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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30842 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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Mm. Point taken. I don’t think I quite conveyed what I wanted, there.

I believe Americans have an obligation to do things which benefit all humanity. Disease eradication is probably the easiest to defend, but I’d go to bat for various foreign aid and social programs to a lesser degree. Proximity is not the issue. Getting our own house in order is not the issue. There’s enough low-hanging fruit out there in the world that we can and should make a difference, even for non-Americans.

nobody believes about their own position

I was actually thinking about edgy contrarians like KulakRevolt. People who delight in judging things based on aesthetic. Perhaps nobody serious, nobody with money or lives on the line, embraces this. But I’m not particularly optimistic. There’s always going to be someone willing to play the heel.

That’s not (usually?) what’s happening with prison abolitionists, border maximizers, etc. Whether or not they embrace heel tactics, you can dig down and find an intended policy. I don’t think that’s true for your average Substack grifter.

gerrymandering

This ought to be a solvable problem. I don’t think there’s a good philosophical case for keeping exploits of the voting map. But either way, FPTP exacerbates the problem. Get rid of that and then we can worry about edge cases in strategic district placement.

Disease eradication is probably the easiest to defend

And maintaining the screw-worm border.

I’d go to bat for various foreign aid and social programs to a lesser degree.

I'd be more satisfied if the people that go to bat for foreign social programs would just acknowledge that it's colonialism, but good when they do it.

I was actually thinking about edgy contrarians like KulakRevolt.

Okay, fair. You seem to consider them more common than I do, and I will not defend the relative proportions.

Whether or not they embrace heel tactics, you can dig down and find an intended policy

Well, yes. Whether or not that policy is insane is another matter.

My pet theory was that the easy way to solve gerrymandering would be to embrace its game-like structure, rather than try to regulate it into submission. Everyone's trying to build a system that is "fair", meanwhile games are the best way that humans have found to interact "fairly". The moves of the game:

  1. The majority party / coalition draw the first straight line that bisects the population of the state. To be mathematically clear: the party must choose two points on the border and a line will be drawn between them, with the requirement that roughly half the population lives in the two sectors created by the line.
  2. The minority party / coalition then draws a second line that either turns the map into (50% / 25% / 25%) sectors or (25% / 25% / 25% / 25%) sectors. To be mathematically clear: they must also choose two points, with at least one point on the border, but can choose the second point either on the border or on the first line that was drawn by the majority party.
  3. The parties alternate turns until all sectors have the required proportion of the population. The total number of moves can vary based on whether points are chosen on the border or on an already existing "line". Moves are always required to bisect an existing district, and a bisection can not bring a district below the required proportion of the population.

The obvious con here is that low-polygon districts don't map well to geographical and societal features (rivers, mountains, city limits), but I don't think that we're doing well with our current system anyway.

Also it doesn't work if you have a number of districts that isn't a power of 2.

Any change would require parties to submit to their minority, though, which will never happen - except through the courts maybe.

Anyway, emphatic agreement that FPTP is one of the roots in the tree of evil and Washington would have outlawed it in his Republic if he had foreseen its consequences.

The majority party/coalition draws the first straight line that bisects the population of the state.

See also the shortest-splitline algorithm.

The shortest-splitline algorithm for drawing N congressional districts:

(1) Start with the boundary outline of the state.

(2) Let A = ⌈N/2⌉ and B = ⌊N/2⌋.

(3) Among all possible dividing lines that split the state into two parts with population ratio A:B, choose the shortest.

(4) We now have two hemi-states, each to contain a specified number (namely A and B) of districts. Handle them recursively via the same splitting procedure.

Yeah this and other "mathematically unbiased" district-drawing algorithms often get plenty of upvotes on Hacker News, so I've seen them. My first issue with them is that they often have to choose some arbitrary optimization criteria to close the space of the problem (e.g. for this one why is that the "shortest" splitline should be chosen among all splitlines?).

My second issue, more practically, is that you'll never get state congress critters to give up even a little bit of power, let alone the power of the district-drawing pen. But red-blooded Americans love a good competition so I'd like to almost think that it would become some sort of televised spectacle where each party announces its next line like it's the NFL Draft. Maybe even some will gamble on it (or would have, if the BBB didn't hamstring gamblers). The congress critters would even get additional time in the limelight, which we all know is what they truly crave aside from receiving a greasing of the palms from industry buddies and pals.

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