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This is interesting, because I feel that the education system is job #1. It is my sense that if you solve that problem, you win on any basic fairness issue you care to name at the polls. That said, if you live in a state like Georgia then you likely have cause to feel differently. I've lived...

Kavanaugh literally makes anything possible on that front, I'm afraid. The only bit of good news on that front is that Missouri and Colorado passed ballot measures with regard to that nonsense which have sufficient force to trump the courts. One can hope that such measures will broadly hit...

I tend to think that Tester is an unusually good Democratic candidate for Montana. Daines starts from a baseline that's better than Cornyn's. That's a really tough ask. There is definitely a risk of further Roy Moores (sup, Todd Akin). Perdue is probably an easier ask than Kyl (utterly...

Having been down the county-by-county rabbit hole and returned: This is a weird election. The general theme I'm coming away with is that educated voters are repudiating Trump in droves. (The Democrats won Staten Island?!?) At the same time, he's turning out rural, uneducated voters. Just...

Thomas will be there until death or health does not permit. The difference in prestige between a sitting justice and a retired one is immense. One does not give that stature away lightly. To put it very bluntly, O'Connor must have deeply loved her husband. What Souter was thinking remains an...

I would hope that my subsequent posts made it quite clear that my pithy joke about a button was precisely that. In all seriousness, though, it has come out that there were standing orders in the denoument of Nixon's presidency that he was not to be permitted to give orders to fire without...

So says Hegel, but can you prove it? I would argue that bargaining models that explain the same result have far more predictive power AND empirical support across time and space.

An excellent synopsis, and it is worth pointing out that you do not drub the other side the way Blair did in 1997 in British elections without adopting a fair-sized fraction of HRM's Loyal Opposition's policies. Things are a bit different in the US; you can win 59-41 in the popular vote and...

If you start from the axiom that the American justice system is hopelessly corrupt in its process and its outcomes are therefore illegitimate, then you can draw that equivalence. I don't fully agree with that axiom (though I'd be willing to accept it in the limited context of the obviously...

Funnier if you've been to a show (so you know where he's exaggerating), but not necessary:

Hitler didn't have nukes, Stalin didn't have first-use capability and I doubt they let Bush know where the big red button was. One can only hope that Mattis is taking the same approach with Trump. The fact that it only took you a minute and a half or so to come up with that retort indicates...

Various advanced stats metrics broadly agree that the semifinals are slightly weighted coin tosses. England is very mildly favored, who wins the marquee semifinal depends on who you ask, and the winner of the marquee semifinal should lift the Cup but they won't be as much of a favorite as you...

Doping alone won't turn you or me into Lance Armstrong. Similarly, being able to run all day isn't going to turn the Russians into world-class football players. Which is why no one seriously thinks they're going to lift the Cup.

I appear to have picked the wrong 45 minutes of football to skip to go play tourist. Not that I could have guessed otherwise beforehand, or after the first half.

I don't know how much more Spain could have committed forward without risking getting burned on the counter. Germany and Spain both faced the same basic problem - they lacked the imagination to break down a parked bus without bringing in the center backs, but were desperately exposed to...

The Argentines are what we thought they were.

FTFY. Should Iceland win tomorrow, IMO you can bank on a draw between Croatia and Iceland the same way you can bank on one between France and Denmark. Very easy collusion to arrange, with the side on fewer points not gaining enough by dodging either prospective knockout opponent to make it...

Well, I have beaten every single Infocom game (yes including Quarterstaff, still have the box/disks/feelies), and it's probably been fifteen years since I spun one up, so that's not a good sign. I did beat Pool of Radiance again within the last year, and enjoyed that tremendously. The last two...

While Lexicus has a point that sensationalism sells, I tend to agree that the commitment to "fairness" was a more substantial problem in the election. If the news media broadly (for-profit or otherwise) had seen fit to hold Trump up as an object of ridicule (like they would treat, say, a...

That's more or less how I'd put it, at least when we're talking about the latter portion of the 19th Century. I'd stop short of characterizing it as an idea with real currency during that time frame, but if you want to characterize it as a fringe belief at the time then I'm not going to argue...