Tag Archives: Amuse

Priorities?

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New York City Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani wants to help the city’s economically challenged to have a better life. He is talking about rent control, city-operated grocery stores with free or very low-priced food. He has stated that millionaires shouldn’t exist. He frowns on private property. He himself is the child of wealth who seems to enjoy thoroughly what that wealth has given him.

Amuse on Substack posted an article about Mamdani’s recent celebration of his wedding. It was a lavish affair in Uganda that lasted for three days and cost approximately $250,000. He is entitled to spend his money any way he wants to, but if he is so concerned with New York City’s economically challenged, why doesn’t he throw some of his money their way? Why does he choose to be charitable with other people’s money while living lavishly with his own? Why not buy a building and let people live there rent free? Why not fund a drug rehab center or an alcohol rehab center?

The article concludes:

As George Orwell once wrote of British socialists in The Road to Wigan Pier, the problem is not the idea of socialism but the people who advocate it. He observed that many socialists do not love the poor, they simply hate the rich. Mamdani embodies this paradox. He does not hate luxury. He hates its availability to anyone else.

And what of New York? If Mamdani governs as he lives, then the city is in trouble. His plans include rent controls so severe they would hollow out the housing market, defunding the police at a time of rising crime, and replacing core public services with untested socialist experiments. His ideology is not tempered by responsibility. It is validated by fantasy.

The irony is thick. The man who declared that “capitalism is theft” held a $500,000 wedding on a private estate, protected by military police, while advocating for the seizure of private property. That is not public service. That is theatrical oligarchy. Mamdani may call himself a radical. But he is something more familiar: a privileged revolutionary who wants to burn down your house so he can rule from his.

If New York City elects this man, they deserve everything they will get!

How To Secretly Influence An Election

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Email is a powerful weapon in campaigns. Along with texting, it is a good fundraising tool in a world where elections cost to much and fundraising is important.

On Thursday, a website called Amuse posted an article explaining how Big Tech can quietly tip the scales in an election.

The article reports:

In an age obsessed with equity, a certain form of discrimination thrives unchallenged: algorithmic bias against conservative speech. While the platforms most frequently scrutinized are social media giants, the more insidious, less visible battleground is email. Long relied upon by Republican candidates, conservative advocacy groups, and grassroots organizers, email has become the new frontier where Big Tech quietly tips the scales.

To many, this claim might appear paranoid. After all, isn’t a spam filter simply a neutral tool designed to protect users from Nigerian princes and unsolicited coupons? That would be comforting if it were true. But the evidence, painstakingly compiled over multiple election cycles, paints a picture that is not only credible but damning.

The most rigorous academic investigation to date comes from a team at North Carolina State University. In a peer-reviewed study analyzing over 318,000 campaign emails sent during the 2020 U.S. election, the researchers created hundreds of fresh accounts across Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, subscribing equally to Republican and Democratic mailing lists. Their finding was straightforward and alarming: Gmail, the most widely used email service on earth, flagged as spam nearly 77% of emails sent by Republican campaigns. In contrast, just under 10% of Democratic emails were filtered. The disparity wasn’t marginal. It was systematic, and it worsened the closer the calendar crept to Election Day.

This sort of differential treatment might be defensible if it could be accounted for by differences in content, formatting, or compliance. It cannot. The researchers controlled for those variables. They found that the political affiliation of the sender, rather than any objective feature of the email, was the primary predictor of whether it would land in the inbox or the spam folder.

Of course, Gmail is not the only offender. Outlook displayed a reverse skew in the same 2020 study, filtering a larger percentage of left-wing emails. Yahoo, while appearing more balanced in 2020, swung hard in the opposite direction by 2024. According to a 2024 study conducted by EmailToolTester, Yahoo flagged 22.3% of Republican emails as spam compared to only 6.3% of Democratic ones. AOL, now under the same corporate umbrella as Yahoo, filtered 32.5% of Republican emails while sparing all but 10.3% of their Democratic counterparts. In practical terms, this meant that conservative organizations faced triple the barrier in reaching their audiences compared to liberal ones.

Blocking political emails is wrong regardless of which political party does it. We need someone to oversee our techies to make sure this will not happen in the future.