Good list.

As in “bert feed me!!” Trapdoor?

Whats a trifecta? Is it House, Senate, Governorship?

So, the Republicans control more, due to winning more State Senates and Governorships but there are more, in raw number of reps, Democrats elected to the State Houses?

So each State can send as many reps to the House as they want?

I’m not sure how a larger population in a State translates into more Federal House seats for that State.

I assumed the whole number of seats allocated to each State in the House was set. But i’ve never really had reason to question that assumption.

Good point. The gerrymandering has been exploited more by the Republicans, so they have less to gain from further redistricting.

Thats fair

So, when this latest round of gerrymandering kicked off it was stated this was a contest the Democrats would ultimately lose because they control fewer US States.

In the last few days there’s been some triumphalism as two? or three? Democrat run States have redistricted. But based on the assumption that Republican States do the same, this isn’t actually good news.

Am I out of the loop on some developments here?

Are Democratic run States finding it easier to redistrict than Republican run? Or is there some tangible reason theres an air of triumphalism?

Or are people not appreciating the wider arms-race-like contest and focusing too much on small wins out of context?

Thanks for the recommendation.

I’d heard of Forster, but never made the time. After reading the first few pages of The Machine Stops it looks interesting. The hyper drive for ‘efficiency’, presented as rational but leading to absurdities I think fits our times and the dissatisfaction with Classical and Neoliberal economic policies, likely the culture war driven faux-Christian morality of many as well.

I think its time to have a look at Forster more carefully. He was involved in the Bloomsbury Set, which is where I’d heard of him before.

Thus was my process, looked through the shops picked up ones on special. Tbh I found a lot of them were quite good. There was only one online one that was a complete bust. Nimbus, there wasn’t much to like about it.

Ha! I switched to Oat milk for coffee last year, after trying a few, i’ve landed on the Aldi unsweetened one as well. I don’t need mine particularly creamy, and its a consistently low price in comparison, which is nice.

Still haven’t been game enough to go down the weetbix/weetabix road with it though. So a ways to go yet.

We won’t agree of course. Everything you’ve said other people in other countries do as well. The point about the monkeys and history is to show that these are underlying social factors, not something unique to US people alone.

For a better future the US should see themselves in and of the people of rest of the world. Recognising aspects of themselves in others, then seeing how things are done differently is a primary way to making a better world, exceptionalism, even if virtuous, threatens to get in the way of that. I don’t believe for a second you don’t already know this though our conclusions are just different.

Anyway, you’ve an interesting perspective. In your sharp critiscism of the US leadership I feel like theres also a demand for things to be done differently, and a genuine outrage that these people committing the atrocities we’ve been referring to in your homes name.

Living up to your name with this comment doomsider ;). I like your bonobo example, shows theres often other ways to handle things. Theres a lot to that comment, so i’m going to try to pick the key ideas in each area and directly address them.

Fascism used so broadly becomes woolly. Certainly you could describe MBS’ Saudi Arabia as a fascist regime by following definitions. But it doesn’t get at the whole picture of that Authoritarian Monarchy. For example because there is no organised ‘opposition’ as such to suppress. Be it trade unions, opposing political parties. So calling everything fascist hides useful differences that helps understand how people across the world have freedoms or are oppressed in different ways.

The suffering the US has caused? Its a lot, but USAID saved millions as well, always weigh in good things done by a people, it may amount to nothing, but its intellectually dishonest to ignore. The key is were the US actions that caused suffering more or even with Mao’s Great Leap forward, the Bengal Famine, many more examples abound. The only unique suffering the US has ever caused is the nuclear attacks on Japan, and that was chosen in part due to the perceived larger loss caused by a US and allies ground invasion. What could have happened to the East Asia region if Stalin’s Russia were more involved? I think more suffering.

Europe is an interesting case from the 1700’s, and certainly earlier than that, to compare to. Because its there that you have the most well known to the Wsstern mind progenitor to the Nation State model we live in today. Its not really the enlightenment that changed attitudes, plenty of people couldn’t give a fig about a lot of the enlightenment ideas, and went on their merry way suppressing, murdering and extracting the wealth of other parts of the world. Every European country is guilty of this througout that time, just like the US. The key point though, is they didn’t do it in Europe. Because there was a rules based society between those peoples, war was ongoing but organised, this is why the European Aristocracy completely freaked out when the French Revolution then Napolean happened, because it threatened to flip that rules based system the contolinent worked on.

Systematic extermination has happened in many societies, the sack of the city of Troy might be a famous old example, the Rwandan Genocide is a new example. So systematic extermination of a population isn’t unique to the US.

So hopefully the violence and greed of humanity can be put to rest as a uniquely US trait.

The real reasons for uniqueness though, you are right, come from the scale and abundance of the US.

But its not ideological, its what I touched on with the French Revolution. The worst of crimes happen when the rules guiding the society are somehow suspended. And this is what happened with the US over and over again in different contexts.

Below are some examples of the worst crimes where the rules guiding a society have for some reason been suspended, in this vacuum of instability is the most dangerous moment.

• Bengal Famine 1943, in the course of the British total war effort (suspension) Churchill directs the required food supplies out of India.

• Rwandan Genocide 1994, assassination of the President and resulting power vaccum and disarray (suspension) led to militias hunting down the Tutsi minority.

• French Revolution, Estates General (suspension), storming of the Bastille (suspension) ,King Louis flight to Varennes (suspension), Thermidorean Reaction (suspension), Coup of 18th Brumaire introducing Napoleon (suspension), the White terror (suspension). The whole period from 1789 to the restoration is littered with suspensions of varying degrees, and like with all historic comparisons France makes an excellent comparison to the US.

The suspension of the guiding societal rules is why canny commentators looking at the US are so intent upon the court system. If that breaks, then all bets are actually off. But the Orange Babboon’s regime has been knocked back significantly more than they’ve won, so its hard to argue the courts are pliant, even with the Supreme Court’s favourable ideological bias.

Conclusion:

Its not a barbaric ideological group of elites, although they may be there and present, its the moments in time and place where a suspension in the guiding rules of people are suspended.

You’re so right with all that you say. Except your admirable self deprecating US exceptionalism. US peeps shouldn’t beat themselves up about the crimes or horrible acts their countrymen are/have done. Where and when any other country is in the same position individuals of those places act in the same ways. Cue every powerful and not so powerful civilisation in history. The rest of us it seems have to clean up their messes as best we can. It seems its a natural animal response that we as a species haven’t been able to adequately address socially or civilisationally.

I don’t really know enough about the subject and how it relates. But these awful group dynamics aren’t confined to humans alone, i feel like this article, Chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park wage lethal ‘civil war’, relates in an important way to the point you make in your comment.

I don’t know why software engineers being on lemmy, so are using activitypub, are so down and out about industry job cuts. Don’t get me wrong, change of industry might be on the cards, but that doesn’t mean being a software engineer stops, and these proof of concept sites and networks are a revelation.

There are so many projects for software engineers. For example, Activitypub is the chance to develop a genuinely healthy market of small to medium sized networked social media sites that are far more reactive to users, unique, and experimental than the likes of engagement driven fb could ever be.

I don’t know, the rivers of gold might be over for a portion of ‘big’ tech software engineers, but it seems like a super exciting time to be in small enterprise software engineering, with the plethora amount of projects that could be being explored.

Of course there are heaps of other non-social media software engineering small scale projects, i just focused on activitypub here because it seems so strange and obvious to a rando like me.

They are such good memories. I remember as a kid in the cold winter huddled up to my desk lamp, that got super warm and was the only source of heat, painting my Catachan armoured column…

why yes, I did not understand how to use the Catachans as a jungle army, how could you tell?

This was my personal response to the argument the post posed. So I definitely align with you on your value statement, and that annecdote is just such a typical example of shithead behaviour.

But I probably don’t agree as much on its obvious relevency, which of course it is, leading to it being incuded in the discussion. What I worry about is discussions like this thread jumping from link to link and in the process flattening the distinguishing features of different propositions.

We’re agreed on having a good baseline set by government.

Don’t know why some companies adding other benefits “feels like the real discrimination that shouldn’t be there”, sounds like advocating for a dictatorship of employment law, as I say before a command and control system.

I probably did a better job explaining my position in the response here

All benefits - if any, should be decided on a government level

Thats not the same suggestion as a healthy social support system.

An example of a healthy social support system could be where the government sets a baseline of standards that must be met, but businesses can go above that in a competitive reachbfor employees.

What was suggested by OP was far tighter, where the top line and base line were controlled by the government. Those systems are referred to as command and control systems, the most famous example of which is probably the USSR, maybe in that conglomeration the GDR might be the best example, for its good and horrifying aspects.

You and I are probably having different underlying assumptions about the connotations relating to communism though. Its not a spectre haunting europe for me, thats fascism.

I think its important to be able to comment on all systems of governance in a reflective and complex systems driven way. By understanding the drawbacks by comparison with other systems, even when those other systems failed, we can understand our own systems more clearly.

Tight command and control systems, like you’re advocating here, are hard to manage. Too many competing interests. Its the primary reason 20th Century style communism failed, and they had an honest to god good go at it. Moving away from such a tight system is a key reason why China has been so successful since Deng Xiaoping.

Thats not the argument though, its a ‘with kids’ versus ‘without kids’ comparison.