . . do your thing,” he said. “But when I come around and I speak, you f–king listen. Tell your boys.”

The video of Sgt. Lesly Charles was recorded by a man in the group, apparently on a smartphone. The city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board is investigating the video, but if this is like most instances of police misconduct, it will result in a slap on the wrist, if anything. After all, they’ll say, he had good intentions. He was trying to protect us.

At one point, Charles makes it clear that he considers himself above having to follow rules. He tells a man in the street near a car, “This is my street. All right? If you got to play tough, that’s your problem. … I do whatever the f–k I want.”

Inside a restaurant, the officer got tougher and more graphic.

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It was a year ago today that the world was supposed to end, according to California radio preacher Harold Camping. Of course, when it didn’t happen, he suddenly found new evidence in scripture to support his revised calculations and said the end would come five months later. That date also passed without the world ending.

It’s easy to make fun of a nut such as Camping — and I did my share last year — but there’s a lesson here for anyone who’s so certain of the accuracy of his own beliefs and predictions: Any of us can be wrong. Certainty doesn’t make a person right — and dogged determination to stick to a prediction or position might just mean the person is arrogant and stubborn. (Unfortunately, strident confidence in error is rewarded in politics, while thoughtful candor is punished.)

How did Camping and his followers go so wrong? I’ll never know. Anyone who knows the Bible know that there’s nothing there to make a reasonable person believe he can predict the end of the world. Anyone who tries is simply bringing his own assumptions (and his own arrogance) to bear in order to come up with a date that isn’t there. (If you want to get a heated argument going, ask people from certain Christian groups to get together and compare notes about what’s going to happen when the world ends. Then hide the breakables and get out of the way.)

On the rare occasions when I could get away with disagreeing with my father when I was a kid, he would tend to say, “Well, you just think you’re right.” That statement always puzzled me. Obviously I thought I was right or I wouldn’t hold whatever position I held. Isn’t that true for all of us?

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How confident are you that you understand what I write? Are you certain that you know exactly what I mean — and that your understanding can’t be mistaken? I wrote Sunday about the difficulties involved when humans communicate — how a message can be completely misunderstood because of the difficulty of moving a message from the abstract of one person’s brain to the abstract of another person’s brain through the medium of words.

Rarely have I ever seen someone so completely prove my point by disagreeing with me. The response that someone wrote is funny and ironic, so I want to share it with you as evidence of what I was saying. Sunday afternoon, a friend shared my article about communication on her Facebook page. A friend of hers shared it to his own page in order to write a rebuttal. Here’s what he wrote:

Since I am well convinced that David McElroy, in this clearly argued and written piece, perfectly communicated exactly the point he wanted to make and that I understood it perfectly well, McElroy’s own thesis — namely that objective communication in human language is defect, “imperfect” and semi-impossible — is thereby refuted. He commits the “self-reference-exclusion fallacy”: his thesis can only be true if its own content is excluded from what his thesis asserts. (Please spare me an extended discussion of Russell’s “theory of types” now: it is backassward and changes nothing.)

Throughout the years, my own Dad has often exclaimed to me: “Communication is impossible!” To which I always blithely answer: “Yes, I know exactly what you mean!” He’s never yet grasped my refutation.

It’s funny and ironic because this person proves my point. He states what he believe my thesis was — and he completely gets it wrong. He misunderstood what I was saying, because he was bringing his own biases to what he was reading. He thought the issue was about objectivity and whether it’s possible. That framing never crossed my mind. It wasn’t my point. So his assertion that I’m wrong because he perfectly understood what I wrote is the very thing that illustrates my actual point.

I can’t tell you how amused I’ve been about this.

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