divided

When you hear hooves, think horses not zebras.

All throughout history viruses have spread from close animal contact with humans. Including—and I cannot stress this enough—a novel coronavirus circa 2002 that spread from bat to intermediary host to humans in a wet market in the very same country.

In comparison, for the lab leak you’re assuming a lab accident (rare), that it wasn’t noticed and quarantined immediately (even rarer), and that the wet market still randomly became the epicenter of early cases despite at that point the transmission being human to human (rare, there’d be no reason for it to be any more significant than any other place people gather).

So when we’ve never seen a significant outbreak from a lab accident (zebras) and throughout all of human history we’ve seen viruses spread to humans from close contact with animals (horses)… yes when there is ambiguity to what the cause is, defaulting to what we’ve always seen before—including literally just 20 years ago—is simpler.

Right, what I’m saying is we know <1% of virus types, and it’s reasonable to believe we know <1% of coronavirus strains.

The bats don’t need to be at all near the market, the theory is an intermediate host was in the market. A bat could infect the host population days prior or years prior. A long potential span of time.

It might be illustrative to look at MERS. They found camel populations >3,000 miles away from the outbreak with antibodies to MERS. One potential explanation is the virus doesn’t sicken camels and had been spreading in their population for a long time prior to transmission to humans.

Or we look to SARS. They did not find SARS in a bat population, but after 5 years of searching they did find a cave where all the building blocks existed. It was a couple provinces away from the outbreak. >500 miles.

So despite your beliefs, how many bats freely roaming the neighborhood may not actually be a much better probability analysis than flu viruses in Antarctica. /s

To be fair, there’s no trace of it in the lab either /s

Double zoonosis? The virus jumped to us and then to dogs, cats, tigers, hippos, pigs, etc. 29 known species! An unfathomable triple zoonosis that happened many, many times (thousands?) over the years. I’d say double zoonosis isn’t too uncommon.

The initial SARS presumably passed from bat to intermediate host to humans in a wet market. This exact type of event happened in China just 20 years ago.

And there isn’t “no trace” of an intermediate host. There are suspected intermediate hosts but none confirmed. Similarly SARS had a couple potential intermediate hosts, and MERS had a potential intermediate host but unanswered questions around that, too. Scientists had more confidence in those theories, but still uncertainties.

Again, I think both theories are plausible. But being a repeat to what we’ve seen before _is_ simpler. When you hear hooves, think horses not zebras.

Fun fact! There are just 9,110 named virus species as of 2021. But there are estimates that mammals and birds may have as many as 1.7 million undiscovered viruses. An older source says there were ~200 some known viruses that could infect humans as of 2013. They estimate there are 800k unknown ones which could infect us. Basically every time they look for viruses, they find new ones.

I don’t believe anyone is saying it’s needlessly complex, but Occam’s Razor isn’t “the second simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”

On one hand you have the market which housed animals that throughout its history some have had and spread different coronaviruses naturally. Every prior pandemic has been believed to have been from animal to human transmission, it’s seemingly the simplest explanation.

The lab leak theory of course assumes a lab accident. Biolab accidents are fairly rare, some years have no recorded accidents, others a handful. They’ve all been successfully contained with no more than a couple fatalities each.

It’s not that it’s needlessly complex. It’s that you have a market with animals who have coronaviruses and you have a lab that studies coronaviruses. Both are reasonable explanations, but a pandemic similar to all other prior pandemics and lots of humans being exposed to lots of potential virus carriers with no protection _is_ a simpler explanation.

Having said that, I’ve remained open minded and willing to consider both reasonable and unproven. Some pandemic will be the first from a lab leak, this may have been it. We will probably never definitively know.

The evidence clearly points in that direction, so yes.

Supreme Court rulings notably trending towards increasing Christian freedoms at the expense of others (reintroducing staff-led prayer at school, allowing businesses to discriminate against gay couples, mandating public funding be sent to religious schools, abortion no longer being within one’s right to privacy).

Then there was the Muslim ban to start off the previous Presidential term. The extreme Zionist stance of some red states, going so far as to legally punish companies practicing BDS. The Texas GOP basically shut out gay Republicans from participating and deemed them an “abnormal lifestyle choice.” They also want prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments back in public schools. There is a growing discussion of finding a way to make gay marriage illegal again. Then there’s the trans panic. The church is also against the legalization of marijuana. It’s challenging to find a place where the party’s policy stance is separate from evangelical churches.

The anti-vaccination stance was also widely promulgated by churches painting the vaccine as the mark of the beast. Similarly have read many argue against mask mandates because we were created in god’s image and it would be an insult to Him. Further, churches were one of the loudest against occupancy mandates or other restrictions on in-person congregations (the loss of revenue hurt). Don’t get me started on the number of popular churches that give sermons on the election being stolen, Trump being a Prophet or Messiah or Chosen One, and Biden being possessed by Satan. Not normal stuff btw.

The founder of conservative social media app Gab probably said it most clearly: “We don't want people who are atheists. We don't want people who are Jewish. We don't want people who are, you know, nonbelievers, agnostic, whatever. This is an explicitly Christian movement because this is an explicitly Christian country.”

Now maybe you’re part of the libertarian wing of the party. Or maybe you support marijuana legalization. Or you don’t want abortion to be completely banned. Or you go to a regular old church that doesn’t give political sermons. But if so, I hate to break it to you but you have little say in the direction of the party.

I respect that, although I wish I could claim to be a zealot. I hope you have a good day, too.

I like to work in facts, so I gave a short list of government actions I’m aware of (I could give many more) done by Republicans that restrict freedoms all within the span of the past six months. I can provide links to articles about each.

However, when engaging with right-wingers I often get zero proof of the reasoning behind their feelings. Like above just brushing it off as an inability to see authoritarian moves by the left. If you’re trying to argue they’re the same, using actual facts and data would go a lot further towards proving your point than just sharing smart-sounding but ultimately empty rhetoric.

OK sure, I'm all in favor of more accountability. But I also think it's absurd right-wing media portrays the FBI as a Democrat controlled and biased organization.

According to a (likely poor quality) poll, when only considering Hillary and Trump in the poll, 92% of police officers chose Trump[1]. I believe it's fair to say that law enforcement overwhelmingly votes Republican, even if the poll is not great quality. 9 in 10? Maybe not. But likely far more Republican than your average voter. That was also in 2016, prior to the Defund the Police movement which would likely bump those numbers up.

That was general law enforcement, but FBI is law enforcement. Given the average FBI agent is probably more educated and urban than the average LEO, their numbers are likely slightly more Democrat, but it's reasonable to believe it would still lean Republican.

65% of FBI's supervisory positions were male, and 78% white[2]. As we know, white male demographics skew Republican at 58%[3]. The total FBI workforce is 75% white, 56% male. Looking at demographics, we'd expect the organization to be more Republican than average.

As mentioned previously, 16 top officials were given the director/acting director title and only 1 of those was a Democrat. If top officials are at all representative of the political beliefs of the organization on average (it's a fair belief, as those top officials typically spent decades climbing the org), picking Republicans that many times would mean either a very rare coin flip, or the numbers skew Republican.

The FBI has spent most of its resources throughout history targeting left-wing organizations a la COINTELPRO. This is still the case over the past decade.[4]

At the same time Peter Strzok was texting about stopping Trump, another agent shared her experience as "The FBI is Trumpland" and that Clinton is "the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel," and that "the reason why they're leaking is they're pro-Trump."

All of this gets overlooked by right-wing media and instead they focus on right-wingers getting investigated and prosecuted. When--I dunno--maybe it's just Republican politicians are more criminal?

Without having actual party affiliation polls of the FBI, I think it's reasonable to look at the information we do have and say if we were to guess, the organization probably leans Republican.

[1] https://www.policemag.com/342098/the-2016-police-presidentia... [2] https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2020/02/fbi-has-failed-mov... [3] https://news.virginia.edu/content/what-exit-polls-are-tellin... [4] https://rightsanddissent.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Stil...

I could easily back it up:

The right has over the past 6 months used the levers of government to make it illegal for women to get reproductive care, banned books on LGBTQ and race from school libraries, removed elected officials for espousing different beliefs, punished companies that disagreed with their views, and outlawed care for trans youths. There are candidates on the ballot in favor of disenfranchising voters, adding the Bible to the citizenship exam, and outlawing contraception.

The left has done what to abridge anyone's freedoms in that time? What are their candidates campaigning on to reduce other's freedoms?

It's a silly argument to have. One side is clearly embracing authoritarianism and you're here arguing both sides are the same.

Comparing intolerance of intolerance to just plain intolerance is a false equivalency.

It’s a bit like saying the abolitionists and slave owners were equally destructive and bad because the slave owners were intolerant of black people while the abolitionists were intolerant of pro-slavery advocates.

There are some overzealous or radical elements on the left, but not at all in the same way as on the right. Not in scale, not in effect.

If you want to say far left ideology is as harmful as far right ideology, fine. But when one problem is 100x larger, let’s not try to give both problems equal attention.

Interesting data points, but in isolation polling seems to be a rather poor method for determining this.

More conservative viewpoints are also associated with higher stigmatization of mental health conditions[1] and one indisputable measure of a mental health crisis (suicides) is more prevalent in rural areas compared to urban[2].

This seems like an obvious confounding variable. If you poll people have they been formally diagnosed with a mental health disorder, and one group of people refuses to seek treatment for it in the first place due to stigma, then _of course_ fewer of them are formally diagnosed.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6600024/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8909802/

Although I think it's fair to characterize the left as favoring collectivism, I don't think it's fair to characterize them as following government rules any more than the right.

Typically speaking, the left want government rules determined by scientists and experts that maximizes overall freedom, the right want government rules determined by the church that maximizes the freedoms of adherents to that church.

So while the left may favor following mask mandates or vaccination drives because it benefits the overall physical health of the community; the right favors abortion bans, banning trans healthcare treatments, outlawing gay marriage, and barring race from being discussed in schools for--presumably--the moral health of the community.

The right is arguing these things are for the greater good in the same way the left argues wearing a mask in the supermarket is. Both sides want their governments to enact and enforce these rules. I'd argue that telling someone to wear cloth on their face is a lighter government touch than forcing 10 year old rape victims to travel 500 miles for care, but I digress.

After all, the government tells you to wear pants and I don't see people calling anyone sheep for doing so.

You state this as if it were a fact, but how did you come to this conclusion?

Presidents don’t determine the type of people who join the FBI, stay for decades, and work themselves into leadership positions. Presidents just appoint one of these individuals as director.

This would be like believing city police are mostly Democrat because the mayors have been mostly Democrat. Or the same of blue state state-level police.

None of this is factual or living in the real world, it’s simply adhering to an unsupported opinion because it reinforces your feelings.

Fair enough, although if you doubted its authenticity, a quick search to verify it is trivial to do.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/words-mccabe-claims-firing-p...

I’m glad you brought up Andrew McCabe, because we have public knowledge about his party affiliation!

> “I have considered myself to be a Republican my entire life,” albeit “a moderate Republican,” McCabe said. “I’ve voted for every Republican candidate for president in every election, except the 2016 one, in which I did not vote. And I chose not to vote because of the political nature of the work that we were engaged in.”

He’s Republican. So was Robert Mueller. And James Comey. And Christopher Wray. And John Durham of course.

We might not have overall numbers, but what are the odds that almost every high ranking FBI official you recognize is a Republican, but that the overall leadership structure doesn’t lean Republican?

It’s not a far-fetched concept. 90% of police chose Trump over Hillary. The people going into federal policing are not dissimilar from local police. Likely more educated and more urban than your average local officer, so I’d expect them to lean more Democrat than 10%, but it would be a stretch to believe that they dominate the org structure.

You’re telling me you believe the heads of the FBI have been registering as Republicans for 85 years and been appointed to the role by Republican presidents all as a long running scheme to lull Republicans into believing the FBI was not the secretly Democrat-controlled organization it truly is?

Even in your argument against the FBI you give a reason for having them. Yes, they missed 9/11, but they have also prevented unknown numbers of terrorist attacks.

They are also largely the ones called in to investigate serial murderers, child sex rings, drug trafficking, organized crime, etc. I think deferring to state level agencies to handle these crimes would produce worse outcomes.

I’m not saying the FBI is great. They’ve done a lot of awful things and had a lot of failures. But the current bad system isn’t automatically improved by getting rid of it if the alternative is worse.

[edit] it’s a bit like hitting a local maxima. Is there a better system out there for catching interstate and large scale crime? Most definitely. But it seems foolhardy to not have that plan in place when deciding to “dismantle” the FBI when doing so means more terror attacks happen, more children get trafficked, serial murderers kill more victims, drug lords grow bigger operations, etc.

Right-wing has tried to portray them as politically biased against Republicans, but the evidence doesn’t bear this out. Since 1935 there have been 16 directors or acting directors. Only one of those was a registered Democrat and he only served in the position for 71 days.

Wait until you hear about all the crimes committed by law enforcement at _every_ level…

The FBI is often involved in some of the most serious crimes (serial murderers, sex trafficking, organized crime), so getting rid of them sounds a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Without a doubt we should be wanting police reform, including better ways to discover criminal wrongdoing and more effective ways to deter it from happening and/or punish those who commit it.

Oh and the hyper-partisan part was you were taking a statement and contorting it into something no one was saying. This is strawmanning an argument so it becomes trivial to argue against.

It’s very, very often used to contort political positions into outlandish caricatures. Pretending the other side was arguing that we shouldn’t listen to 40 states because LA is larger is simply not what’s being argued here.

To be clear, black people having the right to vote wasn’t the original deal, either. Was them achieving the right to vote disenfranchising white people?

That’s the problem here. Yes, black people achieving a say in how they were governed lessened white people’s power. Clearly it was the right thing to do. Unless you’d like to argue against this point?

My argument is that favoring rural over urban is not dissimilar. As a matter of practice, favoring rural _is_ the same as favoring white, Christian (especially evangelical) land owners.

Your fears over “one person one vote” nullifying smaller states is just not reality. Most countries don’t have a Senate-like body and their smaller territories are not wastelands. Thinking it would nullify their voters is not based on real world observation.

As a matter of fact, smaller states derive more benefit from cleaving to bigger ones than the other way around in nearly every way. The world provides plenty of evidence that disproves your arguments, we don’t have to fear theoreticals.

This is an extremely good point, thank you for recognizing it.

In the lead up to WW2, Nazis in Germany appealed to the ailing rural population by telling them the Jews, Marxists, social democrats, feminists, and intellectuals were the reason they struggled.

I suppose I don't have to draw the modern US connections. I don't have to say replace Jews with globalists or George Soros or the media or Hollywood. Like we all see the similarities, right?

Yes, rural America is suffering. I grew up in rural America. The people are being misled into focusing their ire on immigrants, BLM, CRT, and transpeople. Sometimes I wish I could shake them and tell them while they're fuming over an imaginary culture war, their politicians are grifting them out of their donations and using the levers of government to make their suffering worse. But that ever growing suffering just provides a hotter fire to feed more grievances to.

Don't get me wrong, Democrats have been pro-corporation and offshored jobs just as much, but they've certainly done more for lower income people than Republicans. If you look at the extremes of both parties, Bernie's or AOC's policies would do far more for them than MTG or Matt Gaetz's. Sadly, contesting the 2020 election is more important to their 2022 vote than actual tangible plans to improve their economic conditions. Oh sure they'll give lip service to the grievances of soaring fuel prices or inflation, but not a one will give a tangible plan to do anything about it.

And that's where I'm at. I know rural people have real grievances. I just haven't seen a way to connect them to electing people who instead focus on improving those real grievances rather than feeding them imaginary grievances to get outraged over.

> Many in this thread are saying things like “if LA county has more population than 40 states why should we listen to those states?”

I think this is a highly uncharitable rephrasing of what's being said. This sort of hyper-partisan lens I think can ruin one's ability to reason through what's actually being said. It's strawman-ing, in other words.

What's _actually_ being said is "LA county's population should be listened to as much as Michigan state" (for example). No one is saying don't listen to 40 states. They're saying each person should have an equal say in how our nation is governed.

Without that hyper-partisan lens, your argument sorta just looks silly and falls apart, doesn't it? I mean, "it's reciprocal" we value your state's population equally to our own. Those states should listen to us because we listen to them. No one is throwing out anyone's interests wholesale, so we do have a right to govern together and no one should secede?

Being clear here, no one is talking about disenfranchising people of their representation. They're talking about equalizing representation. When your interests are overrepresented this might _feel_ like an attack on you, but it's the same way some subset of men felt women earning the right to vote lessened theirs or some subset of white people felt black people achieving the right to vote lessened their control. It's true in a way, but only in the sense that some portion of the population unjustly and unfairly held more power than they were entitled to. You don't want to look at your voting power that way, do you?

> What if 60% of the population wanted to slaughter the other 40%? That's right, I too can come up with wacky hypotheticals that won't happen and presuppose a lot of other important variables don't change.

This was my point about how the majority can be bastards. There are countless examples where the majority wanted something that punished the minority throughout history and throughout the world. Having said that, humankind hasn't come up with a better system--at least to my knowledge. Yours certainly only introduces the potential to make problems like this worse.

> Why do you presuppose I'm not pushing for the most fair arrangement? Why do you assume that an arrangement where states just as important to the union have two orders of magnitude less representation would be more fair? Probably because, as you keep asserting about me, it benefits you. If a state thinks that the union is a negative for it, and in a way that the union would never agree to change, and it would get a better deal outside of the union, maybe it should just secede. But it's not a net negative, you're just not thinking any further than the culture war; say what you want about the difference between North Dakota and New York, but I'll bet New York really appreciates North Dakota being its breadbasket.

First, the "culture war" is not a real thing. It's just right-wing propaganda to frame any expression or change they disagree with as an attack on them. Framing wanting fair representation as not thinking beyond an imaginary attack on conservatives is sorta funny.

I don't think you're pushing towards a more fair arrangement because you can't even outline what makes a system fair to you. You don't think North Dakota with 0.8m population should have 1/10th the representation of New York with 8m. OK what is fair to you then? What makes it fair or unfair? What knobs could I change in theoretical compositions of the US that would make you say this federation is fair and this federation unfair? Surely you can admit that not all federations are fair, right?

Again, my principle shared before is super simple and easy to represent and I would argue intuitively feels fair to most people. It's not rocket science. Does it benefit my beliefs? Yes. But that doesn't invalidate it as wrong when I think it's also the solution most uninvolved third parties would agree with (also weird, it's what the article in this post states). And I think even _you_ agree with it if the system weren't stacked in your favor or if we were talking about another country.

You magically think that each state is "just as important to the union" when that's impossible. The US without CA is significantly worse off than it is without CT. Just not a matter of opinion or feelings.

North Dakota really appreciates New York buying its produce, too. And producing its science, technology, and art (no matter how much they complain about it now, I mean come on, Fox News is in NYC!). Also, their agricultural output is 20th (ND) and 24th (NY) in the US, so it's not as if NY is entirely reliant on others. Food output is important for sure, but ND gains more benefit from being in a country with NY than NY does from being in a country with ND.

Yes, I’m aware of Quebec’s history (and other provinces/territories threaten it these days). But the same thing happens in the US and having a Senate hasn’t changed that. That was the original point, our Senate/Electoral College isn’t keeping our states in the US. Just like a lack of a US-style Senate isn’t causing Quebec and others to flee Canada. It’s the original point I was trying to make about how this is magical thinking and ignores what history around the world shows us.

The examples given are a far cry from a situation like a US state leaving. A couple are Russian-armed separatists from neighboring countries. No state’s relationship to the US at all resembles Taiwan’s to China. And Kosovo is in a region that has dealt with strife since the early 1990’s.

A state seceding from the US would look very different than these.

Perhaps they would try to give aid covertly, but they wouldn’t risk a hot war. Intervening in a state seceding would be seen as a direct attack on US soil, very different than us aiding Ukraine or Russia aiding Syria.

What's so special about squiggly lines drawn by politicians generations ago? You realize there's no divinity in the division between South and North Dakota, right? Even back then these territories were being divided up to maximize political power.

I could be wrong, but I genuinely believe the problem with your line of reasoning is you're rationalizing for a system that benefits you. Your ideology benefits from how things are, and so you find reasons to justify why the way things are is good, actually.

If say states had been divided up differently, would your entire belief system crumble? Assume city-states were the norm and the Senate was overwhelmingly controlled by whichever party controlled urban populations. Like say North Carolina got divided into Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, the Triangle, Wilmington, and the rest of the state as just one big territory. And every state was like this.

Would you suddenly say hey this is a bad system, not because it benefits people I don't agree with, but because of some other silly reason?

What is so magical about lines put on maps by our great-great-great grandfathers?

If there was a magical US with three states, two with only 1 citizen and one with 1,000,000, would you still hold by your principle that they have their own governments that federate with those of states so this is good?

Where in your system do you draw the line and make a distinction between fair and unfair? How do you determine if one arrangement is more fair than another? Why would you not push for the most fair arrangement?

My principle is embarrassingly simple. Political power should be equal to the number of people represented. That's it. Easy to explain, easy to grasp, easy to measure whether something is fair or unfair. It's imperfect--Lord knows population majorities can still be bastards--but it's the best, most egalitarian system created. And, importantly, it's a principle that doesn't change just because it doesn't benefit me. You're right, it's not very nuanced. Simple often works best.

It’s fantasy because it’s just not how the world works. Territories aren’t just up and leaving Canada because there isn’t a body like our Senate. I cannot think of any territory within any developed nation successfully leaving the country. You have to look at like colonial powers losing colonies or perhaps the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Very, very different material conditions than the idea of Maine leaving because there isn’t a Senate.

Individual states do not have the resources to oppose our military. They may be larger than European countries, but they don’t have the military power of those European countries and our country’s military is stronger than the entire EU. Even if a state like Texas were to revolt, it would be notably less successful than Ukraine is versus Russia. Also never mind that this revolting state wouldn’t be receiving foreign aid (I don’t think even hostile countries like China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea would even attempt to get involved in an internal conflict). It is pure fantasy to believe an individual state could succeed in seceding from the US.

Now could a large enough coalition of states succeed? Sure. But I was responding to the parent’s idea that Maine or Alaska or Hawaii would just randomly decide to up and go because they didn’t have the Senate.

Interesting, but I’d say your case study is a much clearer explanation of the downsides to unfettered capitalism (especially in regards to infrastructure) and money in politics than it is of political power apportioned by population.

Traditionally, the government spends more per capita on infrastructure in less populated territories. This holds true for most developed countries. Within states this also holds true. More state budget is spent per capita to build up rural roads than city ones. They ensure water, sewage, electricity, television, and internet to provide service to remote populations instead of allowing them to only operate in cities (and they charge the same price despite a higher cost to serve rural populations). Again, this tends to be the case despite whether a developed country has a body like the US Senate or not.

When it comes to government decisions, rural territories whether at the state level or the national level receive disproportionately more benefit from their association with more urban counties or states.

It’s ok to get nervous about change. That’s what conservative beliefs are: change is bad. But if I could offer any advice about a better way to think about this specific issue: dozens of countries don’t have a body like the US Senate and don’t decide their elections based on an electoral college. They’re doing fine and in many ways better than the US. The suggestions to abolish these institutions aren’t some untried theoretical far-fetched idea. They’ve been used for hundreds of years in some places. Not so scary, huh?

This is an interesting concept. Put the vote multiplier on the backside instead of the front. The Wyoming rep gets 1 vote, but the California rep gets 1.8, etc. This would allow for smaller bodies for more effective debate and you’d give smaller population territories over-representative expression in those debates, but you’d tie the outcomes to be proportional to the populations each representative represents.

I think this is a clever way to keep a cap on a parliamentary body’s size while allowing for more egalitarian representation.

Wouldn’t help combat the other problems of a capped body size (worsening gerrymandering, for example), but it’d be a step in the right direction.

Ah yes, the 3/5ths compromise and its relevance to today’s world. Basing one’s political beliefs on apportionment of power over the fears held by 18th century politicians feels ripe for bad takes.

There are many, many other divides than high population vs low population territories that we conveniently ignore in this debate. If you want to argue in favor of the population of smaller states deserving greater representation, can I get you on board for giving black people, Muslims, LGBTQ members, and communists vote multipliers as well?

You see, there’s actual historical precedent for population majorities screwing over these groups.

In comparison, those small population states you fight so valiantly to protect historically receive more tax dollars than they pay in. Seems like a pretty sweet deal.

Before you say hey that’s all thanks to disproportionate representation, Canada and other countries with more proportionate representation see the same thing. You see, small population states are in general beneficiaries of putting their lot in with bigger states. Giving them more vote power on top of that is… silly.