Earn What You Deserve: How to Stop Underearning & Start Thriving

Posted on June 13, 2021 by Luke Ford

Publishers Weekly wrote in 1994: “The author of How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt and Live Prosperously here tackles the problems of another fiscally troubled group, those who are earning only enough to meet their needs. He touches on but does not treat in depth the destructive self-image that makes underearning only part of a syndrome. But he does offer advice for treating underearning, beginning with three cardinal rules: do not incur debt, do not take work that pays less than you require and do not say “no” to money, i.e., ignore opportunities to increase your income. Mundis urges drawing up a “spending plan” (not a budget, which is too constricting) and recommends such relaxation techniques as meditation and deep breathing. In what looks like padding, he also presents an adaptation of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.”

Here are some of my favorite sections of this Jerrold Mundis book:

* Pain is the messenger. It tells me that something is wrong.

* The first step in freeing yourself from underearning is to accept responsibility for the problem. This doesn’t mean it is your fault. The fact that you are an underearner, if you are, is not a condition you wanted or that you brought upon yourself. You may be completely justified in thinking that you were neglected or terribly abused somehow as a child, and yes, it may truly be a shame, and yes, perhaps anyone would empathize with you. But going over that repeatedly is not going to help you free yourself—no one ever got better confessing someone else’s sins. That you are an underearner, while not your fault, is your responsibility. What you do about it is your responsibility. No one can change that for you; no external event or circumstance will alter it. But by accepting that it is your responsibility, you can begin to free yourself from ever having to underearn again.

* Underearners evade, avoid, and deflect money like running backs hurtling toward the goal line of poverty—touchdown! Do not say no to money. Do not evade it, avoid it, or deflect it. Let it into your life. We are talking, of course, about money that meets the first two criteria: money that isn’t debt, and money that isn’t less than you need. If it satisfies both of these, then do not say no to it.

* We evade money by not following up.

* Early in my own liberation from underearning, the communications director of a large professional association called me from Washington, D.C. She’d heard that I broke writer’s block for people. (I perked up, sensing income.) That was not the problem she had. (I sagged.) Her staff writers were not blocked. (I sagged further.) Their problem was burnout and staleness, caused by having to write about the same topics over and over. (Why was she calling me?) Could I help? (How? What did I know about burnout in staff writers?) They could pay $1,250 for an afternoon session with their four writers. It was truly depressing to know that $1,250 was available, but not for me. I was about to express my regrets and thank her for the call and tell her I hoped she could find an answer somewhere, when—with the force of a hammer blow, nearly taking my breath away, and causing the hand in which I held the phone to begin sweating—I was struck by the realization that I had a compulsion to underearn … and that I was about to turn down $1,250.

Perhaps, I thought, the reason I am about to turn this money down is not valid; perhaps it is a function of my compulsion to underearn. Though it was difficult, though my throat began to close and I had trouble getting the words out, I forced myself to say: “Yes, I think I can help you with it. I’d like to give it some thought. Is there a time tomorrow afternoon that would be convenient for me to call you back?”

Six weeks later, I led a four-hour workshop for that woman and her writers down in Washington. I called it “Word Renewal.”

* Much of your underearning has resulted from distorted attitudes and perceptions you have about money, about yourself, and about yourself in relationship to money.

* On your pad, write the heading Underearning. Beneath it, list all the ways you can think of in which you actively or passively underearned over the last twelve months. (Don’t bother classifying them; the purpose here is to help you see the ways rather than to divide them.) For example: Sought work for which I wasn’t qualified. Spent a lot of time on projects that weren’t going to make me much money [if self-employed]. Incurred heavy expenses.

* Now make a second list. Here, write down all the ways in which other people you know underearn: set low fees, for example, insist on getting things their own way, continue to employ unproductive employees. Now get creative and add every other way you can think of: claiming that emotional problems prevent one from working, arguing constantly with co-workers and supervisors which results in never being promoted, not honoring commitments.

* Things I Could Do to Change My Emotions

Under this heading, list seven things you could do to change your emotions about money. Let your imagination run free: You don’t have to do any of these. The point is only to show yourself that there are ways to change, ways you never even realized or considered before. Some of your ideas will be more desirable than others. When you’re finished, breathe, exhale, and relax.

Now write the heading: Things I Could Do to Change My Beliefs

Here, write down ten things you could do to change your beliefs or attitudes about money, or about yourself in relationship to money.

* Sit down with your pen and pad. Write thé heading, 100 Ways I Could Bring More Money In.

* Sometime within the next seven days, write out a description of your ideal relationship with money—not what you think an ideal relationship ought to be but what it would actually be for you. It’s important for you to have a clear picture of this. This clarity will help you make choices and take actions that are more likely to serve your best interests.

* If you’ve been underearning for any length of time, a fair amount of what fills your life—clothes, kitchen equipment, furniture—can have become worn out, flawed, and second-rate.

* Pick a drawer, a bureau, a closet, or even an entire room in your apartment or house. Evaluate every single article within that space, from an old tie to a television set. Ask yourself: Do I really need this? Do I enjoy and take pleasure from it?

* “When I’m inside my own head,” says Harry, a chef, “I’m behind enemy lines.” What he means is that sitting alone with his own thoughts doesn’t help him—they are depressed thoughts, fearful thoughts, the thoughts of an underearner. He means that he can’t simply think his way out of underearning, or out of the low self-esteem esteem that is part of his underearning, and into feeling better about himself. So how does one improve one’s self-image, lift one’s self-esteem?

* One of the simplest and most effective ways to lift your self-esteem is by doing estimable—or esteemable—acts. Write down a number of things you could do for which you would respect or admire yourself.

* Diversifying was part of my own liberation from underearning… Diversification, then, is a process in which you identify the skills and abilities you possess in addition to those you use in your main occupation—or further ways to apply those you already do use—and then find avenues through which to turn them into income-producing activities.

* Stick with the winners.

* Finally, remain open—open to new and unexpected possibilities of recovery. To any technique, discipline, or practice you might encounter that can help you in your liberation from underearning.

Underearning is a term that makes most of us draw back uneasily . It is embarrassing , unpleasant . We feel that anyone who might be affected by it — whatever it is — might somehow be defective or incapable . Yet underearning is rampant in America

You Don’t Have to Underearn Any More. > Location 180

I am not telling you that the sky’s the limit or that you can be , do , or have anything you want . It isn’t , and you can’t . But I am telling you that you can free yourself from underearning and stay free of it forever : by using the program in this book , which is a clear , simple , and step – by – step guide .

1. In all its Glory > Page 5

And that’s where I was when Jim Roi said to me : “ Jerry , do you think — is it possible — could it be — that you are a compulsive underearner ? ”

1. In all its Glory > Page 6

To underearn is repeatedly to gain less income than you need , or than would be beneficial — usually for no apparent reason , and despite your desire to do otherwise .

1. In all its Glory > Page 8

Underearning is a self – diagnosed condition — and needs to be . No underearner will ever get free of underearning without first perceiving , or accepting , that he or she is an underearner .

1. In all its Glory > Page 8

Is underearning an illness of some sort ? It may be , it may not . Certainly it’s not a physical illness , but the argument can be made that underearning , like other self – damaging behaviors , is a psychological and spiritual illness . ( We’ll deal with those aspects as we go along . ) But ultimately — is it ? For some , it probably is ; for others , it isn’t . But what it is , is less important than that it is . There is a condition of underearning , a state of underearning , an ontology of underearning . So whatever it may or may not actually be , it is perfectly fine , I think , to call it an illness , a malady , an affliction , a habit , tendency , mindset , or anything else you might wish . Whatever underearning may ultimately be , there are basically three kinds of it : Compulsive , Problematic , and Minor .

1. In all its Glory > Page 11

Active underearning involves doing something that results in underearning , from quitting a job , to setting low fees , to turning down work

1. In all its Glory > Page 13

Passive underearning involves not doing or failing to do something that would — if you did it — cause you to earn more . It can be anything from not getting to work on time to failing to meet a deadline or neglecting to ask for help or advice . Passive underearning is more subtle than active underearning and may be more difficult to discern at first ,

1. In all its Glory > Page 16

There are many issues related to the problem of underearning , but they are not the problem itself . The beginning of wisdom , goes an old Chinese epigram , is to call things by their right name . To underearn is to gain less money than you need . Other issues , which either contribute to underearning or result from it , are part of the syndrome of underearning .

2: Underearners > Page 27 · Location 510

Dysfunctional has been employed as a synonym for murderous , hateful , savage , abusive , and even evil . It is not a synonym for any of those . Dysfunctional means “ disordered ” or “ impaired ” ; it does not mean “ awful , ” “ brutal , ” or “ catastrophic . ” I suggest , as a practical working definition of a dysfunctional household , this : A dysfunctional household is one in which , because of alcoholism or a similar affliction , the family dynamics are more hurtful or repressive than those in households that are not marked by such an affliction .

2: Underearners > Page 33 · Location 578

Or you drive yourself mercilessly only so long as seems necessary , or while your enthusiasm is high , and then at the end collapse and are barely able to perform the minimum expected or required of you . During this latter time you feel blunted , sleep a lot , and have little will for anything , not even recreation

(*) This reminds me of Bi-polar disorder

2: Underearners > Page 37 · Location 635

Many venerable spiritual traditions — at least in some of their teachings — suggest that eschewing money , possessions , and other things of this world can be beneficial and is perhaps even necessary to spiritual development . On the other hand , every tradition places great value on helping to eliminate poverty , or the ravages of poverty , from the world — which would hardly be the case if poverty were in itself ennobling or beneficial .

(*) A fascinating paradox, really. Some people misquote that “money is the root of all evil” Yet the apostle Paul actually said: [1Ti 6:6-10 NKJV] 6 Now godliness with contentment is great gain. 7 For we brought nothing into [this] world, [and it is] certain we can carry nothing out. 8 And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content. 9 But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and [into] many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. 10 For the love of money is a root of all [kinds of] evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

2: Underearners > Page 37 · Location 638

What most people forget about Saint Francis , for example , is that he was an extremely wealthy young man who renounced his family’s fortune , who chose to live a mendicant’s life , who exercised an option . As was , and did , Gautama Buddha . There is a world — perhaps even a universe — of difference between voluntary renunciation and underearning

Part II: Fundamentals

3. Getting Under Way > Page 52

Freedom from underearning means regularly to gain income that is enough to meet your needs in a humane way .

3. Getting Under Way > Page 54 ·

Resistance to surrender , which stems from fear , is based largely on a misconception of what the word means . If you’re like most people , you interpret surrender as meaning a loss of freedom , defeat , weakness . But one of its primary definitions is “To give something up in favor of something else “

3. Getting Under Way > Page 55

Denial is nearly universal at first — after all , no one wants to have an underearning problem . You tell yourself it’s your parents ’ fault , the government’s fault , your wife’s fault . It’s the economy’s fault , the patriarchy’s , the banks ’ , the credit card companies ’ , your boss’s fault , society’s fault . It’s the divorce , you say to yourself , the job market , late – paying accounts , taxes , interest rates , the new roof , high rents . Anything or anyone but you , even though you’re the one who repeatedly gains less income than you need or than would be beneficial .

(*) Its the rationalization. I’m not REALLY an underearner…implicit in this is the belief that “I” am not the problem. Admission and the subsequent surrender is the only basis on which any real change can take place. You can’t move away from something you don’t admit in the first place

4. Reconceiving > Page 74

“ This is a simple program for complicated people . ”

4. Reconceiving > Page 76 · Location 1098

Then I tell them : “ What I did while my eyes were closed was this . First , I thought the worst possible thought I could about all of you . Then I thought the best possible thought I could about all of you .Yet none of you was plunged into despair or got angry at me . Nor was anyone lifted into euphoria or overcome with affection toward me . The point is : What other people think about you cannot possibly affect you . Their thoughts cannot influence your mood . Only yours can — what you think . ”

(*)What other people think of me is none of my business

5. Proceeding > Page 100 And you cannot liberate yourself from underearning by continuing to underearn . Your real job has been underearning . And you have worked hard at it and been very successful at it : at repeatedly gaining less income than you needed , despite the negative emotional and practical consequences that followed. That job is over now . One day at a time , you’re through with underearning . So it’s time to be moseying on — toward work that will pay you enough to meet your needs in a humane fashion .

6. Couples and Families > Page 116

No matter who you are or what your living conditions , this is precisely how difficult your own situation is — more difficult than some , less difficult than others .

6. Couples and Families > Page 125

Acknowledge any legitimate discrepancy that exists between your incomes . A legitimate discrepancy is one that results from the realities of life rather than from underearning — either yours , your partner’s , or both

6. Couples and Families > Page 131

To reach accord is to come to agreement or into harmony .

6. Couples and Families > Page 134

First : Begin by recognizing that your time — as the time of a human being — is neither more valuable nor less valuable than your partner’s time . Your earning power per hour or day may be different , but the absolute value of that hour or day , as a unit of time , is not . Your time , as the time of a human being , is worth exactly the same as your partner’s . One hour equals one hour , regardless of who works it or how much he or she can command for it on the market .

Highlight (pink) – 6. Couples and Families > Page 148 · Location 2022

Finally , live and let live . Live your own life , as you choose , and let your partner , your grown children , and everyone else you know live their lives as they choose — or for reasons beyond your ken , perhaps as they must . Attend to the beam in your own eye ; the motes in theirs are their business . It is your birthright to live as you wish , it is theirs to do the same . Your liberation depends only on you . Theirs , if they are underearners , depends only on them . It is possible that we do know sometimes what is best for another adult . It is also possible that we don’t . To assume that we do is arrogance , to try to force that assumption on someone is tyranny .

Part III: Expansion

7. Growing Stronger > Page 161 · Location 2145

This is an important distinction . It is appropriate to feel fear if a large , savage dog lunges through an open gate at you ; or grief at the death of a loved one . But most fear and despondency stem primarily from your cognitions , from what you think .

7. Growing Stronger > Page 161

The Dhammapada , one of Buddhism’s favorite texts , begins : “ All we are is the result of what we have thought . ”

7. Growing Stronger > Page 163 · Location 2174

Charlotte , a painter who worked part time as a data processor , experienced agony each time she made an appointment for a prospective client to view her artwork . It would look as if she were begging for money , she felt . The client would be contemptuous of her work , think she was incompetent , reject her . She knew she would be humiliated and unable to paint for days . There would be no money . She would have to give up painting altogether and take a full – time job . All this went on in Charlotte’s head — yet her emotions , in response to her thoughts , were as searingly painful as if such events had actually happened .

7. Growing Stronger > Page 166

If any single factor in itself can make liberation from underearning impossible , it is resentment .

7. Growing Stronger Page 170

Allow yourself to experience the emotion purely , completely , without resistance . Be the emotion : Be fear . Be self – loathing . Feel it completely . Be within it ; let it be within you . Experience it totally .

(*) I’m thinking of the scene in Batman Begins when Bruce is in the cave and the bats swarm around him, and he immerses himself fully in the swarm

7. Growing Stronger > Page 170

Most people discover that they can’t experience an emotion — purely , uninterruptedly — for more than one or two minutes , often for no more than thirty seconds . Not because the emotion is so awesomely powerful that they can’t endure it any longer , but because it cannot exist in a pure state much longer than that . It burns itself out , collapses in upon itself , or crests , subsides , and disappears .

(*) This is so very important to get a hold of. Feelings are like weather, only as this points out, quite short in duration.

7. Growing Stronger > Page 174

“ The function of prayer , ” wrote the philosopher Kierkegaard , “ is not to influence God , but rather to change the nature of the one who prays . ”

(*) Prayer is dispositional

7. Growing Stronger > Page 175

Then , as best you can , place your consciousness deep within your diaphragm , in the calm and quiet center of your being . Now ask yourself silently , “ Who am I ? ” Maybe , as your first answer , your name comes to mind : Jerry . Say to yourself , easily , without strain : “ No , that is a name people call me . That is not me . Who is the ‘ I ’ who is called by that name ? ” Perhaps your occupation occurs to you next : A writer . Say to yourself easily , without strain : “ No , writing is something I do . That is not me . Who is the ‘ I ’ who does the writing ? ” My thoughts . “ No , those are a function of my consciousness . They are not me . Who is the ‘ I ’ who has these thoughts ? ” My consciousness . “ No , that is something I possess . That is not me . Who is the ‘ I ’ who has this consciousness ? ” A man . “ No , that is the sex of my body . That is not me . Who is the ‘ I ’ who has this sex ? ” My body .

7. Growing Stronger > Page 178

Money has life , and like other living things — like you , like me — it doesn’t go where it isn’t liked , isn’t wanted . It doesn’t go where it is feared , lusted after , envied , grabbed at , hoarded , resented , and otherwise made to feel unwelcome . * So begin treating money well . Don’t jam it into your pocket or push it into the bottom of your purse . Put it in your wallet , nicely and neatly . Say hello to it . Tell it how pleased you are to see it , how happy you are it’s come to visit . Treat it like a valued guest . And when the time comes for it to move on — as all guests must , and should — bid it farewell and a wonderful journey , happy that it came to visit you and looking forward to your next visitor . Be hospitable . Be a kind , loving , and generous host , into and out of whose life a steady stream of guests are delighted to flow .

(*) What about greedy mean, unkind people who have gobs of money?

7. Growing Stronger > Page

The company you work for is not the source of your money , even though it writes your paycheck . Your clients are not the source , even though they pay you . The stocks and bonds you own are not the source . Nor is the government , your friends , your family , or your customers . Just as the telephone is not the source of your phone calls , nor the mail carrier the source of your letters , but rather the agencies through which those arrive . The real source of your money is God , or the Universe — or , for the determinedly secular , your Self .

Part IV: The Steps

Steps One Through Six > Page 190 · Location 2521

The Steps are not presented in AA or any of the other Anonymous programs as something people must do in order to succeed with whatever difficulty they’re addressing . Rather , they are presented as suggestions , actions to take that will facilitate and strengthen recovery .

(*) There is a problem with this proposition. “This simple program” i.e. the steps are the path to recovery. It’s true no one in program will require or compel any member to take the steps, its clear that they were understood ss ” a new blueprint for living.” The framework within which transformation/recovery comes about.

8. Steps One Through Six > Page 191

If I would change what I experience to be the world , then I must change myself . The Steps are helpful in this.

8. Steps One Through Six > Page 192

As a rough guideline, aim to work with a Step for a least one or two full months before moving on to the next one . ( This is a very rough guideline . Ultimately , you’ll rely on your intuition . )

8. Steps One Through Six > Page 220

Even if I am highly imperfect , scored by a multitude of defects , that does not mean that I am defective , wrong , somehow no good . No more than a car is defective , or wrong , or somehow no good , because it has a defective turn signal . It is simply a car with a defective turn signal . If the defect were removed , the car would be easier to operate and less likely to cause damage to itself or anyone else .

9: Steps Seven Through Twelve > Page 227 · Location 3006

how might it do that ? Instantly . Or at the end of the day . Or over a long period of time . Forever . Or for a month , an hour , or only a few minutes . By direct and recognized divine intervention ( whatever that means to you ) , or by your encountering a good therapist , or through reading some sentences in a book , or the birth of a child , a phone call , or a conversation overheard in a restaurant . In as many ways as you can imagine and a great many more that you can’t , a God as you understand God , or a Higher Power as you understand it , might remove your shortcomings . They’ll be removed , that’s all .

(*) If you’re heading in that direction, you’re likely to get there.

9: Steps Seven Through Twelve > Page 234

No matter what kind of harm you have done in your life , you are not a terrible and hurtful human being ; you would not be reading a book like this if you were . Nor , conversely , are you someone so gentle , timid , and sweet that you have never harmed another human being . It’s not possible to have lived long enough to become an adult without having harmed others along the way .

9: Steps Seven Through Twelve > Page 248

“ Those of us who have come to make regular use of prayer and meditation would no more do without them than we would refuse air , food , or sunshine . ”

9: Steps Seven Through Twelve > Page 249

The fear I had of this Step , and the fear of practically anyone who’s ever been reluctant to approach it , was that God’s will would not be consonant with my own . In other words , that I wouldn’t get what I want . It is very difficult to pray only for a knowledge of God’s will for you and the power to carry that out when you fear that this might mean something you don’t want : suffering , being hurt , being deprived , punished , not getting what you want or think you need . But it’s not difficult to pray only for a knowledge of the will of what is best in you and best in other people and the power to carry that out . Take a moment to sit quietly and identify what is truly best in you and in the people you know .

Posted in Addiction | Comments Off on Earn What You Deserve: How to Stop Underearning & Start Thriving

Sex, Lies & Videotape (1989)

Posted on June 13, 2021 by Luke Ford

Bud says: I just watched Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) for the first time since it came out, what a debut by Soderbergh. One detail I missed the first time, Andie MacDowell’s character wears a cross throughout the film, up until after she does the video interview with Spader, when she confronts her husband with the bad news she’s wearing what appears to be a Magen David. In the final scene she has no necklace. Quite odd, Soderbergh is not MoT.

Posted in Hollywood | Comments Off on Sex, Lies & Videotape (1989)

Joseph Cotto Debates Luke Ford On 2020 Voter Fraud Allegations (6-11-21)

Posted on June 11, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Ethan Ralph hosted Joseph Cotto and me to discuss Election 2020
02:00 Henry Olsen: How we can be confident that Trump’s voter fraud claims are baloney, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=135305
04:00 Joseph Cotto, https://twitter.com/JosephFordCotto
06:00 Cotto/Gottfried on Rumble, https://rumble.com/c/CottoGottfried
1:35:00 When was I last out of the LA bubble?
2:05:00 Southern Dingo calls in and reads two of Luke’s spicy quotes
2:51:00 The Goyim Defense League
2:52:40 Luke debates Joseph Cotto: Did Voter Fraud Determine The 2020 Election? (5-13-21), https://rumble.com/vh5c27-did-voter-fraud-determine-the-2020-election-5-13-21.html
2:54:30 Tucker Carlson
3:30:00 Who is Hans von Spakovsky? https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=135307
3:34:00 Kris Kobach’s bogus claims on voter fraud

The Power Of The Situation To Shape Behavior, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140115
Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139670
The Myth Of Voter Fraud, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=137198
Debunking the most common claims of voter fraud: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140096
“How claims of voter fraud were supercharged by bad science” https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140090
Kris Kobach’s False Claims About Voter Fraud, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140070
‘Trump’s Claims About Illegal Votes Are Nonsense. I Debunked the Study He Cites as ‘Evidence.’’ https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140088
‘Trump And Allies Keep Claiming Republican Poll Watchers Were Banned—That’s A Lie’ https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140062
NYT: There’s no evidence to support claims that election observers were blocked from counting rooms, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140057
‘EXPLAINER: Why poll watcher complaints don’t amount to fraud’ https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140055
‘No, Georgia election workers didn’t kick out observers and illegally count ‘suitcases’ of ballots’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140053
‘Mail-in Voter Fraud: Anatomy of a Disinformation Campaign’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139307
No Evidence For Voter Fraud: A Guide To Statistical Claims About The 2020 Election, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=137683
OutsideTheBeltway.com: A Return to the (Lack of) Evidence of Significant Fraud, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=137612
Michael Anton Says He Does Not Know Who Truly Won The 2020 Election, But He’s ‘Moved On’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=137453
Henry Olsen: How we can be confident that Trump’s voter fraud claims are baloney, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=135305

Posted in America, Voter Fraud | Comments Off on Joseph Cotto Debates Luke Ford On 2020 Voter Fraud Allegations (6-11-21)

Do You Like Watching Soccer?

Posted on June 11, 2021 by Luke Ford

Bud: Soccer is UnAmerican. Maybe the US can’t assimilate foreigners like Fordy who still cling to their native cultures. My loyalty oath would be a pledge to disavow soccer and all it stands for. Ties, flopping, crowd behavior, no scoring. It’s third world. Watching sports is for the plebs with exception of the NFL. There is nothing more iconically American than a star quarterback. He’s a leader, he risks his body to lead the pawns down the field. He has to have mind of a field general one game per week.

Posted in Soccer | Comments Off on Do You Like Watching Soccer?

The Power Of The Situation To Shape Behavior

Posted on June 11, 2021 by Luke Ford

I’ve gone through my life idealizing and devaluing people. Many of those I’ve most admired, I’ve subsequently devalued. Others who I devalued, I came to admire.

I’ve hated some people until I met them, and then I quickly found myself liking them. I’ve loved some people until I met them, and then I found I hated them.

I’ve been learning about the moral philosophy of situationism (that the situation will often determine our behavior more than any other factor, including psychological traits and belief in God) and I love how useful it is.

Philosopher John M. Doris writes: “Commitment to globalism threatens to poison understandings of self and others with disappointment and resentment on the one hand and delusion and hero-worship on the other. In fact, engaging situationism can enable loving relationships, because affection for others would not be contingent on their conformity to unrealistic standards of character. With luck, a situationist tuning of the emotions could increase our ever-short supply of compassion, forgiveness, and fair-mindedness. And these are things worth having in greater abundance.”

Take, for example, my tendency to idealize certain people in public life (and often adopt them as father figures). In the situations I encounter them, I put them on a pedestal. But if they say something I hate, or if I see a side of them outside of the normal, I may loathe them. The situation may well shape my reaction to these public figures more than any other factor.

When I see somebody every day, it is impossible for me to put them on a pedestal. No man is a hero to his butler (and this may be caused by the man being a man, or the butler being a butler, but more likely this is caused by the nature of the man-butler relationship).

I’ve met all sorts of women for whom I felt no initial romantic or erotic attraction. Then, because I was placed in situations where I interacted with them in certain ways (perhaps I talked with them regularly and came to enjoy their company), I might feel a powerful attraction. For example, I am not normally attracted to women with large bottoms, but if I had a lot of laughs and pleasant interactions with a large bottomed woman, I might start feeling something for her. I might even lose my mind in my infatuation and surprising lust.

I remember being set up with a large bottomed woman and I could not face asking her out, but at the same time I recognized that if I was around her enough in low pressure situations, I might well fall for her. Alas, I rarely saw her again and nothing happened.

Similarly, I might have developed and consummated an all consuming erotic and romantic attraction for a woman that was then destroyed when I found myself in a new situation with them. For example, I might suddenly realize that my friends find her stupid, or that she is less socially astute in many situations than I am, or I might realize that she loathed my religion (Orthodox Judaism), or that because of her irresponsibility, having her in my life would inevitably cause chaos and that she would feel like a millstone around my neck.

I might fall in love with a woman with a moderate size bum and then over time, her bums expands, and when the expansion reaches a certain point, my love and respect for her is gone.

I think a major reason why people develop strong erotic and romantic attraction is because of certain situations they find themselves in and when those situations change, the erotic and romantic attraction changes. Most people feel the most intense erotic attraction early in a relationship. Typically, the half-life of a sexual relationship is six weeks (meaning, that six weeks in, the erotic excitement is half the level it was at first).

Many public figures such as Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson develop a following who regard them as heroes, and then when Dennis or Jordan do one thing to disappoint their fans, the fans turn on them with a passion and want to hurt them. I also notice that other public figures don’t seem to endure this. Why?

I have been blogging since 1997 and I have, at times, developed a small following. Sometimes, fans of my work, for inexplicable reasons, turn passionately against me. Why did this happen? Because situations changed, and their admiration transformed into loathing.

Are there things public figures can do to encourage a more sane following? Yes, they could emphasize the power of situation and that there will always be situations wherein people who admire them will hate them. There is nobody we love who we could not also come to hate in particular types of situations.

If you find yourself playing a hero role to some people, it might be in everybody’s interest to emphasize that while there may be certain situations that make you come across to some people as heroic, there are also situations that will reveal you to be a coward. Nobody is universally brave or universally kind or universally serene or universally faithful or universally honest.

In every relationship, we feel powerful tugs of attraction and repulsion. Sometimes the repulsion is at such a level, we can’t handle it and we have to end the relationship despite everything wonderful about it. The more mature a person, the more turbulence he can handle without lashing out at himself and others.

The five main personality traits of OCEAN (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) are partly conditioned by situation. In certain situations, I become extraverted and in other situations I became introverted. In some situations, I strongly more into all of these five traits, and in other situations, I move strongly against these traits.

I have a history of pursuing overly intense relationships in the work place as a distraction from work. Many of these relationships have blown up and destroyed my job. Once I recognized that certain relationship work only at a certain distance and any more intimacy threatens to blow things up, I more effectively navigate reality. Work is not always the place to meet my needs.

Putting myself in sexualized situations such as strip clubs don’t serve me.

I do a regular show on Youtube. Accurate criticism and friendly banter in the chat serve me, but when someone turns nasty, that tends not to bring out the best in me, so it is best for me (and maybe for them), that I ban them.

I have friends (such as Ricardo) who are wonderful friends on a periodic basis but if I interact with them every day, we hate each other.

Situationism is not necessarily moral relativism because one can regard the situation as determining the moral absolute. For example, one might regard the Torah and mesorah (Jewish tradition) as divine, but also recognize the challenge of applying the God-based rules to new and unexpected situations. You might struggle and even fail to find the divine absolute in your current situation or you make find the moral absolute and lack the strength to obey.

People can’t live for long failing to do what they believe is right. If you can’t quit smoking, you will stop believing that smoking is bad. If you can’t quit committing adultery, you will stop believing adultery is bad.

One of two things will almost always happen — you will start obeying the rules, or you will abandon your beliefs in the rules.

Disagreeing with a friend puts stress on the friendship. The closer the friendship, the more stress. The more situations you have that make your disagreement important, the more endangered your friendship.

I had my first cup of coffee this morning in many weeks and this caffeinated situation has made me more creative than usual. Because I don’t usually ingest caffeine, on those infrequent situations that I do, I often get added insight and energy.

If I didn’t have that cup of coffee this morning, I would not have written this post. On the other hand, my coffee this morning may reduce my sleep tonight, leading to a bad spiral in insomnia, causing a decrease in creativity and output.

A friend says:

It struck me your description of people is like certain foods. There are some foods you can eat everyday and others only once in a while. Some food in small servings, and some in big bowls. Some in cold weather, others in hot etc. I remember being surprised at myself by how taken I was when a Polish au-pair I was dating, made dinner for me, then took away the plates and brought in dessert etc. The line ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’ suddenly had new meaning. Whoa, Elliot did shrooms and Luke had a cup of coffee, it’s like the sixties in here.

I heard an argument that the shift to coffee caused the Enlightenment and the shift to beer caused depression.

In certain places, I am extroverted, charming and the life of the party. In other circumstances, I am shy, withdrawn and awkward. In certain arrangements, I am seen as prestigious, and in other arrangements, I seem like the Orthodox Judaism’s biggest loser.

With certain cohosts, I do fantastic Youtube shows. Without a cohost, I rarely do a fantastic show. I find it hard to sustain emotional energy without a certain type of cohost. Other cohosts start out as fantastic, and then over time, I find them increasingly draining and depressing (and they have not changed).

In last night’s debate about voter fraud, Joseph Cotto discussed how much I respect the New York Times and the Washington Post and how he did not place faith in any on media source. I believe all sources of information need to be understood critically (who said it, what are their ideologies and predilections, which groups are they most incentivized to please, what was the situation that gave rise to this communication, etc). That said, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post are broadsheets aimed at an average IQ of 115 while Fox News and the New York Post are down market tabloids aimed at a 100 IQ audience. Most nationally syndicated talk radio seems aimed at an audience with an average IQ of around 105 (Howard Stern and Sean Hannity probably aim at the 100 IQ crowd, Michael Medved and Dennis Prager at the 110 IQ crowd). PBS and NPR and the ABC in Australia probably shoot for the 110 crowd while commercial TV networks (prole feed) aim at the 95 group.

I spend about 20 minutes a day with the New York Times, 10-15 minutes with the Wall Street Journal and Steve Sailer and the New York Review of Books (meaning one day for an hour or two with the NYROB, and then no time for five days), and about five minutes each with the Washington Post, the New Yorker (about 20-30 minutes about once a week), ESPN, The Athletic, and the Los Angeles Times.

Some days I don’t have the bandwidth for some people, and other days I appreciate them in small doses. Others feel the same way about me. There’s nobody in my life who I love that I would not also hate in certain situations.

I went at it hard with Joseph Cotto last night, but there were no shots below the belt, and hence there was no damage to our friendship. Because I don’t consider myself childish or autistic, it causes me no offense to be called such. The only criticisms that wound are the ones that amplify my own insecurities. I don’t think Cotto was hurt when I said he lacked comprehension with regard to my comments on his show about Hans Von Popofsky.

Throughout my life, I have been called selfish. This did not help me to become unselfish. It seems to me that “selfish” people are only selfish in those situations where they feel gaping psychic wounds. If somebody has a huge wound, it does not help them to advise that they become less selfish. First, they have to heal. Once a person feels well, he’ll naturally incline to helping others. Happy people like helping others.

Telling a selfish person to become generous is like telling an alcoholic to stop drinking and a debtor to stop debting. First, they need a way to heal their wounds, and once they undergo a program of recovery, they will naturally incline to helping others.

You have to change their situation to change their traits.

The same person will be brave in some situations and cowardly in other situations. The same person will be generous in some situations and selfish in other situations. The same person will be righteous in some situations and wicked in other situations. Traits such as bravery, generosity and righteousness never characterize the totality of anyone. Nobody exhibits the same traits in every situation. In some situations, the person will be akin to a concentration camp victim, and in other situations, the same person will be akin to a concentration camp guard. There is no nationalism without an inclination to wipe our your enemies in dire situations. There is no victimhood without nationalism and no nationalism without victimhood and no nationalism and victimhood without freedom from moral restraints in certain circumstances.

A person who wants to be good will try to maximize situations that maximize his chances of behaving admirably and minimize those situations that are most likely to bring out his bad side. There’s more effectiveness in this approach, I think, than in trying to improve one’s global moral character.

When I am in hurry, I am short, curt, impatient and transactional in my interactions with others. The more stressed and competitive I feel, the more likely I am to behave in a spiteful manner. Hence, I’ve created a life where I’ve rarely had a long commute. I hate placing my happiness in the hands of circumstance. The shorter my commute, the more control I feel. The more control I feel over my life, the happier I am.

The more desperate I feel, the more moral latitude I feel. So the more I am able to build a life with little desperation, the more decently I behave. The more connected I feel to other people, the better I behave. My natural tendency is towards isolation, so I have to go against my tendencies to create a life that works. One way I do that is by volunteering up to about 10 hours a week. This provide me with energy and connection I would not otherwise enjoy and helps me to learn new skills and experience new sides to life. More than ten hours or so of volunteering a week and I feel that I am hiding from my life mission of writing and speaking.

Posted in Ethics | Comments Off on The Power Of The Situation To Shape Behavior

Most Common Vote Fraud Claims

Posted on June 10, 2021 by Luke Ford

Great analysis here from three political scientists:

ALLEGATIONS:

More votes than voters in MI Expert Witness: Ramsland USA Today
More votes than voters in PA PA State Rep. Frank Ryan AP News
More votes than voters nationally Trump tweet PolitiFact
Biden won record low number of counties Charlie Kirk tweet USA Today
Unexplained vote bumps in MI, WI, GA Nick Adams tweet Reuters
Felons, minors, deceased voted Trump tweet Sterling (GA)
Residents who moved out voted Navarro Report FactCheck.org
Pro-Biden split ticket in swing states Epoch Times 538
1/1015 chance of Biden victory Supreme Court case PolitiFact
Trump won more bellwether counties Tweet USA Today
Trump won more bellwether states Tweet USA Today
Lower rejection rate of absentee ballots Trump tweet Sterling (GA)
Missing absentee ballots Expert Witness: Miller Expert Report: King
Dominion machine manipulation Trump tweet Sterling (GA)

USA TODAY Dec. 31, 2020: The claim: Voter turnout in 4 Michigan townships exceeded number of voters by 290,000

The claim that Michigan’s Zeeland Charter Township had voter turnout that exceeded 100% is false. The affidavit falsely claims turnout there was 460.51%, however, data from Ottawa County shows that Zeeland Charter Township’s four precincts had turnout rates of 74.46%, 80.35%, 80.84% and 84.80%.

Spring Lake Township in Ottawa County, which is claimed in the affidavit to have 120% turnout, has six precincts that had turnout rates of 72.65%, 82.18%, 77.03%, 81.91%, 84.15% and 66.74%.

The chart included in the affidavit also falsely claims that Grout Township had a voter turnout rate of 215.21%. But Grout Township had a turnout of 67.23%, according to election data from Gladwin County. The higher rate did initially match data in the county’s statement of votes cast due to an error, the Detroit Free Press reported.

“We have to hand punch in the total number of registered voters, and they put in the wrong number of registered voters,” Gladwin County Clerk Laura Brandon-Maveal told the Free Press. A corrected report was released by the county on Dec. 3.

In Summit Township, a software settings error caused three precincts to show more than 100% voter turnout for the general election, according to Michigan Live. However, the voter turnout totals were fixed, and 71% of 18,365 registered voters cast ballots there.

Claims in the affidavit that voter turnout was at 100% in Greenwood, Hart, Leavitt, Newfield, Otto, Pentwater, Shelby and Weare townships are also false.

The Free Press reported that Greenwood had 65.50% voter turnout; Hart had 65.69%; Leavitt had 57.78%; Newfield had 62.30%; Otto had 65.99%; Pentwater had 82.13%; Shelby had 37.85% and Weare had 68.20%.

Voter turnout in Grand Island Township was accurately claimed in the affidavit as 96.77%. However, voter turnout in Tallmadge Charter Township was 78.89%, not 95.24%, and Fenton Township turnout was 81.56%, not 93.33%.

USA TODAY Nov. 8, 2020: Fact check: States don’t have more than 100% voter turnout in an election

Updated data and individual state reporting show no state had more than 100% voter turnout for the 2020 election. The implication that Democrats doctored election results to show higher turnout than possible is based off outdated data that has since been updated. We rate the claim that several swing-states received more votes than they had registered voters FALSE.

REUTERS Nov. 10, 2020: Fact check: Vote spikes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania do not prove election fraud

Social media users have been sharing posts claiming that during the night of Nov. 3 to Nov. 4 there were vote dumps of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots only for Democrat Joe Biden in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, suggesting this proves voter fraud allegations. These vote spikes did occur, but they also included Trump votes, accounted for largely left-leaning urban counties, and one state experienced a clerical error.

A spokesman for data analysis website FiveThirtyEight ( fivethirtyeight.com/ ) told Reuters via email that the jumps in Michigan and Wisconsin were due to counties releasing large batches of results all at once and that the votes were not just for Biden. One large jump of almost 140,000 ballots in Michigan was due to a clerical error that has since been resolved. In Pennsylvania both the Trump and Biden campaign gained around 1 million votes on the night of Nov. 3 to Nov. 4.

REUTERS Nov. 5, 2020: Fact check: Biden vote spikes and county recount do not prove Democrats are trying to steal the election in Michigan and Wisconsin

Social media users are sharing an article which cites examples of two large spikes in Biden votes, a county recount and late mail-in voting to prove that Democrats are trying to steal the election in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Although the details surrounding the Pennsylvania mail-in vote example are correct, the other claims are presented inaccurately: the spikes were due to an administrative error and a dump of votes favouring Biden respectively, and the recount was due to a mismatch in vote totals, rather than political factors.

The article by The Federalist (here) has been shared thousands of times on Facebook.

FiveThirtyEight told Reuters that it is not true that Biden received all the votes in the overnight dump: “these batches were NOT 100% Biden votes; behind the blue line, there is also a red line representing the thousands of votes Trump gained. There are also counter examples, where Trump’s line shoots up suddenly when a favorable batch of results are reported.”

It is true that mail-in ballots will be counted in Pennsylvania up to three days after Election Day, provided they were posted by Election Day, including if they have no postmark. However, large spikes in Biden votes were due to an administrative error in Michigan and the inputting of Milwaukee absentee results in Wisconsin. The Antrim County recount was called because vote totals did not match.

AP Dec. 29, 2020: There were not more votes than voters in Pennsylvania

CLAIM: There were 205,000 more votes than voters in the 2020 election in Pennsylvania.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. This analysis is based on incomplete data, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State.

THE FACTS: A misleading claim about election results from a group of Republican state lawmakers in Pennsylvania is circulating widely on social media a week before Congress meets to reaffirm Joe Biden’s decisive presidential win.

The claim emerged in a release from the Republican state Rep. Frank Ryan and several others on Monday.

“A comparison of official county election results to the total number of voters who voted on Nov. 3, 2020, as recorded by the Department of State shows that 6,962,607 total ballots were reported as being cast, while DoS/SURE system records indicate that only 6,760,230 total voters actually voted,” the release said.

The claim then spread to several right-wing websites and social media influencers, including Trump, whose tweet claiming Pennsylvania had 205,000 more votes than voters was retweeted 117,000 times.

However, these claims rely on incomplete data, according to Wanda Murren, communications director for the Pennsylvania Department of State, who called the lawmakers’ release “obvious misinformation.”

It was not immediately clear where the numbers cited in the release originated and Ryan did not respond to a call seeking comment on Tuesday. However, the apparent reference to SURE (Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors) in Pennsylvania points to state data on the voting history of registered voters, which some large counties have not finished uploading yet.

“These counties, which include Philadelphia, Allegheny, Butler and Cambria, would account for a significant number of voters,” Murren told The Associated Press in an emailed statement. “The numbers certified by the counties, not the uploading of voter histories into the SURE system, determines the ultimate certification of an election by the secretary.”

The numbers certified by Pennsylvania counties in November show that more than 6.9 million voters cast ballots in the 2020 election, electing Biden the winner by more than 80,000 votes.

Social media users in recent weeks have also made similar claims that there were more votes counted than registered voters in battleground states and key cities.

Those claims are easily debunked. In Pennsylvania, for example, there were nearly 7 million votes cast. The total number of registered voters in 2020 was just over 9 million.

From Factcheck.org, Oct. 16, 2016: Trump’s Bogus Voter Fraud Claims

Donald Trump is citing unsubstantiated urban myths and a contested academic study to paint a false narrative about rampant voter fraud in the U.S. and the likelihood of a “rigged” election.

Trump claimed “people that have died 10 years ago are still voting,” citing a report that found 1.8 million deceased people remain on voter registration rolls. But the report did not find evidence of wrongdoing, and numerous studies have found such voter fraud is virtually nonexistent.
Trump claimed there is a massive problem with “illegal immigrants [who] are voting,” citing research by Old Dominion professors who say noncitizen voters may have benefited Democrats in 2008. But a Harvard professor who manages the data used in the Old Dominion study said the data was misused and the study’s conclusions are wrong.
Finally, Trump broadly claimed that “voter fraud is very, very common,” and he has called for poll watchers to look for people impersonating voters or voting numerous times. However, numerous academic studies and government inquiries have found in-person voter fraud to be rare.
For weeks, Trump has been warning about rigged elections. He urged his supporters in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 10 to monitor polls and “watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us.”

In a speech in Wisconsin on Oct. 17, Trump provided some detail and purported evidence to back up his claims about the prevalence of voter fraud, particularly by noncitizens and people casting ballots on behalf of deceased voters. But we found that his evidence is lacking.

One of Trump’s principle claims of voter fraud is that “dead people” are voting in large numbers.

“People that have died 10 years ago are still voting,” Trump said in his Wisconsin speech.

Later, Trump cited a Pew Charitable Trust report as evidence of “dead people” voting in large numbers. But that’s not what the report says.

“The following information comes straight from Pew Research, quote, ‘Approximately 24 million people — one out of every eight — voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or significantly inaccurate.’ One in eight,” Trump said. “More than 1.8 million deceased individuals, right now, are listed as voters.’ Oh, that’s wonderful.”

“Well, if they’re gonna vote for me, we’ll think about it, right?” Trump joked. “But I have a feeling they’re not gonna vote for me. Of the 1.8 million, 1.8 million is voting for someone else.”

Trump accurately quoted from the report, “Inaccurate, Costly and Inefficient: Evidence That America’s Voter Registration System Needs and Upgrade.” But the report did not allege the 1.8 million deceased people actually voted. Rather, Pew said that it is evidence of the need to upgrade voter registration systems.

In fact, researchers say voter fraud involving ballots cast on behalf of deceased voters is rare.

“This issue of dead people voting is just not substantiated,” said Lorraine Minnite, a professor at Rutgers University and author of “The Myth of Voter Fraud.”

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 encouraged states to improve the accuracy of their registration lists and to audit their election results. As a result, Minnite told us in a phone interview, a number of states compared their voter lists to the Social Security Death Index, and in some cases they turned up hundreds or even thousands of apparent instances of “dead people” voting.

But with a bit of digging, almost all of those turned out to be due to clerical errors or as a result of people who legally voted via absentee ballots or the early voting process but later died before Election Day, Minnite said.

For example, in 2012 South Carolina’s attorney general notified the U.S. Department of Justice of potential voter fraud after finding 953 ballots cast in the 2010 election by voters listed as deceased, in some cases as long as six years. The finding ran in the Augusta Chronicle at the time in an Associated Press story under a headline, “South Carolina attorney general informs Justice Department of voter fraud.”

But a subsequent review by the State Election Commission found no evidence of fraud and that mostly the cases were clerical errors.

In a letter to the attorney general, the executive director of the State Election Commission wrote that it only had the resources to investigate 207 cases from the most recent 2010 election. Of those cases, it found 106 cases were the result of clerical errors by poll managers; 56 cases were the result of bad data matching, meaning that the person in question was not actually dead; 32 cases were “voter participation errors,” including stray marks on lists erroneously indicting they had voted; three cases were absentee ballots issued to registered voters who cast ballots and later died before Election Day; and 10 cases contained “insufficient information in the record to make a determination.”

Cases of people actually voting fraudulently on behalf of deceased people are rare — though isolated examples have occurred, Minnite said.

“There are a handful of known cases in which documentation shows that votes have been cast in the names of voters who have died before the vote was submitted,” wrote Justin Levitt in a 2007 report, “The Truth About Voter Fraud,” for the Brennan Center for Justice. “It is far more common, however, to see unfounded allegations of epidemic voting from beyond the grave.”

Much of the misinformation about “dead people voting” is due to “flawed matches from one place (death records) to another (voter rolls),” Levitt found. Levitt explored five reports of widespread fraud regarding “dead voters” and found all of them were unfounded or greatly exaggerated.

Allegations of “busloads” of people going from polling place to polling place — such as Giuliani described — is a common urban myth, Minnite said. She has heard tales of busloads of college students coming into New Hampshire to vote, and about busloads of Mexicans from Oklahoma voting in Kansas. And in every case — including Giuliani’s, she said — there is no evidence for them.

“These sort of fictions about busloads of people, you hear about it a lot on the right,” Minnite said. “It is just very unlikely. Think about how and why it would happen. It makes no sense.”

You’d have to know the person you were impersonating hadn’t voted yet, and that the person at the poll doesn’t know that person, she said. And in a busload of people, you’d have to count on every one of them keeping quiet.

“And for what? What is the benefit of it?” Minnite said. There is very little payoff with the potential for a felony conviction. And in the case of immigrants in the country illegally, the risk of permanent deportation.”

A December 2006 report by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission interviewed more than two dozen researchers and experts on voter fraud and intimidation, including Minnite. That report concluded that “impersonation of voters is probably the least frequent type of fraud because it is the most likely type of fraud to be discovered, there are stiff penalties associated with this type of fraud, and it is an inefficient method of influencing an election.”

In an Aug. 16, 2014, article for the Washington Post, Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, currently on leave to work with the Department of Justice overseeing voting, wrote that he has been tracking allegations of voter fraud for years, including any “credible allegation that someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls, in any way that an ID law could fix.”

“So far,” he wrote, “I’ve found about 31 different incidents (some of which involve multiple ballots) since 2000, anywhere in the country. … To put this in perspective, the 31 incidents below come in the context of general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014. In general and primary elections alone, more than 1 billion ballots were cast in that period.”

In 2012, a team of students led by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University analyzed 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases since 2000 and concluded that “while fraud has occurred, the rate is infinitesimal, and in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent.”

In October 2002, the Justice Department in the George W. Bush administration introduced the Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative, which was charged, in part, with targeting voter fraud. But as Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson pointed out in 2007, the efforts between October 2002 and September 2005 resulted in “just 38 cases [being] brought nationally, and of those, 14 ended in dismissals or acquittals, 11 in guilty pleas, and 13 in convictions.”

Wrote Meyerson: “Though a Justice Department manual on election crime states that these cases ‘may present an easier means of obtaining convictions than do other forms of public corruption,’ federal attorneys have failed to rack up those convictions, for the simple reason that incidents of fraud have been few and far between.”

Posted in Voter Fraud | Comments Off on Most Common Vote Fraud Claims

How claims of voter fraud were supercharged by bad science

Posted on June 10, 2021 by Luke Ford

From MIT Technology Review:

* Published in 2014 by Jesse Richman, a political science professor at Old Dominion University, it argues that illegal votes have played a major role in recent political outcomes. In 2008, Richman argued, “non-citizen votes” for Senate candidate Al Franken “likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform.”

The paper has become canonical among conservatives. Whenever you hear that 14% of non-citizens are registered to vote, this is where it came from. Many of today’s other claims of voter fraud—such as through mail-in voting—also trace back to this study. And it’s easy to see why it has taken root on the right: higher turnout in elections generally increases the number of Democratic voters, and so proof of massive voter fraud justifies voting restrictions that disproportionately affect them.

Academic research on voting behavior is often narrowly focused and heavily qualified, so Richman’s claim offered something exceedingly rare: near certainty that fraud was happening at a significant rate. According to his study, at least 38,000 ineligible voters—and perhaps as many as 2.8 million—cast ballots in the 2008 election, meaning the “blue wave” that put Obama in office and expanded the Democrats’ control over Congress would have been built on sand. For those who were fed up with margins of error, confidence intervals, and gray areas, Richman’s numbers were refreshing. They were also very wrong.

* Until Richman’s 2014 paper, the virtual consensus among academics was that non-citizen voting didn’t exist on any functional level. Then he and his coauthors examined CCES data and claimed that such voters could actually number several million.

Richman asserted that the illegal votes of non-citizens had changed not only the pivotal 60th Senate vote but also the race for the White House. “It is likely though by no means certain that John McCain would have won North Carolina were it not for the votes for Obama cast by non-citizens,” the paper says. After its publication, Richman then wrote an article for the Washington Post with a similarly provocative headline that focused on the upcoming 2014 midterms: “Could non-citizens decide the November election?”

Unsurprisingly, conservatives ran with this new support for their old narrative and have continued to do so. The study’s fans include President Trump, who used it to justify the creation of his short-lived and failed commission on voter fraud, and whose claims about illegal voting are now a centerpiece of his campaign.

But most other academics saw the study as an example of methodological failure. Ansolabehere, whose CCES data Richman relied on, coauthored a response to Richman’s work titled “The Perils of Cherry Picking Low-Frequency Events in Large Sample Sizes.”

For starters, he argued, the paper overweighted the non-citizens in the survey—just as the Black Midwestern voter was overweighted to produce an illusion of widespread Black support for Trump. This was especially problematic in Richman’s study, wrote Ansolabehere, when you consider the impact that a tiny number of people who were misclassified as non-citizens would have on the data. Some people, said Ansolabehere, had likely misidentified themselves as ineligible to vote in the 2008 study by mistake—perhaps out of sloppiness, misunderstanding, or just the rush to accumulate points for gift cards. Critically, nobody who had claimed to be a non-citizen in both the 2010 survey and the follow-up in 2012 had cast a validated vote.

Nearly 200 social scientists echoed Ansolabehere’s concerns in an open letter, but for Harold Clarke, then editor of the journal that published Richman’s paper, the blowback was hypocritical. “If we were to condemn all the papers on voting behavior that have made claims about political participation based on survey data,” he says, “well, this paper is identical. There’s no difference whatsoever.”

As it turns out, survey data does contain a lot of errors—not least because many people who say they voted are lying. In 2012, Ansolabehere and a colleague discovered that huge numbers of Americans were misreporting their voting activity. But it wasn’t the non-citizens, or even the people who were in Matt Braynard’s group of “low propensity” voters.

Instead, found the researchers, “well-educated, high-income partisans who are engaged in public affairs, attend church regularly, and have lived in the community for a while are the kinds of people who misreport their vote experience” when they haven’t voted at all. Which is to say: “high-propensity” voters and people likely to lie about having voted look identical. Across surveys done over the telephone, online, and in person, about 15% of the electorate may represent these “misreporting voters.”

Ansolabehere’s conclusion was a milestone, but it relied on something not every pollster has: money. For his research, he contracted with Catalist, a vendor that buys voter registration data from states, cleans it, and sells it to the Democratic Party and progressive groups. Using a proprietary algorithm and data from the CCES, the firm validated every self-reported claim of voting behavior by matching individual survey responses with the respondents’ voting record, their party registration, and the method by which they voted. This kind of effort is not just expensive (the Election Project, a voting information source run by a political science professor at the University of Florida, says the cost is roughly $130,000) but shrouded in mystery: third-party companies can set the terms they want, including confidentiality agreements that keep the information private.

In a response to the criticism of his paper, Richman admitted his numbers might be off. The estimate of 2.8 million non-citizen voters “is itself almost surely too high,” he wrote. “There is a 97.5% chance that the true value is lower.”

Despite this admission, however, Richman continued to promote the claims.

In March of 2018, he was in a courtroom testifying that non-citizens are voting en masse.

Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, was defending a law that required voters to prove their citizenship before registering to vote. Such voter ID laws are seen by many as a way to suppress legitimate votes, because many eligible voters—in this case, up to 35,000 Kansans—lack the required documents. To underscore the argument and prove that there was a genuine threat of non-citizen voting, Kobach’s team hired Richman as an expert witness.

Paid a total of $40,663.35 for his contribution, Richman used various sources to predict the number of non-citizens registered to vote in the state. One estimate, based on data from a Kansas county that was later proved to be inaccurate, put the number at 433. Another, extrapolated from CCES data, said it was 33,104. At the time, there were an estimated 115,000 adult residents in Kansas who were not American citizens—including green card holders and people on visas. By Richman’s calculations, that would mean nearly 30% of them were illegally registered to vote. Overall, his estimates ran from roughly 11,000 to 62,000. “We have a 95% confidence that the true value falls somewhere in that range,” he testified.

The judge ended up ruling that voter ID laws were unconstitutional. “All four of [Richman’s] estimates, taken individually or as a whole, are flawed,” she wrote in her opinion.

* I asked Richman earlier this summer if we should trust the sort of wide-ranging numbers he gave in his study, or in his testimony in Kansas. No, he answered, not necessarily. “One challenge is that people want to know what the levels of non-citizen registration and voting are with a level of certainty that the data at hand doesn’t provide,” he wrote me in an email.

In fact, Richman told me, he “ultimately agreed” with the judge in the Kansas case despite the fact that she called his evidence flawed. “On the one hand, I think that non-citizen voting happens, and that public policy responses need to be cognizant of that,” he told me. “On the other hand, that doesn’t mean every public policy response makes an appropriate trade-off between the various kinds of risk.”

Behind the academic language, he’s saying essentially what every other expert on the subject has already said: fraud is possible, so how do we balance election security with accessibility? Unlike his peers, however, Richman reached that conclusion by first publishing a paper with alarmist findings, writing a newspaper article about it, and then testifying that non-citizen voting was rampant, maybe, despite later agreeing with the decision that concluded he was wrong.

Whatever Richman’s reasons for this, his work has helped buttress the avalanche of disinformation in this election cycle.

Throughout the 2020 election campaign, President Trump has continued to make repeated, unfounded claims that vote-by-mail is insecure, and that millions of votes are being illegally cast. And last year, when a ballot harvesting scandal hit the Republican Party in North Carolina and forced a special election that led to a Democratic win, one operative made an appearance on Fox News to accuse the left of encouraging an epidemic of voter fraud.

“The left is enthusiastic about embracing this technique in states like California,” he said. “Voter fraud’s been one of the left’s most reliable voter constituencies.”

The speaker? Matt Braynard.

Posted in Voter Fraud | Comments Off on How claims of voter fraud were supercharged by bad science

‘Trump’s Claims About Illegal Votes Are Nonsense. I Debunked the Study He Cites as ‘Evidence.’’

Posted on June 10, 2021 by Luke Ford

From Politico.com: Brian Schaffner is a political science professor at University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the founding director of UMass Poll.

Donald Trump is making news with his false claim that he would have won the national popular vote if millions of non-citizens had not voted in November. As evidence, he and his staff are pointing to a study by Jesse Richman and his co-authors that was published in the journal Electoral Studies and advertised on the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog. As a member of the team that produces the datasets upon which that study was based and as the co-author of an article published in the same journal that provides a clear “take down” of the study in question, I can say unequivocally that this research is not only wrong, it is irresponsible social science and should never have been published in the first place. There is no evidence that non-citizens have voted in recent U.S. elections.

I first came across the Richman study in 2014 when I was sent a link to an article by the authors promoting their newly published work. Their chief claim, and the one that made headlines, was that as many as 14 percent of noncitizens living in the United States had cast votes in recent elections. As soon as I saw that figure, I knew it was almost certainly nonsense, but what was troubling was that the “evidence” the scholars were pointing to was from a survey that I coordinate along with my colleagues Stephen Ansolabehere of Harvard University and Samantha Luks from the survey research firm YouGov. The survey is the Cooperative Congressional Election Study—a project that interviews tens of thousands of respondents every election year about their views on politics. A wealth of excellent research has come from this dataset in the past decade, providing important insights about our political world. Unfortunately, the Richman study doesn’t fall into that category. It is bad research, because it fails to understand basic facts about the data it uses.

Indeed, it took me and my colleagues only a few hours to figure out why the authors’ findings were wrong and to produce the evidence needed to prove as much. The authors were essentially basing their claims on two pieces of data associated with the large survey—a question that asks people whether they are citizens and official vote records to which each respondent has been matched to determine whether he or she had voted. Both these pieces of information include some small amounts of measurement error, as is true of all survey questions. What the authors failed to consider is that measurement error was entirely responsible for their results. In fact, once my colleagues and I accounted for that error, we found that there were essentially zero non-citizens who voted in recent elections.

The biggest source of error with the Richman study was its use of one of the survey questions to identify “non-citizens.” Survey respondents occasionally select the wrong response by accident—perhaps because they are rushing through and not reading the questions carefully, because they do not fully understand the terminology being used, or because they simply click on the wrong box on the page. Such errors are infrequent, but they happen in any survey. In this case, they were crucial, because Richman and his colleagues saw the very small number of people who answered that they were “immigrant non-citizens,” and extrapolated that (inaccurate) number to the U.S. population as a whole.

How do we know that some people give an inaccurate response to this question? Well, we actually took 19,000 respondents from one of the surveys that Richman used (the 2010 study) and we interviewed them again in 2012. A total of 121 of the 19,000 respondents (.64 percent) identified themselves as immigrant non-citizens when they first answered the survey in 2010. However, when asked the question again in 2012, 36 of the 121 selected a different response, indicating that they were citizens. Even more telling was this: 20 respondents identified themselves as citizens in 2010 but then in 2012 changed their answers to indicate that they were non-citizens. It is highly unrealistic to go from being a citizen in 2010 to a non-citizen in 2012, which provides even stronger evidence that some people were providing incorrect responses to this question for idiosyncratic reasons.

Since Richman was trying to extrapolate from a very small fraction of respondents to the survey, even these very small amounts of measurement error could cause major problems for his analysis. To get a more valid estimate of non-citizen voting, we can look at the 85 respondents who said that they were non-citizens in both waves of the survey. Since this group answered the question the same way twice, we can be much more confident that they really are non-citizens. Among these 85 respondents, zero were matched to a valid vote record in 2010. That is, all of the non-citizen voters that Richman reports in his study for the 2010 election disappear once we account for measurement error.

In the 2012 election, we do find that one of these 85 non-citizens was matched to a vote record. However, given that this is just one individual among 85 non-citizens, it is unlikely that this is actually a non-citizen voter. One possibility is that this is a citizen who answered the question incorrectly twice. Another possibility is that this individual was matched to the wrong vote record. That’s another place where survey error comes in. When we match survey respondents to vote records, there is always some probability of making an incorrect match—that is, matching a respondent to a record that is actually somebody else’s. Even though the error rate is low, it could easily explain why we find a single voter in 2012 among 85 reported non-citizens.

In our article refuting the Richman study, we summarize our findings very plainly this way: “The results, we show, are completely accounted for by very low frequency measurement error; further, the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0.” We are confident that such a conclusion would hold in 2016 as well.

Simply put, the claims Trump is making are false through and through. Fact checkers and major news organizations have consistently pointed to our study over the past few months to demonstrate that Trump’s claims are based on bad science, yet he continues to use this debunked information to demonize non-citizens as justification for his self-serving claims about voter fraud. Let’s hope the public stops paying attention.

Posted in Voter Fraud | Comments Off on ‘Trump’s Claims About Illegal Votes Are Nonsense. I Debunked the Study He Cites as ‘Evidence.’’

Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law

Posted on June 9, 2021 by Luke Ford

Richard Hananiah writes:

Liberals control institutions because they care more about politics, a disparity that grew larger around 2016. This makes attempts to use government (i.e., bureaucracy!) to take back the culture unlikely to succeed, at least in the short term.

What should conservatives do, then? I’m talking about the anti-woke portion of conservatism, which increasingly seems to be the most animated part of the movement. This post is not meant to be advice for gun people, abortion people, or low tax people; those parts of the right have figured out how to have influence and are doing relatively well.

The good news is that there can be an anti-wokeness agenda, just as easily as there is a low tax agenda and a pro-gun rights agenda.

People have generally misunderstood wokeness as a purely cultural phenomenon. It does have a cultural component, of course, but it is important to also understand wokeness as something that has been law in the United States for the last half century.

The triumph of this ideology over the last 10 years in public discourse is simply culture catching up to law. To reverse what has happened, one needs to know a bit of the history, and how every major institution in the country came to act and think in the exact same way.

Posted in Civil Rights | Comments Off on Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law

The Art Of Spiritual War (6-9-21)

Posted on June 9, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 What gives you energy?
06:00 Curing Back Pain in 90 Seconds, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lnmI_EsbW0
10:00 My fave music playlist, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1_xDytEB1Q&list=PLhQp0uq1786ISg586sYF7k8cDug1-avU0
34:00 Nadine Strossen – Fighting for Free Speech in Today’s America, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-dxdhFOgSM
35:40 Boys & Men Count, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiMYmwqgkJg
51:00 I stand with Israel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ErE7kl_Bk
1:07:20 ROTC: Laura Loomer Does Something Stupid, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww4wpv4TuXw
1:22:00 The origins of Covid
1:30:00 US-China relations: Biden’s trade strike force sees US turn to aggressive ‘industrial policy’ to counter Beijing, https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3136617/us-china-relations-bidens-trade-strike-force-sees-us-turn
1:31:30 Milo’s regrets, https://www.bitchute.com/video/FmZLDQF9UIRY/
1:32:30 Could Donald Trump become Speaker of the House?
1:33:40 Rick Wiles is back, https://www.bitchute.com/video/tHcRTqbMeGsB/
1:48:00 Milo’s trolling for Jesus
2:37:30 Tammy Bruce on America’s crime wave
2:41:20 Ghost Town NYC – Complex Problems and How NOT to Solve Them, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsE4TpKTpb4
2:49:00 Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law, https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
3:01:50 Why isn’t Trump on Gab?
3:09:10 Tucker Carlson on Kamala Harris’s trip south of the border

Shifting identification: A theory of apologies and pseudo-apologies, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140047

Posted in America | Comments Off on The Art Of Spiritual War (6-9-21)