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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
It is my opinion that cultural diversity is strongest when everyone is mixed together to appreciate it. The kind of cultural diversity where Sunni Muslims live in District 5, Hassidic (sp?) Jews live in District 8, and Pentecostal Christians live in District 15 is a recipe for catastrophe. Each group will become more alienated from and hostile to the others over time.
As for Cruz and Fiorina... well. Okay. They deserve each other, I guess...
edited 27th Apr '16 1:29:49 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I think you mean deluded. Not all of them though. Recall how lot of Republicans didn't bother to run because they knew the game was essentially already lost that cycle and focused on down tickets instead (which is how they managed to increase control of Congress even as they lost the presidency). It's a playbook they look to try again as a lot of them have given up this time too.
edited 27th Apr '16 1:45:51 PM by FFShinra
Re: Hastert, looking at the Reuters article on it, 15 months is actually longer than the sentence federal prosecutors recommended and seems to also be taking into account Hastert's age and health, as well as the sexual abuse he admitted to but wasn't being charged with (but motivated his actual crime that he was being prosecuted for)
"Ex-House Speaker Hastert gets 15 months, admits sex abuse" - http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0XO178
edited 27th Apr '16 1:47:48 PM by sgamer82
OMG HERMAN CAIN QUOTED POKEMON!!! THIS ELECTION IS SO CRAZYY!!!1!
We were so spoiled, and we didn't even know it.
Honestly, I don't think Obama was invincible in 2012. The healthcare rollout was a mess and there were even a few times when Romney was polling close to him.
What really screwed the GOP was that all the rising stars were focused on 2016 (which is why the field was so bloated this year) and all the Bush-era figures weren't interested in running (I vividly remember the GOP trying to draft Jeb or Condi).
As result the GOP was left with amateur hour, as guys like Ron Paul, Herman Cain, and Rick Santorum genuinely thought they had a chance at the presidency.
edited 27th Apr '16 2:04:29 PM by Demonic_Braeburn
Any group who acts like morons ironically will eventually find itself swamped by morons who think themselves to be in good company.I dunno, your states' borders seem arbitrary and nonsensical. At least make the states big enough so they have comparably-sized economies, and thus similar amounts of power and prestige rather than having so many tiny ones be dismissed as Flyover Country.
Also, you could stand to have less representatives in the House and Senate.
And people could stand to take State-level politics more seriously.
edited 27th Apr '16 1:51:37 PM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.Yeah, state populations are really inconsistent. I live in a city with a population that's 4x the size of the entire state of Wyoming, and it's not one of the big famous ones you see in all the movies.
And that was before all y'all's stoners started moving here.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.The borders aren't magically arbitrary just because you don't know the history behind them. And current population isn't what determined the borders either, what mattered was the fifty thousand or so people living there when the territory was made a state. You're complaining about the vagaries of history that happened after statehood was a fact in that case.
And again, just about no one thinks changing the borders will help anything. Like Fighteer said it's a red herring so I don't know why people keep bringing it up. Changing the borders won't magically solve any of our problems.
One of the biggest issues facing our system is that one-person, one-vote is simply not true, and was designed not to be true in the Constitution itself. The idea that each state gets representation proportionally and equally via the different houses, plus the fact that voting districts need not have the same number of people, means that the actual weight of any given individual's vote can vary widely.
I don't buy into the idea that Montana's voters will be "marginalized" if they don't have more per-capita say than New York's voters. There is nothing democratic about that notion.
edited 27th Apr '16 2:02:47 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Not gerrymandering. Partisan redistricting. These things are not interchangeable, you can have the latter without the former and vice versa. Utah's electoral map is a partisan redistricting, but not a gerrymander. Maryland is both a gerrymander and a partisan redistricting. California has gerrymanders but not partisan redistrictings - mostly. One could say the same thing about Illinois, almost.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanGerrymandering implies that you are creating odd shaped districts, but there are reasons for doing so other than partisanship e.g in order to keep voters with similar interests in the same district.
Partisan redistricting means you have a map whose scope is to give a specific party an advantage. Ohio and Pennsylvania are such redistrictings, as is Maryland.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanIn essence, the problem is this.
Let's say you have six people labelled A through F. A, B, D, and E all support Bob. C and F support Alice.
You're trying to split them into two districts. Now, you could split them so that A, B, and C are in one district and D, E, and F are in another. In this model, both districts end up supporting Bob due to a 2/3 majority in each. Bob wins by clear majority.
So instead, you might split them into A, B, and D in one district and C, E, and F in the other. Now Bob gets District 1 with 100% unanimity while Alice gets District 2 with 2/3 majority. Just like that, a purple state has been created out of a place where the population is unambiguously in favor of Bob over Alice.
edited 27th Apr '16 2:29:40 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.The Western states borders were drawn with rulers as quickly as the population in those areas of the frontier reached the required number to call it a state. If that's not an arbitrary and ridiculous way to design a territorial partition, I don't know what is.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.How important is gerrymandering to Republican control of the House?
Under my argument above, one can say that lack of gerrymandering is why the House is biased against Democrats.
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There was a series on the History Channel a couple of years ago called How The States Got Their Shapes. Maybe it would help you to understand the US a bit better.
http://www.history.com/shows/how-the-states-got-their-shapes

@Fighteer; I think it would homogenize large sections of the nation, in unhealthy ways. Getting people on the same page, ideally, doesn't involve destroying cultural diversity. Or making sure that certain parts of the population can just outright ignore other parts.
Update: And Cruz is naming Fiorina as his running mate, when he's very much unlikely to win the nomination at this point. This is just full of desperation.
edited 27th Apr '16 1:25:32 PM by AceofSpades