Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
1yr ago
The practice is universal and has been for literally centuries.
Gerrymandering has been around in some capacity for centuries, but a) that's not a defense of an odious practice b) it is false to say that it is universal. Numerous states have independent redistricting commissions and even when they don't they don't always gerrymander.
reduce accountability to the electorate
Relative to what? I would remind you that hardcore partisan gerrymandering is a relative novelty and for a long time one of the major aims of gerrymandering was protecting incumbents. And what basis do we have to think gerrymandering is superior to boundary commissions?
Skibboleth
1yr ago
I wouldn't consider this to be a republican tactic
I don't know what relevance this has to my point, which is that it seems weird to identify lubricating the voting process as technically legal but actually illegitimate while ignoring the myriad of other technically legal things done to de facto disenfranchise voters unless you are alleging that it fatally compromises election security.
it was the VRA that enshrened it into law.
The VRA and associated case law impose specific requirements on how you draw districts with respect to minority populations. They do not in any way mandate the partisan gerrymandering you see in numerous states (including, prominently, Texas).
Skibboleth
4d ago
Why not say that instead of using a needlessly vague and conspiratorial sounding term?
Skibboleth
1mo ago
Most Americans really don't see what's so hard about giving everyone an ID and tell them to bring it to the polls.
This is the sticking point. Republican political leaders have not been particularly enthusiastic about the universal ID part of voter ID laws. Only about half of states with photo ID laws provide free IDs, and the ones that do often make you jump through hoops to get it (e.g. Texas).
The simplest thing to do would be to have a Federal voter database and an associated ID, but that seems to be considered generally unattractive.
The proposals consistently poll very well across both parties and independents.
A lot of things poll very well across both parties and independents until you start talking specifics.
This idea sounds plausible on its own
Does it? That seems like it doesn't pass the smell test to me. The correlation between things like personal liberty + economic prosperity and how aristocratic a given society was/is seems quite negative. If nothing else, contrast the US or Britain (no/vestigial aristocracy) with the Russian Empire (deeply aristocratic and reactionary, also bringing up the rear in terms of economic development and personal liberty). Nor would we expect aristocratic societies to do well on this front - landowning elites are primarily concern with the extraction of land rents and the preservation of their privileges. A merchant class threatens their power base and letting a peasant sue his lord undermines their elite status.
it co-exists in the DR with a ravenous hatred of "elites" and "globalists". How does that make any sense?
They see themselves as temporarily embarrassed dukes.
There's a pretty clear reason for this though, right?
There is, but it's not that American conservatives love freedom more than American liberals. Trump was president at the start of Covid, which made his response a natural angle of attack for Democrats. Rather than defend his performance, Trump argued that Covid was actually not that big a deal. That more or less set the partisan alignment on the matter.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
Even though almost everyone in the West now has a machine capable of streaming much of the world's knowledge to them in an instant, they act as if it is the 19th century and public schooling is necessary to save masses of illiterate farm kids who live tens of miles away from the nearest library from ignorance.
How many kids do you think would teach themselves math via the internet? Or how to read?
If you want to argue that there's a more efficient and/or effective method of delivering universal education than the status quo, I'm quite willing to believe that. I do not find it plausible that internet-based autodidacticism is one of them.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Conservative politics in the US is extremely Southernized - the South is cultural heart of American conservatism (especially the paleo varieties). Loving the South and Southern myths Southern iconography is very common, even if you're not from the South yourself. Attacking them is off limits.
Skibboleth
8mo ago
My point being that when someone says "the deep state sabotage Donald Trump" or words to that effect, they probably do not simply mean "his executive policies got slow rolled because the civil servants in charge of executing them were liberals who didn't believe in the policies".
Regarding the partisan lean of government employees, I refer other comments in this thread. I don't think there is some intrinsic quality of government employment that makes it skew dramatically liberal (and indeed, certain types skew very conservative for pretty much the same reason in reverse).
Skibboleth
9mo ago
One thing they shouldn't do is start throwing more dynamite in the flaming pile.
If you want to preserve institutions, constant escalation is not the way to do it. And that of course goes for both sides.
On the contrary, that is exactly what they should do. Doubly so considering the top-down nature of the affair. The imperative is to send a message that you can play the game or you can sit out, but you cannot try to flip the table. If you can call for an insurrection and then call a mulligan when it fails, there's no reason not to do so every time you lose.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Actually securing the border would be both directly costly (you'd need both far more physical infrastructure and far more border guards) and indirectly costly (exacerbating existing labor shortages; many red industries depend on hispanic labor). Nativists genuinely wish there was less immigration, but relatively few are willing to pay the price for it.
Free speech is a Nash equilibrium we left long ago. It's not coming back for a while I fear.
Hot take: Free Speech is basically fine and getting kicked off Twitter is not that big a deal. Most discourse around "Free Speech" has very little to do with actual freedom of speech as opposed to winning/losing popularity contests. And, perhaps more importantly, the attendant influence it gives you over defining the standards of intellectual respectability and polite conversation. Notably, there is ferocious concern over moderation policies on private forums and very little attention given to actual legal constraints on speech, of which there are many (hate speech and anti-discrimination laws, defamation laws, BDS laws, false advertising laws, IP laws, SCOTUS rulings detailing exigent limits on speech, police violence against protesters, etc...)
The promise of freedom of speech has never been that you wouldn't be judged for what you say. At any given time and place, there are opinions which are considered out of bounds despite being perfectly legal to hold and say. These will get you tagged as an asshole, idiot, or lunatic if you espouse them and which may induce people to exercise their freedom to disassociate from you and encourage others to do the same. This is not a matter of freedom of speech, this is basic human social dynamics. The sticking points now are:
a) conservatives have generally held sway in public spaces while liberals were transgressive. Very recently, this has ceased to be true in many spaces. This puts a lot of conservatives, especially on the far right, in the novel position of risking opprobrium for expressing their social and cultural views. (Of course, there have always been views that were too right-wing even where conservatism was the 'default', but that has usually meant actual mask-off Neo Nazis as opposed to, say, spouting racial slurs or harassing trans people).
b) there's been a divergence in viewpoints. Compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, liberal and conservative social views are significantly further apart. Combat with the above and you wind up with a recipe for conflict, since you have a significant fraction of the population with non-overlapping ideas of what constitutes respectable behavior. This is the break in equilibrium.
c) the creation of large, centralized for a designed to stir shit (i.e. Twitter and Facebook) creates discursive FOMO where not have access to these platforms feels like being silenced, even though its actual impact on your ability to speak freely is pretty marginal.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Is it cohesive? It strikes me as an ad hoc, reactive stance against perceived Democratic policies. To illustrate, let me invert it:
Stop the right from torturing trans kinds, covering for police brutality, ignoring and perpetuating racism against black people, ignoring the looming climate crisis, and generally trashing the country out of reactionary spite.
Whether or not it's a fair assessment is beside the point - it is very much not a cohesive framework. It might descend from one, but as articulated it's just "we're against things our opponents are for". The only unifying theme is that whatever the right does is bad.
with the silent removal of existing research is dishonest and suspicious.
It is? It certainly could be, but it's also pretty easily justifiable if you have a wide range of results and have good reason to think the extrema are low quality or otherwise unreliable. Notably, they didn't just jettison the 2.5M study for being low quality (despite that being fairly defensible on its merits) and report a narrower range that included the lowest estimate but not the highest. All in all, this smacks more of ducking controversy by removing an offending phrase than trying to hide the truth or sabotage gun rights activism.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Only if you count any action taken against someone saying something you disagree with politically, in which case running over protestors or shooting up a drag show counts as no platforming. If you want to define it that way no one can stop you, but it seems like a semantic leap.
I characterize pulling the fire alarm (or other disruptive behavior) as extreme specifically because it is a step beyond the normal threat of social opprobrium while not crossing the line into actually violent/destructive behavior.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Your question presupposes legitimacy-by-default of the existing, highly complex political system, when the system's fundamental legitimacy is the question at hand.
When the system's legitimacy is being questioned because of people exercising their right to vote, I think it's reasonably to ask why.
Convince a large, reasonably cohesive slice of the population that the system is not capable of delivering acceptable outcomes, and they will not necessarily argue indefinitely over where exactly the system is going wrong
Why are they convinced of this?
The other guy points out that his dice win too often to be fair.
The other guy claims that, but considering the other guy wins about half the time, we have to question whether or not his objection is in good faith or he is just being a sore loser.
When dealing with vast, complex systems, people observe outcomes and judge the system thereby. Our current system has delivered unacceptably bad outcomes from a Red perspective, and it's done it long enough that there's no reasonable hope that the problem can be corrected within the general processes and norms of that system.
What outcomes? Reds win half the time (frequently despite having less than half the electorate). If you mean the culture war, it turns out there's no vote you can cast or election you can win that will make your kids respect you.
Skibboleth
6d ago
I'm being a little glib. As a pejorative it's tended to have pro-free market connotations, though when right-wingers adopt the term they tend to emphasize the globalist aspect of that rather than the anti-regulation/anti-public sector implication of left-wing usage. In either case, it tends to suffer from lumping together a wide range of people who may not be part of the same political coalition as each other or hold the views imputed to them.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
How is that winning the issue?
Any Federal voter ID law actually able to make it through Congress is likely to also impose restrictions on election administration that red states don't want. Avoiding Federal standards for voter qualification and election administration gives more leeway to put their thumb on the scale.
Alabama already exists.
Although frankly, that jibe could be applied to a lot of red states. Conservative Christianity is an extremely powerful political force in Republican-dominated states. What it isn't, that it sort of used to be, is a cultural juggernaut. The opprobrium of the religious right carries very little weight outside of the religious right. They have virtually no influence over trends in media/entertainment (outside of internally produced media that is largely considered a joke by outsiders). Increasingly, young people aren't interested in the story they tell about the world and are shedding their religious affiliations. Etcetera. A lot of recent conservative political priorities are fundamentally about trying to remediate cultural defeats with state power.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc
See, this is the crux of it. Even if this was true (of which I am skeptical), none of this is relevant. The goal of a protest is not to stand around politely, then leave with your trash in an orderly fashion. It is either to be such a colossal nuisance that you can get concessions for stopping or to build sympathy for your political movement by baiting the police into kicking the shit out you. Conservative protestors occasionally try to cargo cult left-wing protest tactics, but tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).
Skibboleth
3mo ago
Push come to shove we'll bomb every oil pipe and free Europe from that addiction.
We can't even agree to aid the people who are currently in a hot war with Russia. Until that happens, the idea that we're going to comprehensively destroy European energy infrastructure is a touch laughable.
Even if true, it kind of runs counter to the Trump is NBD narrative.
Again, an economy about equal to Italy
If Italy could figure out a way to leverage boutique luxury goods into military and political power they could make a play for regional hegemon as well.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
SF is more or less the poster child for "I will do anything to end homelessness but build more housing". It's not surprising that their spending on homelessness has failed to resolve the issue when they've made only the most tepid efforts to actually house the homeless rather than just ameliorate their conditions.
Housing isn't the problem. Drugs are the problem.
Drugs aren't the problem. They're a problem, but West Virginia has one of the highest drug overdose rates and lowest homelessness rates (this pattern is true in weaker forms across the rest of Appalachia and parts of the Midwest).
Jim Crow laws were created because of pervasive white supremacist sentiments in the South. They served to keep southern blacks politically disempowered and economically subordinate to Southern elites while also satisfying demand for racism among the general southern population.
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