General Politics Three: But what is left/right?

[Lexicus]

Kind of sad, isn’t it? I understand why you have to laugh.

It's just not really true. Trump's voters are the stupidest and meanest of the "stupid pigs" you mentioned when talking about the TikTok ban recently. There's nothing "populist" about him, his platform, or his white petit bourgeois supporters.

Edit: oh wow, you even mentioned the small business pigs in the same post! Well yeah that's Trump's core base...

 

[Broken_Erika]

Indeed. It turns out the small business pigs who run the country do actually only care about their own money. That’s the “populace” for you. The rest of us are, well, losers, innit?

I was going to post George Carlin's Garbage in, Garbage out, but i think that was posted not too long ago.

 

[Lexicus]

Ok, Lex. Trying to be gracious in alternative readings of the funding map.

Federal input, but my rough eye, seems to scale with senators and resource extraction. Seeing as Americans subsidize thier resource consumption, this makes sense that government money would follow it. There's development of oil, we're an exporter now, mind, in Alaska and North Dakota. New infrastructure. The great plains, particularly the dry plains, export less dense value than oil, the infrastructure for beef and grains was laid decades ago. Then underfunded, if you look at the bridges*. So those federal input gaps make sense, too. But they could go lower, like Alabama.

Also, I've gotta say, it gets a bit old having the borders pointed out as man made constructions. Of course they are. They're demarcations of governance and man made rules. This is a line where the accord changes. If we're going to talk about government like it's a real thing, then states are a real thing! Hundreds of years of accord and discord.

*seeing as they export agricultural value and receive back low investment, and all equations must ultimately balance, I'd guess they're exporting the Ogallala.

1) I think military assets are substantial part of this as well, not just resource extraction
2) my argument with regard to "arbitrary rectangles" is that if you insist on apportioning power geographically then you should make some effort to actually map where relatively homogeneous groups of people live. States are a very very poor tool for that because all of them are much too large and diverse, even DC where there is a staggering difference between Anacostia and Chevy Chase.

 

[JollyRoger]

No, I do know what it means, and that's why I think you're trolling. You don't care about market fairness, you just made a bad investment but don't want to accept the consequences of having done so.

There are smart plays on the ape stocks, just not buy-and-hold diamond hand nonsense. Same with DJT. I've made money on the recent upswing in DJT, but am out at the moment. Made money in both directions on the ape stocks. Fundamentals (and market psychology) count for something despite misreadings by both the Citadels and apes of the world.

 

[Farm Boy]

1) I think military assets are substantial part of this as well, not just resource extraction
2) my argument with regard to "arbitrary rectangles" is that if you insist on apportioning power geographically then you should make some effort to actually map where relatively homogeneous groups of people live. States are a very very poor tool for that because all of them are much too large and diverse, even DC where there is a staggering difference between Anacostia and Chevy Chase.

They're less bad on all the measures that you just listed than gerrymandered districts here that claim to do that. But, you know, it's horse****. Governmental units create meaningful divisions over time and no, they don't need to be along if you like tacos or sausage, drive on streets or roads, if you get burn or get chalky, or if your human value system is linked to affinity for specific semen origins.

 

[Lexicus]

They're less bad on all the measures that you just listed than gerrymandered districts here that claim to do that.

Claimed to, but generally cynically so. As you are aware.

Governmental units create meaningful divisions over time and no, they don't need to be along if you like tacos or sausage, drive on streets or roads, if you get burn or get chalky, or if your human value system is linked to affinity for specific semen origins.

I'm not actually talking about any of those things, but you yourself made a normative claim that the distribution of power according to the constitution of the state should endeavor to "correct for" concentrated economic and social power, such that those who are "weaker" should wield disproportionate influence over political outcomes.

As @EgonSpengler also pointed out you have yet to make a compelling case as to why US states should be considered essentially homogeneous social and economic units for the purposes of the above. There are actually objective ways to measure how much socioeconomic power people have. There are even ways to do it that take into account human geography, rather than sorting individuals statistically as if they are just units of data and not actual humans anchored in space and time.

But you're not really making any of those arguments. You seeming to take for granted that states should be the units of political apportionment, and when challenged on this point you're attacking the strawman argument that political units aren't meaningful at all.

 

[Farm Boy]

They don't need to be homogenous. They do need to have shared political and governmental interests, which at a bare cynical minimum of infrastructure and logistics, they do. I didn't grow up in a food desert. My son is. There is wildlife that's rebounded. There are bugs that are missing. Etc.

I do understand the compulsion to make things homogeneous. It makes things so much easier. I've low affinity for those sorts of value systems usually, though. I spend enough time creating monocultures of plants that I sort of despise people who work so hard to build human ones.

 

[Crezth]

It's just not really true. Trump's voters are the stupidest and meanest of the "stupid pigs" you mentioned when talking about the TikTok ban recently. There's nothing "populist" about him, his platform, or his white petit bourgeois supporters.

Edit: oh wow, you even mentioned the small business pigs in the same post! Well yeah that's Trump's core base...

It’s definitely populist, in moreorless exactly the same way Caesar was. You see, Caesar was not a champion of the slaves. Why would he be? The people voting for him were the middle class plebs whose jobs were being taken from them by the slaves. And those people were, well, The People of Rome, at least insofar as the political context that considered them.

In America, populism is not about the rights of sharecroppers much less urban workers. It’s about the rights of tradesmen to get good deals for their trades, and that runs the gamut from the most pathetic of the yeoman farmers to the most grandiose of the large landowning concerns. In the modern day that includes quite a lot of car wash owners too. But the ones voting against this ain’t the working class. They’re the middle class elite of the blue cities. The workers, nowhere, really have any say in any of this except through their unions. And the non-unionized workers? This country is especially not for them.

 

[Lexicus]

which at a bare cynical minimum of infrastructure and logistics, they do.

Living where I did in New Jersey, I had far more commonality of interest in this sense with people in New York City, in a different state, than I did with anyone south of Princeton.

The people voting for him were the middle class plebs

I mean this is basically untrue, the main "populist" voting bloc in Rome wasn't the middle class plebs, it was men who had been, or whose fathers or grandfathers had been, middle class plebs, but were by the time of Caesar's career the "urban poor."

But the ones voting against this ain’t the working class. They’re the middle class elite of the blue cities.

2020 Presidential Election exit polls: share of votes by income U.S. 2020| Statista

According to exit polling in the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States, ** percent of surveyed voters making less than 50,000 U.S.

www.statista.com

 

[Farm Boy]

Living where I did in New Jersey, I had far more commonality of interest in this sense with people in New York City, in a different state, than I did with anyone south of Princeton.

Shame, needing to be all mixed up like that.

 

[Crezth]

I mean this is basically untrue, the main "populist" voting bloc in Rome wasn't the middle class plebs, it was men who had been, or whose fathers or grandfathers had been, middle class plebs, but were by the time of Caesar's career the "urban poor."

That’s a good addition. Yes they were urban poor. Some, anyway. But they weren’t slaves, right? They actually had more rights than slaves and still felt slighted and wanted to get a little kickback just for standing around while the slaves did all the actual work. Because the economy that they had once helped had build had left them behind to pursue imperialistic greater heights. They just wanted a bigger cut of that. So yes I think you made a very good point here.

2020 Presidential Election exit polls: share of votes by income U.S. 2020| Statista

According to exit polling in the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States, ** percent of surveyed voters making less than 50,000 U.S.

www.statista.com

All this tells me is that poor people don’t really vote, red or blue.

 

[Arwon]

Which is very much by design, though I think often the people doing the vote suppression policies in the US are using race as the proxy rather than income

 

[Farm Boy]

Ever driven around and looked at those notorious voting lines? I looked up some one year and average voting times out in redneckville wasn't any faster to travel to and perform compared to some notorious urban areas. But I get the feeling that isn't really acceptable for some reason. Even the stock photos of lines were being lifted from some bougey place and then misrepresented.

 

[Sommerswerd]

I was going to post George Carlin's Garbage in, Garbage out, but i think that was posted not too long ago.

That was probably me... its one of my favs...

 

[Arwon]

How to Reduce Long Lines to Vote—Joint Center Policy Brief - Joint Center

Click here for a printable PDF. Read news coverage of the report in Fusion. BY SPENCER OVERTON & JENALYN SOTTO The Problem Wait times to vote are longer for people of color. In November 2012, some polling places in communities of color had wait times of up to 7 hours. Nationwide, average wait...

jointcenter.org

Black and Latino Voters Face Longer Wait Times on Election Day | Voting | Carnegie Corporation of New York

A new Brennan Center report warns that long wait times at the polls can have far-reaching consequences, including discouraging voters from even casting their ballots. In the middle of a pandemic, long wait times could also be deadly

www.carnegie.org

Blacks Waited Longer to Vote in 2016, but Not Due to Partisanship

www.nber.org

Been a fairly consistent finding across the years that black and latino voters in the US on average have longer wait times

 

[EgonSpengler]

How to Reduce Long Lines to Vote—Joint Center Policy Brief - Joint Center

Click here for a printable PDF. Read news coverage of the report in Fusion. BY SPENCER OVERTON & JENALYN SOTTO The Problem Wait times to vote are longer for people of color. In November 2012, some polling places in communities of color had wait times of up to 7 hours. Nationwide, average wait...

jointcenter.org

Black and Latino Voters Face Longer Wait Times on Election Day | Voting | Carnegie Corporation of New York

A new Brennan Center report warns that long wait times at the polls can have far-reaching consequences, including discouraging voters from even casting their ballots. In the middle of a pandemic, long wait times could also be deadly

www.carnegie.org

Blacks Waited Longer to Vote in 2016, but Not Due to Partisanship

www.nber.org

Been a fairly consistent finding across the years that black and latino voters in the US on average have longer wait times

That's been another consequence of the Shelby County decision.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924527679/why-do-nonwhite-georgia-voters-have-to-wait-in-line-for-hours-too-few-polling-pl

Since the U.S. Supreme Court's Shelby v. Holder decision in 2013 eliminated key federal oversight of election decisions in states with histories of discrimination, Georgia's voter rolls have grown by nearly 2 million people, yet polling locations have been cut statewide by nearly 10%, according to an analysis of state and local records by Georgia Public Broadcasting and ProPublica. Much of the growth has been fueled by younger, nonwhite voters, especially in nine metro Atlanta counties, where four out of five new voters were nonwhite, according to the Georgia secretary of state's office.

The metro Atlanta area has been hit particularly hard. The nine counties — Fulton, Gwinnett, Forsyth, DeKalb, Cobb, Hall, Cherokee, Henry and Clayton — have nearly half of the state's active voters but only 38% of the polling places, according to the analysis.

Georgia was one of the states covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

[EDIT: Another example of something that could maybe have been different if US Presidents were elected by popular vote and not the Electoral College. Shelby County, Citizens United, and Dobbs might've all gone the other way if George W. Bush and Donald Trump had not been President, just to name 3 Supreme Court decisions. Who would Al Gore and Hilary Clinton have nominated to the Court? I have no idea, but I bet John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Cavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett wouldn't be on the Court right now. It's not outside the realm of possibility that every single contentious decision of the last 24 years could've gone the other way.]

 

[Crezth]

Which is very much by design, though I think often the people doing the vote suppression policies in the US are using race as the proxy rather than income

Yes, absolutely, and why I keep bringing up Alabama. A “red state.”

 

[Farm Boy]

I didn't use wait times. I used ease of voting, discounting transportation cost.

But I don't think it's going to be considered a sufficient metric as it casts different experiences in the total social cost of voting in a different light of privilege. The best served one.

 

[Hygro]

We could give everyone votes inverse to their wealth or give pluses for measured expected marginalization....

The above got slipped into this thread behind some older posts, as I accidentally posted it in.. comings and goings?

 

[Gori the Grey]

Under your plan, the marginalized will be coming and the wealthy will be going.