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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.

What if I Told You…

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What if I told you some things that might seem absurd, unbelievable, completely unrealistic? Things that Alex Jones couldn’t even have conceived beforehand?

What if I told you that the CIA was in cahoots with “researchers” at over 30 universities to illegally experiment with mind control on unsuspecting people using barbiturates, LSD and hypnosis?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it was real.

What if I told you a few years ago that the government would use X-radiation technology in 250 different public places around the nation to look at people’s genitals under the auspices of public security?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it happened at airports equipped with full-body scanners of that type.

What if I told you in 2009 that the military and universities were working on robotic technology the size of birds and bugs that could be used to spy on any person or group, outdoors or indoors?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it was real–such development was under way then and remains ongoing now.

What if I told you in early 2009 that the government bought nearly 2,000 guns from U.S. dealers and supplied many of them to Mexican narco-traffickers, who would use them for killings of both Mexican and U.S. citizens, with apparent knowledge of the U.S. Attorney General?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it was real as part of Operation Fast and Furious.

What if I told you that the military was going to invade a peaceful village in Colorado and kill 148 people there, mostly women and children?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it was real on 29 November 1864, for members of the Cheyenne tribe under Chief Black Kettle.

What if I told you that, for six years, the government secretly has been forcing major telephone companies to turn over their customers’ phone-call logs of all Americans to the National Security Agency, with knowledge of two presidents?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it is real and is ongoing, and until this year with the Edward Snowden scandal, was secret.

What if I told you that a worldwide information company that’s in almost every computer, that has been cooperating with the National Security Agency to supply the government with information on citizens, is warm to the notion of implanting chips in people’s heads?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it’s really under consideration.

What if I told you that the government, by executive order of a Democrat president, was going to round up over 60,000 U.S. citizens in this country and relocate them in involuntary interment camps?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it was real for Japanese-American U.S. citizens in World War II, and for many non-citizens as well.

What if I told you that the military was purposefully spraying a mixture of toxic and radioactive chemicals into the air in your neighborhood without your prior knowledge, and planting false media stories as part of an official cover-up?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it was real for folks in St. Louis in the 1950s and ’60s.

————

To the point, if you haven’t figured it out already: all of these wild ideas and more, until they actually happened, would have seemed like insane conspiracy theories or even delusions of the severely psychotic! Put yourself in the shoes of a rational and reasonably well-educated citizen contemporary to each of those events, hearing someone mention them for the first time–then try to deny this. And yet, they were true. True!

Yes, there are plenty of ridiculous and baseless theories out there. I hear many of them regarding weather, specifically weather control. Not all involve the usual HAARP or “chemtrails” stupidity either. The level and number of ridiculous suppositions out there about weather control is amazing, and all completely without merit. For now, anyway…

That said, can you be absolutely sure, given the insights above, that all of the “conspiracy theories” and “crackpot claims” you hear are going to turn out to be false? Next time you dismiss someone’s insane-sounding ramblings as a “conspiracy theory” or “crackpot”–stop and think twice, for each of the above events would have seemed absurd to the extreme upon your being first told.

Conspiracy theories are bad enough without some of them turning out to be real. Enough! By giving conspiracy theorists such fodder in real events, and by failing to adhere to the tenets of openness and full transparency, we as a society, and our corporations and governments, actively encourage and foster the very kind of thinking we dismiss and mock as the bane of rational thought, and give the actual crackpots a bully platform rooted in nuggets of legitimacy!

Then again, if a conspiracy theory turns out to be true, then it was rational–regardless of how baseless or ungrounded it may have seemed. Even if a suspicion was right for the wrong reasons, it still was correct. After all, the result ultimately is what matters, and nothing is more brutally rational than a hard, cold fact.

The Slavery of “Free Thought”–Part 2: It Isn’t.

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In Part 1, I covered the levels of thinking as a nested analog to Matryoshka dolls, arguing that the freest thought is the most unlimited–in other words, that which doesn’t deny or abrogate the spiritual realm outside oneself. Thinking in a way that is not constrained by self-limitation, consideration not just of the artificial and natural but of the supernatural, truly is the height of open-mindedness. Refusing it, denying higher authority outside humanity, restricts thought merely to the tangible and visible, and as such, is a form of closed-mindedness.

Ultimately, those who bind themselves within any of the dolls’ shells are enslaved, not free. That applies to all of us! We all are enslaved to our human limits of thought. But the smaller the doll we choose to inhabit, the less free and the more restrained we become, the smaller the intellectual prison cell with which we have sentenced ourselves, the stricter the self-tightened shackles bind us.

Don’t get me wrong: I love logic and reason! “Science, logic and reason” (with a dollop of imagination selectively mined out of necessity) are the ideal modes of thought when applied as tools to solve scientific and logical problems! Yet only closed-minded fools, deniers utterly bereft of evidence for their null claims, attempt to apply natural standards to the supernatural, or illogically demand tangible evidence for that which transcends the tangible. How shallow, self-limiting, and truly, contrary to logic and reason!

Another important caveat: it also is possible for those in the outer realms to lose or ignore the inner ones, thereby becoming intellectually hollow. We see that capacity exercised commonly in those who are very spiritual but ignorant of math and science, or in the scientist or engineer with extremely underdeveloped social (emotional) skills.

Nonetheless, logic and reason alone are nothing more than chains of bondage–dark dungeons, really–when considering matters outside that shell. Ignoring or denying the outer realms, we even may get comfortable, smugly self-delusional in the idea that we’ve gone as far as necessary, that this stop alone will suffice.

None of us are purely free thinkers because of our human limitations–distraction, diversion, hubris, finite IQ, irrationality (a.k.a. emotion), and vulnerability to anti-intellectual influences. Still, we are freest in thought when we don’t enclose ourselves within any of the inner dolls–when we use our innate (or God-given, for some of us) free will to wander the fullest possible realms of learning and exploration. Learning doesn’t involve merely facts, concepts, logic and reason, but also, ideas past the here and now, beyond the tangible.

Consider love. I’ve posed to rigid adherents of “science, logic and reason” the following simple challenge. Do you love someone? Who? [We’ll assume the challenge is directed at a man married to “Annie”, for the sake of argument.] Now…prove you love Annie!

Naturally, after considerable hemming, hawing, stammering, hand-waving, sidestepping, avoidance tactics, diversionary straw men, complaints about the validity of the challenge, and attempts to escape onto tangents such as biological benefits of love (which still don’t prove love), one thing becomes crystal-clear. He can’t meet this challenge. He loves Annie, but cannot prove it. He is trapped, ensnared in a “logic” cage of his own construction, imprisoned, enslaved.

This is because anything that comes up as “evidence” (physical or verbal affection, performing good deeds and favors, benevolence, sex, and giving of material objects, service or time) can have many causes and motivations–including platonic, selfish and/or unloving ones–even sociopathy. None of them are unique to love, nor do they prove love.

With a big-enough combination of financial power and cold lack of scruples, a man could hire a live-in woman for some amount of time to perform for him every act of every sort that is associated with love–to service all carnal desires behind closed doors, and to put on for the world every outward appearance that she is madly head-over-polished-toenails in love with him. In fairness, a woman similarly could get a dude to service her in outwardly “loving” ways. Either still would be mere pretension–a well-acted and protracted escort/maid service of sorts–but certainly not love!

Love isn’t subject to arbitrary logical “rules” regarding fallacies. It cannot be calculated with arithmetic, nor placed in a beaker and weighed, nor derived and solved as partial differential equations. Love sometimes is passed off as a chemical reaction in the brain. This is an article of faith (not science), for one cannot document on paper the specific organic-chemistry reaction uniquely yielding love. Show me the unique solution to the biochemical love equation? Don’t try; you cannot.

Love transcends the tangible, physical and mathematical, and defies evidence-based reasoning in unambiguously establishing its existence to the exclusion of other motivations for behavior. As such, love cannot be proved, and the challenge cannot be met! “Science, logic and reason” therefore fail, and fail with miserable and dismal wretchedness, at explaining tangibly the most advanced and wondrous aspect of the human experience.

Those who espouse the supremacy of logic, yet profess any sort of love, face a dilemma they often criticize in the religious–coexistence of the rational and irrational in the same person. How can a religious scientist believe in and love and serve a God he can’t prove to you and me? Well, dear reader…the same way the atheist can be scientific and logical, yet still have love for anther human that he can’t prove to you and me. The difference, as I see it, is that the love for God is directed at the perfect and omniscient–the one ultimately and most truly deserving of worship (the highest form of love).

After all of this, it is readily apparent that the most free thinker does not enslave himself within science, logic and reason, nor within emotion or imagination, nor within only spiritual space. Instead, the freest thinker delves into the abstract, the spiritual, the eternal, the mental processes that journey beyond tangible evidence, while not losing sight of any of the inner ones–engaging in a lifelong exploration of the entire intellectual spectrum.

I don’t hate the spiritually handicapped. I feel pity and empathy instead; for I once was blissfully ignorant that way, jailed in the same state of self-inflicted spiritual infanthood and underdevelopment. Those who tried but gave up prematurely have experienced spiritual atrophy, with much the same net result. When spiritually handicapped, much like physical or mental handicaps, one is missing an essential capacity or capability. The good news is that, unlike a missing limb or a blind eye, we can grow or regrow the spirit, boost our spiritual IQ–but not without struggle, and only if we’re open-minded, free thinkers about it.

This is because the truest level of free thought involves logical intellect, emotional intellect, and spiritual intellect, none to the exclusion of the others, each in its distinct place, but also, each to the others’ enrichment. This is the essence of the most vast thinkers, the truest manifestation of free thought!