EPTThere are plenty of long winded explanations what "actual" conservatism looks like according to their own delusions but in practice it just boils down to "Fuck you, got mine!"
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Velr
Switzerland10842 Posts
There are plenty of long winded explanations what "actual" conservatism looks like according to their own delusions but in practice it just boils down to "Fuck you, got mine!" | ||
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oBlade
United States5850 Posts
On August 27 2025 07:49 Acrofales wrote: Pretty much. That's how gerrymandering works by its very nature. FPTP means that if you win by more than exactly 1 vote, you "wasted votes". So you redistrict so you win each of those districts by as close to exactly 1 vote as you can/dare, while making sure your opponent wins the districts you are inevitably uncompetitive in, with as much waste as possible. How close you can get to a single vote victory is of course the question. Maybe a 4-point margin right now is pretty safe, and based on current polling and some forecasting you're confident that it'll be safe for the next few elections. But polling is unreliable and forecasting something as unreliable as elections is going to be mostly noise this far out. So there's a decent chance your forecasts are wrong and 4% is nowhere near safe. Let's remember the ideal: 50%+1 vote victories. But those only take 1 person changing their mind or 2 extra people staying in bed for the election to go the other way. Now I'm no pollster. I don't have a clue what the GOP data says, but the slimmer the margins they're aiming for, the riskier it is. This is right, but it's also mostly wrong. But it's right in a way that is interesting and I didn't realize why people keep posting this conception of what gerrymandering is until now. Barely winning is not ideal. Crushing everything is ideal. One view of an ideal might be an infinitesimal margin above 50% in some districts only if you somehow have the ability to district a state that you are overall behind in. Then you can corral your opponents into a for-granted district and then claim all the rest by an arbitrarily small margin. By graph theory it's usually possible. Real world restrictions also come into play vis-a-vis maintenance of the semblance of fairness. Otherwise "wastedness" is not a binary condition. If you have 3 districts, that are 60/40, 60/40, and 10/90, the votes above 50 in the first two districts are being "wasted" in an abstract sense. But there isn't a solution where you can make them more efficient. If you take them out of the 60/40 districts to make it closer to 51/49, you are not advancing your position. You are moving them to the 10/90 district where they are far more wasted. If anything it's the 10 you want to go to 0 and strengthen your two wins. So here is the thing with redistricting. The number of districts is fixed. If you win 4 out of 5 districts at some margin, it's not more ideal to reduce your margin in the ones you win. By reducing the margin, you don't conjure the existence of more districts. (That would be a different problem, also interesting, for graph theory.) You have to look at the overall margin you already have. That's the base. The base is not 50/50. The base is your margin in the whole state. If you have a state where you're 60/40, and one district you're 55/45 and one where you're 65/35, the 65/35 is the one that's inefficient because the extra above 60 is making the 55/45 district weak. You want to decrease the 65 and transfer it to the 55, not decrease the 55 also and get it closer to 50 because muh FPTP. If you lead a state for example 60/40, not only would it be a bad idea to give your opponents some "set" districts they lead, while cutting all your winning districts to 51%, it's physically impossible. If you lead the state 60/40 that margin has to actually exist somewhere. If you led a state 60/40, the ideal would be districting so you win every district by 60/40 with a +20 margin. Take a pizza analog. You could cover 40% of a pizza with pepperoni. If that pepperoni is in a giant circle in the middle of the pizza. you don't want to cut a circle around that and give it to your enemy, you want to cut it like a normal pizza into 8~10 slices where each slice is 60% cheese and 40% pepperoni thereby beating the socks off your opponent in every single contest. Which again is usually possible by graph theory but slightly harder to do on a real world map within the realm of reason - gerrymandering historically meant like well beyond plausible salamander shaped and noncontiguous districts, not just districting with some murky perceived advantage. | ||
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Uldridge
Belgium5032 Posts
On August 28 2025 18:49 Velr wrote: The best description of actual conservative policies is "Fuck you, got min/more for me!". There are plenty of long winded explanations what "actual" conservatism looks like according to their own delusions but in practice it just boils down to "Fuck you, got mine!" Exactly. And the more extreme you get the more exclusionary it becomes. And then they weoponize it and cultivate it into something fearsome. Fascism is like the ultimate delusion for a conservative. It's a beautiful carrot that is presented, but they seem totally unaware of that biggest spiked stick that is hidden from them. With everything, when it seems too good to be true, it's probably a scam. Conservatives seem to fall for it every century or so. | ||
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LightSpectra
United States2025 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26225 Posts
On August 28 2025 18:25 lestye wrote: This reminds me of why it's hard to find Republican allies when it comes to local housing policy. I'd think Republicans would be anti-NIMBY, since NIMBY is almost everything Republicans hate, you have government interfering with property rights, they leverage the govt to prevent competition, but somehow they never really connect that dot. It's funny because I think 10 or 15 years ago, I know a lot of leftists/liberals would say conservatism is all about hierarchy. I thought that was abstract and conservatives just want "freedom" and less taxes. But over time I cant unsee them defend complete nonsense systems because they want to maintain hierarchy. Their principles completely go out the window if it compromises their position or the position of people they think have a divine mandate to be where they are in life. Conservatives will present themselves as inheritors of various noble traditions and principles, and hey some are. How many behave, either directly or by advocacy is in actuality often rather different, as you point out. HOAs are that in microcosm, and frankly quite bizarre to observe for us outsiders. And ofc yes I know they’re not exclusively the purview of conservatives. | ||
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Luolis
Finland7157 Posts
Republicans are the largest pieces of shit known to mankind. | ||
KwarK
United States43529 Posts
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/20/trump-says-us-will-not-approve-solar-or-wind-power-projects.html They're literally indistinguishable from cartoon villains. | ||
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KwarK
United States43529 Posts
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2025-08-25/trump-hegseth-national-guard-18876673.html each state’s Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resourced, trained, organized and available to assist federal, state and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances It's unfortunate that the actions that Trump will have taken triggered a nationwide wave of protests but we will find ourselves in such a bad state of affairs that Trump will have had no choice but to use the military against the American public. | ||
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Uldridge
Belgium5032 Posts
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Simberto
Germany11731 Posts
What will be left of democracy and the US in general in three and a half more years of this? | ||
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LightSpectra
United States2025 Posts
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GreenHorizons
United States23607 Posts
On August 29 2025 00:13 Simberto wrote: Half a year, btw. It feels like so much longer. This is just half a year of them being in power. Just the Musk DOGE saga feels as if was ages ago with all the bullshit spam that happened since. But it was this year. What will be left of democracy and the US in general in three and a half more years of this? I suppose it's a good sign they are still trying to rig the elections, rather than not even bothering? I don't know that Democrats winning control of the House, Senate, and Presidency wouldn't just lead to the next legitimately elected Republican being even worse. Especially after the Democrats inevitably fail to repair a fraction of the damage the last one (Trump) did. I know everyone here is pretty anti-AmeriMaidan, but there really isn't another viable (as much as a longshot as it might be) option. | ||
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Razyda
896 Posts
On August 29 2025 00:01 Uldridge wrote: Does any one of them have a distinctively evil laugh with a fitting gesture during? At least one. ![[image loading]](https://media1.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExZjVqcWxseW5kcXVsZDVrdzZvcnN1ODRucjYxbmQ1Znh6eDBvcjJucyZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/LXLgiN2R8YMtdwalWu/giphy.gif) On August 28 2025 23:59 KwarK wrote: In other news Trump has decided to issue some emergency orders to combat the wave of nationwide protests which haven't happened yet. The protests will have gotten so bad that the military will have been needed to be called in to stop them, a situation which will require an unconstitutional exception to be made to the restriction on deploying army troops domestically for policing. https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2025-08-25/trump-hegseth-national-guard-18876673.html It's unfortunate that the actions that Trump will have taken triggered a nationwide wave of protests but we will find ourselves in such a bad state of affairs that Trump will have had no choice but to use the military against the American public. This is actually smart enough that I dont think it was Trump idea. It is whole different thing, to ignore orders of Trump who will vent to his followers on twitter, and ignore orders of Trump who will vent to couple of thousands military he has at your door. | ||
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Jankisa
Croatia1105 Posts
The federalist society and other ghouls behind project 2025 who joined hands with the broligarchs are just competent enough that in combination with Democratic leadership being cowards and morons and American public being completely apathetic and susceptible to propaganda they will lock everything down to the point where elections might happen but they sure as fuck won't be fair and even if they are they will make sure that the results that come out of them are good for them. This new executive order is a perfect example, it's a blimp on a radar and it's basically neutering any sort of attempt at protesting before they even happen in a step that in any other country would be taken as a huge authoritarian overreach. In the USA of 2025 it doesn't even make the front page news. | ||
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LightSpectra
United States2025 Posts
Republicans are currently going by Viktor Orban's playbook, but they haven't conquered the judiciary and news outlets yet (which will inevitably be much harder). You can compare what they're doing to Bolsonaro in Brazil who miserably failed to steal his own presidential election. | ||
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Sermokala
United States14098 Posts
On August 29 2025 00:32 GreenHorizons wrote: I suppose it's a good sign they are still trying to rig the elections, rather than not even bothering? I don't know that Democrats winning control of the House, Senate, and Presidency wouldn't just lead to the next legitimately elected Republican being even worse. Especially after the Democrats inevitably fail to repair a fraction of the damage the last one (Trump) did. I know everyone here is pretty anti-AmeriMaidan, but there really isn't another viable (as much as a longshot as it might be) option. There really is. I don't know how cool you think it makes you look to be nihilistic about the future but its really tired when we're living in the now times to go "lets just make everything worse beacuse things are bad right now. Violent civil wars are bad mkay, stop advocating for violent civil wars. The EuroMaidan was little different than Occupy Wall Street other than the response of the then Ukrainian government. We know what will happen if we listen to you and its embarrassing you keep acting like we don't know what you're advocating for. Things were much worse in the past, and things got better. We don't need to burn the house down to repair the damage to the one we're living in. | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23607 Posts
On August 29 2025 03:19 Jankisa wrote: + Show Spoiler + I don't get the optimism honestly, to me, it seems like Trump has enough semi competent people who co-opted his movement and have no need to be in the spotlight but are rather dismantling things in the background and moving things in a direction where nothing can be done after their plans are completed. The federalist society and other ghouls behind project 2025 who joined hands with the broligarchs are just competent enough that in combination with Democratic leadership being cowards and morons and American public being completely apathetic and susceptible to propaganda they will lock everything down to the point where elections might happen but they sure as fuck won't be fair and even if they are they will make sure that the results that come out of them are good for them. This new executive order is a perfect example, it's a blimp on a radar and it's basically neutering any sort of attempt at protesting before they even happen in a step that in any other country would be taken as a huge authoritarian overreach. In the USA of 2025 it doesn't even make the front page news. It's a bizarre balance of ranting about how Trump is in the midst of an authoritarian takeover, but how the solution is obviously to vote for incompetent cowards to tell us they're doing the best they can while they basically do nothing to stop it. Eventually that will fix it somehow, is basically the plan of Democrat supporters in the US. | ||
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Zambrah
United States7393 Posts
On August 29 2025 04:20 GreenHorizons wrote: It's a bizarre balance of ranting about how Trump is in the midst of an authoritarian takeover, but how the solution is obviously to vote for incompetent cowards to tell us they're doing the best they can while they basically do nothing to stop it. Eventually that will fix it somehow, is basically the plan of Democrat supporters in the US. The Democrat version of Thoughts and Prayers | ||
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LightSpectra
United States2025 Posts
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lestye
United States4186 Posts
You don't get into the orbit of power by skill or competency, you get there by "loyalty". Inevitably the sycophants are going to going to fuck up and blame other people instead of actually handling things. | ||
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