I have this serious love/hate relationship with social media. I love staying in contact with family and friends scattered all over the world. But social media can be a horrific waste of my time, and I don't think of myself as retired or ready to die. As the poet Robert Frost famously wrote, "But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep." I am self-employed as a writer. If I don't sell a book or a short story, I don't earn any income. If I waste hours upon hours each day engaged in asinine, juvenile arguments with presumably adult men and women about religion, politics, or Georgia Bulldog football, I'm wasting hours of precious time that should be dedicated to my work. Earlier this year I threatened to quit Facebook entirely, having purged my Twitter account, with the idea that I would focus all of my attention on professional work, instead of writing for fun or worse, arguing with somebody who has assumed they know more about a subject than I do. However, publishers in this digital era of mass communications expect writers to develop and maintain a social media presence. To my eternal surprise, my wife also opposed a permanent self-imposed ban from Facebook, even though I did manage to delete my membership from all the large forums where most of the arguments seemed to take place. This left me in a bit of a quandary. Could I remain on social media, without getting sucked into a black hole of absurd arguments? The challenge may not be insurmountable, but it has certainly proved to be formidable. Today has been a prime example of why I "hate" … [Read more...]
Liberal limbo
How low can you go? According to Roman Catholic theology, limbo is a place where the souls of people who haven’t been baptized into the Christian faith must go when they die. Since we are going to be talking about human beings and I know I'm not supposed to judge other people, this article won't be speculating about whether or not liberal extremists will end up in heaven, hell, or limbo. I don't think limbo is the same thing as purgatory, but I'm not a Catholic, and therefore not an expert on the faith by any means. Perhaps more relevant, there is also a dance contest that originated in Trinidad called the limbo. Participants bend over backwards and compete to see who can go the lowest under a horizontal bar that continues to be dropped slightly with each successful pass. That definition of the word seems to be more apropos for this article, so we'll stick with the conceptual image of political dancing under a bar constantly getting closer to the ground. Liberal extremists hate everyone who isn't a liberal extremists, which includes conservatives, religious people, the police, and most other authority figures. Liberal extremists include most Greens, radical environmentalists, Antifa, BAMN, Black Lives Matter, the "Squad" in Congress, an overwhelming majority of the lamestream media, and a disturbing number of RINOs. In my entire lifetime, I’ve never seen the degree of hatred and disrespect shown toward a U.S. president that could compare to what has been said by television and print “journalists” about President Donald Trump. Nine out of every ten stories … [Read more...]
Manufactured malignant hate
My favorite bumper sticker from the previous election cycle. These are extremely difficult times. It's impossible to understand why someone would intentionally fly an airplane into a building in order to kill thousands of people at once, and yet it has happened. Why does someone become so angry that he wants to randomly spray bullets into a crowd of innocent bystanders, or people at a music concert? Why would someone rent a truck and deliberately run over pedestrians out for a walk, killing women and children? Has the world gone completely mad? Actually, I believe millions of people have lost their minds, for the most part. The remainder of this article will list the primary reasons I'm making that claim. The more important question is why have so many people become irrationally angry? I've decided to blame three primary sources of manufactured outrage and hate: academia, the media, and politics. Faculty at major colleges and universities are overwhelmingly dominated by liberals who are political activists and literally won't permit conservative thought on campus. As a result, current generations are no longer acquiring useful and relevant knowledge through advanced education. Instead, students are being indoctrinated into liberal groupthink, and most are incapable of logic, reason, or independent thought. The college campus has not only been declared a "gun-free" zone (except for armed robbers there to prey on unarmed students) but free speech has been limited to designated areas. Conservative thought (including logic and reason) has been virtually banned, … [Read more...]
The problem of the married bachelor
Eric Schmidt I must confess that I haven't missed arguing with intellectual lightweights on social media. I especially haven't missed their silly, sophomoric argument about God and logical impossibility that some people actually believe is a clever argument, but in reality it is remarkably stupid: Can a supernatural creator-God create a rock so large that He couldn't lift it? The idea is that the atheist has presented an unresolvable dilemma to the theist by posing this question, because if God can't create such a rock, then He can't be described as omnipotent but then if He actually could create a rock too big to lift, it puts a constraint on His power so either way, God can't be all powerful. When I used to bother responding to these silly arguments I would counter that God can arguably be given credit for not one, but two logical impossibilities: the origin of our universe from nothing, and the animation of dead matter into living organisms. Making a big rock is literally child's play compared to creating a vast universe that contains galaxies, planets, and solar systems. Not only are the creation of the universe and origin of life logically "impossible," they are extraordinarily improbable in statistical terms as well. Another so-called logical impossibility that atheists like to mention during the course of these conversations is the concept of the "married bachelor." Bachelors are single, not married, so the term itself is a conundrum, meaning a logical contradiction. Could God create a married bachelor? Can God make fire cold instead of hot? The point of … [Read more...]
A slight change of plans
It's all good. Well, okay, it's only mostly good. There was that whole yellow jacket incident. The past 72 hours or so have been very interesting. Almost nothing has gone according to plan, but the best explanation for that is that I didn't really have a well-developed plan in the first place, just a convicted thought about needing to improve my productivity. For a guy who spends most of his time writing, I don't get nearly enough real work accomplished. I had the initial impulse to permanently delete my Facebook account primarily because of my own lack of discipline, as far as productive work is concerned. I announced this decision to the general public before discussing it with my wife, which rarely works out for the best because she's not as quick to jump to hasty conclusions. In case you haven't figured it out yet, she's the real brains in our family. Lisa's first concerns were the pictures of the grandkids our daughter posts on Facebook all the time. Didn't I still want to see them? She then asked, what about your high school English teacher and the friends you've made in Australia, and those connections you truly care about? She reminded me the problem with Facebook isn't the people as much as how I've been using the medium. I'll admit that I was more than a little surprised that her reaction wasn't anything but, "Thank God!" Changes had to be made, though, and changes have already occurred. Changes NEEDED to be made because I just can't spend the rest of my life arguing with idiots on Facebook. It doesn't produce income. Liberals and atheists tend to … [Read more...]
