About Strongly Worded

Strongly Worded is for anyone who harbors a suspicion the world might be a better place if we used facts and reasoning to make our most important decisions, both as individuals and as voters.

I didn’t come by this bizarre viewpoint at birth. I grew up in a family that supported one of the two standard US political parties. At some point, I started noticing many of that party’s policies most definitely contradicted one another. I took a hard look at the other major party where I found exactly the same contradictions, just flipped on their head.

It left me perplexed, interested and primed for two once-in-a-lifetime teachers (they’re like 100-year floods… it’s a statistical probability, so you can actually have two in five years, it just isn’t very likely).  Both were very unique economics teachers who taught me to think in an atypical way and ask atypical questions.  They spurred a lifelong passion for studying economics, systems of human social coordination, logic and logical fallacies, and innate biases we all have as humans.  (To answer your question… yes, I’m super-fun at parties).

Getting our thinking right as citizens and voters can dramatically alter the course of our country (and the world) for the better.  We’ve fallen into two warring camps, both maintaining thoughtless defensive postures.  We buy our opinions wholesale based on the truly inconsistent platforms of one party or another. We support awful people doing awful things because they “are on our side.”  We lambaste people doing things we like, because they “are on the other side.”

I am truly convinced we can do much better as individuals and as a society by relying on facts and reasoning to solve our problems rather than using emotion, opinion and group loyalties.  Sometimes this means overriding operating software long ago downloaded into our brains… it’s hard, but doable and freeing.

The goal of Strongly Worded is to challenge the predominantly-held viewpoints on important or just interesting topics in a reasoned, fact-based, friendly and open way.  Ideally, you’ll watch the news or listen to leaders and politicians differently.  You’ll discover ways to incisively confirm, dismiss or modify the ideas you hear and know exactly which policies will work, which won’t and why.  I want to share as much of what I was lucky enough to learn with as many people as I can.  It’s left me realistically optimistic about the world and its possibilities.