Election 2012 | Benjamin Studebaker

November 6, 2012

Special Election Supplement

A little bonus post today–if you’d like to hear a few final thoughts from me on the presidential election, I was on Phil Upton’s BBC Coventry and Warwickshire programme earlier this evening for a brief interview. You’ll find me from 1 hour 17 minutes 45 seconds to 1 hour 22 minutes 50 seconds at the link below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00zmv0t

I reference some material discussed in greater detail here, here, and here.

November 6, 2012

Voting Fascism

Have you noticed that it has become completely socially acceptable to berate people for choosing not to vote? For supporters of democracy, it is often common practise to call non-voters names, to assume that there are no good reasons not to vote and that all non-voters are in some way bad people, or that they don’t matter. I call this near-universal belief in the moral value of the vote “voting fascism”, because it suppresses dissenting opinions and viewpoints aggressively. I am not arguing that all people who vote are fascists, but that people who condemn other people for not voting are repressing a certain set of political perspectives and viewpoints. To make this argument, I will use as an example yourexcusesucks.com, a website that arms voters with arguments with which to attack the character and decisions of non-voters.

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November 5, 2012

The Day after Tomorrow: Why This Election Won’t Change Anything

There is a tremendous amount of excitement and exuberance about the American elections tomorrow, but the trends, and recent history in particular, indicate that this excitement is perhaps undeserved. Over the last half century, the United States government has become less and less capable of actually governing the country and doing things, and there is no better example of the trend in action than what the last two years of divided government have produced. Of course, these are just empty assertions without evidence, but evidence we have indeed.

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November 4, 2012

Misconceptions: “The Election is a Dead Heat”

I’m not one to get mired in election cycle coverage often, but then I saw “news” stories like this one claiming that the presidential election is actually close. This is not true. Barack Obama is almost certainly going to win this election, and his margin in the electoral college is probably going to be more than a couple of states large. Here’s why.

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October 30, 2012

Romney and Disaster Relief

In the wake of the recent hurricane, new attention is being paid to this clip from the primary debates in which Romney condemns federal funding for disaster relief:

While the hurricane has drawn attention to this quip, its intellectual value, positively or negatively, is independent of this particular situation and deserves to be judged on its own merits, and that is precisely what today’s post is all about–the merits of the notion that the federal government should do less.

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Tag: Election 2012