Shawn Levasseur's Blog

(formerly ComicsPundit)

  • ComicsPundit gets the hard reboot.

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    by

    Shawn L.

    So, for the umpteenth* time, I’m redesigning my blog.

    This time, however, I’m dropping the “ComicsPundit” brand. It was created at a time when I thought I could focus on the intersection of two of my passions. But I was all over the place, sometimes comics, sometimes politics, sometimes both, sometimes something completely different.

    So, where the domain still brings you here, and I’ll continue to use it for my e-mail, I will be eventually start using ShawnLevasseur.com to be the blog here.

    To start with, I’ve put all prior posts into review. I’ll gradually post them back. Some trivial posts won’t make the cut, but most of them will get back on here.

    Also, a project that I’ll be announcing soon will be taking up a lot of the posts for the next couple of months.

    Update: July 15, 2024

    That aforementioned project was my campaign to run for the position of Secretary on the Libertarian National Committee. That has passed, but long troubles in trying to get a new feature to work as I expected it to (custom uploaded fonts being part of the WordPress system) caused me to bounce around a variety of web hosting options.

    I did consider a fully static blog, but CMSes to support it are not user-friendly, and hand coding, though possible, would be too much work and not include a critical part of a website: its RSS feed. (It’s important for me to read other websites; it’s only fair that I return the courtesy.)

    But I’ve gotten fonts to work right and settled on a web host (I’d better have, I paid up for three years of discounted service). So the design work and blog post updating begin.

    *_Apparently, “umpteenth” is now an actual word in the dictionary. I discovered this when spellcheck corrected a typo in the word. Language is indeed a virus.

  • Shawn L. for LNC Secretary

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    by

    Shawn L.

    “Who am I? Why am I here?”

    – James Stockdale

    I’ll answer the latter question first.

    I’m running to be the Libertarian National Committee’s Secretary to:

    • Build back the professionalism that we once had in the national party.
    • Build back the trust of the membership.
    • Promote transparency and civility in the LNC.

    As to the former question, I…

    • …have been a member of the LP for over three decades.
    • …have run for the Maine legislature three times
    • …have served on the Knox County Budget Committee for over a decade, reelected twice.
    • …have been a delegate to 11 prior national conventions.
    • …have served in the Libertarian Party of Maine’s state committee as
      • Secretary
      • Treasurer
      • Chair
      • Regional Rep.
    • …am a co-owner and president of my family’s business, a manufacturing company with a dozen employees

    Leading up to the Libertarian Party National Convention, I’ll be posting more details about my background and hopes for the future of the Libertarian Party.

    Thanks for your consideration and support.

  • Ketchup and the Two-Party Problem

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    by

    Shawn L.
    Seth Godin: ketchup enthusiast & political choice detractor

    A defense of third-party politics.

    Seth Godin wrote about third parties in a blog post titled “Ketchup and the third-party problem.” He says that those of us supporting third parties or their candidates are doomed to failure and miss our chance to influence the political field.

    I find the argument lacking and merely a more passive-aggressive method of saying that we should all vote for Hillary because otherwise, we’ll be doomed with Trump. I’ve snarked about it on Twitter, but I feel this deserves a bit more detailed rebuttal.

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  • Choice, and those who belittle it.

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    by

    Shawn L.

    Back in January, I was vacationing in San Francisco. One day while having lunch in a Chinatown restaurant, reading the USA Today, I came across an article on the opinion page by Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College.
    It was an article based on the main theme of his book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. It was about how the abundance of choice can be a burden. I tucked the article away with some notes and only now have I finished the Fisking of Mr. Schwartz.:

    (more…)