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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27218 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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Virginia is voting on redrawing their congressional districts today. Here is the Wikipedia entry.

The main highlight is that it would change Virginia from 6-5 democrat-republican split to a 10-1 split. It is being sold by Democrats as an effort to counter Republican gerrymandering in other states. It is being panned by Republicans as unfair representation, and an election map that looks like Fairfax county (rich county in northern Virginia) gets to elect about half of the state's representatives.

I'm a Virginia resident. So I've been getting lots of mailers about the issue and simple vote "yes" or "no" signs are everywhere.

I'm very frustrated with the whole thing. First for Trump kicking off this fight. Second with the Democrats in Virginia that have made a ridiculously bullshit map. I still have yet to hear anyone from the "yes" side explain how this is good for Virginia other than "fight Trump". I even read one article that had a title implying it would be about voters not feeling represented, and it turns out the content of the article was about democratic leaders addressing the democrat voters in the now single solitary red district. No content about how Republican voters might feel in the 10 other districts.

If this level of bullshit is on the table I feel like other proposals that get shot down for being "crazy" in normal times might end up back on the table. Like a bunch of Virginia counties seceding and joining West Virginia. Or the right to giant congress

  • edit - it appears the redistricting effort has passed.

Note that an under-reported aspect of the Peter Magyar story in Hungary is that Fidesz put in all kinds of tricks to allow them to push through constitutional changes with a plurality vote share, getting huge majorities in parliament despite pulling mid-40s vote percentages. The flip side of this is that the "landslide" much lauded by global libs that pushed them out of office, came when Tisza got just over 50% of the vote.

With 97.35 percent of precincts counted, Magyar’s centre-right party secured 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament on 53.6 percent of the vote, while nationalist Orban’s Fidesz took just 55 seats with 37.8 percent, according to official results.

A gerrymander can quickly become a dummymander if things shift.

So all Republicans have to do to turn this into a huge Republican advantage is actually appeal to suburban VA voters again.

Saw a great This You? style tweet on it. The closer you cut the gerrymander the riskier it gets and some of the partisan shills on X who supported Texas are freaking out about it now with Virginia having gone left in most counties.

Twitter poster Christian Heiens was right. Republicans have way more juice to squeeze out of gerrymandering than Democrats do because Democrats have done more of it until now. The only reason Democrats are winning this fight is that Republicans are reluctant to fight. cf. Indiana

This also creates a deadlock situation. Surely many voters of Tisza would prefer changing the parliamentary system that was set up by the former ruling party, as it was a big source of opposition to the latter, but if Tisza does go through with this, it’ll be an open admission that the system which facilitated their landslide victory and thus put them in a position to change it is unjust and distorted.

if Tisza does go through with this, it’ll be an open admission that the system which facilitated their landslide victory and thus put them in a position to change it is unjust and distorted.

I literally do not see the problem. It is not like Fidesz wanted to help them when they set up the system. It would be like an absolute monarch who inherited the throne to birth deciding that absolute monarchy is bad and decreeing that power should be transferred to a democratically elected government. Only the terminally pedantic would whine that he only has the power to do so due to the present system being rigged, and expect him to renounce the throne and become a revolutionary instead.

The two situations are a bit different though. For one, no absolute monarch chooses to be born as such. In your example, the monarch voluntarily gives up his power, which is not the case here. The now-former Hungarian opposition has specifically been complaining for more than a decade that the current voting system hugely distorts results in favor of the party with the most votes. Unless they want to openly admit that it was all kayfabe and BS, they should vote to change the system.

Plenty of people got mad at king Juan Carlos anyways.

Once a suburbanite has gone Democrat they never go back.

To illustrate that this indeed applies to Hungary as well, I present this article on the subject which appeared two months before the election. Voting districts where the then-main opposition umbrella party, which just now had a landslide victory, positions itself as ‘center-right’ but is nevertheless supported by almost the entire local Blue Tribe and gets applauded in the US Blue Tribe media, has majority support are marked in different shades of blue (heh). Accordingly, the big blue blob in the middle of the map is the capital and the suburban/metropolitan regions and commuter towns around it.

Orange and blue are the colours Fidesz and Tisza chose for themselves.

In general (several countries are exceptions) European political colours are the reverse of the modern* US convention, with centre-left parties using red (even if they are no longer actually socialist) and centre-right parties using blue. See for example this official EU Parliament page, or any Wikipedia article about a European national Parliament. (Wikipedia by policy follows parties' own choice of colour where possible).

Tisza are a big-tent centre-right party, so using blue is unsurprising. (The left in Hungary is defunct, a it is in Poland and the Czech Republic.) Fidesz adopted orange in their early days when they were a right-liberal party opposed to Soviet Bloc communism - yellow and orange are the most common colours used by liberal parties, including the British Liberal Democrats (both over time), German FDP (yellow) and Dutch VVD (who use blue-and-orange, reflecting their role as the de facto conservative party in Dutch politics as well as their own right-liberal tradition).

* To the best of my knowledge, Red = Republican and Blue = Democrat only became the convention after Bush vs. Gore. (Both parties use red, white and blue in their imagery). The BBC used blue = Republican/red = Democrat up to and including 2000 for consistency with the British convention (e.g. the popup map on this archive page) and switched to the modern US convention in its 2004 coverage (archive example). One account I read was that the US networks generally used blue for the incumbent and red for the challenger and red this became fixed as blue=Dem/red=Rep because the 2000 map became a meme during the Bush v Gore litigation.

One account I read was that the US networks generally used blue for the incumbent and red for the challenger and red this became fixed as blue=Dem/red=Rep because the 2000 map became a meme during the Bush v Gore litigation.

As far as I know, marking the enemy in red and your own side in blue on maps has also been a tradition of armies.

Orange and blue are the colours Fidesz and Tisza chose for themselves.

I'm not sure about the latter, because as far as colors and politics go, blue is currently associated with one of the small and now practically defunct local leftist liberal parties. But anyway, as far as the article I linked is concerned, I thought it was a funny coincidence regarding the color blue.

As far as I know, marking the enemy in red and your own side in blue on maps has also been a tradition of armies.

I always thought it was a tradition of NATO and NATO-trained armies, based on the assumption that the enemy would be Red because it was the USSR. (Both the Nazis and the USSR marked themselves in red on military maps, consistent with the dominant colour on their flag). Googling suggests that the origins of the practice are older - during the long period of Anglo-French conflict everyone agreed that Britain was red and France was blue (mostly based on uniform colours, also consistent wiht the predominant colours on the medieval English and French royal flags), and there are various reasons why the capital-A Allies adopted the French colour scheme as early as WW1. If true this suggests that Germany chose to put themselves in red because they saw France as the permanent enemy.

European political colours are the reverse of the modern* US convention, with centre-left parties using red (even if they are no longer actually socialist) and centre-right parties using blue

Not true for Germany. The left is red, the center-left is red, the Greens are green, but the center right is black (with some tiny sparks of yellow disappearing rapidly). The extreme right is classically brown, but the main far-right party is using blue.

I suspect part of what is going on is that almost every political party for whom not being red is part of its identity (which covers the centre right, the far right, right-liberals and some left-liberals, particularly in the former Soviet bloc) wants to use blue if it is available.

Looking at the member parties of the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament, I would say most right-populist parties end up using a darker shade of blue than the main centre-right party in their country.

I think this is, sadly, more probable than not.

Arlington County, Virginia, 2036:

The "White Girl Buses", manned by former Blackwater security, roll in sequence up Wilson Boulevard in Clarendon for the nightly 7:30pm run to Whole Foods. The armed men spill off the bus and cordon off the parking lot. A sergeant dispatches a squad to hastily speed-cuff a few military age somali males who have strayed too far from Seven Corners.

15 minutes 38 minutes later, as Rebecca, Becky, Becca, and Ashlaighyeh re-embark on the security bus with their paper boxes (recycled of course) full of pad thai, one of them flips a crinkled old $100 bill to the Guatemalan street cleaner who bags the liquid shit of their golden-doodle-pug breed. "Gross-eyy-ahhhsss!" she wails, waving at him like he's deaf.

Cain, the security chief for the convoy, radios as the busses pull off; "Got some skinnys by the 66 on-ramp near Ballston that look sporty. Can we get a QRF to do a sweep?"

"Palantir recon already has them marked for a UAV sortie. It's logged." Comes the distorted reply. Cain doesn't even bother to respond. The bus hits a pothole and one of the newer guys loses his balance for a moment, his left hip knocking Becca's dinner box off her lap on, harmlessly, onto the seat next to her.

"Sorry, ma'am" he offers.

"It's like ...... whatever." She says.

Cain thinks about his home in Morgantown. 17 more days until I'm off rotation.

Thank God for redistricting.

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