You Believe What You Want to Believe

I was walking through the Fox News building a while ago and a producer introduced me to a young black man by saying, “This is the engineer you’ll be working with tonight.” We shook hands and the engineer said, “I know who you are. Look, I want you to know, I don’t agree with all your beliefs but I respect you for speaking your mind.” I said “Thanks” because we were in a hurry but what I really wanted to say was, “What beliefs? I’m not a Scientologist. I don’t really have ‘beliefs.’ I have opinions based on the information provided. If you have data that contradicts that opinion, well, let’s get busy as a stump-tailed cow in fly time!”

I’d love to change my mind about something. That’s called learning. My views aren’t radical. They’re benign. I just want people to be happy and free and live full lives that are liberated from bull****. It’s everyone else who’s radical. For example, I think …

Four men from North Carolina State University decided to take a break from oppressing women and invented a nail polish that can detect the rape drug Rohypnol. Unfortunately, feminists have decided this is stupid because we should focus on teaching men not to rape instead.

I went through this same logic on Hannity when I suggested you should worry more about your daughter attending Spring Break than your son. “They have different genitalia,” I was forced to explain.

Of course we should tell men rape is bad. We do. We throw them in jail. That doesn’t mean there won’t always be mentally deranged sociopaths buying rape drugs. The utopian feminist can talk about Eden all she wants. Here on earth, we’d like to prevent some rapes from happening.

No matter what the true story is with Michael Brown, it was an anomaly. Young, black murder victims are almost always shot by young, black criminals. If you want to help prevent this, read More Guns, Less Crime.

The gun control lobby seems to be predicated on the opposite belief. They spend billions promoting Hitler-esque laws that prevent pretty much anyone decent from being armed. Here in NYC, getting a handgun legally is virtually impossible but I know of at least two guys who will sell me one illegally for $500. You can’t get paintball guns here but we still have almost a murder a day because only bad guys have guns.

I think it would be cool to have a gun in the city, but you know who really needs one? The old lady in the ghetto walking home from work and the blue-collar father who can’t afford to leave a sketchy neighborhood. Gangsters will always be killing each other, but innocent people can only protect themselves sometimes. Similarly, stop-and-frisk sounds like innocent black dudes getting harassed. It actually disproportionately stops whites but whatever. The big picture here is it makes poor black areas safer.

Once again, I like the sound of the gun control advocates’ utopia, where nobody gets murdered and innocent people are never harassed, but it leads to more deaths than a pro-gun stance.

We tried giving teachers four months off a year and paying them almost $60 an hour to leave at 3:20 but it didn’t work. Test scores haven’t budged in half a century. I blame the teachers’ ironclad contracts that the overfed unions created. We’re told it’s systemic and “not one change” is going to fix it, but charter schools did. They followed the market and made it possible to fire teachers and now the schools are thriving, especially for poor black kids. You can keep flogging the dead horse of public schools, but I think kids in Harlem deserve an education, don’t you?

Tap water has been flammable since way before fracking existed, but this naturally occurring reaction has caused an overreaction that’s cost millions of jobs. Obama did the same thing when he stonewalled on the Keystone pipeline. Are all these moves being made so we can prolong this war in the Middle East? I thought war and unemployment were bad things.

Also, mass immigration isn’t about allowing Mexicans the same prosperity we derived from Ellis Island. It’s about making rich white guys in both countries wealthier. It devastates the Mexican towns these workers come from and it kills the American towns these workers go to. Liberals tell us we need to raise the minimum wage while encouraging a border policy that is pricing the American poor out of the market, especially working-class blacks in California. The more I learn about liberal policy, the more it sounds like a war on black America.

When you tell a farmer he can lose his land if a rare owl is spotted on it, you get solutions like “Shoot, Shovel, and Shut Up.” When you privatize game and make it profitable to preserve, you end up with situations like Zimbabwe where their entire wildlife went from skinny elephant carcasses to roaring lions going “Hell, yeah!”

The free market handles environmental protection on its own. Sure, China is making a mess of it right now, but so did we when we were at that stage. Then we fixed it. And it wasn’t the EPA’s annoying laws. Their budget has no effect on our air quality. If you really care about Mother Nature, you’ll make her profitable. As Greenpeace cofounder Dr. Patrick Moore says, “by buying wood you are … sending a signal into the market to plant more trees.”

When looking at a map of single-parent families and comparing it to murders, you can’t help but notice that more dads = less murder. The left’s view of feeding our nation’s poor with food stamps and helping out some impoverished, single mom who’s down on her luck sounds good. However, what accidentally happened is we’ve rewarded women for choosing single motherhood. Welfare culture has created a culture where dads are redundant and this has been especially hard on the black and Hispanic communities.

I got in trouble for saying food stamps get abused and our poor are now obese, but “freeloading doesn’t help the freeloaders,” as Stossel put it. Welfare has been bad for the poor since FDR rammed the “New Deal” down their throats, and it has made the black dad obsolete. Once again, the liberal stance kills innocent people with kindness.

While trying to prove women are just as good as men, feminists actually fell into “women are men.” They’re just as strong and have all the same proclivities and want to be a mom just as much as men do. The result is a “roll call of regrets” where women with expired ovaries have come to the realization that not selling out and never giving in has left them unable to enjoy motherhood, the best and most defining part of being a woman.

Speaking of women being oppressed by feminists, how did the abortion debate become a feminist cause? About half the women in America are pro-life and they deserve to be heard. Also, as I’ve said many times before, abortion is leaning toward a gender-based decision, and that usually goes badly for the females. Call me sexist but I don’t like the idea of millions of women’s beliefs being ignored while we support a procedure that promotes female genocide.

As patriotism falls out of fashion, fascism has moved in to fill the void. The Boston Bombers were radicalized in the West. So was the kid who decapitated James Foley. In the name of tolerance we are allowing terrorist training camps on our own soil. I’m all for free speech but this is like having a Hitler Youth Camp on American soil in 1943. Radical Islam sees women as second-class citizens, hates gays, is totally opposed to democracy, and wants to kill us. Tolerating this isn’t multiculturalism. It’s treason.

So, let me get this straight: we all stood on the same starting line 40,000 years ago, and despite covering the globe and having totally different experiences, we’ve all arrived at the finish line at the exact same time, huh? Just because you admit the West is the best doesn’t mean you want to obliterate other cultures. I love a large variety of restaurants as much as the next guy, but how about we discourage immigrants from importing stuff like animal sacrifice, honor killings, female circumcision, rape, pedophilia, human trafficking … you know, stuff like that?

College professors say it ain’t so but I have eyeballs and ear holes. I know the difference between races. My wife and kids are Ho-Chunk Indians. They’ve all had DNA tests to prove it and if they scored below 25% Indian, they wouldn’t be in the tribe.

The scariest part of recognizing race is the spooky taboo of race and IQ. I don’t get the fear about all this well-documented data. We’re talking about millions upon millions of people with hundreds of thousands of exceptions. It’s helpful when talking about policies like, “Do we need affirmative action for Asians in science or short, white guys in basketball?” Spending lots of money on either of these ideas would be a waste of time but for totally different reasons. As far as the individual goes, the data are irrelevant because you have to assume you are dealing with an exception. The beauty of the libertarian stance on this is that it doesn’t matter. We don’t demand that the government enforce equal representation for every group in every field and we don’t tell people who they have to hang out with. It’s all up to the individual. Besides, who cares if your group didn’t win the test? My family tree looks like a dead witch’s hair dipped in a puddle of whiskey but I don’t care. They’re not me.

I’m cool with the big bang and evolution; I just think an omnipotent force set it all in motion. I was raised as an atheist and recently converted to Catholicism but I don’t understand why that’s anyone’s business. Why is Christianity the only religion that needs an autopsy every five seconds? Nobody asks the Native American Church about dinosaurs. Nobody needs to know what the Buddhists in Taiwan think about abortion. America was founded on Christianity but instead of reverence we get a To Kill a Mockingbird trial for every page of the Bible.

It’s not always the progressives murdering people with their beliefs. The right got some things wrong too. Legalizing drugs will surely lead to a slew of problems but they won’t hold a marijuana-scented candle to the all-out slaughter we have now. We tried prohibition. It only leads to more crime.

Lock a straight man in a motel and make him smoke heroin every day and you’ll have a junkie in a couple of weeks. Make him do the same thing with erect penises and I guarantee you he’ll be dry heaving on the 999th just as much as he did on the first. If you think gay is something you can learn, you’re gay.

Seriously, how can anyone in their right mind think a homo in red leather short-shorts who has been prancing around with his boyfriend for 10 years could just put on a sweater vest and marry some chick named Sheila? Have you seen a gay man’s face when you say the word “vagina”? [expletive] Sheila. He should marry his boyfriend and join the ranks of the married. We need all we can get.

I don’t really have an opinion about “the Jewish problem.” I’ve heard they’re overrepresented in finance and media but there’s also a disproportionate number of them in medicine.

I’m told they were the cultural Marxists behind PC, but when you hear college kids defending Palestine and even Hamas today, you realize the movement was hijacked by anti-Semitism long ago.

I haven’t heard any strong Jewish consensus on anything so I’m not buying that they are some kind of manipulative force behind the scenes. Some of the most anti-Zionist writing you’ll read anywhere is in the Israeli papers. Sure, it was funny when Gary Oldman was forced to apologize for saying Jews can force actors to apologize, but is it affecting my movie watching experience? Nope. Whatever scary stuff old guys can tell us about “the Jews” dried up and blew away long ago.

There are plenty of other things that I don’t have enough information on to give a solid opinion about. I find the health care debate totally overwhelming. Has ANYONE read that 906-page bill? We’re already paying for free ER visits and the obesity epidemic is destroying our facilities, but this government can barely renew my driver’s license. I dread giving it that much power.

Similarly, I’m an isolationist libertarian by nature, but I’ve argued with John Bolton about this and he swept the floor with me.

Israel gives me a headache and sometimes I just wish they would all [expletive] off and leave us alone.

The only thing I refuse to believe is that anyone should be deprived of the right to have his own opinions. It took a lot of blood and guts to get us to this level of freedom, and shutting down discussions or having an unshakable belief system about politics is downright un-American. The facts don’t change. It’s the teams who change and today’s liberals look a lot like yesterday’s fascists. The villains we assume are out to get us are often just the ones who are brave enough to do what’s right even when it looks wrong. Sometimes good guys don’t wear white.

Once the EPA was established, there was no way they’d complete their mission and close up shop. No way. They WERE successful, amazingly so, in terms of clean air/water. Then, of course, there were fiefdoms to be established and saved.

You Believe What You Want to Believe

I don't believe that.

Ding, ding, ding! We have our winner. That one sentence response proves this entire thing is based on a logical fallacy.

Radical Islam sees women as second-class citizens, hates gays, is totally opposed to democracy, and wants to kill us. Tolerating this isn’t multiculturalism. It’s treason.

Great post 2nd... the above was my favorite...

The only thing it actually proves is that edpc WROTE that he does not believe the author’s basic premise that you believe what you want to believe. Actually edpc may have meant that or he may have been just having a little fun. It proves nothing about the truth or falsity of the statement which is in itself rather hard to challenge. He says that you believe what you WANT to believe. I don’t think anyone would seriously say that we believe what we DON’T want to believe unless we are forced somehow to believe it. On the other hand who would say that we DON’T believe what we want to believe unless we are forced to disbelieve it.

If the author had actually said that we ALWAYS believe what we want to believe without exception and we NEVER believe what we don’t want to believe then that statement could easily be disproven. I don’t WANT to believe that an organized gang of criminals run our government but I DO believe it because it seems as plain to see as the rising sun on a clear day. In my honest if less than humble opinion those who DON’T believe that are simply believing what they want to believe without reference to observable reality.

Strangely, I came to this interesting article not from browsing Free Republic, but from a recommendation from my phone's Google Now page. Today was the first time my that actual conservative viewpoints appeared there rather than the typical scattering of who cares quasi celebrity train wreck stories.

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