domain:noahpinion.blog
JarJarJedi
16hr ago
They think they're going about their day doing boring and uncontroversial things like protesting for trans rights
That does not compute. Protesting is by definition controversial - if it weren't, it's not a protest, it's at most solidarity march. The whole point though is that the left has been actively in search of culture war since the civil rights movement largely achieved its initial goals (legal equality and high legal barriers to deter any attempt to discriminate). Gay rights, trans rights, BLM, immigrants, vaccines, abortions, whatever it takes. And to crown that, in modern US culture you don't call your opponent a Nazi if you want to hash out policy differences. Everybody knows what you do with the Nazis - you destroy them. So there's no doubt what this framing means.
The right is in full "We're aiming to crush you" mode.
Gee, maybe that's because the Left has been calling them Nazis and promising to crush them for a couple of decades now? May that be where they got the suspicion? I'm seeing the "Nazi bar" metaphor repeated daily on virtually every corner in the left discourse, and they never even explain it - everybody in their audience already knows what it means, they are just confirming, yes, we can't tolerate even the slightest sign of anybody on the right being allowed in the spaces we control. And we can't tolerate any spaces we don't control because all those are "Nazi bars". The right is in this mode because they are aiming to crush the right. Only now, finally, the right starts to wake up and wonder "oh, they are trying to crush us, maybe we should push back?" And then we hear the complaints "how undignified, you are fighting back, people would think you are the same! They will reject you for stooping so low as to fight back! You should just roll over and take it, then you'd have all our sympathies - everybody loves losers!"
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
16hr ago
To be fair, there's not a correct answer to how districts should be drawn. One view is that districts should be competitive, as this encourages moderation and tends to be more proportional. Another is that districts should do their best to represent communities of interest, as that will make it more straightforward for elected officials to represent their constituents coherently. Yet another is simple compactness: districts should be as regular as possible.
There are arguments for and against all of them, but none of them is obviously right and not all are amenable to algorithmic solutions.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
17hr ago
You're like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know...
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
17hr ago
The defense of the legislature was best read as “you don’t have the right to tell us what to do, only we can decide whether we have this power (or Congress with an amendment), and we say no.”
Given this, what recourse would the voters have? They’d have to make this a single issue or else give up. And I’m really not sympathetic to the idea that a certain class - and politicians are by now definitely a class - deserves inalienable privileges over the rest.
You're in good company since 5 of the Justices thought this way. They thought the result was good policy (as opposed to the many, many times the Supreme Court dislikes ballot initiatives, as Thomas lists in his dissent) and therefore the actual language of the Constitution didn't matter.
As to your other points, I suspect you didn't read Roberts' full dissent since he addresses some of your concerns. Not that you have to; there are better things in life than reading random SC decisions from 10 years ago about election laws.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
17hr ago
Calling a random civil engineer who reads court opinions for fun and summarizes them for karma "lawyer-brained" is an insult to the multiple actual lawyer denizens of this forum.
If anything, it's a compliment to the actual lawyer denizens here. Or at least compared to the many other insults I've heard.
TournamentFishing
17hr ago
There have been mathematicians that brag about how their work has no application.
Ironically, some of those were number theorists...
faceh
17hr ago
Hi, one of the 'actual lawyer' denizens speaking, you're doing great, please keep that up.
Being able to summarize legalese in human-readable terms is probably the most immediately useful part of being a lawyer.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
17hr ago
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
Apologies if you find the metaphor specious. It's deliberately extreme, of course. Although interestingly an inability to draw these kinds of conclusions about the actual mafia is apparently wreaking havok in Germany.
But given that everyone making the "leap of logic" to assume it is true just happens to be someone who hates Jews, I find it reasonable to be skeptical and demand more evidence
Doesn't it make at least as much sense to reverse this? I suggested before that the main factor determining whether one believes or disbelieves in foul play about these kinds of incidents is:
- Do I have a prior that individuals belonging to Group X are extremely influential?
- Do I have a prior that individuals belonging to Group X often use their influence inappropriately to benefit their ingroup?
Then it would make total sense that individuals who hold both these beliefs then dislike Group X. It would be kind of weird not to. Chicken, egg. Egg, chicken.
The Princeton site does have individual report card data in JSON format. There is a download button slightly inconspicuous.
How gerrymandered is difficult to score in a single metric, but the largest tell tail is probably a step jump in the "District by average partisan win percentage" chart. It is evidence that the districts are being arranged to isolate one party in fewer districts. Especially if the jump spans the "competitive" line. Shape irregularity is the most common "look at this map it must be gerrymandered," but is not a necessary or sufficient condition to show a map is gerrymandered. That video cites openprecincts(dot)org, but it seems to be down now.
Some of the step jumps are also simply the results of people "gerrymandering" themselves. e.g. Drawing a box around metro-Miami could be chosen based off of pure geographic considerations, but if all the Ds in Florida move to Miami they have secured on "safe" district but given up contesting every other district. It seems this a natural result of choosing to draw the boundaries based on geography, but there being clear partisan differences in geographic distribution. Maybe someone has a clear counter example, but shouldn't there be a trivial lemma as a result of Arrow's impossibility theorem where you just substitute candidates with candidate map. Essentially saying there is not perfectly "fair" map. Or if you substitute candidate representation system for candidates to show that there is no perfectly "fair" representative system.
Edit: To add an example of why you can't just take the grade from Princeton. VA gets an A because it is fair in the sense of proportionate. The jump around the competitive zone on the average partisan win percentage chart is still there. This is probably so that the vote is proportionate for court intervention prevention, but locks in a strong gerrymandered incumbency advantage.
benmmurphy
17hr 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. i assume one problem with this is people would try and simulate the rules in the future and try to choose rules that would benefit them. i guess maybe the current districting is so ridiculous that it would be difficult to come up with rules that can handle that as an initial state and be somewhat stable.
TheDemonRazgriz
17hr ago
Not sure I'm following you correctly -- do you mean the turning point of average people's trust in the lockdown regime? If so, that's relevant, but not really what I was trying to get at.
I don't think there was any one singular turning point as relates to the public's trust in science & medicine writ large, more of a death-by-a-thousand-cuts scenario. There were countless examples of public-facing scientists, and crucially actual public health officials either blatantly making things up as they went along while pretending they had a plan, or outright lying for naked partisan gamesmanship. I suspect I don't really need to remind you of these times. And every time an official said something obviously false it killed the institutional trust of another chunk of average everyday people. Add this up over many, many examples of lying and flagrant idiocy and you get the crisis of trust we have today.
A lot of scientists and doctors at the time (and seemingly a fair number still today) seemed to believe that because they were trusted by the public, they could make pronouncements on social issues and be taken seriously, basically lending their gravitas to the cause of the day. This started relatively rationally with the pandemic measures and then rapidly metastasized into the "racial justice" situation. The problem was they had the flow of authority exactly backwards. People trusted scientists and doctors because they were apolitical. The trustworthiness of scientists comes from their being fixated on their particular field of interest -- "those eggheads might be weirdos, but they sure know their stuff when it comes to biochemistry/astrophysics/[insert niche interest]" is the longstanding popular image of science.
The whole point is that they're dealing with something way over the head of Joe Sixpack, but it's clear that they've devoted their lives to it, so they can be trusted when they talk about that particular thing. This trust does not -- and in fact cannot -- generalize outside of their one particular domain. If anything it anti-generalizes. In other words if a bunch of chemists start talking about structures of intersectional oppression instead of chemistry, people start to question how much they really cared about chemistry in the first place.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
18hr ago
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 and you’d have a hard time to find anyone who knows one out of 5-6 members of that board.
People sometimes do show up for those things. The boards then move to private session or otherwise make their decisions where the public can't interfere. Or on some occasions have people arrested for trying to speak; consider the infamous beating and pantsing of the Loudoun County VA father who spoke up against his daughter's sexual assault in school. People don't show up because they correctly conclude that if their showing up could change anything, it wouldn't be permitted.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18hr ago
There's a reason a bunch of the longest house tenures are Southern Democrats who essentially sit in Rotten boroughs.
A non-trivial number of these are effectively required to exist by the Civil Rights Act.
birb_cromble
18hr ago
This reminds me of the mountain lion in the Eastern US.
The official stance from the federal and state wildlife agencies is that, excluding a small relict population in Florida, the mountain lion has been extirpated from the East Coast and has been for decades.
Despite this, local sightings persist and at least two have been struck by cars in the last twenty years. I have a relative who claims that one was hunting his sheep. He called the local game commission who told him that it didn't exist and that shooting it would be against the law. He claims to have taken a shot at it and winged it, and nothing has hunted his sheep since.
He's also an inveterate story-teller and drunk, so take that with a grain of salt.
range of explanations for how one might have ended up in Australia, such as specimens from the exotic animal trade or travelling circuses getting loose within the country.
I remember stories about 30+ pound black feral housecats in the outback. Is this related?
Under US law, sentencing serves four specific purposes: deterrence, incapacitation, retribution (or just punishment), and rehabilitation.
In the context of the death penalty, the US Supreme Court has held that mentally disabled offenders <del>are not smart enough to understand deterrence</del><ins>do not provide deterrence in being executed</ins> and are inherently less morally culpable as regards retribution. These rationales date back at least to English common law.
I can't comment on non-Anglo countries' sentencing systems.
Thoroughlygruntled
18hr ago
I think it's also worth pointing out that even FIRE and the other libertarian groups are essentially part of the Republican coalition. Both their personnel and their legal arguments draw almost entirely from the right side of the political spectrum. They have been totally and completely frozen out of left-wing institutions, most dems outside the abundance movement refuse to have anything to do with them, and even the abundance dems are embarassed and try to downplay the relationship as much as they can to their fellows.
With the exception of now-irrelevant dinosaurs like Ira Glasser, pre-2025 calls for free speech, tolerance, and academic freedom came exclusively from the right, and even now that Trump is in power the only people maling principled arguments in that direction are still disproportionately right-wing activists.
lollol
18hr ago
The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against
Is there a ranking of states and how gerrymandered they are somewhere that you would recommend? I briefly looked at https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/ and wasn't able to find like a CSV or something.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
18hr ago
It's one thing to make inferences. Some inferences are reasonable, in the absence of evidence. But "leaps of logic" land you into assumptions based on the presumption that your inferences are accurate.
I think your Mafia/Zionist comparison is rather specious,
That's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. Can you know stop falsely portraying the other side's argument?
Thoroughlygruntled
18hr ago
Having lived next door to both, I can assure you the random MAGA was a far better and more pleasant neighbor than the elite college professor. The MAGA person was fun, invited people to barbecues, always offered to help out, always had his kids running around playing outside. The professor hardly ever interacted with the community other than to harangue someone for some petty slight. Most college professors I've met have been either awkward and socially stunted or actively unpleasant to be around.
IQ is not the only measure of quality.
Do you have any local cryptids that haven't worked their way up to the national stage? Do you think they have a plausible natural explanation?
In and around the Blue Mountains in New South Wales there's the Lithgow panther, over 500 sightings of which have been reported in a 20-year period. Big cat sightings have been reported around the region for about a century, and there are a range of explanations for how one might have ended up in Australia, such as specimens from the exotic animal trade or travelling circuses getting loose within the country.
This is actually a more interesting story than most of the cryptids that often make their way into local folklore because there have actually been government enquiries into the subject - four in fact - a number of which actually state it was "more likely than not" that a big cat lived in the area based on scat and hair study. The most recent report, written in 2013 by an invasive species expert, concluded no evidence of a big cat in the Blue Mountains, but he later privately disclosed to the ABC that the existence of a small population was possible. Wiki article here.
Now this one isn't local to me, but there's also the obvious example of the thylacine, where the idea that it may still be extant in remote parts of Tasmania persists with many sightings of it to boot. There are even sightings reported on the mainland, in some cases. Some of the sightings in question are by zoologists and other experts, with the most famous being Hans Naarding's assertion in 1982 that he did see a thylacine and that it was unmistakeable. This analysis of sightings suggests it may have persisted until the 1980s and that there is still "a small chance of persistence in the remote south-western wilderness areas" of Tasmania.
Really I would say these examples of cryptids are actually... fairly plausible, as far as cryptids go. As for me? I'm still a firm skeptic, but of all the cryptids out there, these are the ones I'm most likely to believe in.
charlesf
18hr ago
There have been a few books that were especially well written that I read twice. The first time I'm too consumed with finding out what happens, plot progression, resolution of tensions etc. I overwhelmingly am interested in how the story ends, which distracts from some of the finer points of the writing, sub plots and characters that weren't critical to the main storyline etc. During a second read I already know how these things are going to resolve and can more enjoy the total quality of the writing. Most books aren't actually good enough to warrant this though. I can usually tell when I'm going to reread a series pretty soon after I start it too. Steven Erikson's books are a first example I can think of.
HighResolutionSleep
18hr ago
He sold?
Annouce ze rate couts.
The number of people who don't show up because they think it will be ineffectual (I somewhat agree) is dwarfed by the number of people who don't show up because they don't really care. Because however ineffectual it is, it's still more effectual than updating a profile pic with a slogan, retweeting something, or liking a TikTok short, which far more people do.
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