I think that's a reasonable approach. We can never have perfection, but we can strive to avoid mistakes, and one way is through requiring better evidence, as you called it "beyond doubt". What standards would you suggest?

Ah, I missed the Sweden reference, thanks. Too much stuff to read this morning and I'm skimming at best.

I'm not against the death penalty; I'm against making irreparable mistakes.

There's a way to prevent gung-ho justice: if judgment is later found to be in error, visit the same penalty on those who condemned. Tho I vaguely recall this principle comes from Sharia law, and if so it doesn't seem to limit behavior much in Real Life.

I don't know the case -- was it an American elk or a moose? Cuz both are dangerous under the wrong circumstances, but moose far more so.

"When four men sit down to talk conspiracy, three are government agents and the fourth is a fool."
-- Russian proverb

Where'd you get that newfangled hearin' aid?? I needs me one.

That theory has been put forth, and probably has often been true, but it falls down when it comes to state offices -- where statewide, approval rating was in the toilet, yet the same people got re-elected.

There's also the problem of low turnout. In my SoCal town, the same guy has had a monopoly on the mayor's office for years, yet is widely hated. So how did he stay in office? In the last election while I lived there, less than 2% (yes, TWO percent) of registered voters actually voted. Or at least that was what was reported to the SoS office... there were irregularities sufficient that an investigation was scheduled, but nothing ever came of it.

I'm reminded of a tale from the 1972 Presidential election, from someone I knew who was doing a door-to-door survey: When asked their views, most people espoused typical conservative points. But the final survey question was: Who do you think would make a good president? And the most common answer, even from very conservative voters, was "Teddy Kennedy" (then the most liberal man in all of politics). The conclusion from the survey's data was that most voters didn't actually know what a given candidate stood for, but they sure as hell knew the names. (Mind you this was back when most of these voters would remember JFK firsthand.)

Here in Montana, if someone has an abysmal rating, they're likely to get voted out. One might offer a correlation with the much better educational level...

More than an advantage; in California, it's a shoo-in.

At the last major election before I moved back out of CA -- I forget the year, mighta been 2010 -- public satisfaction with elected state officials was just 13%.

Yet *100%* of incumbants got re-elected. (I checked every race listed on the Secretary of State site. There were NO exceptions.)

If that ain't name-recognition at work, well, you tell me.

And yes, CA has more than its fair share of yellow-dog Democrats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The term originated in the late 19th century. These voters would allegedly "vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for any Republican".

Small world :) I'd like to see pricks like that one's pet shyster get disbarred, but not likely to happen very often.

We are all in the wrong business!

I've been heard to say that the first freedom is economic, because it allows you to exercise the second freedom, which is the ability to travel, and that all other freedoms ultimately derive from these.

A comment below by drinkypoo also gave me this thought: so many tech nerds are drooling over the social virtues of autonomous cars not so much for the technology and the proposed safety, but because when it comes to =other= people, they're control freaks. Much easier to control people (which is to say, make them unable to annoy said nerds) who can only travel as their car will, not as they wish.

As I wrote about it a couple years ago:

Social media: the modern equivalent of gossiping over the back fence while surreptitiously eyeing your neighbor's laundry, hoping to see a stranger's underwear.

The real reason for its popularity? Everyone believes their own underwear is invisible.

Yep. "Owning your identity" is the best reason to have these accounts.... cuz if you don't, some squatter will. ...as I discovered when I went to make a Twitter account, ALL of my domain names (some a bit weird and highly unlikely to have got there by chance) were already squatted as Twitter accounts.

Facebook accounts can be "secret". Hey employer, now what??

This is why I not only have a $12 retard phone (it's not bright enough to be a dumbphone), I also forget to take it with me more often than not. I really don't want to be married to the damn thing. I especially don't want to be married to Facebook.