lowenz on 27/5/2021 at 15:42
Quote Posted by Pyrian
(for instance, against cops).
The most obvious problem with the "state" is that is stupid to think that one institution like to undermine another just for the sake of a hyperuranic conception of "justice".....
So of course a good number of judges resort to this kind of legal trickeries.....
Tony_Tarantula on 4/6/2021 at 03:56
Quote Posted by june gloom
I've long had criticisms of the moderation style on this forum but in borememore's case I hope that TTLG just does what it usually does -- nothing -- because I honestly find this guy pretty darn funny.
Anyway, I have to remark that it says a lot in 2021 when someone actually still cares about the Clintons, none of it good. We've got bigger issues to deal with than an aging neoliberal warmon- ... nevermind. Joe's basically the same thing. At least Clinton never promised us $2000 that we're never gonna get.
Meh. If he cleans out the right wing treason and actually has the balls to use terrorism powers against actual domestic terrorists to imprison the traitors I'll call it a net win.
(
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2381)
Quote:
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, i
s guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
Starker on 16/6/2021 at 20:40
The RNC now says they have always been at war with Eastasia:
Quote:
(
https://theweek.com/republicans/1001598/rnc-without-a-hint-of-irony-slams-biden-for-meeting-with-putin)
The Republican National Committee is going after President Biden for his Wednesday meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva, accusing him of handing Russia a "win."
RNC Communications Director Danielle Alvarez in a statement Wednesday argued that "giving Putin a meeting is just the latest win that Joe Biden has handed Russia," attacking the president for "foreign policy failures" that have "strengthened Russia at the expense of our country."
Other Republicans had previously slammed Biden leading up to the summit for being soft on Russia, though The New York Times wrote that such critics tended to "neglect to mention their backing of" former President Donald Trump, who "spent four years seeking to befriend" Putin while "dismissing Russia's aggressive behavior." During his Helsinki summit with Putin in 2018, Trump famously said he didn't "see any reason why" Russia would have interfered in the 2016 presidential election, defying U.S. intelligence officials.
[...]
In other news, McConnell declared that the era of bipartisanship is over, though that doesn't apparently stop the Democrats running for the ball Charlie Brown style for the umpteenth time, as Republicans dangle possibilities of watering down the infrastructure bill before them.
lowenz on 16/6/2021 at 21:36
Is there a "legal" way to suppress the GOP strategic and shameless ambivalence?
How US citizens can't see such complete revolving?
If they don't see it, if they DO NOT WANT to see it, the GOP electors *are* partners in crime of this foolish and childish "post truth" world.
Cipheron on 23/6/2021 at 04:36
To outlaw gerrymandering would be the best thing overall.
Gerrymandering either skews which party is in control of districts, leading to entrenched minority rule, or it's done by bipartisan collusion to entrench seated members on both sides against any sort of electoral risk. So some type of objective algorithm to decide on district boundaries would be much more fair and lead to more competitive elections rather than entrenched power blocs.
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_States#Gerrymandering_and_the_2018_midterm_elections)
As an example of how far gerrymandering goes, see North Carolina and Ohio. In both states, around 48% voted Democrat but Democrats only gained 25% of seats in 2018. Which is basically near the theoretical maximum bias you
can implement with gerrymandering.
demagogue on 23/6/2021 at 04:46
Interesting. How would you even define it? A fractal dimension D=lim(ϵ→0) [log(Nϵ(A))] / [log(1/ϵ)] less than, say, the coast of Norway, or the Pakistan / India / Bangladesh border, or the borders of Egypt, or something in between? How curvy is too curvy?
lowenz on 23/6/2021 at 10:12
LULZ
Dia on 23/6/2021 at 12:42
Quote Posted by lowenz
Is there a "legal" way to suppress the GOP strategic and shameless ambivalence?
How US citizens can't see such complete revolving?
If they don't see it, if they DO NOT WANT to see it, the GOP electors *are* partners in crime of this foolish and childish "post truth" world.
Well, the Democrats
are trying to legally stop the GOP's repeated attempts (and successes) at outright voter suppression, but true to form, Moscow Mitch is keeping his word to block every. single. bill. the Dems introduce and try to get passed. McConnell and his GOP cronies have basically just shit on democracy and have taken an anti-bi-partisan stance. And yes lowenz, U.S. citizens
are aware of the GOP's blatant manipulations but short of assassination, we have to depend on legal elections and hope our fellow citizens in the red states wake up and vote assholes like McConnell the hell out of office. There've been protests in the states where the new GOP voter suppression bills have been passed and what galls me is how stupid the far-right wing supporters are being in cheering on and defending these GOP bills. They don't seem to realize that those voter suppression bills affect them, too. Nothing like shooting yourself in the foot to make a point. All we can do is to keep encouraging each other to get out and vote in every single election in our state; up here in Wisconsin we managed to oust that slimy POS Scott (Scooter) Walker as governor, which was a serious win for the Dems, liberals and progressives, but now we have to focus on getting rid of assholes like Ron Johnson (I can't believe the shit that comes out of his mouth, ffs! He makes me embarrassed to say I'm a Wisconsinite.) and the GOP state legislators who keep blocking Gov. Tony Evers at every turn. The GOP has become the party of pro-authoritarianism, capitalism, pro-racism, pro-sexism, pro-homophobia and pro-xenophobia; in other words, they represent everything that is wrong with our country and government. The only way we, the U.S. citizens can stop them is by voting and the GOP seems hell-bent on making that as difficult as possible for anyone who doesn't vote Republican.* (
https://apnews.com/article/gop-elections-bill-senate-showdown-0cd91c559b314a695c08ff9e4abd5d8a)
*I voted in Wisconsin's 2018 primaries but when I was preparing to vote in the 2020 elections (checking to see which polling place was assigned to my neighborhood) just two years later, I discovered my name was one of the over 200,000 people whose names had been dropped from Wisconsin's voter registry (yeah, I was seriously pissed off). Because of the pandemic, I had to jump through all sorts of GOP created hoops in order to register and vote again, which I did and gladly (and somewhat defiantly). I later read an article claiming that the majority of Wisconsinites who'd been dropped from the registry had, prior to the 2020 elections, voted a Democrat ticket and I believe that to be true. Once again, our only recourse is to vote those Republicans who've shamelessly gerrymandered our state and actively tried to suppress non-Republican voters the hell out of office. And believe me, the GOP is making it harder and harder for people like me to even vote; the number of our district's polling places were reduced drastically for the 2020 elections, meaning we had to travel farther to the nearest polling place and stand in line for hours and hours in miserable Wisconsin November weather (& hoping we didn't contract covid) just to vote if we hadn't registered to vote by mail. I'm so frustrated at the GOP's manipulations that I'm beginning to think assassination would be a lot quicker than waiting for those assholes's terms to come up for re-election. *smh* :mad:
lowenz on 23/6/2021 at 13:52
Thanks for the well articulated answer!
Cipheron on 26/6/2021 at 14:29
Quote Posted by demagogue
Interesting. How would you even define it? A fractal dimension D=lim(ϵ→0) [log(Nϵ(A))] / [log(1/ϵ)] less than, say, the coast of Norway, or the Pakistan / India / Bangladesh border, or the borders of Egypt, or something in between? How curvy is too curvy?
Usually it's about minimizing some metric such as the sum of squares of the distances, which is typical statistics stuff, and a very well studied area. You wouldn't use border lengths. You use clustering to minimize the distance from the center of each area. See these topics:
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram)
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_algorithm)
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-means_clustering)
So for designing voting precincts you could use the above well-developed mathematical tools but you also take into account population densities of different areas when doing the computations.
For example see the K Means clusterig algorithm, and consider that for designing voting precincts you could weight each point by the number of people who live there (ensuring good clustering in high population areas) while also replacing the normal crow-flies distance metric with a metric that takes terrain and transportation infrastructure into account. This would give pretty good districting, and remove the whole political element from the game.
EDIT, i thought someone probably thought of this so I googled it
(
https://www.brown.edu/news/2017-11-07/redistricting)
So what you'd ideally have is an agreed-on algorithm to use, and everything else is fed into that from the census data.