Comedy can be offensive, Chappelle’s problems are bigger. — Sean King described Chappelle’s arguments in The Closer as “Oppression Olympics”: the debate about whether LGBT people or Blacks are more oppressed. The central metaphor of Chappelle’s argument is a story about DaBaby, a rapper who, while shopping in Walmart in 2019 with his one-year old and five-year old children…

Socialism and capitalism describe economic systems. Communism and representative democracy describe political frameworks. Fascism is different — named after Mussolini’s political party, it is a means of achieving and maintaining power. It is diagnosed, not proclaimed. “Repeat the lie often enough and it becomes truth” is a fascist principle of…

I went to the Trump rally last night. I had to see it firsthand. A few observations: (1) 99% of the crowd is indeed white, evenly split on gender, but there were some POC in attendance, particularly latino. (2) first order of business after the national anthem is dispensing with…

(republishing this here so I can take down my old Wordpress site) The last post tried to break down the good and bad of the America’s healthcare coverage system; this post contemplates how to make it better. The conversation is largely dominated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act…

(republishing this here so I can take down my old Wordpress site) My Dad played for me a radio clip the other day of a right-wing radio host interviewing a surgeon who claimed to have attended a closed-door meeting at the US Department of Health and Human Services, in which…

I’m curing rejected Democratic provisional mail-in ballots in Georgia leading up to the January 5 runoff. Sharing learnings here as I go. December 30, 2020 Overwhelming consensus here is that Black voter engagement and turnout is the reason GA flipped blue in the general election. Georgia’s Black population is heavily…

Democracies don’t end overnight — tyranny is a slow roll of systematically wearing people down so that each new small change does not seem too much to stomach — not too much from the status quo. This is laid out in books such as On Tyranny, On Fascism, The Origins…

Love Trump or hate him, you shouldn’t concede this point. — “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” — Joseph Goebbels I recently heard someone casually concede that they “believe Mueller when he says there was no Trump-Russia collusion.” …

How crossfit landed me an 8-day hospital stay. — I’ve been doing crossfit for 6 years, coach in my spare time, have a Fran time of 3:30; I didn’t think there was much I physically couldn’t do, so I didn’t expect push-ups and pull-ups to put me in the hospital. Rhabdo proved me wrong. Here’s the story. After about…