volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@jackiegardina the topic of gerrymandering tends to be more complicated than most people give credit for.

Just to mention one additional factor, there's the balance between wanting the more competitive districts potentially electing more moderate candidates versus intentionally creating districts to elect candidates that represent perspectives that one believes need more representation in Congress.

So I don't dispute that a district that is more divided might elect a more centrist representative, even that goal itself isn't necessarily the most important one. It's a complicated discussion.

*BUT!* From my perspective, we are so far from even getting down to that level of worrying about the functioning of the representative system.

I tend to say that it doesn't even matter what political perspectives exist within a district when the voters aren't even informed enough to know whether their representative is even matching their preferences.

It's like, I don't know, debating whether to buy a Lamborghini or a Maserati when really you're broke so neither option is actually on the table.

@jackiegardina unfortunately, I think gerrymandering is one of those things that some organizations point to as oversimplification, as they don't want to face the real, much more complicated issue of engaging with voters to change minds.

It's easy to throw one's hands up and just ignore the voters while saying "gerrymander!" when what's really needed is outreach, connection, and even the compromise mentioned above.

So like you said, we need to work with those we disagree with to find common ground. Yes, this is democracy, so those voters who voted for these jerks need to know who they voted for.

An awful lot of people don't know what their representatives do, and that's a real problem.

@greener77176@mastoot.fr

But we don't launch those rockets just for the fun of it.

Humanity derives value from everything from enhanced communications through scientific explorations, and the costs of the rocket launches are the prices we pay for those advancements.

We shouldn't blindly give up the benefits by looking only at the costs.

@marcprecipice

@thelastpsion integrate a static site to fediverse via RSS?

@Woodknot Trump is largely driven by attention-seeking and being mentioned.

It's not clear that Trump sees Sidney Powell matters, but by saying the thing he got you to mention him, and that's the kind of thing that matters to him.

@prefec2 the complaint is not about peer review considering that Wikipedia is not edited by peers.

It seems he doesn't like hierarchy where folks get to the top without regard for the quality of their work, which is a pretty fair complaint.

@taylorlorenz

@AnthonyFStevens there seems to be a misrepresentation about what he said.

According to the article, he didn't say this was a legal requirement, but would have been politically preferable.

It doesn't mean the vote wasn't valid or constitutional. It means the vote wasn't the politically palatable way to go.

He's saying future votes should learn from the experience and go the politically preferable way with the higher threshold.

@jackiegardina every one of the hundreds of representatives in Congress was elected to the post.

We literally get the Congress we voted for.

We probably should stop reelecting the people causing this logjam, but here we are. We chose them.

It is democracy.

@YamakaziTaiga@mastodon.social that Microsoft got busted for cheating on taxes goes to show what I'm saying, that corporations do pay taxes.

Yes, I do know things.

Sounds like the problem here is that you know a bunch of things that aren't actually true.

Yes, corporations pay taxes. No, they don't get to vote.

Basic civics isn't hard.

@YamakaziTaiga@mastodon.social that's just not reality, though.

It makes for a good narrative, and some politicians have pushed the rhetoric to gain votes, but that tired line mainly serves to push voters to disempower themselves.

If you read the Citizens United decision, Kennedy's opinion was all about empowering the everyday person *against* the wealthy interests, as it was the little guy that the administration was cracking down on. Kennedy said no, the little guy must be able to compete against wealthy donors.

But in the end, we vote. We don't vote with money.

To say otherwise is to speak nonsense about how the election system works in the US.

@blogdiva I give up. What flavor do boots come in?

@YamakaziTaiga@mastodon.social what in the world?

Have you ever heard of corporate taxes? Yes! Corporations pay taxes!

And they don't get to vote!

I don't know what to say, are you joking?

@kaia Well I don't know the story, but just based on this post, I would say it would count as ban evasion.

And that's even if the bans themselves are completely ridiculous, well it's still evading them, if that matters at all.

@NanoBookReview so this reminds me, when I talk to my professor friends, they often have philosophical disagreements about whether you should teach the material in a way that is a bit false, but easier to understand and more accessible, or absolutely correct, even if it's a little harder for the students to grasp.

Personally, I side with that second option, that a teacher should always teach true things, even if the student has to work a little harder to wrap their mind around it.

So same thing here. I want activists to stick to hard and legitimate comparison, and avoid exaggeration for the sake of impact.

Just my personal take, but I feel like in the larger picture that might even be healthier for the interest that the activist is pursuing.

@erikalyn no wording matters in legislative procedure.

After all, it's entirely possible that despite the vote McCarthy would continue. What the vote actually did was to shut the place down until he did. So emphatically, the entire point of the maneuver was to shut the House down.

As for voting for Jeffries, a lot of people don't realize that this isn't merely about an individual sitting in the chair. To change the party of the Speaker would likely involve major reshuffling of committee memberships throughout the whole chamber, and given that Democrats were willing to shut the thing down, I don't think they would be willing to negotiate favorable committee memberships, leaving that plan a non-starter.

I don't think Democrats are willing to form a consensus leadership with all that would be involved in it. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but again, their voting record tells me otherwise.

As it stands the vast majority of Republicans are trying to exclude the nut jobs, but the entirety of the Democratic caucus is actively casting votes that make that impossible, so that's where we are now.

Republicans aren't going to vote for Jeffries because of the committee memberships on the line, and Democrats aren't going to step out of the way because they are getting political points out of it, no matter how destructive that is.

@ravenonthill yep!
And so companies also agree with you, they think they should spend money in sensible ways, and that's why they invest in CEOs sometimes with very large salaries, because they worry that trying to save money when hiring a CEO will leave them worse off in the long run.

So there you go. Pretty good explanation for CEO pay.

@trevorflowers

@erikalyn here's a link directly to the House clerk's office where you can see that no, the vote was not about McCarthy.

I can link to the rules of the House to explain farther, but that is harder to pull up because it comes down to pages in a really old book.

Yes, the story that went around was that this was about saving McCarthy, but that story was false. The question before the House was whether to declare the chair vacant and shut it down.

Republicans voted overwhelmingly against the nut jobs. Without Democrats' support the nut jobs would have been rightly just laughed right out of the room. It's only with Democratic cooperation that the nut jobs were allowed to stay.

Heck it's even possible that the nut jobs would have been expelled from Congress all together, but no, the Democratic support meant that instead of being kicked out they were instead effectively put in charge.

Thanks, Democrats.

https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2023519?Page=2

@Jgmeadows just to be clear, I'm referring to reporting that can't be excused by meer bias. I'm talking about major journalistic outlets misreporting everything from results of elections through results of scientific studies.

Just really inexcusable reporting.

In fact, one of the big ways I experienced this is when I start pointing out to scientific friends that the journalist misreported on a paper in my field, and then my friends start noticing journalists misreport papers in their own fields, and then they start noticing more and more misreporting after that.

This goes beyond just media source bias. This isn't a reporter, having a different idea about whether the temperature outside is a bit warm or a bit cool. This is literally misreporting a yes for a no, the number of votes cast, whether an indictment has been handed down, serious factual inaccuracies.

In this environment where different people are told substantially different factual claims, it's really obvious that stuff like political intrigue is going to step up to fill the vacuum.

So yeah, this is an ax I grind. It's a good bit of why I'm on here in fact, just to vent about the state of factual reporting in the world today.

@SaanichGuy

@NanoBookReview Oh I'm certain of it, and yet I would say as bad as those effects are, they're not really comparable to Jim Crow.

It's like the person who is asked to work late too often comparing themselves to slavery. Yeah, certainly an issue, but orders of magnitude matter.

@ravenonthill so are you saying maybe we should... not spend as much money? :)

@trevorflowers