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Supah_Schmendrick


				

				

				

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Supah_Schmendrick


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Should minorities be guaranteed representation, even if they are geographically spread out?




No.  They're not special; they're either Americans just like the rest of us, or they can go found their own country (with or without blackjack and hookers according to their national custom).  Creating specialized ethnic ghettoes is empire shit (Ottoman millets, Soviet ethnic republics), and that's precisely what America was founded not to be.  I know we're probably too far gone for this to be a meaningful position, but a man can dream.


Bonus quotation:




There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.


This is just as true of the man who puts "native" before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul.  Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who
holds any other allegiance.


But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.


The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.




Teddy Roosevelt; Address to the Knights of Columbus, New York City.  October 12, 1915


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes yes, and Phil Burton and Willie Brown were gerrymandering California - home of Reagan and Nixon - blue in the 1980s:


After the 1980 census California became entitled to 45 congressional districts, a growth of two.[4] Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature and the governorship but were feeling vulnerable after former Governor Reagan had won California by a landslide in the 1980 presidential election. Democratic Congressman Phillip Burton and new State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown devised a redistricting plan that would result in five new safe Democratic seats.[5] Congressman Burton would boast that the bizarrely shaped map, which included a 385-sided district, was "My contribution to modern art".[6] Reacting to what was called "one of the most notorious gerrymanders" of the decade,[7] Republicans successfully placed a veto referendum on the primary ballot and California voters overwhelmingly rejected the legislature's redistricting plans in the June 1982 election, the same election that enacted the California Constitution's Victim's Bill of Rights.[8]


A majority of the California Supreme Court justices, however, had been appointed by Governor Jerry Brown and a sharply fractured court ordered the rejected districts to be used in the November election because only it was "practicable".[9] Democrats won 60% of the congressional seats despite only taking 49.9% of the statewide vote.[10] Democrats still lost the statewide elections, losing the governorship and incumbent Governor Jerry Brown losing his U.S. Senate bid to San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson. Governor Brown responded by calling an extraordinary legislative session, amending a previously passed bill with the redistricting plan that had just been rejected by the electorate, and signing the redistricting plan into law hours before being replaced by Republican George Deukmejian.


That's arguably significantly worse than what the GOP is trying to pull now in Texas.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Without reading (at least) 50 years of redistricting history, how does one possibly get to the bottom of this? As time goes on it becomes increasingly obvious to me that it's a folly to believe there is anything resembling objective truth on almost any contentious issue.




I'm really struggling not to read this comment as "without expending energy to assess the evidence, how can I find truth?"  Or, alternatively "figuring things out is uncomfortably hard, therefore it can't possibly be done."  Except that feels really uncharitable and I really hope that's not what you meant.


Yes, motivated argument and even honest disagreements exist.  It's true of most things, not just politically/culturally controversial ones.  That doesn't absolve you - or any of us! - of the burden of assessing things for yourself as best you can.  What hope is there for democracy, the idea that common people can be trusted to manage their own affairs and be entrusted with political power, if the default attitude when confronted with dispute and contention is "welp, no way to determine who's right here, fuck it!"   That's not the attitude of a citizen; it's the resigned fatalism of a slave.