When you vote in person, the trust-level of the result is high.   I fill out my ballot, I walk to a machine with a poll worker and I insert it in and my vote is cast. But with mail-in votes, especially ones where the ballot applications are mailed out, you have a bunch of vulnerable points in the process: You have the possibility of harvesting the applications.  Picture an operative going to a college dorm or a high density housing complex and going door to door to gather ...

http://www.politicalcompass.org/printablegraph?ec=1.12&soc=-3.33      

Typical conversation regarding a certain lawsuit goes something like this: What about <Allegation 1>? They made it up. What about <Allegation 2>? They made it up. What about <Allegation 3>? They made it up. What about <Allegation 4>? They made it up. Oh come on, you’re saying they made it all up? Yes. Can you prove they made it up? Yes. How? Because their own witnesses claimed she did or she directly admitted to doing s...

In no particular order: People often lightly suggest that “you should sue X”. Lawsuits are multi-year arduous, tedious affairs.  My opinion is that the threshold for a lawsuit should be if you lived without civil society would you be willing to commit violence to achieve your objective? If no, then find another way. A customer of ours recently got banned on Wikipedia for aggressively defending me on my Wiki page .  Apparently he had been contributing for years. I fee...

I grew up in a steel town. A dying steel town.  I wouldn’t have called the area I grew up as “rough” but no one would describe it as “privileged”. In my high school, there was a group of 5 jocks who would go around beating up “nerds”.  One of my friends came in one day with two black eyes and his face incredibly swollen up.  He had been “chosen”. One afternoon, while leaving my advanced math class, I was punched in the back of the head.  I fell to the ground and tur...

 

This article pretty much describes how I'm feeling about the recent events concerning Trump and the rapid deplatforming going on. I'm not going to miss Trump.  But I am going to miss the days when people were able to talk to each other civilly even when they disagreed.

I found this article quite thought provoking.  https://pjmedia.com/columns/dennis-prager/2021/01/05/i-now-better-understand-the-good-german-n1305198 This past week we didn't just see the banning of Trump for "inciting violence" (despite said inciting is never included for people to judge for themselves).  Countless other people were banned and even groups like #walkaway on Facebook were banned. Regardless of your politics, this is nothing to celebrate.  I remember a time...

Human beings tend to want to make sense of things. When we hear that someone has died, many people will try to rationalize why such a thing wouldn't or couldn't happen to them. It comforts them.  We instinctively want to find a  reason for the unreasonable. When we see violent mobs in the middle east, some people want to blame an "offensive video". But that's not rational. Healthy people, in our society, don't go into a murderous rage over the abstract.  Other ...