Kevin Pezzi, MD

Disagree with something I wrote? So do I! Read more

“To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

— Elbert Hubbard, American editor, publisher, and writer (1856–1915)

Trivia: He and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, the noted feminist and writer, died aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, when they were heading to Europe to cover the war and interview Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

If you disagree with something I wrote, feel free to challenge it. Some of my viewpoints are the antithesis (exact opposite) of what they once were. That isn't flip-flopping; that is changing opinions with scant evidence to support them into convictions with a firmer foundation of facts.

My political philosophy is an amalgamation of libertarian, conservative, and liberal principles. My opinions have changed so significantly that my conservative friends might be horrified by how I strongly believe that liberals are correct on certain issues. I've previously written about some of them, but to make this more fun, I will present others as challenges in which I offer $100,000 to the first person who can refute the logic I used in forming that opinion. Please note that due to my limited time and difficulty using my hands after I broke my neck, I cannot quickly update my previously published opinions. However, now that I am balancing the promptings of head and heart, I strongly disagree with many opinions I expressed in my writings.

I like finding people who make me think, not necessarily those who agree with me. Genius Robert Heinlein said, “I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” If you can educate me, I'm all ears.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
— Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein

“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years—may not ever. So I like to support people that are risking their lives.”
— ex-Microsoft billionaire brainiac Nathan Myhrvold speaking about Jill Tarter, who inspired the character played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. It takes a brilliant person to see that others who go against the grain of conventional wisdom may be sages although lesser minds often ridicule their ideas.

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
— Euripides, Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)

“It is socially unacceptable to be right too early.”
— Robert Heinlein

“I'd rather stand alone on the truth than with millions on a lie.”

“The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.”
— Arthur H. R. Fairchild

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
— Abraham Lincoln

This reminds me of something stressed by one of my psychology professors, who said that society imposes rigid boundaries for what behavior is acceptable, and applies tremendous pressure trying to force people to conform to the behavioral expectations. Some of the most brilliant and productive outside-the-box thinkers led unconventional lives. One of the side effects of forcing people to think inside the box is that by lopping off outside-the-box behavior, potentially great outside-the-box ideas are lost, too.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (1908-1965)

“You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.”
— John Eliot

NOTE: Several family members were brutally slaughtered recently, so I will take a break from writing. Their deaths erased my affinity for writing about politics or the economy, thus I'll later limit myself to health and brainpower in addition to completing my book on rapidly overcoming racism and bigotry. BTW, the two men who murdered my father are still on the lam; I am offering up to $100,000 for information leading to their arrest and conviction.

Liberals claim to be more tolerant and civil—but are they?

As someone who strongly agrees with liberals on some issues, why would I pillory their incivility? Because they richly deserve it, as I'll prove in this article.

While I side with certain liberal ideas, I don't side with liberals, nor with conservatives. After having been a staunch liberal at one time and later an inveterate conservative, I belatedly realized that the ideological political poles are just havens for inside-the-box thinking that cannot solve our problems. To do that, we need outside-the-box ideas that help conservatives, liberals, and everyone else get more of what they want. Requires pixie dust? Impossible? No. Read an example of how we could make government affordable without penalizing anyone.

Instead of searching for ways to put a smile on the face of everyone, partisans exhaust their exiguous intelligence by sniping and patting themselves on the back for their reverence of second-rate ideas. We can do better, if we put our thinking caps on. Hence, I implore you to stop sniping and start thinking . . . outside-the-box.

Liberals often talk about civility while behaving in a very uncivil manner. They assail conservatives for trivial (or fabricated) imperfections while turning a blind eye to vicious and even barbaric incivility from other liberals, such as the ones who threatened to kill Sarah Palin and her daughters—something Palin confirmed on Fox News—or the ones who firebombed her church in December 2008 when several women and children were working inside.

Michelle Litjens

Wisconsin State Representative Gordon Hintz—a Democrat—told Republican Representative Michelle Litjens that she was “fucking dead” after she voted for Governor Scott Walker’s budget plan. On February 10^th 2011, Hintz was issued a municipal citation for violating a city sexual misconduct ordinance; the alleged crime evidently occurred at the Heavenly Touch Massage Parlor.

On March 9^th 2011, Republican Senators in Wisconsin received e-mails threatening to kill them and their families:

Stephen Sweeney, a New Jersey Senate Democratic leader, angry at Governor Chris Christie, said, “I wanted to punch him in his head.”

Dan Savage, whose “political leanings are primarily liberal” according to Wikipedia, “was so angered [in 2000] by televised remarks in opposition to same-sex marriage by conservative Republican presidential hopeful Gary Bauer that [after contracting the flu] he … volunteered for the Bauer campaign with the intent to infect the candidate with his flu. He wrote that he licked doorknobs and other objects in the campaign office [including "the rims of all the clean coffee cups drying in the rack"], and handed Bauer a saliva-coated pen, hoping to pass the virus on to Bauer and his supporters (though he later said that much of the article had been fictitious).”

I strongly support treating gay and lesbian people the same as everyone else, so I oppose discrimination of them, which is needlessly cruel and contrary to the Golden Rule ethic of reciprocity. Savage is intelligent and insightful, but even thinking about intentionally infecting others with a potentially deadly virus is appalling. Savage said, “I wish the Republicans were all fucking dead” but later “apologized for his remarks,” adding that his “dad is a Republican.”

Savage isn't crazy but some of his comments make him sound that way, or at least very uncivil. If a conservative said or did anything half as outrageous as what Savage has done, liberals would brand him as a psychopathic loon—because liberals, despite all their rhetoric about being tolerant, and despite the dictionary definition of liberal that makes them seem almost perfect, show no mercy in pouncing on Republican or conservative imperfections. We're all human, hence we're all imperfect, hence we all occasionally say things we later regret and often never agreed with because anger and frustration often overly amplify emotions.

In a bizarre twist to the Tragedy in Tucson, one victim, 63-year-old James Eric Fuller, 63, a self-described liberal who was shot in the knee, spoke of torturing top Republicans before severing their ears. “There would be torture and then an ear necklace, with [Rep.] Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin's ears toward the end, because they're small, female ears, and then Limbaugh, Hannity and the biggest ears of all, Cheney's, in the center.”

Fuller disrupted a town hall meeting by photographing Tucson Tea Party leader Trent Humphries and then saying, “You're dead!” As police escorted him from the room, he screamed, “You’re all whores!” Fuller was arrested and committed for a psychiatric examination.

He previously claimed that Republicans “appeal to simple-minded rednecks” and repeatedly denounced the “Tea Party crime syndicate.”

The James Eric Fuller page on HypnoThoughts.com said he was looking for “an opportunity to advocate my personal agenda promoting social justice and common sense.” His specialty was using “extraordinary persuasive charisma to interest blasé, apathetic, oblivious and at times hostile voters to listen to the voice of justice and consanguinity.”

“Extraordinary persuasive charisma,” “common sense,” “voice of justice,” torturing people, cutting off ears, crafting an ear necklace, firebombing a church, threatening to kill kids, licking doorknobs—and Tea Party people are the crazy ones?

I've had liberals harass me at home in ways that make me question not only their sanity but brainpower, because while I agree with conservatives and libertarians on most matters, I agree with liberals on others. After being a liberal in my youth (I proudly voted for Jimmy Carter), I morphed into a conservative and thought they were right on just about everything. I did more than my share of liberal bashing but kept listening to them and eventually sided with them on various matters, one of which is hugely important but they perennially approach it in such an ineffective way that it will never get traction.

Since I strongly agree with liberals on some issues, why do I not treat conservatives with the same contempt as liberals? Why do I respectfully disagree with conservatives even when I think they are wrong? Because conservatives are not trying to put a noose around my neck, depriving me of basic liberties and more of my money. (This opinion needs updating. While that statement once seemed unquestionably true to me, that matter is not as simple as it seems; see The endless wars we cannot afford in my article The collapse of the U.S. economy: inevitable unless we do this.) Furthermore, conservatives are more likely to tolerate differences of opinion; they're more likely to think, not just react. However, there are exceptions, such as a well-known conservative whose rush to judge others reveals a striking character defect, a lack of brainpower, or both. In an upcoming article, I will skewer him for his reverence of hot air, not facts.

Liberals like to portray themselves as paragons of tolerance, but they often vilify others who disagree with them even slightly. Liberals who don't have the intellectual horsepower to substantively make their case often resort to ad hominem attacks and character assassination. In other words, if they can't beat others in an argument, they'll disparage them, as they did during the 2008 campaign when they alleged that Bill Clinton was a racist.

This nuttiness typically stems from the rabid Obama fans who need such flak to divert attention from their idol Barack, whose singular gift is reading a teleprompter, echoing the words of gifted speechwriters. Obama didn't know how many states we have, what a P/E ratio is, or how to pronounce corpsman (he repeatedly said corpse-man).

If Obama is a genius, why is he so ashamed of his college records that he sealed them? What could they possibly contain that would be worth sealing? A failing grade in economics? Something worse?

Obama admirers point to his Harvard Law School record as evidence of his brilliance, but as I documented in another article, some colleges award sham grades and sham degrees as part of a covert affirmative action program.

Many people strongly suspect that Bill Ayers wrote much of Obama's book, Dreams From My Father (read Jack Cashill's impressive analysis).

Obama is focused on “looking good,” but that's not good enough. With the United States teetering on the edge of financial collapse, Obama attended a roundtable discussion to talk about job creation and energy efficiency. The best idea generated from that meeting was the suggestion that installing more insulation in homes and businesses would save energy by reducing heating and cooling costs.

Obama's roadmap to recovery is leading him down paths everyone already knows about. He said that insulation is sexy because it saves money. A proverb states that “a well-beaten path does not always make the right road.” The right road to our recovery leads to places that Obama and his brain trust don't know about, such as my idea of how to modify a home to save more energy without the cost or installation hassles of insulation. That idea enabled me to be warmer than ever during an unusually cold Michigan winter without turning my furnace on even once.

No one expects Obama to have all the answers, but he should be smart enough to know where to find the ideas we need to recover. However, his roadmap is leading him to places that even kids know about. That's genius? That's leadership?

In the near future, Americans will be hammered by economic problems so severe they will thirst for answers to their problems, even if they are not inside-the-box ideas found on the roadmaps favored by the two major political parties—roadmaps that led us to economic disaster.

If so, please tell me about it.

In writing about politics and the economy, my goal is not to hammer liberals, with whom I increasingly agree. Instead, my ultimate goal is to propose solutions (here is an example) beyond the usual rehash of freeze-dried ideas from bygone American politicians. Some of those inside-the-box ideas will help, but they won't be enough to save us and restore our prosperity. We need good outside-the-box ideas off the well-beaten path; ideas you won't ever hear from politicians or the political pundits in the media who think they are so darn smart, such as those on Fox News, which isn't as fair and balanced as they claim, as I proved in another article. However, we live in an inside-the-box world that often ridicules new ideas, as I discussed in another article.

If liberals are as tolerant as they purport to be, why are so many of them picking through every word I write, looking for a way to attack me? To illustrate the depths of their desperation, they even ridiculed the Mosquito Motel I made for my Mom as a Mother's Day present:

They also criticized my sheds, with one bird-brain mistaking them for birdhouses. Do they look like birdhouses to you? Birds that large became extinct during the Jurassic Period! :-)

Benjamin Disraeli said, “Small things affects small minds.”

Liberal sounds pretty great, doesn't it? However, many liberals are anything but liberal. Instead, they are mean, nasty, spiteful, filled with hate, and looking for any flimsy excuse to stick a knife into the backs of anyone who doesn't agree with them on everything.

Arthur H. R. Fairchild said:

Why is the supposedly tolerant left so shockingly intolerant? Could it be they are not as liberal as they purport to be? Or as smart?

Many liberals are not tolerant, civil, or smart

Liberals often possess an arrogant certitude that they are more intelligent than others, but smart, educated people would not jump to hasty generalizations: logical fallacies of faulty generalization by reaching inductive conclusions based on insufficient evidence. In other words, leaping to conclusions or rushing to judgment.

For proof that liberals often commit hasty generalizations, look at the profusion of liberals attacking me and the number (zero) who had enough brainpower and honesty to challenge other liberals on their preposterous smears.

Too many liberals act as if they don't want facts to get in the way of their hasty opinions. This problem affects even some in the liberal elite, such as Ron Schiller, who, as Senior Vice President for Development and President of the NPR Foundation, said that Tea Party supporters are “not just Islamophobic, but really xenophobic! I mean, basically they are—they are—they believe in sort of white, middle America, gun-toting. I mean, it's pretty scary. They're—they're seriously racist, racist people.”

Nothing like painting with an overly broad brush, eh Mr. Schiller? To use his D-student manner of expression, what he said is a seriously bigoted, bigoted statement, but he doesn't appear to be bright enough to sense his conspicuous hypocrisy.

He added:

No wonder NPR fired him for making statements that made him sound as if he were a petty, small-minded bigot who enjoys nitpicking and jumping to hasty generalizations. However, he is hardly alone. Too many liberals derive a malicious, juvenile satisfaction from tearing others down and focusing on isolated islands of dirt in a shining sea of goodness.

What you say about others says a lot about you

Psychological researchers published an article (Perceiver effects as projective tests: What your perceptions of others say about you) demonstrating that what you say about others says a lot about you. Specifically, they found that kind-hearted, happy, and emotionally stable people are more likely to see others in a positive light.

I've seen the truth in that in my own life. While I worked as an ER doctor and in the years thereafter in which I was recovering from the burnout that plagues many emergency physicians and dealing with chronic extreme sleep deprivation, I was cynical and embittered, which was reflected in my writing—much of which is still posted online and in my books. However, in the past year or so in which my spirit rebounded to its pre-ER state of being sunny and naturally buoyant with a profound desire to help other people and animals, I've noticed that as I've become much happier, I am less critical of others and more likely to figuratively put myself in their shoes and see things from their point of view. If you sincerely do that, it is difficult or impossible to be harshly critical of them, except when they richly deserve it.

As I've empathized with the perspective of others, I lowered my resistance to—and sometimes even wholeheartedly embraced—certain liberal positions. Some of my most cherished conservative beliefs did not withstand the scrutiny of pondering whether they were ethically justifiable. For example, the issue of illegal immigration is deceptively simple: it's our country, they entered illegally, kick 'em out, end of story. Then I learned that a huge chunk of the western United States once was part of Mexico. We bought a small part of that land fair and square, but the rest was acquired using might makes right principles of coercion. As fond as I am of the U.S., I am even more fond of doing the right thing, and might makes right is never a justifiable part of that equation. I am now doing something I couldn't have imagined in my conservative days: selling my Sea-doo, Ski-doo, and shed to help a deported person reenter the United States, and writing about the priceless benefits of sponsoring immigration.

I don't fit into any one political box, so I am not a liberal or conservative. As my political views have become more eclectic, I've seen how liberals and conservatives make errors in framing their preaching to the choir arguments that rarely accomplish their goal of changing hearts and minds. I was fortunate to meet some people with different viewpoints who used placid methods of persuasion, not heated rhetoric.

Related articles:

Dr. Lazar Greenfield versus the PC police

Liberals who react, not think, and fall for smears that are obviously untrue

Not all liberals want more of your money

Online incivility triggered by minor differences of opinion

Michelle Malkin discussing “AFL-CIO thug-in-chief Richard Trumka” and Fox News reporter Mike Tobin who was struck and threatened with having his neck broken.

Reading list:

• Unruly Kids May Have a Mental Disorder (and undoubtedly adults, too)
• The Effect Of 'In Your Face' Political Television On Democracy
  Excerpt: “Much of today’s 'in your face' televised political debate also causes audiences to react more emotionally and think of opposing views as less legitimate. [...] Conflict is inherent in any democracy, but the legitimacy of democratic systems rests on the extent to which each side in any controversy perceives the opposition as having some reasonable foundation for its position.”
  Comment: Exactly. The “other side” isn't stupid or crazy. People who see merit in only their opinions have defects in empathy that prevent them from seeing how other perfectly sane and intelligent people can possess views antithetical to theirs. Emotionally mature people routinely put themselves in the shoes of others to understand their points of view and how they arrived at them. When I began doing that in my über-conservative days, some of my opinions changed so much that I now, IMHO, do a better job of espousing some liberal viewpoints than many lifelong liberals.
• The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness
• Liberalism is a Mental Disorder: Savage Solutions
• Rules for Radical Conservatives: Beating the Left at Its Own Game to Take Back America, by ex-liberal David Kahane
• Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation
• Control Freaks: 7 Ways Liberals Plan to Ruin Your Life
• United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror
• Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
• The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party
• Get a Load of This Slightly Threatening Email From the Obama Re-Election Campaign (another source for it)
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

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