I have a PhD in American political history and live in Virginia which is currently having a public referendum on a constitutional amendment to redistrict for increased Democratic representation to counter act the Texas Republican redistricting. I have SOOOO many thoughts about gerrymandering. The short version would probably be partisan districting sucks and is bad for any semblance of democracy, but if one side is going to do it to try to blatantly rig the government, the other side has not only a right but perhaps even a duty to respond in kind.
Edit: to add to the fun fact side of things, gerrymandering is pronounced with a soft g, close to a j sound, but the person Gerry’s last name is a hard g.
Before we slide into politics I find it interesting that America goes for both representation by population and by geographical area through the house and senate
I was thinking today that in Ontario there is a disproportionate voting system to penalize people living in cities.
The province is broken into regions (called ridings), each of which elects 1 member of provincial parliment (MPP). But Toronto, since it holds the vast majority of the people in Ontario (and in Canada) has fewer ridings than its population requires. Therefore 1 vote in Thunder Bay is worth more than 1 Vote in Danforth (which I think works out to approximately 0.6 votes).
This is interesting terminology. It’s still informally used in Yorkshire in the UK where they talk about Ridings with the main compass points. I’m not aware of other areas of the UK using ridings similarly. I may even look up the term’s origins
Which in the short term will preserve the status quo, in the medium term amounts to light disenfranchisement as a material number of districts have been “color locked” in the process (yay Keyflower), and in the long term will lead back to normalcy - barring future meddling.
Barring future meddling…
The game theorist in me wonders if that middle part was the goal all along. The tit for tat is so obvious that redistricting was unlikely to cause any short term change. But by color locking what, 30 districts across the seven states participating in the tug-of-war?..you make house elections matter less (my district is already 95% blue, so voting for the house was already meaningless). And making elections matter less comes with a variety of after-effects that can benefit a variety of players.
Sometimes it looks like there’s a Varys orchestrating things here. And sometimes it looks like there’s a drunk raccoon in the liquor store.
And this is apparently deliberate, so that a candidate can’t win only by appealing to the cities.
As for riding it originates in Yorkshire, with the Old Norse ðriðjungr (one-third part, under Viking rule) which becomes Old English þriðing. Which is why there were always three of them.
Yeah, yeah. I know. It feels very “Me First!” style politics, though, where every gain in one arena must come at the cost of another.
Sorry, sorry. I just get so angry these days over… gestures around to encompass everything. How many “Once in a Lifetime” economic crashes has it been? Cans of beans now cost $3 a can (bringing it up to about $5/kg, which is just slightly less than the $6/kg of whole chicken or $7/kg of bone-laden pork). I have an electric car, so the nonsense with gas is only hitting me tangentially, but I am so tired of being angry and broke all the time.
Argh. Okay. Pity party over.
Did you guys know that sharks are older than trees? And older than the rings of Saturn. And I want to say have circumnavigated the Milky Way… twice? I’m going to say twice.
I also find gerrymandering a difficult subject. I’ve had discussions before about what the intent of voting districts is. Is it to provide balance? Or is it to provide a unified voice?
Certainly something we won’t solve here (Or… ?)
But that part that bothers me so much is that somehow we have “two sides” in a system where it’s both helpful (to unify common voices) and, more importantly, dreadful (forcing false dichotomy)
Today I learned that after The Dark World, Hemsworth declared he was bored with his job.
And that’s why Thor went on hiatus for a bit and we came back with a different (better) character in Ragnarok and the Infinity Wars.
Yesterday I learned that Henry Cavill had 7 extra weeks of special workouts for the 30 seconds he’s shirtless in his first Superman movie - I guess getting in shape for a costume and getting in shape for no costume are separate exercises.
But now I notice that Thor has exactly one shirtless scene in The Dark World as well - I guess it’s too much to expect actors to retain that last level of fitness for an entire shoot.
Then I’m also thinking of what the actors in 300 went through.
Despite the glut of “AI” sites and the descent of search engines into near uselessness, the Internet still delights occasionally with the ability to throw a choice morsel of whimsy at my feet.
Today I learned that Ginger Baker auditioned for the role of “Homeless Man” in Weird Al’s movie “UHF”. He didn’t get the part.
There’s tons of reasons the US has a two party system that focuses on sides winning and losing rather than multiple parties and/or a focus on actually governing. None of the reasons are gerrymandering and none of it would be solved by addressing gerrymandering. We are deep in symptom not cause territory.
Not just sharks as type of animal. Individual sharks can be crazy long lived.
“In 1606 a devastating pestilence swept through London; the dying were boarded up in their homes with their families, and a decree went out that the theatres, the bear-baiting yards and the brothels be closed. It was then that Shakespeare wrote one of his very few references to the plague, catching at our precarity: ‘The dead man’s knell/Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives/Expire before the flowers in their caps/Dying or ere they sicken.’ As he wrote, a Greenland shark who is still alive today swam untroubled through the waters of the northern seas. Its parents would have been old enough to have lived alongside Dante; its great-great-grandparents alongside Julius Caesar. For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as above them the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again.”
I was going to make a snarky comment like, “In other news, it’s Thursday,” but then I had to go an look it up. A new edition every 3 years seems to be the norm since 2014.
Political systems are designed to keep the people who are hoping to govern too busy playing games to be able to do as much harm as if they spent all that time and effort on actually governing. When they get in the way of candidates keeping all their campaign promises, it’s the system working as intended, protecting the voters from their own stupid choices and the kind of people who devote their lives to achieving power.
Can I ask a linguistic question out of curiousity?
You’re waving the sign, but you’re not waiving the sign… but do you think those two words have common origins? My instinct says no (and yes, I know I could Google this, but I’m more curious about your impression of whether waive and wave are supposed to be the same word or not, rather than a deep dive into if they factually are or not).
It’s silly, but I’m mentally thinking “I wave off your offer of protection” led to “Will you sign this to wave your rights” led to “What’s this I’m signing? A waver?”
Among the careers that could have been, I would love to have been a professional Etymologist. Unfortunately, I don’t think that career path actually exists (except on Youtube?)
Another career path I realized too late that I would enjoy is Workflow Consultant (because I have a strong dislike for bad business processes) – this one could be a quasi-retirement plan, honestly.
I’m curious about this one as well. At the outset, I see that “wave” should refer to the physical gesture of moving your hand in greeting and/or farewelling. “Waive” would be the option for dismissing, abandoning, and refusing.
But in practice, apparently, you can substitute “wave” for “waive” in many contexts and it would be generally acceptable.