domain:noahpinion.blog
4nji2
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
23hr 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
23hr 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
23hr ago
C'mon man, what's fun or entertaining about this?
I know, right? Poor guy didn’t even get to finish (ejaculate).
Throwaway05
23hr 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
23hr 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
23hr 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
23hr ago
DiscourseMagnus
23hr 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
23hr 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
1d 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
1d ago
I think you may have hit a new low for how “fun” your cases are.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d 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
1d 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
1d ago
I could swear I've seen seagulls too big to fly, render purely landborne by their diet of leftover McDonald's fries.
PreformancePertension
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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.
kky
1d ago
Does he? I certainly didn’t find that when reading it. He certainly doesn’t present a compelling case that the US Constitution provides for any specific organization on the part of the states beyond assuming that they all must follow a familiar pattern. Well, now they don’t. So what now? Rule the very practice unconstitutional because it was not anticipated by the initial authors? He doesn’t make that claim ever. Why not?
His whole initial section on the definition has a particularly laughable moment where he undermines his whole argument, if he had been aware of it. Quoted in full:
Moreover, Dr. Johnson's first example of the usage of "legislature" is this: "Without the concurrent consent of all three parts of the legislature, no law is or can be made." 2 A Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed. 1755) (emphasis deleted). Johnson borrowed that sentence from Matthew Hale, who defined the "Three Parts of the Legislature" of England as the King and the two houses of Parliament. History of the Common Law of England 2 (1713). (The contrary notion that the people as a whole make the laws would have cost you your head in England in 1713.) Thus, even under the majority's preferred definition, "the Legislature" referred to an institutional body of representatives, not the people at large.
That is, in the initial definition of legislature, THE KING OF ENGLAND was a necessary component. We obviously don’t have that. The institutional body of representatives was ONE house of Parliament. The Lords Temporal and Spiritual were institutional, but not representative. The King was not a body in the sense he intends at all. Yet “the voting public when they select a ballot initiative” is somehow excluded from a definition of “legislature” that is obviously descriptive as to how the laws are passed in the country of concern? On the basis of THIS paragraph? Did this guy read what he was quoting?
Like I’m telling you, specious in its entirety. Come on, you can’t read this and tell me the guy doesn’t come off like Sotomayor.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Yes, but both "packing" and "cracking" minorities are disallowed.
celluloid_dream
1d ago
Ogopogo is your bog-standard lake monster with a cool name. I'd have assumed it was invented to sell cute snake plushies at souvenir shops, if not for its apparent long history:
According to Ben Radford, the Ogopogo is "more closely tied to native myths than is any other lake monster." The Secwepemc and Syilx natives regarded the Ogopogo, which they called the Naitaka, as "an evil supernatural entity with great power and ill intent."[7] The word "n'ha-a-itk" has various translations, such as "water-demon", "water god", or "sacred creature of the water".[8] In native lore, Naitaka demanded a live sacrifice for safe crossing of the lake. For hundreds of years, First Nations would sacrifice small animals before entering the water. Oral traditions often described visiting chief Timbasket, who rejected the required sacrifice, denying the existence of the demon. Upon entering the lake on a canoe with his family, Naitaka "whipped up the surface of the lake with his long tail" and the canoe and its occupants were sucked to the bottom of the lake. The Naitaka was often described as using its tail to create fierce storms to drown victims. In 1855, settler John MacDougal claimed that his horses were sucked down into the water, and nearly his canoe before he cut the line.
MollieTheMare
1d ago
One of my more unhinged pet ideas for the house is that the the main problem with Arrow's impossibility theorem and Gibbard's theorem are the requirements for a deterministic process.
In my fantasy each voter would be able to nominate one person to serve in the House for a two year term. You would then select 2,500 ballots to establish the house for the next two years, continuing to select random ballots one at a time in the case of duplicates. No one would be guaranteed incumbency, so you couldn't trade as much on future electoral success. Very popular politicians would still be more likely but not guaranteed a spot, so they would also have to maintain a real job or do a good enough job to maintain influence even when not in power. With a 2,500 strong body crazies should be a small enough minority, on an given issue, to be safely ignored. And if the sample is random you would have enough statistical representation to match the populace to within 1% on any given topic, even tighter if things are not 50/50. The idea would be that the majority go back to their regular life after serving.
Leave the institutional knowledge building and statesmanship to the Senate.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Article going into detail on this topic
AMENDMENT XXXI: There shall be not less than one Representative for every thirty thousand persons, and not more than one Representative for every twenty-five thousand persons.
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.
More options
Context Copy link