[throwaway490194]

Mixed feelings. On the one hand, we all know that most if not all politicians are corrupt, so the greater transparency that modern technology offers us to expose this truly does help to make the world a better place. On the other hand, the constant obsessive search by one of the parties to discover “bombshells” from the other while turning a blind eye to the corruption of their own party is upsetting. I cannot help but feel that this blind obsession to winning the zero sum game at any cost leads you to become the very thing that you are fighting against.

[jacquesm]

This goes well beyond corruption, it is clear disenfranchisement based on race.

[someguydave]

When black Americans vote for Democrats at rates above 90% how could you draw districts without racial implications?

[jacquesm]

By explicitly not selecting for voting behavior for any party during the drawing of the districts, but basing the borders of the districts purely on a geographic or statistical property such as area and/or population. As soon as you start taking voting behavior into account you will be favoring either one or the other party.

[lupire]

That's an excellent question, which makes me wonder the Republican Party was not satisfied disenfranchising Democrats and catching Blacks as collateral dammage, but insisted on disenfranchising Blacks specifically.

[fzeroracer]

For starters, the GOP could instead try and figure out why black Americans vote overwhelmingly in favor of Democrat and update their policy stances to reflect that. Instead, they're deciding to draw districts to lump them together so they can disenfranchise them and make their vote worth less.

So you're right there are racial implications, and it's certainly on the side of the GOP.

[gumby]

> we all know that most if not all politicians are corrupt,

We do? Seems unnecessarily cynical. If that were true than by corollary most if not all people are corrupt, and that does not match my experience by far.

[big_chungus]

That statement is predicated on the mis-guided assumption that politicians are a statistically-representative sample of Americans.

[lupire]

No one thinks their own frieds are corrupt. That's part of the corruption. The quiet benefeciaries "just following orders" and "useful idiots" of corruption aren't seen as corrupt.

[throwaway490194]

Invalid logic. It is not necessary for most if not all people to be corrupt for the same to be true of politicians. Many people are gullible. Many people are easily manipulated. This is especially true of those who are young, and prone to adopt the ideology of the group. But yes, I do believe that a significant portion of the population possess the brain anomaly that manifests as narcissism and these people are more successful than others at climbing political hierarchies because they are unrestrained by conscience.

[throwaway490194]

If you are curious about this phenomenon, you might want to research "the flying monkeys of the narcissist"

[ianmcgowan]

This seems both overly-cynical and a case of whataboutism - "most if not all politicians are corrupt" [citation needed]. There's also a difference between "bombshells" which usually relate to moral lapses and regrettable life choices, and actual corruption which is a crime typically investigated by the FBI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_scan... is an illuminating read. Some of the older entries seem quite quaint now the bar is a lot lower:

"John C. Doerfer (R), the appointed Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission by President Eisenhower, spent a week-long Florida vacation in 1960 on the yacht owned by his friend George B. Storer, president of Storer Broadcasting; as a result, he was accused of conflict of interest and forced to resign."

[codingslave]

I think about this alot. Modern elections have turned into political investigations where the goal is to get more dirt on the opponent than they can get on you. But in some ways this causes a self policing effect and hopefully stops rampant corruption at the highest levels of government.

[jacquesm]

> hopefully stops rampant corruption at the highest levels of government

I think we have a strong proof that that isn't the case.

[kevingadd]

If the most recent election cycles are any indication, rampant corruption is something many politicians are proud of

[big_chungus]

I used to figure I might run for public office some day; no longer. I haven't done anything that would merit a scandal or be counted as "dirt", but that doesn't change it. I don't want a bunch of busybodies poking into ever detail of my life, and more importantly, don't want that to happen to my family.

[ipython]

If modern politics is any guide, the takeaway is that you are able to run for office no matter what happened in your personal life. Your family, I can understand not putting them through that, but there's no reason why you should be ashamed of anything you've done.

[ianmcgowan]

Unfortunately the definition of "dirt" has drifted slowly to any moral lapse, which almost every person has at one time committed (at least, among my group of close friends who share that kind of thing, maybe things are more moral somewhere else). It's sort of a slippery slope though - unearthing information of Epstein/Moore type activities is more legitimately in the public interest than Trudeau blackface lapses (arguably). I think the millennial generation will be more forgiving of dumb things done in youth, simply because their dumb things are more thoroughly documented than the boomers/gen-x'ers.

[lupire]

This is the country whose government held that sex with a subordinate is a worse offense than starting a war for personal profit.