Saturday, August 14th, 2010
Colorado's 2010 gubernatorial race reveals a major flaw in our plurality-based elections: vote splitting. It's well-known that Dan Maes and Tom Tancredo will split the Republican vote. This makes it much easier for Democrat John Hickenlooper to win compared to if one candidate withdrew. In an ...
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Saturday, April 10th, 2010
How free are you? Some food for thought by Robert Nozick, an excerpt from Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 290-292 (1974), winner of the National Book Foundation's National Book Award in 1975. Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is ...
Posted in PPC, philosophy & religion, public policy | View Comments
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
From Pajamas Media TV:
"Barack Obama ran an unprecedented Presidential campaign - utilizing the power of design to help secure the seat of the President of the United States of America. However, his iconic emblem, the ever present "O", holds more power than even Obama knows. Bill Whittle points out the ...
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Monday, November 3rd, 2008
Wendy McElroy presents some food for thought on principled non-voting in a recent speech. I think her ideas are worth considering, but Bill Bradford's rebuttal (not to this speech, but to an article of McElroy's) is also worth reading for an opposing perspective. Here are some excerpts:
But what if the ...
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Saturday, October 25th, 2008
Last week my thoughts on third parties and mandatory voting were published in the Boulder Daily Camera:
No one likes to hold their nose and vote for a candidate they perceive as the "lesser of two evils." But voting for your favorite minor-party candidate can help elect the "greater of two ...
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Thursday, May 11th, 2006
From Reason magazine
Harvard’s Sendhil Mullainathan and Yale’s Ebonya Washington, in a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, examined surveys conducted from 1976 to 1996 that asked young adults about their attitudes toward a candidate two years after the candidate’s election. They discovered that those who were eligible to ...
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Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004
This voting thing is getting out of hand. It's becoming a four-letter word to me. On NPR this morning I heard that a woman flew from Eastern Europe to Michigan to vote, as she had not received her absentee ballot. She could have donated the cost of ...
Posted in gratitude, politics | View Comments
Saturday, November 29th, 2003
Word of the week: zeugma \ZOOG-muh\ noun. Date: 1523: the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense or makes sense with only one (as in "opened the door and her ...
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Wednesday, November 6th, 2002
Atheists don't pray. Anarchists don't vote. [When first I posted this, there was a website called fuckthevote.org, apparently it's gone...]
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