Things I Wrote Instead of My Lincoln Paper - Part 1

Lincoln explains himself all too well.  How is one supposed to write a paper arguing that he was anti-savery, when he says things like "I have always hated slavery" and "I am ... anti-slavery?"  There is no argument!  Everything he says, he explains somewhere when he thought so, how and why he thought so, with and to whom he thought or said so, whether he has ever changed his mind, and everything else that one might normally expect to extract by analysis.

S.N.A.F.U.

So people are actually, seriously talking about letting the Michigan and Florida delegates vote at the Democratic National Convention. Michigan and Florida, where the candidates said they would not campaign. Michigan, where Obama took his name off the ballot. Florida, to which Clinton flew just before the election. (Yes, I know Obama's national TV ads ran in Florida, too.)

The point is, both primaries were decidedly unfair, and do not represent the opinions of the voters or their best interests in any kind of democratic way. Thus, the only reasonable solutions are to hold new elections, with all the candidates on the ballot and campaigning, or to nullify all the votes of the two states. Logistical nightmare or voter disenfranchisement? That's a harder decision than for whom to vote, but unfair representation is worse than either. It would be a disservice to voters and a perversion of what semblance of democracy we have.

Yes, that's the other, bigger point: why can't we have a plain and simple, democratic election? In a day and age when the votes of twenty-four states can be counted and announced nationwide in under a day, I see no reason for any sort of representative election system. It obfuscates and confuses, and more significantly, misrepresents the will of the electorate.

The superdelegate system was put in place in the eighties to correct for the problems of proportional representation by district (see here for explanation), and hasn't caused huge problems yet, but it's a fundamentally flawed concept,¹ as we are seeing in the very close Obama/Clinton race, in which the superdelegates may decide the election. The real solution is to abolish the compartmentalization of the electorate that caused the problem in the first place. No "winner takes all," no "proportional by district" or "by state;" just count up the votes of all of the nation's democrats and award the nomination to the candidate who gets the most votes.

Whoa! That was pretty crazy. Whoever gets the most votes wins? It's a revolutionary concept! Why has nobody thought of this before?

¹I suppose from the view of the party as an organization unto itself, the idea of the group's leadership having a say in who the party's candidate is is defensible, but I, as a voter, still find it unfair. Maybe later I'll rant about how stupid the party system is in general....

Rant of Speed

You know what ticks me off way more than it ought to?

The phrase "rate of speed."

Speed. Is. A. Rate.
...Already!!!

A rate is "an amount measured in relation to another amount."

Speed is the measure of distance traveled relative to time.
Hence, speed is the rate of change in distance with respect to time (dx/dt).

What makes it worse is that people using this phrase obviously think it's a highly technical term that makes them sound as if they're knowledgeable in the ways of physics, when what it sounds like is: "rate of rate of change in distance relative to time." That doesn't sound smart. That sounds like something President Bush would say, causing everyone to get all over his case about it.

So if you're referring to the absolute value of the derivative of displacement (especially when talking to me), do my perception of your intelligence a favor and call it "speed." Just plain "speed."

Unless you mean velocity.

And don't get me started on "deceleration."