America - The Official Thread

[McLaren]

It'll be interesting if we can find out on which social media platform he laid out his plans to exterminate Democrats. Something tells me it wasn't Facebook or Twitter.

I'm convinced Parler is a Honeypot at this point. The site not only has the balls to ask for the front & back of your ID and a photo to become a verified user, but if you want full access to all its features like DMs, you have to turn over your SSN. The site's policy will even hold you accountable for legal fees if Parler gets sued for something involving you.

You have to be 1 reaallly dumb bastard to turn over such information, & then go off saying things that gets the FBI to come knocking all because the site goes, "Muh Free Speech!".

And in the case it isn't a Honeypot, you'd still be really dumb. Someone pointed out it runs no ads to generate revenue, which means they're probably selling off your information.

 

[TB]

The site not only has the balls to ask for the front & back of your ID and a photo to become a verified user, but if you want full access to all its features like DMs, you have to turn over your SSN.

Anyone who agrees to that deserves whatever they get.

Also, @Jordan, this might be a good money maker for you if toner isn't cutting it!

 

[TexRex]

The site's policy will even hold you accountable for legal fees if Parler gets sued for something involving you.

I suppose this may be part of why they're so welcoming of the people calling for revocation of CDA Section 230 protections for social media platform providers.

 

[Imari]

I'm convinced Parler is a Honeypot at this point. The site not only has the balls to ask for the front & back of your ID and a photo to become a verified user, but if you want full access to all its features like DMs, you have to turn over your SSN. The site's policy will even hold you accountable for legal fees if Parler gets sued for something involving you.

You have to be 1 reaallly dumb bastard to turn over such information, & then go off saying things that gets the FBI to come knocking all because the site goes, "Muh Free Speech!".

And in the case it isn't a Honeypot, you'd still be really dumb. Someone pointed out it runs no ads to generate revenue, which means they're probably selling off your information.

Wow, I didn't even know this existed. That's bizarre.

I always thought the chans were the way that free speech would end up. Obviously they're toxic as 🤬, but if you wanted an ultimate free speech platform that seems like the way*.

*Yes, I'm aware that the current implementations with tripcodes and IP logs are hardly anonymous, but in principle the imageboard idea lends itself pretty well to private, uncensored discussion.

 

[McLaren]

Wow, I didn't even know this existed. That's bizarre.

I always thought the chans were the way that free speech would end up. Obviously they're toxic as 🤬, but if you wanted an ultimate free speech platform that seems like the way*.

*Yes, I'm aware that the current implementations with tripcodes and IP logs are hardly anonymous, but in principle the imageboard idea lends itself pretty well to private, uncensored discussion.

I saw one person describe it as basically Facebook & 4chan mixed together. The person said the difference though is that 4chan users love to attack & take shots at each other regardless of political opinion, so there's no real bias. They believe Parler's conservative safe space approach is actually scarier than 4chan since there's no opposing views to keep people "in-check".

 

[TenEightyOne]

I've just discovered they pronounce "parler" as "parlour", rather than the normal "par-lay"... I'm out

 

[MatskiMonk]

I would prefer different representation altogether (such as proportional representation based on party or something like that), but I can't see how we get there from here.

The national interstate popular vote compact could limp us along (effectively doing away with the EC) until we get to the point where we can amend it properly into the constitution.

Interesting, I'd not heard of the NIPVC. I think it's pretty impressive that something is already in place, even if not fully adopted. I'd guess that the freedom for states to handle things differently from one another might allow a decent form of PR to creep in slowly, from state to state, rather than requiring a wholesale constitutional change?

 

[UKMikey]

We've been pushing the NIPVC quite a bit in the electoral college thread. It sounds like the US's best path out of EC-induced Republican hegemony.

 

[Famine]

I would prefer different representation altogether (such as proportional representation based on party or something like that), but I can't see how we get there from here.

I haven't done 2020 yet (too busy these last two weeks), but here's 2016.

 

[polysmut]

I haven't done 2020 yet (too busy these last two weeks), but here's 2016.

You mentioned adjusting the EC vote count along with your hypothetical system.

I'd want to adjust each State's EC vote count though, to even out the populations more effectively.

Would you be satisfied with reallocating the number of representatives in congress for each state based on population and continuing to use that number to calculate electoral college votes? Alongside the rest of your proposal that is.
Perhaps the numbers would be corrected if necessary every time the census is taken?

I suspect the question of where to draw the lines between congressional districts as population changes would be the big problem with that.

 

[TexRex]

I suspect the question of where to draw the lines between congressional districts as population changes would be the big problem with that.

Yeah, gerrymandering needs to go.

 

[polysmut]

Yeah, gerrymandering needs to go.

Is there a way to avoid it?

 

[Blitz24]

Yeah, gerrymandering needs to go.

I would say split up the congressional districts by county, but that would make some states look even more ridiculous (and then Louisiana would theoretically have "zero" as they have parishes).

 

[TexRex]

Is there a way to avoid it?

I would say split up the congressional districts by county, but that would make some states look even more ridiculous (and then Louisiana would theoretically have "zero" as they have parishes).

Yeah, I'm certain I'm not intelligent enough to come up with a method that itself can't be exploited, I just think gerrymandering needs to go. It's so ubiquitous at this point, though, and as much as one may want to point the finger at a particular group, I don't think it's appropriate to do so. I was once "gerrymandered" in a manner that benefitted me in terms of local representation, but I despise the convention regardless; it marginalizes the voting power of the People.

 

[Famine]

You mentioned adjusting the EC vote count along with your hypothetical system.

Would you be satisfied with reallocating the number of representatives in congress for each state based on population and continuing to use that number to calculate electoral college votes? Alongside the rest of your proposal that is.
Perhaps the numbers would be corrected if necessary every time the census is taken?

I suspect the question of where to draw the lines between congressional districts as population changes would be the big problem with that.

Ultimately as it's a per-state vote, gerrymandering doesn't matter; you're not going to change the population of a state by drawing new sub-state boundaries. Of course it is necessary to creatively draw lines at these lower levels to divide areas into roughly equal populations, but gerrymandering is just excessive.

What I'd look at is taking the smallest state by population by the last published Census as the base unit, plus two EC votes (representing the two senate seats). Wyoming would thus get 3 EC votes - one for its population plus the two base seats. Vermont, Alaska, DC (which is a special case, but irrelevantly so), and North Dakota would also get 3 EC votes.

South Dakota has a population of 1.53 Wyomings, so it would get 4 EC votes - two for its population. Delaware, Rhode Island, Montana, Maine, New Hampshire, and Hawaii also get four. Idaho is next up with 3.1 Wyomings, so 5 EC votes. And so on, to California's 70 EC votes - and before anyone gets too excited about a blue state having that kind of power, it's only 0.7% more of the EC by proportion and actually California is the worst represented at 564k population per vote - Wyoming is the best - because of the seat-per-senator rule and by 2020's numbers, under the system detailed earlier, the red party would get 23 of those EC votes (final numbers aren't in) rather than none.


Amusingly, that generates 667 EC votes - the neighbour of the beast, assuming the beast lives at the very end of a cul-de-sac

Edit: Because you did this to my brain, the whole thing (ignoring third parties, though I don't think any would have picked up enough this time round) currently works out at:
Biden - 343
Trump - 324

With 334 required to win. If we were to reverse the six crucial states and reassign the two bonus EC votes for winning Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and one each for winning Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada, Biden would still win by 334-333

Biden would have picked up 227k votes per EC vote, with Trump at 224k.

 

[Imari]

Is there a way to avoid it?

Australia has it done by a neutral electoral commission. It's not perfect, but there has traditionally been very little outright gerrymandering.

What's the chance of America setting up an independent body to do the distribution in a way that conforms to some previously established ideal? Or at least a bi-partisan body, which potentially locks any third parties out forever but is still a marked improvement on whoever is in power getting to call the shots.

 

[Blitz24]

Australia has it done by a neutral electoral commission. It's not perfect, but there has traditionally been very little outright gerrymandering.

What's the chance of America setting up an independent body to do the distribution in a way that conforms to some previously established ideal? Or at least a bi-partisan body, which potentially locks any third parties out forever but is still a marked improvement on whoever is in power getting to call the shots.

The chance is less than zero, as neither party would let the independent body exist after ONE thing doesn't go their way, and the bi-partisan body could very well end up being deadlocked and doing nothing.

 

[Danoff]

Australia has it done by a neutral electoral commission. It's not perfect, but there has traditionally been very little outright gerrymandering.

What's the chance of America setting up an independent body to do the distribution in a way that conforms to some previously established ideal? Or at least a bi-partisan body, which potentially locks any third parties out forever but is still a marked improvement on whoever is in power getting to call the shots.

This is the Colorado independent redistricting commission page - resulting from a redistricting ballot initiative that passed here only a little while ago. I'm a little partial to the idea of using counties instead. The "independent body" makes me a bit squeamish.

Anyway, this is currently the method being championed to eliminate gerrymandering. State-wide ballot initiatives for independent redistricting commissions. They're having some success.

 

[polysmut]

Ultimately as it's a per-state vote, gerrymandering doesn't matter; you're not going to change the population of a state by drawing new sub-state boundaries. Of course it is necessary to creatively draw lines at these lower levels to divide areas into roughly equal populations, but gerrymandering is just excessive.

Gerrymandering wouldn't matter in terms of a national election, no.
Elections to the house of representatives would be affected, assuming current population distribution would be used to define congressional districts.

 

[Famine]

Elections to the house of representatives would be affected, assuming current population distribution would be used to define congressional districts.

Indeed, and it's something that would need to be addressed.

I'd suggest that the rules for defining these areas would be:
* Continguous
* No more than 1m population, no less than 500,000 population (mean is currently 785k)
* No subdivision of existing sub-state level administrative units (counties, or - for AK/LA - boroughs/parishes) outside of urban areas

I don't know how places like LA County (8m population) are divided already, but if there's sub-country administrative units then simply apply rule three to those.

 

[Danoff]

One of the things that is happening to me due to all of the conspiracy theories getting floated by the right is that my threshold for giving them any credibility is going way up. That's happening retroactively too.

I gave the Hillary email scandal a little bit of credibility at the time. After years of smearing from the right, Hillary's motives were easy to question. The email server that she controlled seemed to raise eyebrows. And it was a technical violation of the requirements the government laid down (according to the FBI). She had her arguments for why it wasn't, the FBI didn't agree.

But in the end, no actual harm was alleged, and no evidence of actual harm was presented. So basically, this is a non-story. Fake news. A waste of time. Sure, she shouldn't be allowed to keep doing it, and needed to ensure that the proper records were kept. But like... no real harm done. Let's get back to our lives.

I had definitely not given her the benefit of the doubt on that story, and mentally just assumed that she had some nefarious motive that was never uncovered. I'm not doing that anymore. After so many years of made up conspiracies (remember the birther conspiracy?) all the way down this past week including Don Jr's (zero evidence) allegation that Pfizer released their vaccine efficacy when they did to hurt his father.

I'm finally officially willing to give Hillary essentially a complete pass on the emails. The whole story required an assumption of greater guilt that I'm no longer willing to bring.

That's not to say Hillary is a saint. She should not have stuck up for her husband's sexual harassment so recently. But that's its own issue, Republicans don't seem to mind that one so much.

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

no less than 500,000 population...No subdivision of existing sub-state level administrative units outside of urban areas

I think you'll find many thousands of counties in the US that cannot meet both of these requirements.

edit: I guess you could agglomerate multiple adjacent counties to reach that threshold without violating any other rules.

 

[Blitz24]

I think you'll find many thousands of counties in the US that cannot meet both of these requirements.

By a rough count, only 140 US counties have a population north of 500,000.

 

[Famine]

I think you'll find many thousands of counties in the US that cannot meet both of these requirements.

edit: I guess you could agglomerate multiple adjacent counties to reach that threshold without violating any other rules.

Yes, that's the idea. They can be joined together, but never divided into sub-units.

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

Yes, that's the idea. They can be joined together, but never divided into sub-units.

Trying to understand the implications of this. I live in a rather large district -

It encompasses the entire coast of California north of San Francisco. It actually adheres fairly well to your list (encompasses 5 entire counties, 722k people), except it does not include portions of Sonoma county. If it did include all of Sonoma (the missing part is the city of Santa Rosa, fairly large) then it would not stretch to the Oregon border as it's already fairly big in terms of population. I can't imagine there would be much substantial difference if it traded Del Norte & Humboldt counties (at the far north) for the rest of Sonoma, but people in those counties might feel (with good reason) excluded from the table - as it is they have a say in a Bay-Area ($$$) adjacent district. I think this particular district is a bad example because it's actually a pretty reasonable one.

 

[Famine]

It encompasses the entire coast of California north of San Francisco. It actually adheres fairly well to your list (encompasses 5 entire counties, 722k people), except it does not include portions of Sonoma county. If it did include all of Sonoma (the missing part is the city of Santa Rosa, fairly large) then it would not stretch to the Oregon border as it's already fairly big in terms of population. I can't imagine there would be much substantial difference if it traded Del Norte & Humboldt counties (at the far north) for the rest of Sonoma, but people in those counties might feel (with good reason) excluded from the table - as it is they have a say in a Bay-Area ($$$) adjacent district. I think this particular district is a bad example because it's actually a pretty reasonable one.

I don't know much about the specifics of the geography here, but what you're looking at is either:

* Remove the partial county and place it in another district
* Include all of the partial county

Wikipedia says Santa Rosa is 174k population, so that'd take it to 896k - within the limits.

There's some tricky maths at play though. What would be the effects on other districts of either decision? Would including Santa Rosa drop its current district below the 500k threshold? Would removing the rest of Sonoma to it move its current district above the 1m threshold? Would it cause a geographical issue for any other districts in terms of remaining contiguous?

 

[Imari]

I gave the Hillary email scandal a little bit of credibility at the time. After years of smearing from the right, Hillary's motives were easy to question. The email server that she controlled seemed to raise eyebrows. And it was a technical violation of the requirements the government laid down (according to the FBI). She had her arguments for why it wasn't, the FBI didn't agree.

But in the end, no actual harm was alleged, and no evidence of actual harm was presented. So basically, this is a non-story. Fake news. A waste of time. Sure, she shouldn't be allowed to keep doing it, and needed to ensure that the proper records were kept. But like... no real harm done. Let's get back to our lives.

So while I personally agree with "no harm, no foul" in principle, it tends to not be how it works when it comes to security matters. Using unapproved personal storage for high level classified information is a big deal, regardless of intention or outcome. If you have clearance, there is training and regular refresher training around this. At that level, there's an expectation that people are aware of the principles behind secure information management and if they're not at least making a reasonable attempt to follow them then you sort of have to assume either malice or incompetence in a degree that disqualifies them from handling that kind of information.

Now, given that the Trump White House essentially hammered through clearances for Ivanka, Jared and others despite them having massive red flags that should have made that a no go, one could say that Hillary's thing was no worse. And sure, maybe. But it seems a bit like the rules around classified information apply only until you get to high office, and I think that sort of defeats the whole point.

 

[Danoff]

So while I personally agree with "no harm, no foul" in principle, it tends to not be how it works when it comes to security matters. Using unapproved personal storage for high level classified information is a big deal, regardless of intention or outcome. If you have clearance, there is training and regular refresher training around this. At that level, there's an expectation that people are aware of the principles behind secure information management and if they're not at least making a reasonable attempt to follow them then you sort of have to assume either malice or incompetence in a degree that disqualifies them from handling that kind of information.

Now, given that the Trump White House essentially hammered through clearances for Ivanka, Jared and others despite them having massive red flags that should have made that a no go, one could say that Hillary's thing was no worse. And sure, maybe. But it seems a bit like the rules around classified information apply only until you get to high office, and I think that sort of defeats the whole point.

Long ago I handled classified information, I'm familiar with the great lengths that are gone to to manage it. I worked in a classified room, spec'd out a classified server, and even wrote computer code which is no doubt still classified somewhere. I even got to properly dispose of hard drives with classified data. So I do understand the gravity of her offense. For the record I no longer do any of that stuff.

But... I haven't heard of a leak, or lost information, or anything she was unwilling to turn over or any great shredding or destruction. If I'm trying to guess at her reasons for wanting to do what she did (other than the "I didn't want to use two devices" which is probably not it, I'd agree), I'd guess that she was not entirely trusting of those around her, even within the US government, and wanted to further sequester her own access to her own data. Stuff gets leaked to the press all the time.

As secretary of state, I think she gets some leeway as to whether she orchestrates her own data security practices. She's not your "typical" employee with a secret clearance. If she wants to dictate how data gets secured, and from whom, she does have some authority in that area. Granted she overstepped, but people with a strong understanding of the situation decided that it would not be even reasonable to bring charges, and absent some other evidence I'm willing to leave it at that.

 

[Imari]

Long ago I handled classified information, I'm familiar with the great lengths that are gone to to manage it. I worked in a classified room, spec'd out a classified server, and even wrote computer code which is no doubt still classified somewhere. I even got to properly dispose of hard drives with classified data. So I do understand the gravity of her offense. For the record I no longer do any of that stuff.

But... I haven't heard of a leak, or lost information, or anything she was unwilling to turn over or any great shredding or destruction. If I'm trying to guess at her reasons for wanting to do what she did (other than the "I didn't want to use two devices" which is probably not it, I'd agree), I'd guess that she was not entirely trusting of those around her, even within the US government, and wanted to further sequester her own access to her own data. Stuff gets leaked to the press all the time.

As secretary of state, I think she gets some leeway as to whether she orchestrates her own data security practices. She's not your "typical" employee with a secret clearance. If she wants to dictate how data gets secured, and from whom, she does have some authority in that area. Granted she overstepped, but people with a strong understanding of the situation decided that it would not be even reasonable to bring charges, and absent some other evidence I'm willing to leave it at that.

Sure, and I think that's totally reasonable. But I'm not sure that dismissing it as a non-story, fake news, and a waste of time is reasonable. It was a completely sensible thing to raise and investigate, and it was and remains something that while not necessarily impactful is relevant and potentially of concern. It was not a non-story, it was not fake news (at least the non-opinionated parts but that can be said for any news story), and investigating and reporting on it was not a waste of time.

I think this relates to something that you posted in the COVID thread.

Let's not over-react, but let's also take this very seriously. Is that possible? Can we do that?

Too often the options we're presented with are "this is nothing" and "this is a crisis". Both Hillary's emails and COVID are neither of those. Admittedly, COVID is more towards the crisis end while Hemails are more towards the nothing end, but these are issues that require a nuanced and considered view.

Which to be fair, you absolutely have as you've explained your view in both posts, which is why I think it's unfortunate that you lapse into Trumpian hyperbole simply because the conclusion was that the particular events didn't warrant a major response. The news, the reporting and the investigation were all valid, and should happen in any case where an official in high office does something that is outside of the normal bounds or has the potential perception of not being in the interests of the country.

That your two party system jumps on any shred of impropriety and tries to turn it into the seeds of a civil war is unfortunate, but if public accountability becomes lax just because people are scared of the media circus then I don't see it ending well. We've seen what people with little disregard for tradition and precedent can do within a relaxed rule set, if they're not even publicly accountable then you're going to need a lot more Edward Snowdens.

 

[BobK]

I view the Clinton email thing through the lens of "what would happen to me if I were caught doing the same thing?". In the US we're supposed to be equal under the law, right?

Although it's no secret that some are more equal than others.