So extensive is this practice that the resulting shapes can approximate any letter of the alphabet. Quite readable too.
But N, D, U, and a few others are real gems.
I’m not sure if gerrymandering is all that bad. Wait, what’s this, a font made out of gerrymandered districts? It must be really bad, we should do something about it. Except the T doesn’t look that great, and it’s from California anyway. Maybe this isn’t such a big deal after all. And the Q! The Q is barely even gerrymandered. Fuck it, I’m gonna go play some video games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_8th_congression...
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_14th_congressio...
...both of which seem like textbook examples of what a good, non-gerrymandered district should look like.
If the point of this project was to call attention to ridiculously-shaped gerrymandered districts, these are some of the last districts that should ever be considered for inclusion.
Maybe there were, and the author had to use them for their relatively sane shapes compared to calling Maryland's 3rd District the X.
For instance some distracts were purposely built around a minority groups neighborhoods so that they would have a representative. If you made the districts purely based on grids then the group would be too small to have any representative.
Which maybe is the wrong solution. But you get funky district shapes for all sorts of reasons that are not the corruption people typically think of.
So no, it isn't interesting.
These minorities need 'help' in that a majority is going to be self-interested and lacking compassion or any sort of integrity at larger scope.
In the U.S. this might take the form of tax loopholes for speedboats and golf memberships eating into funding for basic social services (infrastructure, law enforcement, education resources and such) on the other side of town.
If you can unpack the above and place yourself in the shoes of the people on the bad end of that deal, you might start to get the idea.
To be eligible for a majority-minority district, a minority group must be "politically cohesive" and "sufficiently numerous and compact to form a majority in a single-member district", while the majority group must "votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it [..] usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate". (Thornburg v. Gingles) In other words, there must be a political bloc that (a) is not receiving any representation in the area and (b) would have representation with a majority-minority district. Letting them have that in no way gives them an advantage over the majority, whose preferred candidates will still control all the other districts.
Why not apply this to political blocs that exist based on factors other than race – like plain old conservative versus liberal? Well, I think we should; again, I'd prefer proportional representation. But the current rule is enforcing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which specifically calls out discrimination based on race – something that was a huge problem in 1965, and is still a problem today. Compared to other types of political blocs, racial ones are disproportionately excluded from the political system. And morally speaking, although being discriminated against due to your political beliefs is bad, being discriminated against due to your race is somewhat worse, because you can choose one but not the other.
Although comex’s answer is, probably, more important.
Not if there are more than 2 groups. There could easily be 3 minorities with 0 majorities.
I think most decent minded folks can see where this is leading.
I'm vitriolic towards any law that gives one group preferential treatment under the law. The entire premise of American democracy is majority rule within limits. The founding fathers already gave us ways to protect the minority's rights via the judicial system and the constitution. You cannot legislate status quo because it is derived from the sentiment of the population. If you want to change the sentiment you need to halt the division. You cannot pass a bill forcing black to love white, you can only pass bills that make the distinction irrelevant.
> I think most decent-minded folks can see where this is leading.
Hopefully to a world where people are judged by the content of their character and not by some physical attribute or thing they identify as.
Juust so you are aware, this all extends far beyond questions of race, not sure why you are so focused on that, but it's probably pretty telling.
Also, I'm not at all sure what you see as a distinction between these protections and "founding fathers already gave us ways to protect the minority's rights via the judicial system...".
We are discussing implementation of that Founding Father Judicial system stuff in this thread, please expand on why you think it serves as an argument against modfying or creating laws to protect abused classes?
Just so you are aware, everything is racist in the news today. If you go to any major news site I promise you will find some article about Trump or his supporters being racist. Trump says things about Baltimore, media calls him racist, why is that? Is that telling? Is calling out this guy for having the worst district really that bad? https://i.redd.it/wlf72xth8gd31.jpg
In your version of the US, the Civil Rights Act should be forever expanded to include more and more oppressed groups, whereas in my version of the US the Civil Rights Act should be a universal truth. I don't think it's fair that clubs in Vegas can charge men and women different prices, but is there a movement for that? Does that ever make the news? Of course not. I'm being discriminated against based on my gender but since I don't have protected status that's ok. Instead, I think any discrimination based on physical features should not be allowed unless it somehow impacted their ability to perform a job. (IE ok to say no to person in wheelchair for UPS job)
> "founding fathers already gave us ways to protect the minority's rights via the judicial system...".
If you feel oppressed, you can sue and have your case adjudicated in court. In your system, only those who have protected status have grounds for a lawsuit, therefore people are no longer equal in the eyes of the law. In my system, valid claims of discrimination can be herd regardless of protected status. I would also impose a fine for losing to discourage frivolous lawsuits. If that's too burdensome then that's why we have the ACLU.
I want to get rid of classes. I want people to associate because of common interests not out of mutual dislike. I want to eliminate all differences between citizens under the eyes of the law. I just think it's deeply flawed to think that if you pass enough protection laws suddenly the people that inflict the so-called "oppression" will have a change of heart. You can only hope to do that by highlighting peoples similaries instead of their differences. Conversely, if your goal is to get people to hate each other, you should constantly point out there differences, something the modern media does a fantastic job at.
In simple terms, many minority groups in America have been forcefully and intentionally disadvantaged for generations through programs like redlining, segregation, the so-called war on drugs, gerrymandering, and hundreds of other racist schemes designed to deprive minority citizens of the same rights and privileges you and your ancestors were afforded solely based on the colour of their skin.
And I would hope that you can understand why centuries of systemic oppression would have a lasting effect that needs more than just words to address.
From the Atlantic:
"But just in time for the redistricting in 1990, some enterprising Republicans began noticing a rather curious fact: The drawing of majority-minority districts not only elected more minorities, it also had the effect of bleeding minority voters out of all the surrounding districts. Given that minority voters were the most reliably Democratic voters, that made all of the neighboring districts more Republican. The black, Latino, and Asian representatives mostly were replacing white Democrats, and the increase in minority representation was coming at the expense of electing fewer Democrats. "
Just because the districts are drawn by unelected people doesn't mean the districts aren't gerrymandered.
Archive link because the Baltimore Sun doesn't like Europe:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/06/gerrymandering-symposium-...
I may be mistaken, but I thought I read the court ruled it constitutional
Without this protection the voices of people who live outside the 5 major metropolitan areas simply wouldn't matter and candidates would have no reason to listen to their issues and have no repercussions for hurting them to favor city-dwellers.
This would be bad. Very bad. A straight population vote ends up being a scheduling algorithm for issues where rural interests have unbounded wait time.
One could say that the solution of weighting rural votes higher is a clunky system but any replacement voting system needs to take this into account as those small towns are where almost all of our primary industry is.
Also, the Senate is supposed to combat the House in this instance. That's what it's there for, and frankly, because of the importance of the Senate, a voter in Wyoming has more voting power than a voter in California. This isn't good either as you mention in your last statement.
Local and proportional representation is the main reason for having the house of representatives, while the reason for Gerrymandering is to disproportionately favor one party or another.
In the unbalanced system which currently exists in the USA, rural voters are given huge, disproportionate advantage in electoral power, leading to national decisions being made that favor them (have some more farm subsidies!) and ignoring the voices of the millions of citizens who happen to live in large cities and populous states.
Why are rural people better than city people? Shouldn't it be.. equal?
Then another thread discussing rural voters being given excessive representation. Why shouldn't the cities dominate, they ask?
Rural voters comprise a minority.
How consistent should these threads be in terms of the arguments and what is seen as good? How consistent are they in practice?
The point of the electoral college was that news travels slowly so voting for a rep to vote for you to represent your district was the right thing to do. Now, everyone can vote for themselves and probably should and we can have it counted in a day or two.
Because bills are _always_ full of pork (Gov funded projects that are specific to the representative's district), there is nothing that would stop a highly populated region representatives to divert all funds to their district, while taxing an other region higher. In essence, diverting not only shared funds, but levy punitive taxes on other regions.
If the electoral college was apportioned correctly and the size of the house not artificially capped, there wouldn't be any reason to compare "voting power" of low-population vs high-population states.
Presidential candidates want to win Florida. Badly. The state has a popular vote for the presidential candidate. If "popular vote encourages candidates to ignore everything except for population centers" then we'd see candidates campaigning in Florida exclusively target major cities. But we don't. The candidates themselves show up in small towns in Florida as part of their campaign efforts.
If we don't see this behavior at the state level, then why would we expect to see if at the national level?
I think if any measure should be focused on getting equal representation its class. But guess which class is both by far the largest, but still has the least representation. Perhaps it is the purpose of arbitrary drawing of districts to keep it that way.
Why should people get more say because they live more spread out? Why do 100k people living across the countryside get more say than 100k people living in a city?
If 5 million people live in a city and 2 million people live in the countryside, the people in the city should have 5 reps to the rural 2.
Density is a completely arbitrary metric to use. Why not use race? Why not income levels? Why does density demand electoral privilege but no other metric?
The only actual answer is "status quo". They are overrepresented now, so there is a retroactive justification that somehow balanced representation is "unfair", when in fact it is only "unfair" because it is less than they already have.
You need to amend the constitution to change that. It’s hard to do, but again that was intentional.
(And, to clarify, I believe you're referring to a false talking point that's often thrown about to spread F.U.D.)
'Sarah Toporoff, a Massachusetts native who works in Paris for the Global Editors Network, which promotes newsroom innovation, raised similar questions. She said U.S. newsrooms “are a benchmark for digital innovation” — and it’s important that their content be available in Europe.'
'It is naive and wholly irresponsible to think that U.S. news holds no relevance beyond U.S. borders...'
Perhaps, then, Europe should've had some international discussion about their hyper-aggressive legislation, to try and prevent this situation. I am dumbfounded that anyone thinks the U.S. corporations are to blame for not spending millions to comply with a foreign law from countries where they have no legal representation.
Preventing that sort of 'taxation without representation' is something of a popular idea over here.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/more-than-1000-u-s-news-si...
Compliance with GDPR is easy though - don't aggressively track and monitor European visitors. If you've stuffed your website that full with invasive trackers et al that you can't show it to Europeans for fear of broaching personal privacy legislation, you should probably have a good long think about where you've gone wrong.
There are people who aren't doing anything wrong, who did the math and decided they can't clear a profit on proving they aren't doing anything wrong.
What’s wrong with actively investigating your own compliance?
What government permissions are you even talking about?
You must consult in case, quote “processing would result in a high risk in the absence of measures taken by the controller to mitigate the risk”.
You keep imagining things and expect me to have an argument about them.
What I do care about is for companies getting the highest possible fines for their mismanagement of user data. Like British Airways, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/british-airways-data-breach-...
Pretty amazing, though.