VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
fixing gerrymandering,
I have personally come to the conclusion that all geographic representation maps are gerrymandering. There doesn't seem to be a consistent enough definition of "fix" here that could satisfy everyone. And some of the seemingly-absolutely-fair mechanisms for doing so (assign voters to districts by valid dice roll) are in fact the worst. It's never a fight against gerrymandering, just whose map is better, and of course everyone likes their own map.
Although I'm taking suggestions for what an un-gerrymandered districting algorithm could look like, even if I don't think it exists.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
At least part of this is that American ballots are fiendishly complicated: how many issues are you voting on? My American ballot is a complex superposition of half a dozen different geographic boundaries in terms of which races I vote in: US representatives, state legislature (two different boundaries), municipal city races, county races, school district races, state court boundaries. By the time I'm done with it, my sheet of candidates to vote for probably has 30 or more names on it most years. In comparison I often see other countries with just "which party are you voting for?" and wonder if that's a better system. Hand-counting all the different races couldn't be done night-of easily. Also, the complexity of the ballot means that my specific combination of races I vote in plausibly identifies a pretty small set of street addresses, so anonymity is a real concern.
On the other hand, my county (counties run elections, here -- and yes, I get to vote for elections commissioner) does a pretty good job: it's a computer-printed-and-counted, but human readable paper ballot, and I can vote at any of the dozens of sites in the county. And there are plenty of options for early voting.
Looking at your itemized list sounds pretty reasonable to me, but I can't help but think of which constituencies, and how, each would be challenged. You can't assume everyone has an address! Nor that they check their mail.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
IMO the most amusing comparable incident was (VP candidate) Tim Kaine's son getting arrested for trespassing in the Minnesota Capitol with smoke bombs and fireworks.
But the sheer scale of lawfare against the Trump administration was also pretty darn disruptive even if "legal" -- in quotes because SCOTUS on a few occasions had to step in to resolve mutually-incompatible injunctions. Or how we had IIRC an agency head that refused to leave the position when replaced until a court ruled they had to leave. Not that all of it was misplaced, but it definitely reflected a desire to subvert the lawful powers of the executive purely on the basis of the character wielding them.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
Nearly 70% of Republicans think 2020 was stolen
IIRC a pretty similar number of Democrats said the same thing about the 2016 election, at least as of a few years ago. See that entire looking spectre of Russian Collusion and the probably-wrong dossier. And I expect a similar fraction of whichever side loses this year to think similarly, even though I think it's pretty stupid generally.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
hyper-articulate Bill Clinton
Don't you know you're not supposed to call America's first Black president "articulate"?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
Isn’t the obvious use case for election prediction markets to hedge agains unfavorable election outcomes?
Sometimes actual sports betting is used to hedge against unfavorable sports outcomes. Houston's "Mattress Mack" is famous for promotions like "Buy furniture today, and if [local sports team] wins, I'll give you your money back," which he's been known to fund by betting accordingly in Vegas.
I could imagine doing this with political outcomes ("If Kamala wins, I expect to have higher taxes"), but I can't imagine the market is liquid enough to support doing this for anyone large enough to care about hedging. But maybe it will be possible in the future.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel.
Has any ethnic group gotten blanket asylum in the West? There has been a slow shift away from permissive asylum policies (see the entire cats thing): nobody is letting in "the other" wholesale (Rwanda? South Sudan? Yazidis?) with maybe a few limited exceptions like Ukrainians fleeing Russian invasion or Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh. That's putting a heavy assumption that those Jews won't be treated as "the other" there (for which there are plenty of pre-WWII examples), and even then I don't think that supposedly-favored groups like white Zimbabweans (whose population there is down at least 80% since the country became independent in 1980) have ever been recognized as categorical refugees.
But that may follow from my general skepticism on putting faith in "moral arc of history" memes: literal blood-and-soil nationalism even gets praise from self-declared progressives, as long as who, whom? fits. It's funny to me that the West is expected to allow any-and-all immigration of largely-unverified refugees seeking asylum and giving jus soli citizenship and votes to their descendants, but the residents of the (withdrawing) British mandate for Palestine in 1948 and their descendants are eternally allowed to "resist the occupation" in means that would make even the American far right nauseous. But again: who, whom?.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
But the government, specifically the Army/DoD and by extension the National Guard, are supposed to be experts in logistics in impassable terrain. It's not like wars are always fought on open desert: sometimes they are, but there are plenty of battlegrounds in recent memory with far worse terrain than North Carolina. Oh, the bridge is out? That never happens in war! They are supposed to be able to cross unbridged rivers rapidly under fire. And do Search and Rescue and extraction operations day and night. If they can supply remote fire bases by helicopter, surely we could setup tents and feed hot MREs to people anywhere on the ground on mere hours notice. Or at least airdropping rations.
On the other hand, I'm clearly armchair quarterbacking. Those things are all harder than they sound, I'm sure. Maybe all the bridging engineers are already out fixing washed out roads, and helicopters are out on SAR or supply missions. But it doesn't seem like we should throw up our hands and claim that it's completely beyond us: at the very least we should be learning lessons for next time.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
This is why I bring my political commentary here, and not shouting into juvenile name-slinging fora like Twitter or most of Reddit.
I'm doing my part.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
due to cost
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I've also heard it suggested that the RBMK reactors were distinctly designed to be dual-use for plutonium (weapons) production. I'm not sure if that is somehow more difficult in a Western-style PWR, though. I know some of the (early) Western weapons projects (Oak Ridge, Windscale) used similar unpressureized reactors.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
Sometimes it seems pretty obvious from the outside that a given production is going to fail miserably: Borderlands, as another example. This conversation has me wondering if it always looks like a train wreck on the inside (reshoots, recutting, extra VFX) in ways that we just don't see as outsiders. Was the set of a great movie, say Jurassic Park, less chaotic in these ways than Waterworld? It's conceivably sampling bias to see the trainwrecks from the outside.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
but 0 about the Roosevelt (D)'s camps,
You know, it is surprising that, say, Farewell to Manzanar doesn't have a movie adaptation. Are there really none? I certainly can't think of any.
I look forward to reading your effortpost! It sounds interesting.
EDIT: that Foreign Affairs article seems pretty reasonable. Thanks for the link!
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
I personally find the "Russian trolls" narratives to be really frustrating because, whether or not the subject actually originated, or even was just amplified by them, the discussion tends to devolve into Westerners (Americans) accusing each other of being Russian trolls. Which is itself a loss in social trust "making it worse" in ways far beyond what the Russians would have been able to do themselves. Bickering about Russian trolls is, in itself, a victory for those trolls! The long-running inquisition into the Russian activities in the 2016 election seems to me to have been far more damaging to American institutions than anything the Russians themselves directly did.
Which isn't to say that they don't exist -- they do -- but most coverage I see of the issue seems, at best, counterproductive.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
a white guy rushing the Divine Nine would be pilloried as a racist for showing up looking white
Not a perfect comparison, but some HBCUs have been quite successful at recruiting non-Black students, even though they've suffered the same sort of "taking of the talented tenth" that the Divine Nine have mentioned in OP. Not saying that I can't see it going this way, but I don't think it's strictly inevitable.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
Mid-air collisions happen more often than you might expect given the size of, well, the atmosphere even in spots that aren't busy disaster zones. There was one just a few weeks ago in Nevada in clear weather, and there have been several over the years in tourist flight hotspots like Alaska. The automated systems (TCAS) are getting better, but still aren't going to prevent everything.
Although in this case, I think we should, as a society, consider that reducing safety standards (in a limited capacity) is an acceptable risk in response to the much more imminent risk to life and limb. I'm not sure exactly what my judgement would be in this case.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
I can't speak to the state of actual relief efforts, but there does seem to be a bit of an effort to manufacture this as a mirror image to Bush's Katrina response, which dragged on Republicans for a long time: see Kanye's infamous "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" line.
Which is funny to me because in hindsight it's less clear that it was purely the Bush administration's doing. Much can be said about the (blue!) city and state leadership not taking the imminent storm seriously even as the National Weather Service issued extremely dire warnings, but Mike Brown's leadership of FEMA wasn't exactly a "heckuva job" either.
At least that's how I see it under the "politics is unprincipled conflict" lens. I suspect there are real challenges to providing useful aid with so many roads inaccessible (as there were in 2005), and I doubt anyone is actually slow-walking aid, even if they are trying to play political football ("FEMA is running out of funds" "that's because you spent it all on migrants"). Personally, I don't know much more to do than pray, although I'm open to suggestions.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
I hear those are also highly recommended in earthquake-prone regions.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
Could you expound on that difference? My understanding of American immigrant crime syndicates is that they were also historically quite involved in machine politics like Tammany Hall. I'm not sure if the mafia, for example, became a bipartisan bugbear of its own volition, or more because it became politically expedient to oppose organized crime circa the 1930s. There are probably still rumors of involvement by organized crime in politics -- maybe see the current longshoremen union?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
"Police state" isn't just a function of uniformed officers. I don't totally agree with the description, but if you consider "fearing the police" a critical part of a police state, I'd point to the absurd conviction rate and the idea that you'd just expect to get arrested if you started any sort of disruptive crime as indicators that the Japanese largely "fear" (probably uncharitable, more like "respect and comply with" in practice, I think) law enforcement.
As compared to the US where I've seen no shortage of people doing (minor, mostly non-violent) crimes right in front of police officers.
Many Muslim nations still have drug problems, but with drugs other than alcohol: qat and captagon come to mind most prominently, and aren't to my knowledge issues in the West. Opium was an issue in Afghanistan, but IIRC the Taliban was actually against it.
I don't know if the quintessential Western hard drugs (meth, fentanyl, probably missing a few because I like my life boring) are major issues elsewhere in the world these days.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
I believe they're largely prohibited in the US, but the European (?) model of non-adversarial, or at least less-adversarial, unions is something I think we should give more consideration. IIRC it involves things like board representation for labor.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
There's only certain situations that one can be granted asylum for (and that was narrowed recently by the Biden administration), and asylum-seekers are expected to appear in court
Wasn't the entire process that largely started or at least hugely expanded under the Biden administration "show up at or across the border, say the shibboleth 'asylum', and we'll have you take a number for your court date. Conveniently that's years down the line due to the volume in cases, so we'll let you loose to show up then, and let you apply for am multi-year work permit once your case has been pending 150 days, but nobody is going to look at any details within that time anyway. Here's a list of government-funded NGOs that can provide for you during that time".
That's hardly "certain situations" and only very loosely "expected to appear." Charitably, it sounds like a well-meaning policy to help people fleeing oppression amid an overcrowded system, but I see why it's opponents characterize it as opening the floodgates and shrugging at the idea that any effort could be put into it.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
I think you're right about the technology aspect, but I sometimes worry that we've normalized lethal force (literal in-flight ballistic missiles) as sub-casus belli because the (expensive!) technology exists to block those attacks, and that Peace In Our Timeniks believe that actually hitting back in these sorts of cases is the dreaded "escalation", rather than inaction normalizing escalating attacks everywhere.
Generally when I see "other countries" brought into a discussion of gerrymandering, it's comparing to a proportional representation scheme, which I think would be interesting to try for the House. The only other country I can think of with geographic districting is the UK and there is plenty of complaining about district maps there too.
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