ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP
" The solutions on the website are the same as the one in the video. It's not like the wording changes once you scroll down the page. represent.us has a list of laws they want to pass, that revolve on getting people out to vote. The problem is how many people actually go out after watching the video, get inspired enough to visit the website, and then decide to donate or support local elections to enact the changes they are proposing? Don't you think that's a lot of steps that most people can't be bothered to do? Isn't it betting too heavily on forming movement that after a year or so will die out or fall into infighting as soon as a scandal breaks out? What happened to the woman's march? Justice Democrats? The LGBT movement which is now 'sometimes' at odds with transgenders rights. We had plenty of good movements with thousands of support that are now fractured with people trying to grab power for themselves. I'm just saying the video and the website is banking on wishful thinking (if we excite people, they will go out to vote all the reforms that will fix the system) that doesn't represent reality. People have better things to do with their time. " It's a real problem, but not something that can be fixed anytime soon. If you don't gerrymander you are just leaving districts open to the opposing side to pick up and in politics that's not happening if you want to remain in power. It's one of the only ways you stay in office in a given district without having to rely on the whims of the public. I don't see it as a major problem, just because its a natural result of how you vote politicians in. The real problem is the lack of voter involvement which allows such laws to be passed in the first place. If people gave a fuck, it wouldn't happen. Abortion and racism for example are contentious subjects because people actually care about it. Gerrymandering, not so much. " I don't think legitimate party challenges would really make much of a difference. All you'd get would be politicians and billionaires building up a successor, that would then primary them when their term was up and pretend to be a serious candidate. Or they'd do some other scheme that I haven't thought about that could get around whatever law passed to make elections look fair. The system itself has to reward candidates for being good. You can't just expect new faces every term to solve some if any of the issues the current legislation faces. It's a darwinian problem. The most successful if not evil strategies always come out on top if the system rewards that behavior. It doesn't matter what random factors you keep tossing in there to keep things balanced and fair. " I like all of the ideas, but the video doesn't present a real solution. I mean are we forgetting what happened to Panera's pay whatever you want restaurants? Even universal basic income is a huge mixed flag of maybes and what-ifs for the countries that have tried it. It wasn't the fix-all solution that some people kept touting. (⌐■_■)
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" Viva la revolución? |
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"It is THE major problem in politics for the same reason monopoly is THE problem in economics — it destroys competition. Y'know, that motivational force that makes free markets work, competition. Noncompetitive elections are corrupt elections — literally rigged elections. Gerrymandering is election rigging. This isn't about what's in the best interest of your political party, but what's in the best interest of the people. And what's in the best interest of the voters is not elections tilted towards your preferred party, but competitive elections. And what's in the best interest of the people are Congressional districts drawn in all kinds of weird shapes, but for the polar opposite motivation as gerrymandering — to balance liberal and conservative as well as possible to make both parties viable. The goal of drawing district boundaries should be making them all as purple as possible. Do that, and Congress will be filled with people who can cross the aisle, instead of two teams of obstructionist partisan hacks. "First, I was wrong — RepresentUs supports single open primaries wherein all parties compete against each other. Obviously such primaries are not run by the parties themselves. Second, I'm not trying to make things "fair." I'm trying to make them Darwinian, artificially so if necessary. There's no natural selection in a contest with a foregone winner. I'm explicitly about increasing competition, whereas your attitude seems to be "they already competed, leave them alone for a bit." As if the holder of a monopoly has earned it and therefore his monopoly shouldn't be broken up. The reward is election, obviously. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA And YOU were lecturing US for being childish. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on Mar 1, 2019, 10:58:34 PM
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" Everything ScrotieMcB said about gerrymandering is right on, IMHO. What makes it so much worse over the past 20 years compared to the period of time prior to that time when the practice was upheld in the courts is that computer analysis has polished the practice to the point that neighborhood blocks or even side of the street is within the capabilities of tailoring the district to serve the ruling party. As mentioned, this highly sophisticated gerrymandering means that a large percentage of our elected representatives are far more concerned about primary challengers than they are about the general election. This means they will be less likely to work to get laws passed or help the people because these kind of activities require bipartisan agreements and working across the aisle. This would only provide fodder for potential primary challengers, so is avoided. Over 430 threads discussing labyrinth problems with over 1040 posters in support (thread # 1702621) Thank you all! GGG will implement a different method for ascension in PoE2. Retired!
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" I disagree with this sentiment, generally. Gerrymandering has very similar effects to financial leverage. By gerrymandering, you take on a lot more risk for amplification. This doesn't destroy competition, it makes the stakes higher. By turning a mix of safe blue/red districts into, say, one red dump district and tons of slight-blue districts, you put yourself on the razor's edge. If even a few people change their mind, then you get a massive swing as all of the slight-blue districts go slight-red (in addition to the red dump district). --- Besides that, there's a generally collectivist reasoning behind it all that I find distasteful. That you can presume to know how people are going to vote N years into the future based on how they voted in the past or the color of their skin or their gender. The reality is that people do change their mind over time; certainly over a single 10-year census-driven redistricting period, but more generally over their lifetime. You can see it in real time right now comparing the political issues from even 2 years ago to the issues today, despite the districts staying the same during that time. People also physically move over time, and it's not unheard of to move due to political reasoning (i.e. taxes too high, or job market too dry (due to policy), or religious communities fearing oppression, etc.). --- Before I want to hear solutions to gerrymandering, I would first like to see the problem of gerrymandering written down in precise terms, since these too can change from proponent to proponent. If it's just some bogeyman hiding around the corner (much like "corruption"), then it's impossible to say if any policy truly solves it. RepresentUs's ACA anti-gerrymandering says that the problem is solved by independent redistricting committees, but which problem are they solving? If it just so happens that the independent committee is entirely made of wealthy Republican business owners and they create districts that prioritize their issues and incidentally amplify republican votes, did that solve the problem? If the committee creates districts based purely on physical geography and it amplifies republican votes because democrats typically live in dense urban districts, did that solve the problem? --- To make my stance perfectly clear, I don't think that giving the job to an independent committee necessarily solves it, because I think the problem with gerrymandering is that it splits physical communities. If I had my druthers, I would require any districts to not create lines that split houses on one side of the street from houses on the other. Within a city, industrial/retail districts, unoccupied spaces (i.e. parks), and large streets (i.e. highways) should be the primary source of the lines. Suburbs getting cut in half is an absurdity, especially when it's very likely that suburb is already politically tied together due to HOA or covenants. Chopping a house or two from one side of the suburb just foments neighbor-against-neighbor division. Last edited by pneuma#0134 on Mar 2, 2019, 3:17:36 PM
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" That's not exactly correct. Say red is in charge and doing the gerrymandering. The first goal is to put all the blue voters into the same districts. This makes those blue districts super safe but also makes more red districts safe. So, for example for simplicity say there is a state with 3 districts, 60 blue voters and 40 red voters. Put 34 of the blue voters all in the same district. That leaves 20 red and 13 blue voters in the other two districts. So even though there are far more blue voters overall there are two red representatives, one blue representative and the two red districts are still very safe with 60.6% of the vote. Over 430 threads discussing labyrinth problems with over 1040 posters in support (thread # 1702621) Thank you all! GGG will implement a different method for ascension in PoE2. Retired! Last edited by Turtledove#4014 on Mar 2, 2019, 3:33:31 PM
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" This assumes that there is no existing rationale for districting whatsoever. That everyone is in a giant bag, and every new redistricting is always a complete redrawing. What if the 100 voters are split live in a city that spans a river, like Budapest, and on side of the river, there are 34 blue voters and 36/40 voters on the other side of the river? Is it wrong to say that there's one district on one side of the river and two districts on the other, each of ~equal population? And that that leads to nominally 1B/2R districts? Is it more correct to draw the districts horizontally in stripes across the river, despite the fact that the voters in those districts now need to reach group consensus on policy that, say, would result in a factory being built on the left side of the river? A "correction" to 3 districts of (20/13, 3B overall) breaks really the only aspect of districting that I care about which is keeping nearby people voting together (and arguing with each other about policy that directly affects them). Last edited by pneuma#0134 on Mar 2, 2019, 3:55:05 PM
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" There probably are some districts whose population leans so much towards one party that trying to gerrymander it in a way that the OTHER party wins might be tricky. Do you consider the chance that the party with the most votes wins a bad thing? If you don't, rephrase that, please, because it really, really reads like that. " Great, you are one fine specimen of our human race. In order to ascertain the validity of this argument, please take a look at the number of people who - for any reason - still seem to think that Trump should be president. " Do you think this is a point for or against gerrymandering? Why? " Democracy is a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting. My vision of democracy is that every vote should count the same. gerrymandering, as is is currently fashioned in some areas, leads to not every vote having the same value. If you don't believe that, educate yourself. If you don't think thats's a problem, feel free to elaborate on why. " How could it? IMHO, gerrymandering can worsen or help alleviate the problems that are based in the "the winner takes it all"-principle. Geographical aspects may or may not be purely coincidental. |
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" +1 to that paragraph. I would even go a step further to say that the whole point of gerrymandering is to make the votes of the party in power to count more. With modern computer processing gerrymandering has become super efficient and powerful in doing exactly that. Over 430 threads discussing labyrinth problems with over 1040 posters in support (thread # 1702621) Thank you all! GGG will implement a different method for ascension in PoE2. Retired!
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This is pretty fascinating.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/02/us/black-president-nazi-group/index.html |
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