Playing “Opposite Day” with Opinions

I once entertained the idea of occasionally taking the opposite position on issues that I was accustomed to taking and developing an argument for my newly (and temporarily) adopted viewpoint. Were I to do this, it would entail me listening a lot to conservative talk radio and watching the Fox News Channel (which often seems to have its own entirely different vision of what constitutes “news” from that of the other channels). But that’s not all.

I would also need to explore the world of extreme left-wing politics, championed by linguist-turned-expert-on-everything Noam Chomsky. Chomsky tends to blame America for just about everything bad going on in the world and, dammit, makes a convincing, compelling presentation. But since I have an instinctive aversion to making scapegoats out of any specific party for problems that are almost always rooted in wrong-doing on the part of many different involved parties, I tend to reject his actually simplistic message out-of-hand. But why not play along for a while and see where it goes?

The same goes for all of the wacko conspiracy theories floating around today. I might as well delve into them as well, as it sadly appears that with the rise of this tea party movement that more and more of my fellow Americans are subscribing to them.

I bet it must be reassuring to think just in terms of black and white: either you agree with my worldview and are one of the good guys, or you are either bad or seriously deluded. If deluded, then there is still hope through reeducation. But wait, isn’t this the rigid, intolerant mindset that we hated about all of those totalitarian communist regimes of the last century?

On second thought, maybe I had better just stick with more mainstream opinions and philosophies that I tend to disagree with for my “opposite day” ventures. After all, there is involved here a matter of preserving my own sanity!