The real illusion of voter fraud

The pleasingly-named Hans von Spakovsky

Let’s say you lived in an exceptionally honest town where theft was almost unheard of. After years of almost zero larceny, the Honestburg Police Department announced that a massive crime wave had struck the city. Thieves were thick, according to the HPD, and so the cops went house to house confiscating stolen property. Occasionally they would take the television some old lady had for decades, but they returned it to her eventually and, besides, such mistakes are inevitable when battling a crime wave of this scale. So a question: does Honestburg have a theft problem now? On a completely unrelated note, the Ohio Voter Project filed a complaint with the Hamilton County Board of elections alleging that Theresa Sharp was fraudulently registered at the house where she has been living for 30 years.

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Friday links! Rich pleasures edition

It is tempting to believe that as our society becomes more crass and hedonistic, the sophisticated pleasures evaporate. How can we enjoy the incisive psychology of The Cherry Orchard when our brains have been honed to Barely Legal 6? It’s tempting to think that the game of inches that was 20th-century culture will be lost on a society that measures value in millions, but that’s just declinism talking. In fact, the mass stupefaction of American society provides us with rich pleasures, the way Oedipus having a marital dispute with his mom provided the ancient Greeks with irony. And we don’t even have to go to the theater. Today’s links offer plenty of schadenfreude and a healthy dose of rueful surprise, and they’re all constituted of at least 50% real life. Won’t you succumb to embittered satisfaction with me?

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