Category Archives: Politics – 2016Election

How to Cope with Today’s Presidential Inauguration

(This post is dedicated with love to a dedicated reader.)

The American Political World Is Bad And Getting Worse 

At the request of a reader depressed by today’s American presidential inauguration, I’m quickly writing this post.  My own views—in more complete form—about the tragedy and danger of electing someone so manifestly unqualified, so psychologically, morally and intellectually unfit, (“An amygdala with a twitter account,” as my son puts it,) have been expressed over and over in previous posts. Continue reading How to Cope with Today’s Presidential Inauguration

Is Trump A Legitimate President?

In his blog Erasmatazz, Chris Crawford recently published: “The Crisis of Legitimacy.” His main thesis is that the legitimacy of Trump’s forthcoming presidency is debatable. First of all, Clinton received almost 3 million more votes than Trump so it is “reasonable to conclude that Trump won on a legal technicality …” In addition, the legitimacy of the election itself  is questionable, as it was affected by Trump’s mendacity, fake news stories, FBI intervention, Russian influence, voter suppression targeting minority voters, flawed vote counting, and more. As Crawford puts it, the election hardly looks“free and fair”.

Continue reading Is Trump A Legitimate President?

Prospect Theory & The Election

H-L-Mencken-1928.jpg

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. ~ H.L. Mencken

As a follow-up to my recent post, “Education and the Election,” another thing that struck me about the voting was how prospect theory in behavioral economics explains why many gambled on Trump. Continue reading Prospect Theory & The Election

More Devastation About Trump

Fitzgerald c. 1921

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Continue reading More Devastation About Trump