This, I predict, will be an unpopular post. Few events in recent memory have brought such universal calls of immediate condemnation as Wednesday’s massacre of cartoonists and staff from the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. As a pacifist, I join…
Tag: Politics (n.): a strife of interests masquerading
Symmetrical Surveillance: Serial, the Panopticon, and Why Murder Rates Really Have Crashed
Two things seem to be really trendy these days, if you don’t count bashing Muslims (I’ll talk about that one and why it’s so wrong in a different post). Serial the podcast (which I discussed at length in November) and…
Password Protection and Self-Defeating Security
This country has a bit of a problem with a false sense of security. So-called revelations have been abounding this week over the extent and nature of some specific acts of torture enacted by the CIA during the Bush administration…
My Public Ballot, 2014 Louisiana Run-Off Edition
This is probably the most inconsequential election I’ve ever taken part in, especially given that my primary act was to abstain from the headline race because (a) it literally forced me to vote for a Democrat or a Republican and…
Cop Immunity
When I was in high school, I devised a thought experiment that I discussed extensively with my friends. It was called “Cop Immunity”. My question was whether someone would take the deal of having total immunity to all interactions of…
Why No One is Voting
Turns out my Facebook feed is the exception. No one is voting in the United States. According to the New York Times, the elections earlier this month set a 72-year low for voter turnout, with 36.3% voting. (For context, Catalonia’s…
American Voters Actually Progressive: The Case Against Representative Democracy
There has been a ton of negativity spewing out of the wake of Tuesday’s election, especially from all my liberal Democratic friends. I get it. My posts lately have been pretty negative, talking about how fear motivates voting and how…
What am I Missing?
The graphic above is going to be most of what this post is about. So go ahead and peruse that. This is my best guess at the five things that Democrats, liberals, and the other people who mostly comprise the…
Fear in the Box
Maybe election day is just a little too soon after Halloween. We’ve discussed American fear, its prevalence and perniciousness, quite recently. We are afraid of terrorists, even though what they are supposed to wield as a most scary object is,…
Misdirection
All anyone in the media can talk about anymore is ebola. Unless it’s ISIS. Or maybe, on slow days for ISIS and ebola, pretty white women going missing from college campuses. Never mind that far more people die from frat…