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birb_cromble
1hr ago
Obviously we should give each party a bull's hide, and they may claim any land it encloses as their own.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1hr ago
I've been reading the fanfiction Pokemon: The Origin of Species on and off recently. It's a rationalist take on the Pokemon setting in the same vein as HPMOR, if you aren't familiar. It's had some good ideas and moments, and can be delightfully brutal, but I just got to the chapter that introduces Bill and was put off by the other dropping a bowling ball on my head about AI safety, with lines ripped (cited?) 1:1 from Big Yud. It feels almost... quaint? But more tiresome than anything else; this isn't a new topic for anyone who had read a lot of Rational fiction or blogs.
Moreover, it's made me apprehensive about the direction of the story and unsure if I want to continue. I enjoyed rationalist concepts applied to the Pokemon world, and the author trying to make real various concepts and moves in the game. I'm not interested in it turning into another AI/ending death story... which seems like where the author or main character wants to go given recent events in the story.
Has anyone else read this fic? What were your thoughts. I'm only on chapter 37/143 myself, so I won't be able to talk about events far in the future.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
State democrats are very effective at turning money into pointless drama, much moreso than shooting yourself.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
To be fair, mid decade redistricting is, while definitely signaled well in advance, not very precedented.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Texas wasn’t that gerrymandered before this. In fact thé worst gerrymanders in terms of the difference between popular vote percentages and congressional results are in Oregon and Illinois, a complication for the ‘evil republicans’ narrative.
4nji2
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
1hr ago
C'mon man, what's fun or entertaining about this?
This part:
(The judges don't mention it, but obviously any 19-year-old male who would choose to hire a 51-year-old prostitute also has a severe mental disability that warrants special sentencing treatment.)
kky
1hr ago
My argument is effectively that trying to secure power in a democracy through anything other than pleasing the majority of constituents is eventually opposed to its own goal. If you can get away with pleasing your constituents less by virtue of a gerrymander, then they will come to distrust you. If they distrust you, your voterbase will erode out from under the gerrymander, and when the dam bursts you will be in real trouble. The one-party democratic systems, like in Singapore and Japan, are obsessed with pleasing the majority of constituents and use the opposition parties as ways to find areas where they are falling behind public opinion. That’s the heart of it.
Sloot
1hr ago
C'mon man, what's fun or entertaining about this?
I know, right? Poor guy didn’t even get to finish (ejaculate).
Throwaway05
1hr ago
I've seen a number of stories on the internet where someone states they found mountain lions outside the accepted range and the response from the government is "nope but actually yes it's just rare and I don't want to deal with the paperwork."
I can't say for sure if this is a meme or refection of reality.
kky
2hr ago
I’m not personally sold on the correlation myself. Plenty of dumb harpies out there. Meanwhile, the smart women I know (NOT identical to academics) are generally pretty nice, including to me, a man.
Now, what I do see a correlation on is deference. A smart woman is more likely to challenge you on things and assert her own opinion, and less likely to take what you say at face value, holding kindness constant. This is simply because they’re more capable of going toe to toe on the details on account of their intelligence. So if you say something stupid, a smart woman will call you out, possibly nicely, but certainly accurately. And she’ll bring receipts. So for a man who likes to impress his woman (all men), this can be a bit of a challenge. Does she still like me and look up to me? Chances are yes, but it’s something a little galling. It’s like a man doing better with a child or animal - a sort of personalized, gendered insult.
So maybe that’s where it comes from. For me, dumb is such a dealbreaker that I can’t really look past it. But attraction is one of those things where people can never really see eye to eye, and I guess that’s a good thing in itself.
DiscourseMagnus
2hr ago
In the context of the death penalty, the US Supreme Court has held that mentally disabled offenders are not smart enough to understand deterrence
...wait a minute, what? But the entire point of deterrence as a justification is that you're not trying to deter the specific crime that actually happened, but rather comparable crimes in the future. I have non-zero sympathy for the "less morally culpable as regards retribution" argument, but deterrence would surely be an argument against this class of defense, not for it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2hr ago
DiscourseMagnus
2hr ago
Don't know if this is a real dream or a story you wrote, but either way it's a high-quality bit of moral instruction and prophetic vision.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2hr ago
Can you know stop falsely portraying the other side's argument?
I haven't, which I took your refusal to explain in what way you think I am doing so as an acknowledgment of such
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
I've always favored assigning voters to districts by valid dice roll. Nothing up my sleeves there, must be fair.
Is statistical joke, if unclear: each individual district becomes a random sample of the whole and converges to such, such that this is the worst possible gerrymander. But I didn't do anything obviously against the rules like taking race into account.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
I think you may have hit a new low for how “fun” your cases are.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
i've always wondered instead of a commission you could just agree ahead of time on some rules on how redistricting would be performed and then just have the rules execute at a fixed time period.
It's relatively straightforward to figure out how any given rule would alter the existing electoral chances. Announce your commission, and people will figure out what ruleset gives them the best advantage, and then insist that this ruleset is clearly the "unbiased, optimal" rule and that the commission should adopt it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3hr ago
My guess is that they're being attracted to the silliness part of it and attributing the lack of intelligence as a cause of the silliness. Which potentially has some merit: I think there is a negative correlation between intelligence and silliness on average. I could be wrong, some people do just want to be way smarter than their partner, as some combination of pride and the ability to win arguments and control things, but I think most of it is correlations and stereotypes connecting intelligence to other things. If I had to choose between an intelligent bitter feminist constantly comparing everything I do to a historical dictator, and a sweet highschool dropout country girl with rocks for brains and a heart of gold, I'd choose the latter. If for some reason I was convinced that intelligence inevitably produced the former and wasn't aware of the exceptions I would have been tempted to join more unintellectual activities to try to find unintelligent women. Or just despaired and given up because I don't think they would like me even if I did like them.
The point being, I think some men do think this way. And I think statistically they're partially correct but missing plenty of exceptions.
I'm not the election law lawyer you're looking for, but in short I'd say "it's a mess". Longer: the law in question is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, accompanied with a bunch of court precedents, of which the Gingles test. Per Wikipedia:
Under the Gingles test, plaintiffs must show the existence of three preconditions:
- The racial or language minority group "sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district";
- The minority group is "politically cohesive" (meaning its members tend to vote similarly); and
- The "majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it ... usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate."
There is some relevant more modern precedent, but that's the basic part. IMO it's not a good answer because it effectively dilutes the no-longer-majority votes that end up in that district (in largely the same ways, just reversed), and because putting too many minority voters in one district is "packing" which is also disallowed.
This is what happens when you don't have a constructive example of what should exist, just congressional and judicial legal wrist slapping saying "no, but not that".
ETA: Hopefully someone else can give a more complete answer.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
3hr ago
I could swear I've seen seagulls too big to fly, render purely landborne by their diet of leftover McDonald's fries.
PreformancePertension
3hr ago
I'll admit that that was exactly the article I was thinking of; I rounded off the 11,000 member proposal just for convenience's sake, even though it probably shouldn't scare anyone here.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
3hr ago
You're supposed to go "here I googled/grokked that for you" when google/grok actually provides a comprehensive answer. This is not a comprehensive answer, zero mention of Bogdanoffs.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3hr ago
I’ll be honest with you that most normies just don’t really care about politics and thus don’t really care if their votes actually count
I don't think this is right - people get extremely mad if they feel their vote is being taken away. What I think is true is that very few people have a sense for the details of politics. They want to show up once every 2-4 years and vote for someone they vibe with and otherwise not think too hard about the substance of policy.
Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up
In addition to the point I raised above, these meetings are often contrived to be difficult to attend and your individual participation is not particularly meaningful. Showing up as an organized group does have an impact (which is why these processes are often dominated by small groups of angry retirees), but that's contrary the central tenet of neogrillism, i.e. only absolutely minimum effort participation in the political process.
Sometimes the old ways are best.
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