Author: Alan Buddug
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The Terrorist Attack in Buffalo
Monday night, I attended a vigil for the victims of the terrorist attack in Buffalo that killed 10 people and injured 3 more (one seriously). The organizers felt that asking for justice for the victims was appropriate; even though they certainly weren’t wrong about that, it seems extremely unlikely that anything resembling justice can happen.…
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Oil Prices and Capitalism
The Biden administration is trying to decrease the price of gasoline in the US — or at least they are making a performance of trying to decrease the price. Let’s take a look at how capitalism is making this problem worse and how a liberal (i.e., capitalist) government like the Biden administration is ill-suited to…
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The Many Flavors of Conservative
The “political spectrum” as we usually see it is specifically designed to make it seem like a free-market libertarianism is the best political system. It puts “social” on the horizontal axis and “economic” on the vertical axis. Of course, you realize that economics is just another kind of power (and that all power is ultimately…
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The Constitution: Originalist vs. Structuralist, States Rights, Flaws in Roe
Originalists vs. Structuralists There are basically two active sides in the debate over what the Constitution says about things like abortion rights, sexual behavior rights, marriage rights (including same-sex and interracial marriage), voting rights, and so forth. On one side are the Originalists who contend that we should go with the intent of the authors…
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It was Alito.
When investigating a crime, it is always a good idea to ask, “Who benefits from this crime?” I’m not sure if the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s initial draft majority opinion on overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey would qualify as a crime, but the person who stands to benefit the most…
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The Man Who Accidentally Killed the Most People in History | Veritasium
When you think of the person that killed the most people in history, you probably assume it is going to be a dictator — probably a Hitler or a Stalin — but no, the person that killed the most people in history is Midgley. He was an aspiring capitalist who cared more about making a…
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The “Gun Show Loophole” Explained
I still occasionally get questions from all kinds of people — including those who own guns — about the “gun show loophole”. It’s poorly understood because the entire characterization of it is wrong. When we think of a “loophole” what we typically mean is a detail of the law as written that has been discovered…
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Now the Far-right Hates Sports
I’m not a sports fan. I’ve been known to refer to such activities as “sportsball” and I certainly agree with Noam Chomsky’s analysis of professional sports as part of the greater distraction function of capital-owned mass media. The latest trend in far-right insanity still has me scratching my head, though, and honestly, I can’t help…
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Population Size and Post-apocalyptic Fantasies
There’s a persistent narrative in America about collapse involving a small band of heroic individuals surviving through a relatively short hard time to rebuild the human species. Sometimes, “relatively short” means only a few days, while sometimes it is as long as a generation, but the band of people is never bigger than perhaps a…
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Bidenism and the End of the World
The latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report has been out for a while (August 2021), and scientists are continuing to comment on it (the working group portion came out in February). In summary, limiting warming to 1.5C (probably the threshold for keeping advanced civilization from collapsing) requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak…