Summary: Increasing Voter Turnout for 2018 and Beyond

Below find a summary of this New York Times article (Ctrl Click):

Hillary supporters voted underwhelmingly.  Only 43% of those under 25 voted last year.  Low turnout favors extreme candidates and incumbents.  To inspire turnout, inspire voters with a good candidate.  Also, personal contact increases turnout.  Voter anger increases turnout.  Activism increases turnout.  Voting’s structural obstacles preserve rich, white, old and suppress poor, young, minorities.  Institutional reforms make voting easier.  For example, Denver mailed ballots and allowed registration and voting on same day.  Republican officials make it harder to vote.  Automatic registration does not necessarily increase turnout.  Weekend and holiday elections increase turnout.  The many voting entities cause voting to occur every week and, so, decentralization decreases turnout.  Voting is easier in US than ever before but turnout is declining.  Making voting a habit increases turnout.  All improvements add up.

Analysis: Trump and the True Meaning of ‘Idiot’

A Quinnipiac University poll asked participants for a word that came to mind when they thought of Donald Trump: The No. 1 response was “idiot”.

To access this New York Times article hold ctrl key and click on icon.

Analysis

  • Idiot in modern understanding describes a person who lacks intelligence but it’s original meaning is more appropriate when applying a word to Trump.
    • An idiot in ancient Greece depended on the public for his existence, contributing nothing to it, concerned only with self.
    • Being uninvolved with the community but taking benefits from it, the idiot contributed to both his own demise and also the slow deterioration of society.
    • The idiot does not communicate with the community, he talks only for and to himself.
    • The idiot in ancient Greece existed as prepubescent (not transitioned to public life), parasitic, and self-idiomatic (a language only understood by him).
  • Idiot today means low intelligence thanks to the usurping of the term by early IQ test “Ableists” (characterizes persons as defined by their disabilities and as inferior to the non-disabled).
    • As a consequence of this IQ classification, idiots aren’t able to vote in Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico and Ohio.
    • Keeping idiots off the voters roles was meant to accomplish both self and social preservation.
    • The more power the non-community participating idiot is given the more danger he is to the public.

The choice of the word idiot as an attribution of our president, its current meaning inaccurate, seems to be historically accurate. Just as four states still prevent what are defined as modern day idiots from voting, our country should prevent ancient day idiots from running for public office.  The deterioration of community might not survive the administration of our current idiot.

Review: Lincoln Transformed Depression thru Lit

Rather than bury his melancholy, he resurrected it.

My review and summary of a blog on BetterLivingThroughBeowulf.Com

Lincoln Transformed Depression thru Lit

What was Lincoln’s source of strength?  His life as president fraught with rage and ridicule.  His wife an unstable and hostile companion.  His mental state a constant siege of depression and fear.  Seemly imprisoned by his mental illness, he found a source of succor in literature.  Lincoln’s life unfolded in three parts: fear, engagement, and transcendence.  Lifting himself up from the question of whether he could live, he decided how he would live.

The trials of his life became his weapons in war.  His personal suffering prepared him for the nation’s suffering and did not let it overwhelm him as it did so many.  Knowing what he knew, of optimism he was suspect.  With his essential purpose always in focus, his vision for our nation governed his work.  The discipline of his early adult life had tempered a fortitude which endured disappointments.  Lincoln’s ingrained strength of purpose prepared him to engage his own awful fear and doubt and triumph.

Literature both prepared him for life’s process and encouraged him to cope.  Rather than bury his melancholy, he resurrected it.  Reading, reciting, and composing poetry that examined themes of death, despair, and human futility, brought comfort to a man who so often sat alone in a place where his only companions were those dark themes.   Lincoln’s single secret achievement of finding a therapy for his incurable malady gives him yet another dimension of greatness. In the depression of key author’s, Lincoln related:

Lord Byron’s: Sorrow is Knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth. 

What is it (melancholy) but the telescope of truth?

Lincoln read Poe because it was gloomy.  The Raven, an emblem of the poet’s melancholy, poeticizes both Poe’s determination to be rational with the prospect of a never-to-leave madness.

Lincoln related best to Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  His ambition and existential doubts resonated and were forces in both his objectives and his melancholy.  The grasp of literature held Lincoln back from shallow optimism and prevented him from falling into deep despair.  He knew that devils and angels battled within all of us and he believed that the better angels of our nature would triumph.  He believed in this nation and its ability remain united when challenged.