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Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Relearning Lessons in Arguing Rationally with the Irrational

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Recently in a social-media thread, I let myself get sucked into exactly the sort of seemingly unproductive “discourse” that I usually try to avoid, with a representative of the “progressive” left. As usual, it involved a lot of backtracking, goalpost-moving and several ad hominems on his part.

This occurred without my using any name-calling against him, though I did honestly question his reading comprehension after he misstated two positions I clearly had made to the contrary. Yes, I called those out. One was that Trump is my “dear leader,” though I already stated having voted against him (third party) and why. [Truly a ridiculous assertion for anyone who knows me, even superficially.] His other falsehood was to claim I don’t think racism exists, after I clearly and plainly said the opposite. It was as if, in his zeal to apply gotchas and (mis)characterize me, he forgot to actually read the words I wrote, and instead responded from spoonfed progressive talking points and emotion, instead of knowledge, reason and original thought.

To many others outside the left, and me if I must admit, that sort of reaction is no surprise, and follows a very familiar pattern. The whole time I’m laughing at the pathetic nature of his replies one minute, and in the other, asking myself why I stooped down to trying to deal rationally with a person in a patently irrational state (a lesson I learned long ago from a failed relationship with a particular woman, but apparently must relearn on smaller scales sometimes).

Still frustrating him emotionally in what should have been an argument of logic, facts and reason, I deconstructed one house of sand foundation after another. For example, after bringing up the notion I was being “unscientific” somehow, he tried to lecture me that science is about proof. No, it decidedly is not! Then when he found out my name is on over 100 scientific papers (didn’t even mention also being a longtime reviewer and journal editor), the goalpost shifted. “All of your papers have nothing to do with this issue!” So why bring up science to begin with, bud…then try to lecture a longtime scientist about it, using a completely off-base concept of “proof”?

The original comment to which I responded was about supposedly “marginalized groups” in a racial context. This is a concept I did and do dispute; it’s a mass-victimhood excuse, outdated in 2025 with every one being equal under the law, discrimination disallowed based on skin color, and amplifying racial divides accomplishes nothing but needless further division. [It also makes a lot of money for the Democratic Party and affiliated gaggles of professional race hustlers and highly paid industrial “diversity” consultants, but that’s another issue.]

Besides, race is itself an artifice. It has no mathematically analytic, consistently reproducible, biological basis, nor objective, empirically based classification standards. Speaking of positivist science! Yet extremes on right and left love to group people by skin color, equate that with race (never mind that most people are what most would call “mixed race” anyway, and that multiple “races” can have the same skin color, etc.), and completely ignore the fundamental conceptual illegitimacy of race itself.

At one point, I told him that by completely misrepresenting my points to be the opposite, he either failed to comprehend what I wrote, or was misrepresenting it on purpose — either way, a bad look, and embarrassing. “You should stop here before you bury yourself in the dirt you’re throwing straight up from the hole you’re digging ever deeper.” I tried to give this guy a chance to back out, but…on a silver platter, he then handed me the nuke needed to finish the whole thing off.

He told me, of all people, to learn understand what it’s like to be poor, and to go to the inner city and live for a week, like “they” do in “one of these communities.”

Whoa. Go to the inner city…for a whole week! Does two decades count instead?

Anyone who knows me knew this was an invitation to absolutely implode the final argument, which of course I forthrightly did, verbatim:

    That’s a good suggestion. I’ve done it. Base already covered.

    Grew up inner-city poor, amid broken families, drugs, gangbangers, alcohol abuse, violent and property crimes of every kind. I know the streets because I lived the streets. I dare say I’ve seen more poverty than you by factors of hundreds.

    I’ve seen and learned more about what we call poverty or “marginalization” in any given week of my youth than most people will in a lifetime. How long would you last on the corner of Beacon and Columbia in east Dallas during the crack wars in 1985?

    Did you know that these problems are mostly the result of bad decisions by individuals? That everyone who huffs glue, smokes crack or meth, beats up his girlfriend, abuses her child, or deals heroin, *chose* to do that? No big bad racist bogeyman made them. Especially since most poor people are white.

    No “racist system” made one kid I knew beat a teacher bloody. No “racism” caused another to steal radar detectors, or another to sell food stamps for sex, or to wrap a chain around another kid’s throat and swing him around by it, or another to sell herself on the corner of Ross and Haskell to pay for her bennies, or another to lead a street gang into a fight with Mongols bikers off east I-30 (which they won, amazingly), or another to light his pregnant girlfriend’s apartment on fire, or the woman driver on one of my school buses to accidentally shoot herself in the leg with a .22 pistol in her purse, or a dude I knew to rob a 7-11 and still be in prison for it today. Some (not all) of both the criminals and their victims here were not “people of color”. Many of the worst racists I knew against black folks were Asian. Or Mexican. Wow, can you imagine?
    Individual responsibility, bud. That applies to all those crimes, and all racist acts. That’s because they are chosen.

I suspect it was his first exposure to a conservative/libertarian, multiply published physical scientist who grew up poor in the inner city. Hah! To hell with skin color. I am diversity!

Once it became apparent that I knew a whole lot more than this person, from first-hand experience, about science, and poverty, and the inner city, he deleted all his comments. Of course. Take the checked king off that board, bud.

The wildest part of an interaction like that isn’t necessarily the disagreement, it’s watching someone tell you they understand your own lived experience better than you do. Progressives in particular have become contagiously frequent with it. Brings to mind a tweet from a guy I follow who is a multinational author, rapper, speaker and all-around great guy, and whose presentation at OU I attended (Zuby).

Tweet from Zuby

There’s this strange moment where you realize the debate stopped being about reality, and turned into their defensively clinging to a rote, spoon-fed script handed down for recitation by secular, hyper-partisan viewpoint authorities in media and academia. [And yes, it can and sometimes does happen on the right too, but far less, since media (see item 9, page 11 here) and academia as a whole tilt strong left by every polling measure, and the academic left strongly tends authoritarian.]

Independent thought be damned! And honestly, it’s actually hilarious, in a pathetic way, because what else remains but to laugh, when someone insists you try to experience the stories you’ve already experienced immersively, and known better, for longer.

I’ve plied the grounds of my childhood trying to find even a corn kernel of this mythical “privilege,” and there’s no corn there. Were I a deer trying to eat from the feeder of privilege, I’d have starved. Blessings sometimes? Yes, as my friend who made the original post (and agrees with me) rightly differentiated…but not privilege.

What is the “privelege” of poverty? Avoiding being shot by the gunfire heard at night, or only being stabbed once, or seeing a guy’s brains sprayed across a roadway? Actually having a father at home, whichever drafty, roach-infested, rundown duplex was “home” was any given year? Blessing, yes…but not “privilege.” Fatherhood is supposed to be the norm in every home.

But in the end, all else of what may seemed a curse also becomes a blessing, as it imparted valuable perspective. I’m now glad for it. No regrets. And it taught me what MLK tried to teach everyone, but it appears far too few have learned: It’s about the content of one’s character, not the color of one’s skin.

So I assess and respect the former, and treat the latter as irrelevant. Why? Because Jesus himself did. Nowhere did He say, “Pity and favor thine dark skinned people,” nor, “I love all, but I love some skin colors more than others,” nor, “Go and sin no more, except if you’re the head of a BLM organization committing embezzlement and money laundering, or looting a store in Ferguson, or wearing a white hooded sheet burning crosses, or in a Mexican gang beating up blacks or vice versa, or being a white supremacist, or a black supremacist, or sending millions of dollars overseas illegally from Minneapolis.”

No, Jesus’ ideals apply the same to everyone. I approach race as impertinent, because He made no big deal about it either.

Secular and Religious Implications of Government as Robin Hood

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The idea of helping the poor among us is noble and correct–a grand calling of good. Of that, I know no practicing Christian (and few secularists) who disagree. The only dissension is in how that should be accomplished.

I prefer that charity toward the less-fortunate be done on the individual level, as each person’s conscience and/or personal duty to the Lord shall compel, through either direct aid or through reputable charities. I also prefer charity that helps the poor to help themselves–rather than the equivalent of dumping money into enabling of destructive personal addictions and dependencies (including dependency on government).

Any of us who are not sufficiently charitable in this life (even if that includes me) will have to answer for it in the next. And for those who don’t believe in a next life, you had better hope you’re right…and even then, there’s still your own conscience (if any) to which you are nominally accountable.

By contrast, some leftist Christians (including our President, apparently), indicate that it is the believer’s duty to make sure government will take from one to give to another, sanctimoniously supposing they or the government best knows the needs of poor and rich private individuals, as well as how best to spend hard-earned money of others once it has been taken from them.

[Odd how it’s others’ money the left wants, isn’t it?]

Just because we are supposed to “render to Caesar” doesn’t mean we encourage Caesar to steal more. And by the way, Caesar is dead, and so is the Roman Empire. This entertaining gentleman puts it another plain-spoken way, which I certainly can appreciate. To his reasonable rant, let me add more food for thought…

Forcible or coercive taking of resources, money or time from a person, in any form, is called theft. Ever heard of “thou shalt not steal”? Does it say, “Thou shalt not steal except to give to the poor via government bureaucracies”? No. Question answered.

Governmental extortion via taxation has proved for decades not to solve poverty anyway, by virtue of the simple fact that poverty still exists. Making an idol out of big government isn’t the answer. Charity–especially small, locally-based charity, is.

Every dollar taken from us in taxes is one dollar less we have for charity. This is mathematically unavoidable fact–not opinion. Now, for some experience-based opinion: indeed, private charity and philanthropy are much, much, much better equipped, in terms of compassion, familiarity and efficiency, to handle solutions to poverty than distant Washington bureaucrats with their bloated overhead, wastefulness and policy inertia. Maybe there’s a good reason that conservatives are more charitable as a group (individual exceptions being averaged into the general trend)–whether with money, time or blood.

Far be it for liberal Christians to assume that there is something inherently, socially noble about using government as a vector to commit Robin Hood style theft. Again, read the Eighth Commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.” That commandment applies equally to governments as to individuals; for governments are composed of…you guessed it, people! This means that all the criminal ills that afflict society at large also are present within government–including extortion, embezzlement, bribery, kickbacks, favoritism, cronyism, and assorted anti-whomever prejudices.

Those who work in some form of government, including me, are bound by our ethics (and faith, if religious) to check any such inclinations at the door. Even if only a tiny percentage of government fails to do so, that’s still many tens of thousands of people on a national scale. Do you trust they won’t get their grimy paws involved? Do you trust them to deliver the goods with your money more efficiently and effectively than, say, a local charity that is more directly accountable to the giver than some distant, faceless, nameless Washington bureaucrats? If so, I’ve got some land between Key West and Havana to sell you.

For all who claim, “Taxes are a moral issue!”, I agree–they are–just not in the way you might think. And for all those who advocate higher taxes (again, typically for others): for years, I have offered one simple challenge that no higher-tax advocate–I mean not one single person–has had the moral wherewithal or courage of conviction to take up! That says something about those who push for higher taxes, their willingness to stop bellowing hollow ideology and instead put money in place of mouth.

For the very few who might include themselves in the request for more taxation: do you believe you’re being generous and charitable by paying more taxes? If you’re part of the Christian left, do you think that somehow will get you deeper into Heaven, or earn brownie points with the Big Man that somehow aren’t available to those anti-intellectual, heathen, backward-thinking right-wingers–the folks whom you look down upon while claiming some high-horse position of pseudo-egalitarian social-justice advocacy?

Or if you’re secular, answer this: how is forced altruism (i.e., you can’t back out or change your mind!) not an innately self-contradictory idea? The Soviets could tell you: “It is, and so what. We take, regardless.” If you get your wish, that’s your fate, and that of everyone else too. I suppose then we’re all equal, all right…equally screwed!

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For more on poverty problems and straight-talk solutions, see my four-part series on poverty in America: (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4). Part 3 is especially pertinent to this topic, and contains the taxation challenge.

Savage Bigotry, Intolerance and Bullying…toward Christian Children

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Meet Dan Savage (but only at a distance). This is a person who is so “tolerant” that he once advocated truck-dragging a politician with whom he disagreed. He also stated on national TV that he wished all Republicans were “f___ing dead.” Are truck-dragging somebody to pieces, and the desired mortality of millions of people, proper ways to settle a problem? The racist killers of James Byrd, and the notorious genocide architect Adolf Hitler, might say “sure”. Otherwise…

This is a person who once wrote that he volunteered for a Republican presidential primary campaign as a mole, then tried to infect that candidate with the flu by spreading the germs of his illness on items that the candidate (Gary Bauer) would handle. Later Savage backed off that story, calling his account fictitious. This either makes him dishonest, delusional, uncivilized, and an irrational hothead at best–or a dangerous sociopath at worst.

In light of incidents such as these, is Dan Savage someone a responsible parent or educator should want influencing any child of any age? And yet, and yet…

For some reason, this extreme-fringe “queer” activist, admitted liar, violence-advocating anti-bully crusader, and convicted voter-fraud criminal was invited to speak at a national high-school journalism conference held by the National Scholastic Press Association. For the sake of civilized humanity…why? This was the awful and shameful result. What as the NSPA thinking…or were they? Given Savage’s decidedly unstable background, such a cruel and hateful eruption shouldn’t have surprised the organizers.

Insult-infused, gratuitously profane rants against Christians and Christianity seem to be en vogue, satisfying some carnal desire for puppies to kick by insecure bullies of the left. Even given that, Savage’s spew was extreme to the max. Substitute Jew and Torah, or Muslim and Koran, for Christian and Bible in his verbal screed, and this guy would have been pilloried by mobs of mainstream media finger-waggers at every turn. This further exemplifies the dripping hypocrisy of leftist “thought”, where doublespeak is the norm: bigotry is portrayed as anti-bigotry, hatefulness used in the struggle against hate, bullying as part of an “anti-bullying” agendas, and intolerance in the name of tolerance. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth would be proud.

As I’ve written here before, tolerance and acceptance also means tolerance and acceptance of political conservatives, of Christians, of the right wing…in other words, of me–and millions of others like me. The Dan Savages of the world, and the frothing lapdogs of lascivious deviance who march to their tune, are too engulfed in the flames of their own hatred and bigotry to see that their credibility in any such arguments is burned to a crisp as a result.

This sort of extreme-left radicalism, using overt and profane insults and as vectors for spreading the message, would be absolutely unrecognizable and shocking to more sane, level-headed and thoughtful civil-rights activists of the early ’60s. Radical homosexual activists often speciously and disingenuously compare their “struggle” for recognition, approval and attention to that civil-rights era. Really? I mean, really? Talk about delusions. This makes me wonder…

What would the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King say about such tactics as Savage has employed? What would MLK say to the notion that Christian children are being called “pansy asses” in public, by the speaker, for walking out of a hateful and insulting rant against their faith? What would he say? Answer that.