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general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall Voting

Is Democracy Undemocratic?

ballot measure, money, Colorado, initiative, women's sports, trans

“Blue-state voters buck the wave — and demand sanity on trans athletes.”

That’s how The New York Post headlined an opinion piece by Jennifer Sey, founder and CEO of XX-XY Athletics, applauding victories for ballot initiatives in four states that will keep biological males out of women’s sports. 

In Arizona, while the incumbent Democratic governor won reelection by nearly 13 percentage points, a proposition requiring “people to play on the sports team and use private locker room space based on their biological sex” passed by almost 18 points. 

Nebraska voters passed Initiative 442 to ban male participation on female sports teams by better than a two-to-one margin.

Deep blue Washington state likewise voted overwhelmingly to protect girls’ sports with Measure 638 garnering 57 percent support.

Democrats won the U.S. Senate seat in Colorado by nearly 25 points and the race for governor by more than 27 points. But even with opponents of prohibiting men in women’s sports outspending its proponents by better than 16 to one, Proposition 134 nonetheless prevailed.

“Ballot measures are a function of funding more than anything and are wildly undemocratic,” Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, posted on Instagram.

Strangio is badly mistaken, as spending on the issue in Colorado so clearly demonstrates; not to mention delusional as well, in calling a public vote not only somehow “undemocratic,” but “wildly” so.

An election report by NBC News’ Adam Edelman said that “Republicans and conservative groups also placed a series of measures targeting transgender individuals on the ballot in several states.” Yet these ballot measures were not targeting transgender women. 

This issue is about sports, basic fairness, and protecting biological women. Even blue state voters understand.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Past Common Sense on the issue:

My Sporting Double-Standard — Paul Jacob on the birds, bees and basics of athletic competition. (August 28, 2026)
Trouble with Definitions — Paul Jacob on knowing a man or woman when he sees one. (January 15, 2026)
Trans-Violent — Paul Jacob on thug activism for trans dominance. (April 12, 2023)

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Thought

Pareto

History is a graveyard of aristocracies.

Vilfredo Pareto, The Rise and Fall of Elites (1901; 1968).

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Today

Gandhi Arrested

On November 6, 1913, Mohandes K. Gandhi was arrested for participating in a march of Indian miners in South Africa.

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meme

Hey Democrats!

social democracy, socialism, authoritarianism, DSA, democratic socialists of America

ASK GROK:

  1. Why has state socialism ALWAYS resulted in authoritarianism?
  2. Would “more democracy” or nicer leaders have saved those murderous regimes?
  3. Are the Scandinavian states an example of successful socialism OR… an example of strong capitalist market economies with large welfare states? Do the Nordic states see “state ownership of the means of production” as their ultimate goal?
  4. Does the DSA advocate for state ownership of the means of production?

Typical GROK responses:
1. Central planning requires coercive power to override markets, prices, and dissent; economic failure then demands more force (USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela).
2. No: structure, not personalities, drives centralization. Allende, Yugoslavia still concentrated power.
3. Capitalist market economies + large welfare states. Private ownership predominates; leaders reject socialism and state ownership of production as a goal.
4. Yes: DSA platform calls for public ownership of largest corporations and key industries.

Categories
meme

Ask Grok

ask Grok, State Socialism, authoritarianism

ASK GROK:
1. Why has State Socialism ALWAYS resulted in authoritarianism?

2. Would “more democracy” or nicer leaders have saved those murderous regimes?

3. Is Scandinavia an example of “successful socialism” or are the Nordic states examples of strong capitalist market economies with large welfare states (and zero interest in state ownership of the “means of production”)?

Typical GROK response:
1. Central planning requires one authority to direct all resources without market prices, creating shortages and incentives to coerce compliance and silence alternatives. Power concentrates; history shows the pattern across regimes.

2. Unlikely. The structure demands uniformity over competing claims or restraint; nicer leaders still face the same logic.

3. Nordic states are capitalist market economies (private ownership of most production, top-tier economic freedom rankings) with large tax-funded welfare systems. Leaders there reject the socialist label.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

The Good News

Trump, midterms, election, Democrats, Republicans, noncitizen voting, immigration

Republicans suffered a thumping by Democrats across the country, Tuesday, not only losing their majority in the U.S. House, but also losing the Senate — beaten badly in GOP strongholds including Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas.

Plus, Senate contests in Alaska and ruby-red Mississippi are still too close to call.

The only “conservative” bright spots? Ballot issues decided by the very same voters who booted the GOP and boosted Democrats. 

Take California’s Proposition 40. Puh-lease. Though the ever-envious left loves the idea of confiscatory taxation against people whose only crime is producing wealth, the actual votes of Californians have the Billionaire Wealth Tax losing by 11 percentage points. (If we can live long enough to see Golden State ballot tabulators actually finish counting, we may legitimately celebrate.)

Citizen Only Voting measures swept at the ballot box in five states: Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia. “The laws are expected to prevent any local jurisdictions from moving to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections,” NBC reported, “which some municipalities have sought to do in recent years.”

Yes, non-citizens are now voting — legally — in 24 U.S. cities in four states and the District of Columbia. In most of those cities, even non-citizens here illegally are empowered to cast a ballot.

Conversely, since 2018, more than 45 million voters in 20 states have had the opportunity to decide whether their state and local elections should be limited to American citizens. Thus far, Citizen Only Voting is 20-0. 

More sanity? Nebraska legislators placed a constitutional amendment on Tuesday’s ballot to weaken their term limits; more than 80 percent of Cornhusker voters said, “No.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought Today

The Fifth

On the Fifth of November, 1605, Guy Fawkes was arrested in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament, where he had planted gunpowder in an attempt to blow up the building and kill King James I of England. Now known as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, originally called the Gunpowder Treason Plot or the Jesuit Treason, the conspiracy was an unsuccessful attempted regicide against by a group of English Catholics, led by Robert Catesby.

Guy Fawkes himself had been assigned to light the fuse. He was tortured, tried, and finally executed on the last day of the first month of the next year. Parliament declared a memorial day of November Fifth, and the event has been celebrated in one form or other ever since, echoed in literature, with poems by John Milton (1626), a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth (1841), and a comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd (1982-1989) contributing to the memorials. The latter was turned into a movie, V for Vendetta (2006), in which the hero wears a Guy Fawkes mask (designed by Lloyd) and recites a famous nursery rhyme on the subject:

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Categories
Accountability ideological culture national politics & policies Voting

What Was Applied

midterms, election, voting, Republicans, Democrats, Socialism, Islam, war,

Shellac seems to have entered English from India in the 1600s. The noun was derived from “shell” + “lac” — a resin secreted by the lac insect of South Asia, scraped from trees, refined into flakes and dissolved in alcohol to make varnish. 

It was ubiquitous in the 19th and early 20th centuries for furniture finishing, phonograph records, and sealing things.

In American slang, “shellac” came to refer to cheap alcohol and the adjective “shellacked” to being drunk. Shellac joined other slang terms for hooch like “varnish.”

From this latter meaning, “shellacked” morphed into “beaten up” or “trounced” — someone staggering after a fight looked much like someone staggering out of a saloon. By the 1930s, sportswriters were using “shellacking” freely to describe lopsided defeats. You’ll find it ubiquitous in boxing and baseball coverage of that era; political writers followed suit, saying a defeated candidate had “taken a shellacking.”

Yesterday, Donald Trump and the Republicans took the proverbial shellacking.

We’ve seen this sort of thing before. It’s not unheard of. Americans repudiate failed programs, and Trump, who promised to keep the American people out of war did the precise opposite of what got him elected in the first place. Only by grace extended from the American people could the application of the varnish be withheld.

Boy, that grace was so not extended! Overwhelmingly electing members of a party that includes actual “seize the means of production” communists was . . . graceless? 

A kind of justice, maybe.

This could be a warning to all: the awfulness of your opponents will not stay the hand of shellac . . . er, citizen correction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Yves Guyot

When the first fire-engine appeared in Japan the carpenters asked to have it removed because it robbed workmen of the employment provided by fires. Bastiat himself never invented anything better.

Yves Guyot, The Comedy of Protection, 1906, viii, referring to Frédéric Bastiat’s infamous satires on protectionism, such as “The Candle-makers’ Petition” and the “Negative Railroad.”
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Today

Cyber-Dissident

On November 4, 2002, Chinese authorities arrested cyber-dissident He Depu for signing a pro-democracy letter to the 16th Communist Party Congress. He Depu was released from prison on January 24, 2011; the day of his release he was beaten by four police officers.