Weather or Not

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.

R.I.P. Walter Williams

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The prominent economist, educator and socioeconomic commentator Walter E. Williams died a couple nights ago, apparently in his sleep, of causes yet known at this writing. His best friend and fellow longtime economist and columnist, Dr. Thomas Sowell, penned this brief tribute within a day.

I related well to him, though we were vastly different in looks and age. 🙂 Williams was raised in a rough area of Philadelphia, by a single mom, and understood poverty better than almost everybody else who ever talks about it on social media, simply because he had lived it. He saw, by plenty of good and bad examples and bad, first-hand (which is the best way), how to either succeed or fail in life. A late bloomer — college dropout and cab driver as a young adult — he ultimately chose the former.

The world should be grateful he did. Alas, too few will appreciate his brilliance, because he not only didn’t conform to the prevailing welfare-state advocacy orthodoxy, nor the ridiculous “woke” social-justice herd mentality, he actively and resoundingly refuted it. This was not despite, but because, he knew better from both his own academic study and, most importantly, seeing the effects of economic hardship directly.

When I found his columns and Sowell’s as a kid and young teen, it was as if I was reading future versions of myself (adapted to becoming an atmospheric scientist instead of economist, of course). They not only served a poor city kid like me by sharing their understanding on a weekly basis, but by life example.

Sure, I strayed for a few college-age years from capitalistic enthusiasm and economic conservatism, but then a combination of simple mental maturation and first-hand witnessing the deep inefficiencies of government bureaucracy set me straight. And there they still were: Williams, Sowell, and a few others, like old friends and mentors I’d never met, still conversing, teaching me again about economics, societal issues and writing, this time with even greater appreciation on my part.

Though they traveled different paths from childhood poverty to achieve their well-deserved intellectual accolades, it’s no wonder he and Sowell became best of friends. I didn’t realize until Sowell’s post-mortem tribute that Williams was slated to be Sowell’s literary executor (younger, but still in his 80s). Can you imagine some of the discussions they had over the decades? I’d love to be a fly on the wall for just any random few of them. Between casual pleasantries, imagine the deep socioeconomic insights from such powerful thinkers.

Here’s a snippet from one of Williams’s video appearances, on the counterintuitive impacts of minimum-wage laws:

Rest in peace Dr. Williams. Maybe someday, more will grasp the simple, truthful, real-life-tested, yet oft-slandered socioeconomic concepts that you have been teaching for decades.

Scattershooting 200924

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Scattershooting while wondering what happened to objective academic rigor in public-school curricula…

NADLER CRAPS HIS PANTS at PELOSI: I’ll start out this posting with some comedy gold, courtesy of Jerry Nadler. Watch this video on C-SPAN of Nadler obviously dropping a big ol’ butt biscuit in his boxers, while introducing Nancy Pelosi. If the video disappears from C-SPAN, you should be able to find it on YouTube by searching for “Jerry Nadler pants”. It’s hard to blame him. Indeed, having had a few “wet farts” myself in a lifetime, I feel sorry for the guy actually, despite my admitted amusement at the slapstick but ultimately harmless scene. Others’ reactions to Nancy Pelosi have been worse…and justifiably!

STEALING OTHERS’ PHOTOGRAPHY DOESN’T PAY, EXCEPT for the PHOTOGRAPHER: It looks like Montana photographer Sean Heavey got a solid settlement (solid enough to be satisfactory to him, whatever its amount) from Netflix. To be succinct, Netflix straight-up stole his wonderful supercell photo for one of their shows, then had the stunningly arrogant audacity to defend their theft with the legally invalid, laughably ridiculous, straw-man claim that you can’t copyright Mother Nature. Good for Sean (and all of us photographers of the vapors aloft). I’m happy he busted Netflix and got a settlement from them. [After learning of their illicit use of his imagery, several others and I strongly encouraged him to do so.] On smaller scales, I’ve done the same, and absolutely will do it again whenever necessary. Gear, fuel & lodging aren’t free. Intangible property is still property; taking it without permission is still theft; and commercializing it still is selling stolen property. Exodus 20:15

CHINA LIED, PEOPLE DIED: A recent Congressional report asserted (rightfully, in my view) that, in essence, the 200,000+ deaths and countless more numbers of severe, debilitating illnesses the U.S. has suffered so far can be laid straight at the feet of the red commie Chinese government. You can argue all you want about our bungling response once their coronavirus got here, but that ignores that it shouldn’t have arrived here to begin with, and why it did. This is disgusting, but not surprising. All of the available evidence (not including what’s been covered up by the Chinese Communist Party that we don’t know yet, of course) has pointed this way all along. Their nationalization of PPE production by foreign companies (including ours):

  1. Directly harmed efforts to contain this disease here and elsewhere around the world, and
  2. Serve as Exhibit A on why the US should be beholden to no other nation for manufacturing of essential medical equipment and supplies.
    Bottom line: collectivist dictatorships cannot be trusted, in any way, shape or form.

CRITICAL THEORY HARMS RACIAL MINORITIES: The struggle over dilution of admissions standards at a top American public school, to accommodate specific racial groups at others’ expense, is a prime example of how the entirely subjective, arbitrary, radicalizing, societally destructive, and diabolically evil thought cult known as “critical theory” undermines excellence. In this case, we have a gifted-student STEM magnet school that already has 79% racial-minority enrollment, with a large fraction of immigrant parents. Yes, PC “woke” infestation of education can hurt minorities, and this shows how. The ideological cancer knows no limits. As a formally published scientist who came from far poorer means than almost all those pushing the “woke” idiocy, married to someone who was an academically gifted immigrant, I insist: facts, reason, logic, and objectivity must prevail…and rigorous excellence must be restored as priority one in STEM education (and all education for that matter).