ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
17hr ago
Which is just another way of saying "they're irrelevant".
No, they'd just as relevant as any other individual voter.
Speaking generally, I don't know that I have a useful definition of being "relevant" or "irrelevant". I'm hearing very similar claims that, after Callais, gerrymandering can or will make many black voters "irrelevant". One could pithily retort that they are just as relevant as any other individual voter, but I don't think that would be satisfying to the person making the claim.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
This is sort of precisely where I think there is a simmering culture war, the clash between your comment and that of @JTarrou.
Scoping out a bit, the stylized story I might tell would be that back in ye olde days of Snowden/Assange, there was this sense of "information is meant to be free" and "sunlight is the best disinfectant". My sense is that at least some of those folks had a change of heart when their own ox was gored. But I think it's still a significant culture war.
Are soldiers supposed to keep secret military operations secret? Or is part of the point of things like prediction markets specifically to say something like "information is meant to be free", even governments shouldn't be able to keep even that sort of stuff secret, and it's good to build tools with the "whole point" being to prevent folks from being practically capable of keeping even stuff like that secret?
I certainly don't think this culture war has been won in either direction. It's just sitting there, menacingly, underneath a variety of these related debates.
I had a plastic surgeon come up in one of the podcasts I listen to. I remember him saying that there was a category of people, I don't remember the whole set of criteria, but I remember that it was young-ish men, that he simply would refuse to operate on, specifically for this reason. He had too many experiences of people in that category (again, I don't remember all of the qualifiers) exhibit this exact phenomenon, and they'd keep coming back for something else, then something else, then something else, and it just wasn't healthy for them.
I would have thought that it would be women who are more likely to have this problem, which is why it stuck out in my memory that he called out men.
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