What is to be done, when dicking us over and harshly keeping us in line is profitable, and we keep electing them to do it?!
>What is to be done
A people that doesn't pay attention to the government gets screwed by the government every time, no matter what rules are in place. That's why Lawrence Lessig is trying to change the rules to encourage people to take part.
Most people don't care about X (civil forfeiture, whistleblowers, Controversial invocations of the Patriot Act, etc.)
> Pay more attention to the election and government processes.
Yes but this completely ignores the fact that most Americans are apathetic to these issues.
What I learned this year was that (as another poster put it) "Gerrymandering, fraud, bribery, voter suppression" were visible, they would also be tolerated.
Also, if you're under investigation by the FBI for espionage, most Americans will STILL vote for you. And the other major half will vote for someone who is clearly racist and (imho) dumb as nails.
if you're under investigation by the FBI for espionage
--John Kiriakou (He was the first CIA officer to be convicted for passing classified information to a reporter) [1]
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.
[1] http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/all_whistleblowers_shoul...
My interactions with people after reaching adulthood have also taught me that people have different inclinations, ethics, intentions and internal reward systems. Some people gain satisfaction by helping others, or doing 'good;' while some others, gain satisfaction from hurting others, or feeling superior to them. Unfortunately I've met a lot of terrible people, and that makes me wonder what we should reasonably come to expect in who we collectively elect?
We might do better drafting from a pool of otherwise qualified people who really don't want the job!
I've just never really solved how to apply it to politics. I've long felt that if you're going to have 2 "houses", one ought to be appointed by ballot as a check/balance on the elected members (a variation of hereditary peers in many ways but without the same bias).
It can be clearly recognized where it occurs, and there are plenty of examples in the Wikipedia article. I don't have the skills or knowledge to say exactly how it should be done, only that it shouldn't have extreme obvious political bias.
I contend that the system we use, the gerrymandering system, is the most defensible, it's democratic. Don't like it, vote for somebody else.
The explicit goal of gerrymandering is to render this remedy ineffectual.
however, I feel you are so convinced you are right that you are not looking at the actual issue and you intellectually impoverish yourself as a result. Gerrymander is an accusation you hurl at opponents in the majority who don't do what you want (like calling them uncivil even if they have not been, eh!?). However, when your party is in you do the same thing... not because you are a hypocrite (like the hypocritical games played over Supreme Court nominations) but because there is no way to draw redistricting boundaries that is actually fair; many factions will be disadvantaged by aggregating votes in districts, there is no way to avoid it.
Instead of downvoting me more, google a supposed gerrymander map and try it on a city you know, you'll see that you'll be making political choices that you favor. You might be "fair" in your mind because you consider yourself an independent so you will favor neither Democrats nor Republicans, but instead your gerrymander will favor some other metrics that you prefer.
You might even go so far as try to create a very evenly divided legislature that will have difficulty passing any laws, and you'll look at me and say "see, I did it"... then immediately after that I'll have to listen to your unsophisticated drivel about how gridlock is destroying our country and if only everybody was "civil" like you, beautiful compromises would emerge.
It's named after the former Governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, who redrew the districts to ensure his party would win the senate. Apparently, he had to draw the districts in rather unusual shapes to achieve this, and they kind of ended up looking like a salamander. Hence, Gerrymandering.
By what principle do you think districts should be drawn--they must be redrawn due to shifting population--so do you intend to draw exaggerated patterns to spread out minority opinions, or to clump them together? Or are you suggesting that you flip coins topologically? What if flipping coins results in a salamander of some sort, you want to use soap films to find the minimum enclosing surfaces? "Mathematically neutral" methods of drawing districts will result in some parts of the country randomly enhancing minority opinions while other parts of the country will randomly diffuse them, with results that will lead partisans to complain bitterly.
My point is, there IS NO RIGHT ANSWER. There is only your preference.
Even if true, this is surely the least civil way, and one of the least convincing ways, to state the fact.
> My point is, there IS NO RIGHT ANSWER. There is only your preference.
That seems to be a different claim to:
> any creation of voting districts is a Gerrymander
(which you said above). Two reasons why:
1. As slavik points out, a gerrymander is, by definition, intentionally (not incidentally, accidentally, or unavoidably) unfair.
2. More importantly, "all district-drawing schemes are unfair", while probably true, does not mean that they are all equally unfair, or that we should give up on seeking fairness. It seems rather like http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm .
Let's say we make the whole nation into a single constituent district. Now, every voter will cast one vote for one representative and the top N candidates with the most votes win.
This is a terrible solution but even this is better than what we have today which i hope goes far too show how bad the system we have today is...
Systems design should strive to make it resistant to corruption and try to not rely on the goodness of people making correct/impartial choices.
(I am fully aware of my hypocrisy when I claim to support democracy around the world except obviously {{}} can't be in government. I hope that this just shows that I can't even trust myself to be correct/consistent/impartial.)
Bottom line is that every vote within a jurisdiction should be equally equal regardless of geographical location. It might lead to people we don't like getting elected but that shouldn't dissuade us. However, I have to agree with President Obama in this -- the only way to effect any change here is to get people involved in very large numbers. Get people to move to these safe districts. I can't see how we can accomplish change here with the levels of apathy we have...
To try to forge a simple example to illustrate it to you (and yes, this is spoonfeeding to an HN audience who refuses to do the work themselves when downvoting is so much simpler): people interact with their neighbors and they squabble with their neighbors and there are many more factions on a myriad of issues than even a multiparty system can allow for. But neighbors unite over many issues, like "we don't want a sewage treatment plant here", or "we need more parking".
If you have a "system" that does not give local people a loud voice on local issues, your system will be overturned in favor of one that does. For instance, the American Revolution and the Brexit are the same basic issue: people far away should not be deciding our local affairs.
So now that your system's been overturned, we have a system of local districts... but local districts are filled with people who do not agree on all issues...
It's all gerrymandering, there is no such thing as not gerrymandering, including in the mathematically degenerate cases of Athenian (or New England town meeting) democracies. Factorial of 0 has to be 1, because...because... "gerrymander"
But to your point(less), considering the world population, I've looked, I've googled the gerrymander topic hard; and I've tried to engage the wikipedia "talk" community in hopes of finding birds of a feather, people actively interested in the issue. (You give it a try, I am the only one saying it... Oh wait, it's much easier for you to avoid learning anything and just to drop a tart comment.)
I am certain that many others (still a tiny minority of the planet) have noticed that when you draw district boundaries that you must inherently advantage some and disadvantage others; a subset of those notice more sophisticated political things about it, and a tiny subset probably notice that it is a deeper d(N-color geographic map projection onto a hyperdimensional Venn diagram problem)/dt.
But that notion does not filter out. The concept of a "gerrymander" is very dear to the hearts of relatively sophisticated people (unsophisticated people don't know the word). I imagine it's not taught properly in political science curricula.
My claim is, there is no way to draw legislative districts that is not a gerrymander (unless you adopt the non-standard definition that a gerrymander is any drawing that is not geometrically compact/convex)
The original Gerrymander political cartoon: it was a clever rhetorical point, I'm in favor of cleverness and rhetorical flourish.
Further noticing that all districting is political, ideological, or doomed to be rejected by an outraged populatce, I don't know how clever that is, but I can't find anybody other than me who has noticed it and stands up and says it.
In terms of your suggestion about not drawing district lines at all, I can (seriously) see no merit to it at all. That could be because while you could have made an actual argument for your point, instead you simply stated it as I did in my post... I guess according to your comment calculus I should accuse you of not following the tone that we prefer and downvote you?