Pay more attention to the election and government processes. Inform people. Most people don't know about civil forfeiture (even the name is enough to bore many people), so they don't know cops are stealing from people.
A people that doesn't pay attention to the government gets screwed by the government every time, no matter what rules are in place. That's why Lawrence Lessig is trying to change the rules to encourage people to take part.
Most people don't care about X (civil forfeiture, whistleblowers, Controversial invocations of the Patriot Act, etc.)
> Pay more attention to the election and government processes.
Yes but this completely ignores the fact that most Americans are apathetic to these issues.
What I learned this year was that (as another poster put it) "Gerrymandering, fraud, bribery, voter suppression" were visible, they would also be tolerated.
Also, if you're under investigation by the FBI for espionage, most Americans will STILL vote for you. And the other major half will vote for someone who is clearly racist and (imho) dumb as nails.
Unfortunately, I've also learned the same in the last year.
My interactions with people after reaching adulthood have also taught me that people have different inclinations, ethics, intentions and internal reward systems. Some people gain satisfaction by helping others, or doing 'good;' while some others, gain satisfaction from hurting others, or feeling superior to them. Unfortunately I've met a lot of terrible people, and that makes me wonder what we should reasonably come to expect in who we collectively elect?
I've just never really solved how to apply it to politics. I've long felt that if you're going to have 2 "houses", one ought to be appointed by ballot as a check/balance on the elected members (a variation of hereditary peers in many ways but without the same bias).
It does seem to be the case that someone who doesn't really want the job, but is otherwise qualified, is the best person for it in this case. It seems to me to be very likely that this is true for both politicians, as well as LEO, including the FBI, CIA, and probably all other three letter agencies as well.
> The judge in my case was clear about a number of issues. First, the very definition of “espionage” is incredibly broad. Espionage is the act of “providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it.” Period. My judge also said that there did not have to be mens rea, or criminal intent, for there to be guilt in an espionage case. And the concept of “harm to the national security” was irrelevant.
--John Kiriakou (He was the first CIA officer to be convicted for passing classified information to a reporter) [1]
That's simply inaccurate. Gerrymandering is specifically the redrawing of electoral districts in a purposefully unfair manner. It's commonly prevented by setting up independent commissions to do the redrawing of districts, rather than allowing the incumbent politicians to draw the lines directly.
It's named after the former Governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, who redrew the districts to ensure his party would win the senate. Apparently, he had to draw the districts in rather unusual shapes to achieve this, and they kind of ended up looking like a salamander. Hence, Gerrymandering.
You (and everybody else) don't understand what I mean because you haven't thought about it as much as I have.
By what principle do you think districts should be drawn--they must be redrawn due to shifting population--so do you intend to draw exaggerated patterns to spread out minority opinions, or to clump them together? Or are you suggesting that you flip coins topologically? What if flipping coins results in a salamander of some sort, you want to use soap films to find the minimum enclosing surfaces? "Mathematically neutral" methods of drawing districts will result in some parts of the country randomly enhancing minority opinions while other parts of the country will randomly diffuse them, with results that will lead partisans to complain bitterly.
My point is, there IS NO RIGHT ANSWER. There is only your preference.
> You (and everybody else) don't understand what I mean because you haven't thought about it as much as I have.
Even if true, this is surely the least civil way, and one of the least convincing ways, to state the fact.
> My point is, there IS NO RIGHT ANSWER. There is only your preference.
That seems to be a different claim to:
> any creation of voting districts is a Gerrymander
(which you said above). Two reasons why:
1. As slavik points out, a gerrymander is, by definition, intentionally (not incidentally, accidentally, or unavoidably) unfair.
2. More importantly, "all district-drawing schemes are unfair", while probably true, does not mean that they are all equally unfair, or that we should give up on seeking fairness. It seems rather like http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm .
I've presented a pretty terrible solution before and I'll say it again to illustrate a point.
Let's say we make the whole nation into a single constituent district. Now, every voter will cast one vote for one representative and the top N candidates with the most votes win.
This is a terrible solution but even this is better than what we have today which i hope goes far too show how bad the system we have today is...
Systems design should strive to make it resistant to corruption and try to not rely on the goodness of people making correct/impartial choices.
(I am fully aware of my hypocrisy when I claim to support democracy around the world except obviously {{}} can't be in government. I hope that this just shows that I can't even trust myself to be correct/consistent/impartial.)
Bottom line is that every vote within a jurisdiction should be equally equal regardless of geographical location. It might lead to people we don't like getting elected but that shouldn't dissuade us. However, I have to agree with President Obama in this -- the only way to effect any change here is to get people involved in very large numbers. Get people to move to these safe districts. I can't see how we can accomplish change here with the levels of apathy we have...
Surely believing that you, of all other people (many billions of them!) only you have "thought about it" enough? That strikes me as a delusional belief to hold.
first of all, oh come off it, when I said everybody else, I meant "everybody else here on HN who is downvoting me and not balanced by upvoters in my corner, and since anybody can upvote and only a small faction can downvote, we are talking a serious tilt". (In a microcosm of the larger gerrymander debate, your studied obtuseness on this issue is forcing me to spill a lot of words to explain a notion that should be obvious to you, but I apparently am the only one amongst you and me who is thinking about that.)
But to your point(less), considering the world population, I've looked, I've googled the gerrymander topic hard; and I've tried to engage the wikipedia "talk" community in hopes of finding birds of a feather, people actively interested in the issue. (You give it a try, I am the only one saying it... Oh wait, it's much easier for you to avoid learning anything and just to drop a tart comment.)
I am certain that many others (still a tiny minority of the planet) have noticed that when you draw district boundaries that you must inherently advantage some and disadvantage others; a subset of those notice more sophisticated political things about it, and a tiny subset probably notice that it is a deeper d(N-color geographic map projection onto a hyperdimensional Venn diagram problem)/dt.
But that notion does not filter out. The concept of a "gerrymander" is very dear to the hearts of relatively sophisticated people (unsophisticated people don't know the word). I imagine it's not taught properly in political science curricula.
My claim is, there is no way to draw legislative districts that is not a gerrymander (unless you adopt the non-standard definition that a gerrymander is any drawing that is not geometrically compact/convex)
The original Gerrymander political cartoon: it was a clever rhetorical point, I'm in favor of cleverness and rhetorical flourish.
Further noticing that all districting is political, ideological, or doomed to be rejected by an outraged populatce, I don't know how clever that is, but I can't find anybody other than me who has noticed it and stands up and says it.
False. My "most parent" comment attracted downvotes well before any of my other comments. I went to edit it to improve it but I think downvotes turn off the edit button or something (not much time had transpired). So what exactly did you find objectionable about my tone there? My guess is I "Socratically" challenged the firmly held beliefs of pinheads that they are politically and intellectually sophisticated when they are simply not; you should not defend the mob.
In terms of your suggestion about not drawing district lines at all, I can (seriously) see no merit to it at all. That could be because while you could have made an actual argument for your point, instead you simply stated it as I did in my post... I guess according to your comment calculus I should accuse you of not following the tone that we prefer and downvote you?
Wikipedia's definition[1] is "In the process of setting electoral districts, gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries."
It can be clearly recognized where it occurs, and there are plenty of examples in the Wikipedia article. I don't have the skills or knowledge to say exactly how it should be done, only that it shouldn't have extreme obvious political bias.
if you scour the discussion history of the wikipedia page you will find my comments many months ago disputing that the article implies that there is some "fair" way to draw districts without laying out what that way should be.
I contend that the system we use, the gerrymandering system, is the most defensible, it's democratic. Don't like it, vote for somebody else.
however, I feel you are so convinced you are right that you are not looking at the actual issue and you intellectually impoverish yourself as a result. Gerrymander is an accusation you hurl at opponents in the majority who don't do what you want (like calling them uncivil even if they have not been, eh!?). However, when your party is in you do the same thing... not because you are a hypocrite (like the hypocritical games played over Supreme Court nominations) but because there is no way to draw redistricting boundaries that is actually fair; many factions will be disadvantaged by aggregating votes in districts, there is no way to avoid it.
Instead of downvoting me more, google a supposed gerrymander map and try it on a city you know, you'll see that you'll be making political choices that you favor. You might be "fair" in your mind because you consider yourself an independent so you will favor neither Democrats nor Republicans, but instead your gerrymander will favor some other metrics that you prefer.
You might even go so far as try to create a very evenly divided legislature that will have difficulty passing any laws, and you'll look at me and say "see, I did it"... then immediately after that I'll have to listen to your unsophisticated drivel about how gridlock is destroying our country and if only everybody was "civil" like you, beautiful compromises would emerge.
A people that doesn't pay attention to the government gets screwed by the government every time, no matter what rules are in place. That's why Lawrence Lessig is trying to change the rules to encourage people to take part.