The problem is that races are not equally politically united. It's not a given that any race (besides African-Americans) are going to be for a party to such a degree that a partisan gerrymander is synonymous with a racial one. So you risk essentially rewarding the most polarized groups (presumably the thing we eventually want less of) and/or disenfranchising less polarized people in order to give them representation.
It's not an easy problem. I'd say it's near unavoidable under the current system, like gerrymandering itself. What is the compromise solution here? Some room for partisan gerrymandering except where it causes a racial gerrymander which then, by your own argument, is a partisan gerrymander that necessitates a gerrymander in the other direction?
Tanista
18hr ago
Same for the weird relationship with the Sublime
The Sublime seems to resolve most of your complaints it seems to me.
It's a process any collective group can go through that takes them to a realm where it's proven nothing can die nor get bored (in fact, realspace is so boring in comparison most people never return) and there's endless discovery and growth.
It's more democratic than realspace since non-Minds can have it and apparently all sapient races can achieve it.
The Culture is set up so as to theoretically be a utopia, but after reading just a couple of the books, I think Iain M. Banks hates the Culture, or at least, is keen to find its flaws. He doesn't cheat and give the Culture an obvious evil side (the Minds really are benevolent, humans really can engage in positive and meaningful work, this isn't made possible by any kind of oppression or injustice, etc.), but he is constantly looking for the ways in which this society is unsatisfactory. The Culture cannot manufacture meaning, or sense of communal purpose. The best it can find is the tawdry impulse to make more of itself.
I think the Culture is a utopia that its author disapproves of, if that makes sense?
This to me is the Culture not seeming like a liberal utopia but being one in truth. A liberal nation cannot resolve all questions of significance, that's just going against the whole point. It's a practical limitation for other forms of government but not for liberals.
Just as liberal societies are divided today by major issues the Culture are divided. But the difference is that Banks uses the Culture's nature itself as a tool to manage this: secession means nothing in a post-scarcity, interstellar context where each ship is a hologram of the Culture and can rebuild the bits it likes. The Culture doesn't just make more of itself, it can fracture too when it runs into issues that just can't be resolved and maintain all of the benefits of its technology.
Banks is explicit that he made the Culture was much of a utopia as he could. His liberal instincts and need to write a good story drive him in certain directions.
But what other ones are there? No one in the Culture novels ever articulates a very convincing alternative - Idiran or Chelgrian theocracy hardly seem better, Azad is awful on multiple levels, and the Sublimed steadfastly refuse to explain themselves.
The Gzilt are the closest thing to a Culture analogue that maintains some agency for non-superintelligences.
The problem is that the Culture are atypically focused on the galaxy: once cultures reach a certain level of success they tend to descend into some sort of steady state as an elder civ or Sublime and leave the material world, as the Gzilt did. So a lot of the alternatives have weeded themselves out.
Tanista
18hr ago
If I write a dystopia about an oppressive one-party state, but then add a lot of statements into the story that in this world it has been scientifically been proven that this is the logical endpoint of any and all societies, does this suddenly make it not a dystopia?
It's a dystopia because of the "oppressive" downside, Culture Minds are not oppressive, just superior.
Why would you believe this when you see your group failing more in the market?
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