Welcome To My Blog

A friend of mine has a non-profit in which he raises money to provide academic scholarships to kids in South Africa. It’s a terrific organization doing terrific work. He raises funds on the platform of Academic Equality, and mostly mobilizes college students to host parties and fundraisers then works closely with students who are being provided scholarships. As he started his organization, I couldn’t help but notice it grew much more quickly than The Mentoring Project, an organization I started to provide positive male role models for kids growing up without fathers. I couldn’t help but wonder why. As my friend and I talked about it, we wondered whether organizations that simply raise money in America and send that money overseas weren’t easier to grow because, quite frankly, they don’t require you to change the way you actually live? I know that sounds harsh, but think about it, if you could feel like a humanitarian for simply wearing a t-shirt and attending an occasional rally or updating your facebook status, or if you could feel like a humanitarian for taking a few hours a week out of your life and working with an actual child in an after-school program, which [...]

As we all know some of the dialogue on the internet is less than constructive. While most of the conversation taking place on this site is on a level I would consider phenomenal (read: objective, open and respectful) elsewhere, and even sometimes here, civility is lacking. Recently I posted principles for civil discourse, so today I thought I’d post principles for non-civil discourse. Here are several principles for how to Not Really Win an Argument: 1. Take a persons argument to an extreme: If the argument is about environmentalism, assume the person you’re talking to wants everybody to live in the woods and heat their tents with hemp oil. It will be much easier to attack them if you take their ideas to an extreme rather than contend with a more balanced view.  2. Always use the term always: A great way to exaggerate somebody’s idea is to use the words always and never. Has a person said we should be kind? Spin their statement into an always statement…We are alway supposed to be kind and never supposed to be unkind, therefore we should be kind to people who turn pet poodles into breakfast sausages. Always and never takes the [...]