I've asked Russ to either take down his website, or at least remove from it my articles, and anything there that has its origin in any suggestions or comments that I'd sent to Russ.
Over the years, Russ's website has been an ongoing embarrassment on EM, because Russ has often
reworded my definitions in a way that is ambiguous or means something different from the wordings that I'd sent to him.
I've been getting more and more tired of hearing on EM about "my" ambiguous defrinitions on the electionmethods website.
Most of what was at electionmethods can be found at the following website:
http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/vote/sing.html
The Approval strategy articles there need some updating, but, with possibly a few changes, the rest is up to date. Of course I'll update whatever needs it.
So I recommend http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/vote/sing.html as the replacement for the electionmethods website.
But Russ's befuddled rewording of my definitions wasn't the final reason to ask him to cancel the website. It took a little more than that.
In electoral reform we sometimes work with people with whom we don't agree politically, when we're all working for some common goal. Election reform for instance.
Russ calls himself a "libertarian", but I doubt that many genuine libertarians would agree with that designation of himself. He's really more Republican than the Republicans, more Bush than Bush, and more violent in his intentions toward people in the smaller, weaker countries than Bush is.
But because I felt that electoral reform is worthwhile, I tried to avoid ethical and moral topics.. The problem is that Russ is also loud. He wasn't inclined to keep his beliefs to himself. Finally I decided that I'm working with voting systems because of principle, and principle doesn't call for not replying to someone like that. I've done my part by sending the articles and definitions, etc., and what someone else does or doesn't do with them after that isn't my concern. So I began letting Russ know where he was in error.
Russ, it turns out, is someone whose only way to reply to someone who doesn't agree with him is by raging, ranting namecalling. Of course that sets him up for a few little comments that aren't entirely flattering either, and so I provided a few of those. That predictably ratched-up Russ's anger
level all the more, and it finally today reacahed the point where I told him to either take down the website or remove from it my articles and anything else there that originated from anything that I'd sent to Russ.
Well, it would be off-topic to post those discussions here, and of course it would be unethical to post private e-mail. But his latest anger resulted from my reply to his claim that when we tax capital gains, we're taxing the investment income twice. Why is that? Because if we tax your money at 20% before you invest it, , then you're only investing .8 times as much as you otherwise would. Therefore your profit is only 80% what it would have been if we hadn't taxed your money before you invested it. Therefore, your investment income has been "effectively" taxed at 20%. :-)
So then, if we tax capital gains, we're twice taxing your investment income, says Russ.
I tried to explain his obvious fallacy to him, and that set off his worst anger, and that's when I told him to take the website down, because he'd become someone I didn't want to work with.
That aside from his garbled, befuddled and ambiguous wordings of my definitions.
Russ's latest letter added that he was deeply offended by my lack of support for the men and women who are fighting for our freedom in Iraq.
Does anyone believe that those thousand-plus U.S. combat deaths, and many times more wounded, were necessary to protect our freedom. Are the Iraqis trying to take away our freedom?
Apparently to Russ and some others, "supporting the troops" means keeping them over there to be killed or shot-up, not letting them come home when their term is up.
Anyway, that was the last straw, that plus all the garbled, befuddled and vague rewordings of my definitions at Russ's website.
Mike Ossipoff
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