Sharon McMahon
speaker
324 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 25 Feb
Sharon McMahon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Nobody has the lock on we've historically had all the good ideas. That's ridiculous.
That's right. And the right thing to do is to admit when you got it wrong and to do what you can to make it right. And I think too often our leaders today view admitting any kind of change in thinking or any kind of, you know, like, I thought it was a good idea. And then ultimately it ended up not working out the way I thought. They're so penalized for admitting those kinds of things. Yes.
When personally, if we're having an interaction together and you call me on the phone, you're like, you know what? I really screwed that up. I am so sorry. I did not realize how it would impact you. I'm going to make changes. You would have respect for that person.
Who did that to you personally, but yet on a broader political scale, we're like, oh my God, they're a flip-flopper.
We probably don't need to put every book in an autoclave, right? But yet the initial responses to a global pandemic were not perfect.
Where we would come together?
Totally. Of course, everyone was wrong. It was a brand new thing.
I totally agree. And now we should be willing to do a postmortem on that.
Now we know the learning loss from not being in school was too great a burden to bear. But yet you can also understand how children are not the only people in the schools, right? That the adults that work in the schools also deserve a safe working environment.
And that's very tricky when you have small children who don't understand basic hygiene, who don't know how to cover their cough, who don't know how to wash their hands appropriately. What about the adults in the schools? Don't they deserve to not die from COVID?
But that's a lot of people. A lot of people. The black and white thinking I don't think is particularly helpful here because, yes, the children should be in school. And also, yes, the teachers should not die from COVID. Both of those things are true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the idea that only my side is the correct side. And if you don't agree with it, then you're a Satan worshiper.
Or whatever it is.
Worked from Zoom.
Yes. And both of those things can be true at the same time. Yeah. And people's weddedness to their political party of choice blinds them in some ways to the things that their own party is getting wrong. And this blind allegiance... has never led any civilization somewhere worth going. Blind allegiance to a party or blind allegiance to a leader, that has always led to dehumanization.
That has always led to dictatorships. That has always led to further marginalization of vulnerable groups.
Exactly. The idea of blind allegiance. No one deserves, not me, not any of y'all, nobody deserves your unexamined loyalty.
And I think we're seeing the effects today of some people who have unexamined loyalty to a party or a person. And it's a dangerous direction to be headed in.
If you want to paint yourself as a critical thinker and as an intellectually honest person. And I think most people would want to be labeled a critical thinker. Right. If I'm like, well, you don't know how to critically think you'd be offended. Right. We all want to feel like we're good at critical thinking.
If you want to be a critical thinker and you want to be intellectually mature and honest, you have to be willing to admit when your preferred ideology gets it wrong. You really do. And I think it's a failure, regardless of what your preferred ideology is.
And if you cannot listen to a single criticism of your preferred ideology, then you don't have the intellectual maturity enough to be able to say, yeah, you know what? We screwed that up. We should not do that again in the future.
Showing 161–180 of 324 · page 9 of 17
← Previous
Next →