Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
20hr ago
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.
Supah_Schmendrick
20hr ago
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.
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder. At least this time it’s closer to a tenuous gentleman’s agreement than settled law, right? Right?
What part of "the most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; there is no more gerrymandering blue can do here" don't you understand? The norm goes into the shredder when the first side defects, not when the patsy notices and finally decides to fight back.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
"White America" received its worst ever cultural hostility and abysmal political achievements from the Trump administration
This is...dubious.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
If I am attacked, it is good to use force against my attacker to both defend myself but also to establish future deterrence. If I am cheated, it is good to sue not just for the value of what was denied me but also for punitive damages - to take the cheater's money. If I am stolen from, it is good not just to retrieve what was stolen, but also to incapacitate the thief to prevent their ability to do these things again.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
Do you believe the left would be justified with removing Tom Macdonald for his "the devil is a democrat" speech because the right wing started with saying legal residents don't have protections?
I don't think so because I have principles about free speech that apply regardless of who started it, but if I understand you correctly revenge is a perfectly suitable argument for going against one's words.
The Left already is doing such things while mouthing banal principled platitudes, and has been for decades. It has won them near-complete control of the knowledge-making and -legitimating institutions in the country, including academia, journalism, with significant inroads into corporations and the legal profession. It has enabled the Left to take its social program from radical fringe to state-enforced orthodoxy. They have hijacked bureaucracies, lied about their intentions, ignored or subverted laws they did not agree with, including court decisions, and more.
They did these things not even for such a good reason as revenge, but instead out of pure will-to-power.
Remove the beam from thine own eye before complaining about the mote in another's.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
The other position is that the academics forced to parrot spurious diversity statements to keep their jobs are, you know, the victims, with ideologically-captured admin as the bad guys. The second position seems trivially the correct framing to me, and wanting to punish the academics as collaborators looks about as absurd as saying you're going to topple a tyrant to liberate the people, then executing anyone who ever saluted the tyrant at gunpoint.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
So you agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?
No. I would be perfectly happy to live in a world where some woke professors and some conservative professors sniped at each other at conferences and from offices across the quad, but otherwise left each other alone. This, in theory, is what tenure and the notion of academic freedom are.*
The Left was not content to live in this world, and across the generations took over the universities, installed their own apparatchiks in administrations, systematically discriminated against disfavored demographics, anathematized and drummed out opposing voices, instituted political litmus tests in hiring and publishing, and created a climate of fear on campuses where the vast majority of students parrot political lines they do not believe in order to avoid social and personal blowback.
If we cannot have an academy run according to our preferred rules - academic freedom, properly understood - then at a minimum we will live according to the woke's rules applied evenhandedly. Perhaps with enough rounds of tit-for-tat, we will be able to reach a new harmonious equilibrium.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
as there is still a long and ugly history of nasty jewish pedophiles making use of their jewishness to evade justice.
Correct, insofar as pedos (and many other sorts of criminals) seek to flee overseas to countries without easy extradition to the US. The Saudis, for example, seem to have something of a state policy of bailing out and whisking away their nationals away from American justice.
But I strongly suspect that all of this a rounding error being blown out of proportion because of who's involved. If there are base-rate statistics showing that jews are disproportionately likely to commit sex crimes, that would clearly indicate a problem. If there are statistics showing that that jews accused of crimes have disproportionately lower rates of conviction once charged, then that's likely a problem whether or not they are abusing aaliyah as the mechanism.
Otherwise it's just chinese cardiologists.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
Because anyone can be a sensationalist?
Supah_Schmendrick
4d ago
Roman Polanski; Chinese billionaire Richard Liu; the Saudis have a habit of having their government bail out their nationals after their arrests, including for rape and child porn...
Can you point to any other diplomatic personnel or senior political staffers of first world countries who have been arrested in the U.S. for sex-related crimes? Don't we sort of take it for granted that people in power are fucking deviant horndogs - isn't it a totally normal headline that prostitutes/escorts "descend" upon Davos and similar major-power conference locations?
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?
Not dying. Maintaining the level of success, arete, and prosperity that has already been obtained. These are not only good insofar as we get more of them - they are good in and of themselves, and forgetting and taking for granted the successes of the past is one of the chief flaws of modernist thinking.
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
Here's the thing though. I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending. I'm neutral about it.
There's a saying about this..."so open-minded his brain fell out."
I enjoy being alive, but I see no fundamental deep importance in keeping the human species existing. I'm not a nihilist in the least bit. I love being alive in a very visceral way.
Okay, so you're a solipsist, not a nihilist [edit: fixing a brain-fart]. This is not an improvement.
Supah_Schmendrick
10d ago
Most humanities programs are, to put it bluntly, huffing their own farts. There is little grounding in fact, little contact with the real world of gears, machinery, or meat. I call this the Reality Anchor. A field has a strong Reality Anchor if its propositions can be tested against something external and unforgiving. An engineer builds a bridge: either it stands up to traffic and weather, or it does not. A programmer writes code: either it compiles and executes the desired function, or it throws an error. A surgeon performs a procedure, the patient’s outcome provides a grim but objective metric. Reality is the ultimate, non-negotiable peer reviewer.
What about a descriptive discipline like history? What's the reality anchor for that?
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
Where were they for the four years of nonstop gaslighting and censorship we endured?
One theory is that they might have some sort of relationship with the Bidens. I don't know if there's any true merit to the idea, am not endorsing it, and haven't seen more than idle speculation on this, so caveat emptor. But basic googling does reveal that Kevin Morris, who called himself one of Hunter Biden's "closest friends" and who loaned/gave Hunter Biden at several million dollars to tide him through his tax and legal issues, also has a long-standing relationship with Parker & Stone.
Very much YMMV, but frankly pulling punches for personal reasons makes as much sense to me as the idea that somehow the same guys who did "the snuke" suddenly converted to the resistance.
Supah_Schmendrick
13d ago
I swear, if it wasn't for my late-Victorian educated granny teaching me how to do long division the old-fashioned way, I'd never have learned the way it was taught in school.
same here, only it was my "learned calculus with a slide-rule" engineer dad who got so fed up with what the school system was trying to pull he just sat me down and long-handed it out with me.
Supah_Schmendrick
14d ago
I've thought a lot about this issue for the last ten years, as many have, and it's hard to escape the feeling that public consent has been laundered by keeping the spotlight firmly on rare, sympathetic cases while the intent of campaigners has always been significantly more far-reaching.
This...seems like a fully generalizable description of basically all political activism in WEIRD democracies??
To me the regulated-militia bit implies a strong skepticism of loose cannons and even an outright endorsement of some loose degree of government (perhaps suitably local) control.
There has been linguistic drift; at the time of the founding, the word "regulated" meant "functioning," and in the concept of a militia - which the founders generally intended to be the primary American military force to the exclusion of standing armies - meant well-equipped, trained, and disciplined. [Edit: the militia was supposed to supply their own weapons, or draw from privately-stocked and -maintained armories. Hence why ensuring that the militia would be well-armed would require the private ownership and carrying of military arms]
As far as I'm concerned the 2nd Amendment, properly understood, requires every citizen to own, maintain, and drill with M4s and other military weapons, a la Switzerland. However, practically the champions of militia vs. a permanent, professional military establishment lost for good after WWII.
Supah_Schmendrick
15d ago
That's still the person, not the gun itself, and a 98th+ percentile asshole-quotient person at that. Might as well ask "is there so much difference between a pet tiger that could maul you and a drunk, sleep-deprived rice-rocket driver coming back from a sideshow?"
Supah_Schmendrick
15d ago
Come on, be charitable. It's not a perfect analogy. The point I'm trying to make is that it's a dangerous thing to be carrying around in public. It does require volition, but volition may be influenced by rage, or alcohol, or psychosis, or mental illness, or one bad day.
But that's a significant difference! You've moved the goalposts from "that's something that can kill if you don't concentrate on it sufficiently" (untrue, but would strongly favor your position a la "ultrahazardous activities") to the true argument of "but people are sometimes idiots, impaired, or negligent" which is a major shift with significant consequences!
Supah_Schmendrick
16d ago
This was quite different back then than it would be now. If you live your entire life in one neighbourhood and there are a dozen other ethnicities living there, soon enough everyone will adopt a common tongue.
Except that's not true. New York had significant yiddish, italian, bulgarian, lithuanian, greek, etc. communities, where those languages were spoken alongside, or even to the exclusion of, english in the early 20th century. Chicago had polish, ukranian, etc. Los Angeles today has several areas where spanish is predominant, as well as several suburbs that are at least duolingual with many/most advertisements in mandarin, vietnamese, etc. Up until WWI huge swathes of the midwest spoke german, usually as a second language, but in some areas to the exclusion of english.
Immigrant ghettoization is extremely common, and tends to preserve language use.
It's interesting how open carry has changed in the US in the past 30 years. I grew up in a place with many guns and where open carry was legal, but only the most trashy of rednecks would open carry, and they were derided by other gun owners. "Whatsamatter, you think the Russians are going to invade today?"
Comparing modern to founding-era and 19th century gun discourse is also fascinating; back then there were laws against concealed carry because that was viewed as covert, sneaky, and dishonorable. What do you have to hide and who are you trying to surprise? Whereas open carry was considered completely normal. Nowadays it's the sight of a gun that freaks people out, so concealed carry is much more popular; allow the gun person their hobby without scaring everyone.
Supah_Schmendrick
16d ago
a leashed tiger, or a running chainsaw.
This is a wild comparison; the gun is inert and has no volition of its own. Nor is it always in a state of active danger like the running chainsaw. Firing a gun is not something that is done by failing to pay sufficient attention to the gun - it requires volition and active intent across several particular bodily motions to draw, aim, turn off a safety, and fire a gun, just like it would to grab someone by the head and try to break their neck, or try to stab someone with a knife or pen, etc.
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:
Teddy Roosevelt; Address to the Knights of Columbus, New York City. October 12, 1915
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