MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
52m ago
That just a who’s watching the watchers game. A fight to gain political power within the selection committee.
It is a solved problem in every other democracy with single-member districts, despite the stakes being even higher in Parliamentary systems. I agree that the level of partisan rancour in the US right now is that it couldn't be done from scratch, with the possible exception where a non-partisan populist governor in a purple state like Jesse Ventura decided to make ending gerrymandering in the state part of his legacy.
But a bigger issue and a huge Chesterton Fence is it would be an attack on State’s Rights and their internal politics.
This is a good rhetorical point for conservatives to make to each other, but the moral logic of States' Rights doesn't include a state's right to organise its government in a sufficiently non-democratic way. There isn't a Chesterton's Fence here - the general principle is in the Constitution (the "republican form of government" clause) and there is a history of successful federal interventions against insufficiently internally democratic states during the civil rights era. (Under current SCOTUS doctrine there are no grounds for intervention, but "current SCOTUS doctrine" is not a moral argument, and in a world where "everyone knows" that SCOTUS is a partisan institution that doesn't really believe in the rule of law it isn't a legal argument either.)
There are some purple states (notably North Carolina and Wisconsin) where the state legislature is so gerrymandered (and has the power to continue to gerrymander itself in perpetuity) that state legislators are no longer meaningfully accountable to voters. In the current year there is no federal authority that could intervene as anything other than a blatant partisan flex, but if SCOTUS still had the credibility it did in 1964 then intervening would be very much within the tradition of American constitutionalism.
Federal Election gerrymandering is bad but if everyone does it then it’s overall effect on federal politics is smaller.
Federal election gerrymandering ultimately destroys state-level politics by making state elections proxy federal elections. This is a large part of why the OG Progressives supported the 17th amendment. (The other was that US senate elections in state legislatures were a bribe magnet). This is an old problem - the 1858 state legislative elections in Illinois are famous for a series of debates between US Senate candidates who were not on the ballot.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1hr ago
IIRC a number of noisy affirmative-action opponents have said they would be willing to hold noses and support a compromise where affirmative action (and laws like disparate impact that de facto mandate it) was credibly restricted to ADOS blacks and tribally enrolled native Americans.
This isn't going to happen because
- Machine politicians of other ethnicities are a key element of the Democratic coalition that could punish politicians for doing the deal.
- White anti-black racists are a key element of the Republican coalition likewise
- The vast majority of the problems caused by low-human-capital sub-populations in the US are caused by ADOS blacks anyway.
But affirmative action in favour of poorly assimilated immigrant-descended sub-populations is one of the most socially corrosive things you can do.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1hr ago
There is a reason why I use "spergery" and "sperg" rather than "autism" to talk about the social dysfunction which is common (but not universal) in high-functioning autism and the people who display it. "Autism" or "ASD" with the modern diagnostic criteria covers a very broad spectrum from "not actually disabling at all" to "about as functional as a pet rock", and moderate-to-severe autism can be disabling in different ways. "Having an ASD diagnosis" is definitely anticorrelated with IQ, because the most severe cases are more likely to be diagnosed.
My personal view is that there are two different aetiologies of autism, which I call "familial autism" and "fucked-head autism" - the second of which is caused by some kind of brain damage and typically comes along with multiple other disabilities and a very low IQ. This would make autism anticorrelated with intelligence because fucked-head autism exists. I don't know what sign the correlation between familial autism and IQ is, although anecdotally it is positive.
There is definitely a positive correlation between visible spergery and visible intelligence. My darkly cynical view on this is that neurotypical people recognise that the socially correct thing for smart people in normal social environments (and especially mainstream schools) is to act dumber than they are so they fit in with the top quarter of the local IQ distribution. So only spergs show a visible high IQ. There is also a selection effect, where 90 IQ moderately autistic people can't manage their own condition and end up removed from the public realm due to e.g. frequent meltdowns.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
10hr ago
75% of blacks voted for FDR in 1936, for example.
75% of blacks who could vote. In 1936 most blacks lived in the Jim Crow South and couldn't vote.
My rough model is that in the New Deal era Northeast and Midwest, the Republicans were the party of monied elites plus rural and small town voters and the Democrats were the party of the big city political machines. In that model Northern blacks vote Dem because they live in the cities and benefit from the political machines.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
20hr ago
Tom Holland's Persian Fire is nominally about the Greek-Persian war, but about half the page count is the history of Achaemenid Persia up to that point. His In the Shadow of the Sword is mostly a debunking of the "official" story of Muhammed and the origins of Islam, but it includes a good, long chapter on Sassanid Persia.
Holland is an extremely talented writer (he was a successful mass-market novelist before he took up history) and his status as a freelance historian with no academic affiliation allows him to be considerably more based than academic historians writing for a mass audience. His books are considered not-bullshit by serious academic historians, although they attract criticism for writing narrative descriptions of events which we imply we are more certain about what happened than we really are.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
20hr ago
I'm equally unfamiliar, but the origins are definitely Japanese - it claims to be selling the insights that underlie Taiichi Ohno's Toyota Production System. The question of how much the TPS is a native Japanese thing and how much it is just W Edwards Deming's ideas being applied in a country where all the vested interests that could sabotage them had been nuked into oblivion is controversial in the process improvement world.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
23hr ago
"Nigger" isn't harsh because of the sound or the meaning, it is harsh because of the history. "Bugger" used to refer to male homosexuality (which is not the primary meaning in modern British English) has the same issue.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The Sherlock TV show fandom had almost as strong a Britpicking culture as the Harry Potter fandom - if you wanted to write fanfic you were expected to get it Britpicked, and there were lots of British fans willing to Britpick it for you. But I guess the Doyle's Sherlock Holmes doesn't have the same kind of organised fandom.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Private medical insurance in the UK pays you £100-200 a day if you receive NHS treatment for a covered condition. Almost nobody takes up the offer.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Basically, they have terrible pricing models for rating the evilness of actions.
NOOOOOO. You just gave me a brainworm about trying to develop a market risk or counterparty credit model downstream of such a terrible pricing model and now I want to drink a pitcher of sulphuric acid or zip all my confidential e-mails and leak them to FT Alphaville or something similarly stupid.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
In contemporary America, you expect everybody to know and accept that murder is bad.
Gangster movies are almost always written with an implied moral framework where murder is not bad if done in a way which complies with the unwritten rules of gangsterism - with the paradigmatic example being the various killing Michael Corleone is involved with in The Godfather.
The child murder in In Bruges was bad because Colin Farrell's character killed (a) the wrong person by mistake and (b) a child. A clean hit on the priest he had been paid to kill would not have been a problem in gangster movie world. Although I agree with other posters that In Bruges is not actually written in this moral framework, and is arguably satirising it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I thought it was fairly explicitly tied into Japanese spirituality via martial arts, so presumably some mix of Shinto and Buddhism.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
"Cunt" would be at least a write-up in a white-collar workplace in the UK, and probably a firing offence for someone without unfair dismissal protection*. The Australian usage is Australian-only. (There was a survey about what words were unacceptable on British TV even after the watershed, and "cunt", "nigger" and "Paki" were in a class of their own for offensiveness, well above "fuck")
The difference between the US and UK usage of "cunt" is that in the US the primary meaning is as a misogynistic slur (so the cuntiest cunt in America is Hilary Clinton) whereas the primary usage in the UK is as an generic slur for obnoxious and/or unpopular people (so the cuntiest cunt in the UK is Boris Johnson).
* Under British employment law, once you have been in post for two years you can't be fired for a single offence unless it meets the legal bar for "gross misconduct". Calling a male cow-orker a cunt would be misconduct, but would only be gross misconduct if your workplace had a written policy saying that foul language was gross misconduct.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
That usage of "bugger" - basically as a milder version of the nonsexual use of "fuck" also exists in BrE. When turned into a noun, it becomes "buggeration".* "Bugger off" means "go away", with the implication that the person you are telling to bugger off is annoying but not necessarily hostile - you could tell a friend trying to strike up a conversation while you are busy to bugger off but not to fuck off.
* "Bugger" as a noun is an extremely severe homophobic slur unless it is obvious from the context that you are talking about Ender's Game. @gattsuru below is correct to point out that "silly bugger" is another exception.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The difference is that the innocent meaning does not exist in BrE, so even where the innocent meaning is clear from context, British ears default to the obscene one.
The classic is "fanny" which means "bum" in USE and "vagina" in BrE, although it is now an old-fashioned term that suggests "Carry On" films rather than pornos. But American tourists talking about their fanny packs will definitely still be laughed at.
Also "jock" is a stereotypical high-school athlete or a piece of male underwear in USE and a mild slur for Scottish people in BrE (and a nickname for "John" in Scots dialect, like "Jack" is in standard BrE). I don't know how you get an easy innuendo out of that, but it should be possible.
Also endorsing @FtttG below - "pants" has a lot of potential.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Media coverage makes three arguments for a mild daughter preference in the modern rich world:
- When US IVF clinics offer sex selection at no or trivial extra cost, most patients choose girls. (Patients who explicitly seek out sex selection and are willing to pay a premium for it are mostly non-whites with a cultural preference for boys).
- Adoption agencies say boys are harder to place than girls, and are able to extract more money from adoptive parents who get a healthy girl than they do from parents who get a healthy boy.
- Last children skew female, suggesting that couples who have a girl are satisfied but couples who have a boy are more likely to try for a girl.
In the west it is an issue where people lie on surveys because "no preference" is definitely the politically correct answer (except for families with one child preferring the opposite sex for the second - "one of each" remains an acceptable, and common, preference for two-child families), but see for example this Korean poll showing a dramatic, recent shift in Korean preferences, with people now openly preferring daughters in surveys.
There is a lot of discussion about mechanism, but my suspicion is the dominant one is that most parents in cisHajnal societies have an own-sex preference, coupled with the feminist norm that having children is something women should make the decisions about.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Chesterton's Fence is the obvious one: the sex ratio, and the genes that cause it, affect so many things that its impossible to predict the effects. Doing such a big change without being able to predict the effects is imprudent.
Chesterton's Fence doesn't apply here because we know why the 1:1 sex ratio exists - evolutionary equilibrium requires an equal chance of having grandchildren between boyparents and girlparents - and the reason serves no human purpose. At a more basic level Chesterton's Fence only applies to man-made fences, not facts of nature.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Based on my understanding of the restaurant industry which comes from Kitchen Nightmares, 86 means to temporarily take an item off the menu, normally due to a sold-out ingredient but on the show often due to an impulse decision by an insane manager or a gross kitchen screwup.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
"Rich people are morally obliged to contribute to society in ways which reflect the level and type of resources they control" is a social norm, as is "Influential people should form coalitions to punish non-contributing rich people". "This should be centralised and formalised through high taxes" is the political norm, and I don't think it enjoyed supermajority acceptance as a political norm in any time or place except 1945-1975.
The underlying social norms are a lot older than Andrew Carnegie. The Athenian liturgy system is a compulsory but informal version, Republican Rome doesn't institutionalise it but the idea that rich Romans should personally fund public entertainments is a major theme in Roman politics. Medieval feudalism is the idea that rich people should personally fund the very expensive military equipment (warhorse and steel armour) that they and their retainers perform compulsory military service with. (They were also expected to make large donations to the Church). The Victorian concept of noblesse oblige which is probably part of what inspired Carnegiesque philanthropy was based around the idea that rich people who no longer needed to work should take on prestigious-but-burdensome unpaid roles in local government.
The explicit and public rejection of the underlying norm by the Tech Right, with Musk saying that rich people should continue to invest their wealth in for-profit businesses and calling out Bill Gates for letting the side down by donating it, is historically unusual, and the rest of America co-ordinating to punish them would be historically normal.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Social workers are sufficiently badly paid that they wouldn't be doing the job if they didn't genuinely believe that they were helping. I think this is a case where Occam's Razor points to mistake theory and not conflict theory.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Two doctor couples in the UK routinely hire a full-time nanny and a part-time housekeeper, and we have less inequality and higher taxes than you do, so there is something other than taxes or wage compression preventing Americans hiring servants.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The petit bourgeois (as defined by Marx) in modern society consists mostly of self-employed tradesmen and microbusiness owners. These are the most right-wing occupational group and largely define themselves in opposition to the PMC, which by stereotype consists of employees of large (public and private sector) organisations with large salaries.
The key thing that makes the difference in the UK (and, AFIAK, other Commonwealth countries) is that there is a small amount of wiggle-room on equal electorates, allowing most districts to align with local government boundaries that change a lot less often than the redistricting cycle.
If the non-partisan merit criterion is "draw as many district boundaries on municipal boundaries as possible, conditional on all districts having equal electorates to within 5%" then there may even be a knowable optimum answer, and in any case there is less wiggle-room than "draw compact districts with exactly equal census populations" because you can't tweak boundaries at census tract level.
When the UK Boundary Commission consults on map changes, they get two types of response:
At least in the UK, real normie voters would rather be mildly under-represented than have an unnatural constituency drawn based on a size criterion. The textbook example is the Isle of Wight where the locals insisted on having a single constituency with 113k voters (vs a national target of 73k) rather than having 40k of them share an MP with part of the mainland. In my own mis-spent youth as a local politician when I was in grad school in Cambridge, Cambridge residents similarly felt that the City of Cambridge (c. 90k voters) should be a single constituency with an aligned boundary, although the Boundary Commission ignored them and drew right-size constituencies that put one ward into the adjacent rural seat. Uncontroversially, the whole county of Cambridgeshire got exactly 8 constituencies (with no constituency crossing the county line) despite an electorate that would justify about 8.2.
More options
Context Copy link