Month: February 2020

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Keep Your Religious Hands Off Our Legal Marriage

“The Bible says marriage is between a man and a woman,” people like to regurgitate when they are attacking the concept of same-sex marriage. I could spend my time going over some of the fucked-up shit people believed about marriage in biblical times, and how marriage in those days was basically a transfer of property from father to husband. I won’t bother, because it doesn’t matter what the Bible says about marriage, or what people believe the bible says.

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The National Popular Vote is the Bad Idea We Need Right Now

For those of you who are not aware of it, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a campaign that means to render the Electoral College impotent and irrelevant. The idea is that states agree to change their election laws with regards to how their electoral votes are awarded during a presidential election. Each state awards its electoral votes to the candidate that wins the national popular vote, regardless of the vote totals for that specific state. For example, if the Republican candidate were to have the most popular votes nationwide, then that candidate would receive California’s electoral votes, even if the Democrat won California. This system only goes into effect once there are enough states on board to give the popular vote winner 270 electoral votes and the election.

Don’t get me wrong, as I have said before, I think the Electoral College is the inflamed appendix of democracy, both useless and dangerous, so I absolutely sympathize with the NPV folks’ desire to short circuit it.

Unfortunately, I also think the National Popular Vote is a bad idea.

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My Home County Does Voting Right

So, I just voted, a full 10 days before the California primary. This was possible because Orange County, where I presently live, has radically overhauled their voting procedures for the better in 2020 and, I have to say, I have no idea why they don’t do it this way everywhere. Hopefully, this first time goes smoothly, and other jurisdictions around the country emulate what we are doing here.

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Why I Am Not a Libertarian, Part Deux

In an earlier post, I detailed my reasons for not embracing libertarianism. To me, the libertarian view of government is lost back in the eighteenth century and mistakenly conflates a popularly-elected democracy with a European aristocracy. Their mantra of “less government equals more freedom” is not merely unprovable, but also displays an overly simplistic faith in the free market as a “one size fits all” solution to every single problem.

It’s this faith-based appeal to the free market that brings me back to the subject of libertarianism.

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