domain:vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
13hr ago
I'm perfectly calm, Dude.
Supah_Schmendrick
13hr ago
Yes yes, and Phil Burton and Willie Brown were gerrymandering California - home of Reagan and Nixon - blue in the 1980s:
After the 1980 census California became entitled to 45 congressional districts, a growth of two.[4] Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature and the governorship but were feeling vulnerable after former Governor Reagan had won California by a landslide in the 1980 presidential election. Democratic Congressman Phillip Burton and new State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown devised a redistricting plan that would result in five new safe Democratic seats.[5] Congressman Burton would boast that the bizarrely shaped map, which included a 385-sided district, was "My contribution to modern art".[6] Reacting to what was called "one of the most notorious gerrymanders" of the decade,[7] Republicans successfully placed a veto referendum on the primary ballot and California voters overwhelmingly rejected the legislature's redistricting plans in the June 1982 election, the same election that enacted the California Constitution's Victim's Bill of Rights.[8]
A majority of the California Supreme Court justices, however, had been appointed by Governor Jerry Brown and a sharply fractured court ordered the rejected districts to be used in the November election because only it was "practicable".[9] Democrats won 60% of the congressional seats despite only taking 49.9% of the statewide vote.[10] Democrats still lost the statewide elections, losing the governorship and incumbent Governor Jerry Brown losing his U.S. Senate bid to San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson. Governor Brown responded by calling an extraordinary legislative session, amending a previously passed bill with the redistricting plan that had just been rejected by the electorate, and signing the redistricting plan into law hours before being replaced by Republican George Deukmejian.
That's arguably significantly worse than what the GOP is trying to pull now in Texas.
Rov_Scam
13hr ago
I'd honestly be surprised if this were the case in your state. If you wouldn't mind telling me what it is I can look at the sentencing guidelines myself.
Rov_Scam
13hr ago
Presumably, these offenses would get something closer to 30 years in a US court.
Looking at the PA sentencing guidelines, I'm not seeing anything close to 30 years no matter how you slice it. Even getting to what the Australian court imposed would be tough. All I see here is one count of simple assault causing bodily injury from the first incident. From the second incident, one count of simple assault causing bodily injury, one count of aggravated indecent assault, one count of attempted rape, and one count of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse using force. The IDSI charge is the most serious here, and sentencing from the remaining charges of the second incident would almost certainly run concurrently. They would probably tack on the assault charge from the first case to run consecutively, but that's only 24 months of probation. There are no relevant enhancements or mandatory minimums. The aggravating circumstances would likely be balanced by the mitigating circumstances. This is a first offense, and the sentencing guidelines for IDSI for a first-time offender call for 4.5–5.5 years in state prison. Even if we grant the max allowed for aggravating circumstances, that only gets an additional nine months. Plus sex offender registration and whatever post-release supervision the guidelines call for.
Judges in Pennsylvania have discretion to deviate from the guidelines, but they have to provide a justification, and the sentence is reviewable. Getting to 30 years would be theoretically possible, but it would require such a gross deviation from the guidelines that an appellate court would shoot it down pretty much immediately. Hell, the statutory max is only 20 years; anything beyond that would require consecutive sentences. Even the aggravating factors here are kind of weak, even if you don't take the mitigating factors into account, and the guidelines already account for them. As grisly as these crimes sound, they're really par for the course when it comes to what the guidelines anticipate.
Supah_Schmendrick
13hr ago
Without reading (at least) 50 years of redistricting history, how does one possibly get to the bottom of this? As time goes on it becomes increasingly obvious to me that it's a folly to believe there is anything resembling objective truth on almost any contentious issue.
I'm really struggling not to read this comment as "without expending energy to assess the evidence, how can I find truth?" Or, alternatively "figuring things out is uncomfortably hard, therefore it can't possibly be done." Except that feels really uncharitable and I really hope that's not what you meant.
Yes, motivated argument and even honest disagreements exist. It's true of most things, not just politically/culturally controversial ones. That doesn't absolve you - or any of us! - of the burden of assessing things for yourself as best you can. What hope is there for democracy, the idea that common people can be trusted to manage their own affairs and be entrusted with political power, if the default attitude when confronted with dispute and contention is "welp, no way to determine who's right here, fuck it!" That's not the attitude of a citizen; it's the resigned fatalism of a slave.
And I see what you mean about them appealing to a "male romance fan" but- well, does it not strike you that there is a large overlap between the male protagonists of those stories and the generic, uninteresting, personality-less girl being mocked in that /r/romance_for_men cartoon?
Yes, of course. That's why we call them MC; because they are so interchangeable that we can't even remember their names. They are "boring, indecisive schlubs whose only identifiable personality traits are vague kindness and an inhuman ability to put up with abuse", as Nornagest put it. These stories are named after the love interest, not the protagonist, because she is the one who is actually unique and interesting.
I bailed because the male protagonist, Yuu, is so annoyingly... well, non-masculine. Unassertive, cringing, insecure, less smart, less confident, and less cool than his girlfriend... I kept wondering "What does she see in him?" But you have made me realize I was seeing it from the wrong angle, as a story appealing to women (who I guess in Japan find an unthreatening submissive softboi a turn-on?) But no, it's appealing to men
I thought that was obvious? There is nothing in Shikimori to appeal to a woman; it is very clearly a male fantasy. Women in Japan, like women everywhere, are attracted to tall, rich, dominant assholes, and if you read Japanese media that is aimed at women, that is exactly what you get.
But no, it's appealing to men- or more specifically, to boys who feel insecure and unmasculine and unable to compete in traditionally masculine ways, but want to imagine the cute, smart but devoted and affectionate girl will still fall in love with them.
...
And this is perhaps why "romance for men" doesn't appeal to me much. I am hardly a "manly man" who wants to go out and conquer kingdoms, but I guess I am a traditional enough man that I want to see men working, striving, struggling, and earning their rewards. A guy who offers no apparent distinction but has women falling on his dick anyway is not a fantasy for me, it's a mystery.
Don't you think that's a little harsh?
Yes, in the real world, Komi would have friendzoned Tadano as soon as she started making progress on communicating, then dated a popular fuckboy. Nagatoro would have become attracted to an artist who had already drawn lots of girls naked, like a Japanese version of Titanic, instead of becoming Senpai's muse and helping him achieve his full potential. "Women don't care about a mans struggles, they wait at the finish line and fuck the winners", as Richard Cooper said.
What anime romcons (and other romance for men) sell is precisely the impossible fantasy of a world where this doesn't happen. Is it wrong to want to escape the domaine de la lutte for thirty minutes at a time, if only in our imaginations?
Have you read Haruki Murakami?
Nope, sorry; never even heard of this dude.
Boys would have to overcome the stigma of reading "romance" and, let's be honest, a story like I have described, where an ordinary boy wins the love and affection of a hot girl out of his league, would be scorned and mocked across social media and booktock, and become loser-coded.
A good salesman can come up with a marketing strategy to overcome any stigma, like calling G.I. Joe dolls "action figures", or rebranding minivans as SUVs. As for getting trashed on social media, well, yes, any story that appeals to men is going to have to make its peace with that, as is any man who wants to read something that he enjoys.
GBRK
13hr ago
I'm a big fan of serial novels, and I've previously written (fanfiction) serially before. But as an art form, it's like comparing a TV show to a movie-- for all the things that are similar, there's still plenty of things that change. For example, I'm committed to polishing to book to a mirror finish, which means obsessing over line-level prose, snipping dangling plot threads, and cutting out fat like I'm sculping a character from greek myth. But all of that goes directly against the grain of serial fiction, which favors expansive plots, slower development, excessive-- almost extraneous-- detail, and update rate over polish.
I'm not going to rule out publishing serially in the future, but this book specifically would only work as a traditionally published work
Pasha
Defend Kebab
13hr ago
I sometimes wonder whether men who marry purely for aesthetics fully grasp that children inherit genetic material from both parents. I would never marry someone intellectually deficient, simply because no offspring of mine deserves the curse of inheriting my appearance and her cognitive abilities. This woman had drawn the genetic short straw; the rest of her family consisted of high-achieving intellectuals.
I mean if her family is relatively smart probably your children will be fine as well?
Templexious
13hr ago
I dropped the story at that chapter because it was such a lazy approach to trying to get readers on board with the idea. If the author was being that lazy with the pitch, what else were they being lazy about?
Just went back to reading Most Evil Trainer, which was actually good.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14hr ago
I believe the standard advice nowadays is to ignore the traditional publishing process, and instead publish for free in serial format (possibly with a Patreon) to drum up interest, before depublishing that preliminary version and publishing a final version on Amazon.
>>>/lit/wng says:
>Why write web novels?
Ease of access & potential for Patreon earnings. Many successful authors gain an audience on their website of choice and funnel their readers into a Patreon. See graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing for an idea of what some are earning.
Also, once an author has earned a fanbase, transitioning into an Amazon self-publishing career is several orders of magnitude easier than starting 'dry'.
>>>/lit/wg says:
Traditional Publishing
Pros:
- you get to focus mostly on writing
- you must write a proposal to the publishers and sell your story to them
- you make 10-15% profit max, but they also eat all the risk and the costs
- self publishing is basically like running your own company
- you only need to do some simple marketing and reach out to readers
Cons:
- you make 10-15% profit max
- self publishing you make 70%+
- they’ll still require you to do all the leg work of a self published author anyways
Self Publishing How-To
- risky, but much more profitable
- you must pay for everything yourself
- if you do, you will spend more time on running a business than writing, but can be worth it
I can say that, over the past few years, I have purchased several books through this pathway.
GBRK
14hr ago
So I'm starting the search for a literary agent for my fantasy adventure novel. I haven't sent out any queries yet-- I've got at least one more round of beta readers and I still need to perfect a query letter-- but I've been looking through manuscriptwishlist and querytracker for prospective agents. Now this didn't come as a surprise or anything, but the ratio of female to male agents is something like 7:1. And making some assumptions based on biographical elements, I'll wager that the ratio of female to straight male agents is something like 15:1. And despite the fact that as a catholic I'm already pretty redpilled culturally in spite of my neoliberal principles neoliberal-- wow is the performative support for alphabet + "marginalized" (read: nonmale, nonwhite) identities off the charts. It's genuinely pretty disheartening.
Now I could, in principle, present myself as exactly the kind of person these agents want; a brown author with a story set in a non-euroamerican inspired fantasy and female gender-non-conforming main character. (She actually conforms pretty well to the gender norms of her own culture, but I made a concerted effort to have all my cultures be strange and bizarre.). I even address a "socially relevant cause" (immigration) as a secondary theme. But the idea of contorting myself into their box disgusts me. And besides that, my treatment of the theme draws intentional parallels between immigration and imperialism, and poses the question of tradeoffs: security vs prosperity, the right to preserve your culture vs. the need to enforce uniform standards of good behavior, the interests of the immigrants vs. the interests of the locals, etcetera. And also the main character is genuinely racist. I don't think that'll go over well with the kind of people who "care deeply about supporting marginalized voices" and specify, "NO MORE BORING CIS WHITE GUYS" in all caps.
Despite that, I'm still going to go through the submission process. I'm not going to cope about sour grapes-- most probably, if I can't get an agent, it'll be because my manuscript just isn't good enough. Or, even if it is, it might just not be marketable enough, for reasons completely unrelated to politics. I was this close to listing "made in abyss" as a comp title; my level of politics-neutral degeneracy is high enough that I'll be genuinely surprised to earn out an industry-standard $10,000 advance.
But still-- if anyone can point me to resources for finding agents who aren't NPCs, I'd appreciate that. I'm also thinking about direct submissions to conservative-leaning mid size presses but worry those will just pose the equivalent-but-reflected problem.
Quantumfreakonomics
14hr ago
This is unironically why payment-for-order-flow is so lucrative.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
It’s also the things that even in a direct democracy you’d personally have very chance of actually having much input on the issue. It’s the perfect way to get credit for being “concerned about the community” while having no real requirements to understand anything. It doesn’t matter, and you won’t be held responsible for making a mess of things. So you get to argue about it, thus appearing knowledgeable and caring about “the issues”, while facing absolutely no consequences if you get your way and are wrong. Call it M’aiq’s Law. The more visibility the debate has and the less responsibility anyone has for getting it right, the more likely people are to debate it.
sodiummuffin
14hr ago
Does that actually benefit Democrats though? Concentrating your safe voters in a single district is generally the opposite of what you want to do if the goal is maximizing number of seats or attaining a majority. My default guess would be that majority-minority motivated gerrymandering would actually hurt Democrats, but I assume somebody has done the actual analysis.
HighResolutionSleep
14hr ago
I apologize for having fun in the fun thread
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14hr ago
Quote from the opinion:
As is often true of common-law principles, the reasons for the rule are less sure and less uniform than the rule itself. One explanation is that the execution of an insane person simply offends humanity; another, that it provides no example to others and thus contributes nothing to whatever deterrence value is intended to be served by capital punishment.* Other commentators postulate religious underpinnings: that it is uncharitable to dispatch an offender "into another world, when he is not of a capacity to fit himself for it". It is also said that execution serves no purpose in these cases because madness is its own punishment: furiosus solo furore punitur. More recent commentators opine that the community's quest for "retribution"—the need to offset a criminal act by a punishment of equivalent "moral quality"—is not served by execution of an insane person, which has a "lesser value" than that of the crime for which he is to be punished. Unanimity of rationale, therefore, we do not find. "But whatever the reason of the law is, it is plain the law is so." We know of virtually no authority condoning the execution of the insane at English common law.[1]
[1]At one point, Henry VIII enacted a law requiring that if a man convicted of treason fell mad, he should nevertheless be executed. This law was uniformly condemned. The "cruel and inhumane Law lived not long, but was repealed, for in that point also it was against the Common Law...."
*Citing Lord Coke:
By intendment of law the execution of the offender is for example, ut poena ad paucos, metus ad omnes perveniat**, as before is laid: but so it is not when a mad man is executed, but should be a miserable spectacle, both against Law, and of extream inhumanity and cruelty, and can be no example to others.
**Latin: "So that punishment may come to few, [but] fear to all."
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
15hr ago
My hypothesis is that the modern hyper fixation on federal politics is bike shedding writ large. It's easy to have a strong opinion on federal issues (name one). Local politics deals with practical, boring questions about zoning, school bonds, and such. We spend way too much time arguing over the easy-to-understand bits (what color should the bike shed be), not on most of the details of governing.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
15hr ago
Should minorities be guaranteed representation, even if they are geographically spread out?
If you say yes, then you're in favor of majority-minority gerrymandering, which is the cause of the most egregious electoral maps in the United States. If you take a look, you can see the individual buildings carved out to create a electoral district in the name of equity. Yes, this is for the benefit of black people in urban districts. Yes, they are primarily Democratic - even in deep red states.
This has been the status quo for so long that people forget that yes, it is a scandal.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
15hr ago
(2) It's very interesting to compare Australian sentencing with US sentencing. Presumably, these offenses would get something closer to 30 years in a US court.
I was thinking about this earlier. In my state, if he went to trial and got convicted, he'd be looking at life with no possible release for at least 25 years (and the release isn't parole, it's far more restrictive and rarely granted). I would be surprised if any prosecutor here would offer him a plea deal with less than 20 years, and even that seems optimistic.
Walter, Walter, what's the point, man?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
15hr ago
stuckinbathroom
15hr ago
Desi women are so beautiful
Is it possible to learn this power?
(I’m, uh, asking for a friend)
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
15hr ago
No.
Yes if he was doing actual boxing boxing.
They do cardio, technique, footwork, hand work, and very, very light sparring.
Even then, I would recommend a kid take a few to the head in a boxing gym rather than not.
It forms important understandings as a kid imo.
But as long as they get to vote, sure they argue about politics but, at least from my personal observation, the participation is mostly about feeling as if they participate, and very little about outcomes and certainly not about what happens after they vote. Like if they get little of what the6 say they want, sure they grouse, but it’s not like they’ll do much more than tantrum on social media and talk about lying politicians. So the median American “votes”, fails every time to get politicians to do what they actually want done … and are mostly perfectly okay with it. That’s not “caring about the vote” so much as “caring that they get to cast a ballot every couple of years.” Which is different, and furthermore doesn’t bode well for the predictions that people will get upset about their district being rendered non competitive. They still get the parts they care about: the process of casting a ballot, the ability to complain, the constant need to stay informed so “they know how they should vote.” The only part missing is the steering wheel being connected to the wheels. It’s like those little car-seat steering wheels kids have. The kid is perfectly content with turning the little wheel and couldn’t give a care that it doesn’t do anything to the car.
And really, for most human behavior, the truism holds that if a person really truly cares about something, they’ll find a way to do it. If they really cared about local politics, they’d find ways to participate, it’s not impossible. Yet nobody cares about that stuff. If people thought that politics was important, they’d at minimum know who sits on these various boards and committees, who’s mayor and which county ward they live in. They’d know the issues and vote accordingly. It doesn’t happen. Turnout for city races is somewhere near 25%, board meetings are not full of citizens concerned about the issues. Unless some sexy national issues come up, nobody attends school board meetings. Real politics is a ghost town, nobody knows or cares what happens there.
No. They're not special; they're either Americans just like the rest of us, or they can go found their own country (with or without blackjack and hookers according to their national custom). Creating specialized ethnic ghettoes is empire shit (Ottoman millets, Soviet ethnic republics), and that's precisely what America was founded not to be. I know we're probably too far gone for this to be a meaningful position, but a man can dream.
Bonus quotation:
Teddy Roosevelt; Address to the Knights of Columbus, New York City. October 12, 1915
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