David McElroy

I’m sick of smug and condescending politicians. Maybe even more than that, I’m sick of their naive and arrogant followers. I’m sick of grown men and women shrieking at each other and calling each other names.

I’m sick of people waving a Red flag or a Blue flag and pretending that they’re anything more than two sides of the same failed and broken system. I’m sick of watching people on a sinking Titanic fight each other for control of the dead bridge of the ship.

So for my own mental health, I’m going to completely boycott the entire sick mess for at least 90 days.

For the next three months, I’m not going to read any news about current politics. I’m not going to listen to any discussions of the subject. I’m going to avoid the inane shouting matches on Facebook by people who think they’re engaging in thoughtful political debate. And I’m certainly not going to write a word about it.

If you think it’s a good idea, you’re invited to join me. I’m sure we can find plenty else to talk about. There’s the future of the world. There’s my future and your future. There’s love and need and anger and a million emotions. There’s philosophy and religion. There’s art and beauty. In other words, there’s real life — which doesn’t include partisan bickering.

Keep Reading

What you believe about this picture is determined by what you’ve been told about Adolph Hitler. There are very few people left alive today who can personally tell you their experiences with him, so why are you so sure that you know enough about him to have an opinion about the man?

Almost everybody today knows that Hitler was a monster. That’s what I believe. That’s almost certainly what you believe. We’ve seen all the pictures from concentration camp victims and we’ve heard his hateful rhetoric about Jews. We’ve been told that he was responsible for millions and millions of deaths. So that’s what we believe.

But why did the Germans in the picture above adore the man? Why did they see him as their hero, not as a monster? The difference is that their narrative was very different from the one we’ve been given. Because they believed a different story, they saw him as a hero.

What is a narrative? It’s just a story. When you think about what you believe — about anything — you probably tend to assume that you’ve carefully looked at all the facts and come to a rational decision. The truth, though, is that you know a tiny fraction of the facts regarding anything, even things very close to you.

Keep Reading

I might have found the person who most strongly represents the kind of thinking that leads people to support really bad government action. Cindy Vinson is a San Jose, Calif., woman who calls herself a big supporter of ObamaCare. But after she found out what it’s going to cost her money, she whined about it to a newspaper.

Although she wants other people to have health care, she found out last week that changes brought about by the law mean her policy will cost $1,800 more per year than before.

“I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.”

Seriously. She said that. It’s not satire.

And that is the idiocy and the hypocrisy of supporters of these “social programs.” People such as Vinson are happy to vote for benefits for certain people — as long as they can demand that other people pay for their “generosity.”

This is the core moral problem with the system we have today. People can consider themselves kind-hearted and generous, but demand that “the rich” pay for what they want other people to have.

Keep Reading