2068

Congratulations Randall, XKCD has finally become the worst thing about campaign season.

2067

This is one of the worst political maps I've ever seen. Randall is mapping multiple variables onto the same aesthetic, which goes against the grammar of graphics. The size of each name indicates both the "height" of the office (what does that mean, anyway? is a Senator "higher" than a Governor?) and the challenger's chance of winning, so there's a serious confounding issue there-- in Montana, is Matt Rosendale bigger than Kathleen Williams because the Senate is "higher" than the House, or because he has a better chance of winning? Also, no scale is provided, so it's impossible to tell relatively how likely any of these people are to win in the first place. I guess the intended take-home message is supposed to be that the Democrats are going to clean up on Tuesday, since there are a lot more big blue names than big red ones, but then you have to remember that all those blue names are challenging red ones to begin with. When you consider that every one of those Democratic names is running for a seat currently held by a Republican, the Democratic Party is actually doing worse than I thought.

Consider, too, Randall's condescending disdain for people who actually care about sports. He knows that caring about sports is dumb, because it's just an atavistic urge toward tribal solidarity expressing itself in an incredibly lower-class way. All that endless talk about how teams stack up against each other is such a huge waste of time; the outcome of the game will be decided by the players when they play, and it won't matter after the game anyway. For all these reasons, real intellectuals know that sports are stupid, and that you should care about more important things like who's going to win legislature seats in a state you'll never visit.

2066

This is a fascinating window onto Randall's technofetishism. He really appears to have negative feelings about laws against using cameras while people are voting. The alt text raises several questions, among which the one it highlights is (naturally) the least interesting. What "were" the good reasons for such laws? What harm do they inflict? In what sense are they now doing more harm than good? When, approximately, did this balance shift?

Of course the obvious answer is that none of these questions actually have answers, because "does more harm than good" is a bromide, an empty phrase employed to avoid thought. But in a deeper sense, it may be that Randall is actually incapable of engaging in even the act of voting-- the foundation of citizenship-- without using his cell phone. The simple but momentous act of casting a ballot is not "real" for him, unless he can in some way document it on the internet. Even his capacity to function civically is bound up in and dependent upon technologies that did not exist a mere ten years ago.

What a sad creature.

2065

Does Randall really think only 15% of his contacts are just politely putting up with him?

2064

From a reader:

In which Randall comes out in favor of Voter ID laws

2063

This is so lazy I'm embarrassed for the AI that wrote it.

2061

So Randall was reading the Wikipedia article about plate tectonics, and idly thought it would be a cool idea for a computer game. But, realizing that that wasn't a very good joke, he decided that it would be a computer game in real time, and struck comedy gold. He also blew half of his ink budget for the year.


2062

And there goes the other half of the ink budget.