J. Roberts: "Awwwww COME ON! Just tell me a plausible lie. Give me something. Anything."
What if they told the truth? Would that be acceptable?
That's the worry. If they do, it might be. Too busy today to talk in detail -- tomorrow.
I realize these decisions are more political than logical, but is the Court's argument truly that if a state effectively disenfranchises you through gerrymandering in favor of the opposition party, the appropriate legal recourse is to vote for different state and federal representatives? I'm coming to this with near zero expertise, but that sure is what it sounds like from the other thread.
That could be ugly. "Studies have confirmed that maintaining the essential character of our Republic requires measures that will reduce the political efficacy..."
That's right, but the larger issue is that there is just nothing they can do about it. After all, if we wanted to have a federal court that had authority over the states, then we wouldn't have chosen to stick with the Articles of Confederation.
8: So hellscape without even the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability it is, then. Not new news exactly, but, damn, its blatancy is still shocking.
Well, people certainly can't sit out an 0 year election because there's no presidential candidate on the ballot, or because there's no difference between the parties, or because the Obama stimulus was too small, or whatever reasons they might have. There's no substitute for mobilization.
(A quick google shows that 51% of 18/19 year olds voted in 2008, and 21% voted in 2010.)
The constitution just leaves district boundaries to the state houses, right? Did they simply intend for everything to be gerrymandered, or what? What was their rationale?
The rationale was mostly always "to increase the influence of white, male property owners."
It was Adams' idea, I swear.
But white, male property owners are not harmonious. For instance, the white, male property owners of the colonies rebelled against the white, male property owners of Britain, and fought in large numbers on both sides of the ensuing civil war, and subsequently disputed most fiercely with one another the constitution of their white, male property owners' republic. White, male property owners would be both the incumbents and the opposition, the beneficiaries and the victims of gerrymandering. On the face of it they were just opening the door for permanent lock-ins of power in each state.
The framers of the Constitution were strongly opposed to the concept of political parties and didn't expect them to be a factor in the system they designed. This is at the root of a lot of the dysfunctional aspects of the American system.
13, 15: Maybe they didn't consider it. The word didn't even exist yet.
17 may be even more illuminating than 18.
They weren't necessarily opposed to permanent lock-ins of power at either the state or federal levels, though. Hamilton wanted the president to serve for life.
17: That parties of some kind were a dominant feature of AFAIK every single republic they would have had reference to didn't give them pause?
And on what grounds were permanent lock-ins justified?
They were certainly familiar with the concept of partisanship (there had been Whigs and Tories in Parliament for a long time at that point), but they thought it was a problem and tried to design a system that would avoid it. Obviously they were unsuccessful.
And on what grounds were permanent lock-ins justified?
They figured government would be dominated by smart, decent guys like themselves, and why shouldn't people like that stay in power indefinitely? (Hamilton was kind of an outlier in his position, which stemmed from his greater admiration for monarchism and a strong executive.)
23: He probably would have like Narnia.
22-3: Seriously? And where there regional variations in thinking? I mean, I'd expect straightforward Burkean conservatism from the South at least.
The initial issue that split the country into opposing partisan camps was in fact adoption of the Constitution itself, so in some sense the whole system reflects one side of a partisan dispute. The other side was also opposed to partisanship at least in theory, though.
26: The south was dedicated to Burkean conservatism in the sense that they wanted to be sure slavery could never be outlawed and and that slaves should be counted in the census.
I'm sure there were regional differences, but this is getting beyond my level of knowledge. I'm sure it's all discussed in the Federalist Papers, though.
This confirms my tentative underinformed bias that the US constitution should be read as a late medieval constitution rather than an early modern one - implicitly assuming de facto oligarchic/hereditary power and radical divergences.
You need to think about how there have been changes in the interpretation of Burke's work over time. Delta Burkean.
Here we go: Federalist 10, in which Madison argues for the advantages of the countermajoritarian features of the Constitution as safeguards against the problem of "factions."
33: good grief, no one under 50 is that devoted a student of American culture.
Let's all list our SAT scores and how far our gums have receded.
37: When your gums have receded that far, no one should trust you to remember your SAT scores accurately.
Obligatory note that reporting on the Gerrymander case without the mentioning the context, that of a Republican power grab and a significant step towards a one party state, is malpractice.
As a loss of state control to Republicans is now permanent or near permanent is it incumbent upon Democrats to preemptively gerrymander?
The court ruled on two gerrymandering cases. One where Republicans had done it and one where Democrats had done it. So, as we can see, the court favored neither party.
I expect that argument to get used by many Brooksian pundits. They'll ignore that the decision favors partisan rigging and disenfranchisement.
Bookending Federalist 10 is George Washington's farewell address, with its vain hope of staving off partisan rivalries after his departure, esp. pp. 20-25.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
Can someone explain Marianne Williamson to me? All I know about her is an excellent funny pisstake in the Washington Post from which I excerpt:
* Marianne Williamson could stop climate change by teaching the enormous turtle underneath the world to love.
* Marianne Williamson is capable of assuming the form of a duck, if she chooses. But she never chooses.
* Marianne Williamson does not use superfluous oils. If Marianne Williamson calls an oil essential, it is.
"Does not use superfluous oils" is a line to be remembered by
43: is he describing something that had ever happened in reality, here? I guess maybe the fall of the Roman Republic?
I think the emergence of the Medici in Florence might also qualify. There must be other cases in which elective monarchies became hereditary. But the fall of the Roman republic will have been uppermost in the minds of anyone educated in the 18th century.
(And how did Israel get kings, anyway?)
They kept voting for the guy who was shooting Palestinians even though he was obviously corrupt.
46: This is where I reveal my half-educated-ness, but isn't that a theory of politics from Greek city-states? Probably Aristotle because what else would it be, but in any case a theory that democracy necessarily evolves into tyranny? Again, my memory of details is terrible, but it happened in Athens at least once if I remember rightly.
Wasn't Washington just looking at France and reporting the news?
49: I think it is kinda, but Plato's theory is that democracy degenerates into tyranny because democracy just causes chaos and a lack of self discipline, and so the most selfish and power hungry person becomes a tyrant. It's not party politics specifically.
Israel got kings because the people wanted glory and showmanship, despite the ominous warnings of the prophet Samuel that monarchy inevitably means conscription as pastry cooks. (related, of course, both Ho Chi Minh and Gen William Westmoreland were trained pastry cooks.)
46: There were violent dissensions in every pre-US republic I know of (United Provinces maybe not? IDK).
And any number of tyrants, but I don't know of any actually being elected.
This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.
This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.
45: She is one of the less weird New Agey figures that were big 20 years ago. (Yes, less weird, believe it or not.) I think she was on Oprah a lot. I literally forgot she existed until this most recent election cycle -- which maybe is why she's running for President.
58: I don't think I had heard of her, but I did know people that were into A Course in Miracles.
Why did she decide to run for President now?
It's a time in which it's harder than ever to come up with a good answer to the question, "Why Not Me?"
I'm sure in her own loopy way she thinks Trump needs to be stopped.
NMM to Justin Raimondo. Interesting obit. https://original.antiwar.com/antiwar_staff/2019/06/27/justin-raimondo-rip-1951-2019/
I'd personally prefer to see boundaries drawn by "independent" redistricting commissions rather than sleazy pols, but there are restrictions on drawing districts that are still in place. For example, State and Federal districts have to be of approximately equal population*, and can't obviously disenfranchise protected minorities. The GOP keeps working on that minority thing, of course, even though it makes Democratic gerrymandering/redistricting harder and actually helps the GOP in parts of the South.
Democrats have the advantage in gerrymandering in most states, because a typical US state has one or more urban cores full of Democrats, surrounded by lower-population suburbs with a bunch of Republicans, then low-population rural areas (outside the South) with mostly Republicans. Democratic gerrymanderers can slice their urban cores into wedges which include parts of the Republican suburbs and outvote them, and then gather rural Republicans into a small number of districts. Republicans can't really do that because with very rare exceptions, there are no Republican urban cores. This is what the Democrats in many states have been doing for decades. A lot of the time the resulting districts "look okay" because they seem fairly compact, but they are designed to maximize Democratic chances in each one, and suppress the GOP vote. The MD case was an extreme example of it. When Republicans try to do this, it's more obvious because they end up drawing actual gerrymanders, or snakes, or octopi.
Partisan Democrats should applaud this ruling, actually. Outside of public view, state pols are probably heaving a sigh of relief.
* It wasn't that long ago that many states' Senates were based on geographic representation, like the Senate, and there was more leeway in district populations.
Partisan Democrats should applaud this ruling, actually.
Seriously, no. We would win more elections if they were more small d-democratic. A system that lets both sides cheat is bad for Democrats. Also, you know, abstractly wrong if you care about that sort of thing.
Democratic gerrymanderers can slice their urban cores into wedges which include parts of the Republican suburbs and outvote them, and then gather rural Republicans into a small number of districts. Republicans can't really do that because with very rare exceptions, there are no Republican urban cores. This is what the Democrats in many states have been doing for decades.
I think only the Democats in Illinois and Maryland have been doing this for decades. And in Maryland it gets them 1, maybe 2 seats.
Of course the Democrats in e.g. Texas were doing it back when they were the dominant party there, but that was before "Democrats" meant "blue states" meant "liberals" meant "cities".
The fucked up electoral situation which would have been freshest in early American minds is the Polish sejm, liberum veto and all that. Incidentally, that also strikes me as the situation most resembling ours, if only faintly. Doesn't seem to have troubled them any, mind.
Update: Maybe Washington too. Although it was 6 D, 4 R until this past election when the intensely charismatic Dave Reichert retired and D finally won his seat.
59, 60:
It's a time in which it's harder than ever to come up with a good answer to the question, "Why Not Me?"
On the one hand, Trump sets a new precedent for his level of decorum, competence, and ethics; more and more people really could do as good a job as he is doing. On the other hand, the stakes are really high. Sure, in a sense they're always high, and it's hard to avoid presentism bias, but 4 more years of an 80s movie villain being the US President would be really, really fucking bad. I have less sympathy than usual for vanity campaigns or Quixotic campaigns to raise awareness for some issue or build a candidate's reputation for next time around if they hurt the eventual nominee in any way at all.
65: Elaborate? I don't see that avoiding unanimity traps requires the licensing of election-rigging by incumbents.
I think California Democrats have been well-served by independent redistricting, because it opened up more room for realignment in the progressive direction. Note the muted comparative impact of the blue wave in 2016 and 2018 in the below lower-house percentages D elected. 2012 was the first year with new districts.
2008: CA 64%, NY 73%
2010: CA 65%, NY 66%
2012: CA 69%, NY 70%
2014: CA 65%, NY 71%
2016: CA 69%, NY 71%
2018: CA 75%, NY 71%.
I also have the impression CA has had a ton more progressive policy actually passed in these eight years. (None of this caucusing-with-Republicans bs.)
The apolitically positive implications for good governance are left as an exercise for the reader.
68: I think the idea is that allowing election-rigging by incumbents sets up a unanimity trap. The voters can vote the incumbents out only if an overwhelming majority of them (not quite unanimity but close) agree -- if there's any substantial minority that supports the incumbents, they're unstoppable.
And of course with more national implications, with partisan redistricting protecting incumbents on both sides in a particular balance of power, it probably would have been a lot harder to have flipped seven U.S. House seats in 2018.
election-rigging by incumbents sets up a unanimity trap.
70: I don't follow. When I say unanimity trap I mean that unanimity is required for action ( the fatal problem attributed to Poland). What you describe is the opposite: permitting of election-rigging means that unanimity as a rule isn't required for anything.
68: When I said faintly, I wasn't kidding. There is a structural paralysis of policy and a willingness of domestic actors to invite foreign intervention for political gain.
68: That is to say, I wasn't referring to the gerrymandering in particular.
that unanimity as a rule isn't required for anything.
It's required for opposing incumbents (or, not unanimity but huge and evenly distributed supermajorities).
51: I think lots of people were looking at France and seeing that news from the future. Burke in 1790 said "some popular general" would seize absolute power out of factionalism, though he might have been thinking of Lafayette and certainly had Rome, etc. in mind.
I should know, but don't, whether Napoleon emerged out of party politics in any meaningful sense.
77: Sort of? The parallel to political parties in more stable states is strained, I think, but my sense is the Directory at this point was pretty well paralyzed between the remnants of the Jacobins on the one hand and various anti-Jacobins/crypto-royalists in the other, the latter of which party talked Napoleon into the coup because they thought they could use him, oops. Maybe they'd read Burke and thought it was a good idea.
Liberals cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades. The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.
Just so long as we all agree the George Washington could see into the future.
77. No, Napoleon emerged out of an early version of caudillismo. His USP was precisely that he stood above parties and rescued the country from their machinations..
I think that's exactly "emerging out of party politics in a meaningful sense." Blaming both sides and calling yourself the alternative is inseparable from party politics as I've seen it.
OT: I was making toast and after I'd already buttered it, I noticed that the bread in the bag had mold. But I didn't have other bread, so I figured the toaster killed the spores.
So, with that by way of introduction, you know who you are and if you're lurking, hope all is well.
I'm solving a stupid timezone bug at work that involves setting my computer to GMT and the best way to do it, since London is GMT+1 during the summer, is to tell the computer that we're stuck on St. Helena.
Won't your computer be disappointed if you ever turn on the location service and it knows you've been lying.
Artemis under the orders of the Navigating Lieutenant was wheeling round to take the station allotted her by the standing orders for convoy escort at night. It was as well that the fires had been subdued, for otherwise the flames would be a welcoming beacon inviting a torpedo. The aeroplanes had attacked in the morning; in the afternoon they had beaten off the surface ships; tonight they would have to be on their guard against submarines, for the enemy, like the devil, was capable of taking many forms. One battle completed, one victory achieved, merely meant that Artemis and her men must plunge headlong into the next, into the long struggle of sea power against tyranny; the struggle that the Greeks had waged at Salamis, that the Captain's ancestors had waged against the Armada of Spain, against the fleets of Louis XIV and Napoleon and Wilhelm II, the long struggle which some day would have an end, but not now, and not for months and years to come.
And even when it should end the freedom which the struggle should win could only be secured by eternal vigilance, eternal probity, eternal good will, and eternal honesty of purpose. That would be the hardest lesson of it; peace would be a severer test of mankind even than war. Perhaps mankind would pass that test when the time came; and when that time came (the Captain said to himself) he would fight to the last, he would die in the last ditch, before he would compromise in the slightest with the blind or secret enemies of freedom and justice. He must remember this mood; when he became an old man he must remember it. He must remember in time to come how nothing now was farther from his thoughts than the least yielding to the open enemies of mankind, and that would help to keep him from the least indolent or careless or cynical yielding in that future.
The Captain suddenly tensed himself as his roving eyes caught sight of a twinkle of light ahead, and then he was able to relax again and even smile a little to himself in the twilight. For that was the evening star shining out over the Mediterranean.
83: You don't need to clean your coffee spoon, because the coffee is pretty hot, right?
86 on topic because St. Helena.
More seriously, on topic because I just find it a terrifically spirit-raising bit of writing and I thought it might help people's moods. It's the final couple of paragraphs of The Ship.
I think I've never read that one. All the Hornblower, and a fair amount of other assorted Forester (I don't think I've ever been as cold as I was reading _The Good Shepherd_ during a hot summer when I was a teenager), but not that.
84. How did you get there? You've never tried to conquer Europe AFAIK.
The man who services our washing machine told me that his daughter, who is a social worker, had a job on St Helena for a couple of years trying to address the problem that molesting underage girls is regarded as cultural SOP and > 50% of women have had to deal with this. Until a few years ago this was completely ignored.
89: it's a really good one - similar to The Good Shepherd, I suppose, but about a light cruiser escorting a Malta convoy in the Med. And instead of covering an entire convoy, it's an almost minute-by-minute detailed account of one not very important ship fighting in a very small, fairly bloodless and apparently inconclusive action - the whole book covers one afternoon. There's one bit that hasn't aged well; probably best skip the couple of pages about AB Colquhoun.
Since I figured out that C.S. Forester isn't E. M. Forster, I really should give those books a try.
I mean, I won't. But I should at least remember they are different people. I will finish "Elements of Surprise." I'm getting pulled aside because I keep reading mysteries mentioned in it so I'm not spoiled.
87: I don't believe that, so I drink black coffee at work and put milk in my coffee whenever I'm at home or out.
The Ship is wonderful. I should reread it.
Huh, The Good Shepherd is being adapted into a movie. Release next May.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyhound_(film)
Yeah, the people making it, etc. didn't make me flinch.
I think we've all had that dream where we're a merchant captain and Elisabeth Shue is a uboat captain chasing us.
89 Currently being adapted for the screen, and starring Tom Hanks.
Jimmy Carter's statement today about the election was something else. Good to have that in the open like that.
I get sick of Democrats sometimes but they/we really do have some fundamentally decent people, Jimmy Carter chief among them.
Democratic gerrymanderers can slice their urban cores into wedges which include parts of the Republican suburbs and outvote them, and then gather rural Republicans into a small number of districts. Republicans can't really do that because with very rare exceptions, there are no Republican urban cores.
It's more complicated than this! You could equally argue that a Dem core allows a packed district in the middle of the core, and then dilute the next corona with fingers reaching out through the suburbs.
I read somewhere recently that it's a myth that Napoleon was short, and that, in fact, he was taller than average for a French man of his time.
Yes, short Napoleon was an extremely successful invention of British caricaturists.
He was 5 foot 7 - same height as Putin. Possible explanations include a) the Imperial Guard were all over six foot so he looked short beside them b) Gillray's caricature of him as a tiny furious man c) height at death measured at 5 foot 2 in French inches which are slightly longer than Imperial inches d) nickname (affectionately) the Little Corporal may have made people assume he was actually short e) he was not short by the standards of France or indeed Britain but he would have been short by the standards of the British upper class who were 8.7 inches taller than the lower class at the time.
I remembered where I read the Napoleon thing—it was Wikipedia's "List of common misconceptions."
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