The other forty-seven percent are idiots.

I’m not much of a people-person. I generally like people when I get to know them individually, but when I’m out in public, it just seems like most people exercise so much selfish stupidity on a regular basis that I catch myself saying that I hate people pretty much every time I leave the house^[a]. This is something that I know runs counter to Christ’s teachings, and is something that I’ve been actively praying about recently.

This doesn’t help.

Nearly half of all Americans support the “Fairness” Doctrine, which would require television & radio stations to provide equal time to opposing viewpoints on the air. That’s bad enough, but even worse is the fact that 31% believe that the same thing should be true of websites.

Forty-seven percent of Americans believe that radio stations should be forced to air opposing commentary out of some bizarre sense of “fairness”. That means that 47% of Americans believe that anyone who owns a radio station should not be allowed to choose what their radio station airs. Suppose you own a radio station, and you have a talk show whose host spends a half an hour proclaiming that Jeffrey Dahmer was a bad guy. Assuming the “Fairness” Doctrine was put into place again, you would then have to devote a half an hour of broadcast time extolling Mr. Dahmer’s virtues, no matter how disgusted you might be at expressing those opinions (or how much advertising money you might lose while airing the unpalatable opinions).

As for the nonsense about requiring websites to obey the fairness doctrine, I pay for this website, and I make absolutely no bones about the fact that, while I usually do give some data in defense of my opinions, the purpose of this website is for me to express my opinions. I will not pay to allow someone else to express an opinion opposite to mine simply to obey some moron’s bizarre philosophy of “fairness”^[b].

1. My usual line is, “I like persons, but hate people,” kind of like Tommy Lee Jones’s line in Men In Black: “A person is smart. People are stupid.” [↩]
2. I might, however, allow someone else to express opinions opposite to mine on this site for other reasons. There are a good number of people whose political opinions differ from mine who would be more than welcome to write a post here should they ever wish to do so, but that has more to do with my personal respect for those individuals than out of any desire to be “fair.” [↩]