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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27941 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.

Once a suburbanite has gone Democrat they never go back.

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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