“Extremism can come in many forms,” President Biden said at a speech recently. “It can come in the rage of a mob driven to assault the Capitol. It can come in a smile and a fleece vest.” “Extremist” or not, turns out coming in a … Continue readingTriumph of the Fleece Vest
We’ve all heard the mantra “Build Back Better” so beloved by our political leaders, including President Joe Biden, but what does it mean? At last we have an answer on the White House website, as encapsulated in “The Life of Linda”. Here I will go … Continue readingUpgrading the Life of Linda
Kurt Gödel is famous for his “incompleteness theorems”, and ranks among the all-time great mathematicians (he was also a logician and a philosopher). What’s less well known about him is that he claimed to have discovered an “inner contradiction” in the United States Constitution, a … Continue readingGödel’s Loophole: My Pet Theory
We should abolish elections and replace them with sortition, random selection from the citizenry, thus guaranteeing a representative body. I’ve posted about that before. But if we must have elections, what voting system should we use? Pure proportional representation, that’s what; specifically multi-winner ranked choice … Continue readingFor Proportional Representation
The results of the 2020 United States Presidential election are well known by this point, and much analysis has been offered, including by myself on Twitter. For the first time on this blog I would like to offer some of the thoughts I’ve expressed in … Continue readingChecking in on American Politics: 2020 Edition
What if we abolished elections and replaced them with a system that was much more democratic? Sounds fantastic? It shouldn’t, because “democracy” as everyone understood it until a couple centuries ago had nothing to do with elections. Rule by the people meant just that: political … Continue readingAbolish Elections: For Sortition and Direct Democracy
But for a twist of fate, today we would have seen the second of three Presidential Debates in the United States for the upcoming Presidential election, this one having been scheduled to be a “town hall” style debate. Combined with the generally negative reaction to … Continue readingPresidential Debate Reform: A Radical Proposal