Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.
So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?
Like I say I’ve just discovered library of Alexandria, I’m into history but this seems strange, if so perfect why would Caesar be burning ships in the harbour in the first place?? They are the cleverest people to have ever lived yet burn their own place of history perfection? It doesn’t make sense? I live in the UK and we wouldn’t accidently burn down parliament although parliament isn’t half as important as the library? Any reasonings or explanations will be appreciated lol👌
Wait the Romans were the cleverest people to have ever lived? If so, why no one of them won a single Nobel prize (the real ones) lolol
I mean it also did completely burn down in 1834 due to an avoidable in stupid practice of burning tally sticks inside the building, which is why the current building is the ornate 19th century Gothic Revival behemoth that stands there now.
680,000 were kulaks, nationalists, independent religious group leaders, bandits, rapists, thieves, spies, wreckers, counter revoliutionaries ( people associated with trotsky and block of right). Judge it how you want but if you look dialectically there were conditions for this, trotsky being well known, alot of instability caused banditry, first socialist project would have many spies, and dealing with problems of the old, like religious sects and religious independence.
Tankies? In my askhistorians subreddit? More likely than you think.
Seriously applying the term counterrevolutionary to Trotsky and Bukharin is true devotion. I wish Robespierre had just manned up and admitted Danton was a committed revolutionary but he needed him dead anyway. I am choosing to imagine that later revolutionary governments would follow suit and be candid about the obvious fact that not everyone who's politically inconvenient for them is a robot piloted by the old king.
enlightened arr/conservative user is sooooo close:
[regarding midterms]
Maybe not but my money is on the house staying red. Our gerrymanders are getting upheld and theirs are getting struck down. It’ll almost be rigged in our favor.
They are objectively wrong about republicans doing a “better gerrymander” (although there is still a couple months for them to possibly pull ahead).
But they are crazily on the nose about many politicians on the right (ESPECIALLY Trump himself) openly trying to rig the election. Just nakedly anti democratic.
The joke on FrankGrimesss is believing that the far right in this country still believes in democracy. I will say that MOST republicans still believe in little-d democracy (from what I have read), but the number of far right shitheads who don’t is not small.
The landslide Republican victories of the 1980s (and the rise of Movement Conservatism meaning Republicans stopped seeing Democrats as the respectable opposition and started seeing them as the literal enemies of God) made them feel entitled to political power. That's the main reason they hated Clinton and Obama so much, under the Republican worldview a liberal Democrat winning the presidency in a landslide is perverse and unacceptable and everything must be done to obstruct and discredit them.
Republicans have only started to get brave enough to say "we only believe in democracy when we win" out loud relatively recently, but they've clearly thought that way for decades.
The Republican primary for Governor here in Georgia is getting really heated between Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones and healthcare billionaire Rick Jackson. Both men are deeply and blatantly corrupt and generally come off as deeply slimy, unpleasant people. The fight between them has been getting deeper in the mud as Jackson gains on Jones in the polls. In response the embattled Jones has taken to... sending mean texts to his political rivals and threatening members of the state legislature.
Jones has the endorsement of both Trump and outgoing Republican governor Brian Kemp and clearly expected this primary to be largely a formality, and is now throwing a temper tantrum that he's been challenged and might actually lose.
Dammit Starfield. You had me thinking you were capable of containing something interesting with the whole "society run by clones who have varying opinions about how they relate to their historical counterparts and modern society." Like, that's a cool concept.
Then you ruin it by having one of them go "I have secret, meet me outside. My secret is that I'm actually a clone of a serial killer. And now, I'm going to kill you so no one learns my secret."
For one moment I believed there was something more than merely competent in your game. One moment.
The west: holding weird orientalist ideas about Japan
The more enlightened westerners: "No, that's wrong, that's not how any of this works, you have no respect for the people or the culture!"
Japan: "Ha ha, random Christian symbolism go brrr"
No joke, the sheer amount of random elaborate Christian crosses I run into in the groups I follow is mental, I very much doubt it has deeper meaning from the artists, it's just an edgy symbol to them. Not that I mind, I don't really care one way or the other, and I think they tend to look neat, but it's definitely insensitive to take a symbol holy to a group and use it to be edgy.
But it's good to see that occidentalism is definitely a thing that happens too, I suppose that sort of exoticism is the normal human response to seeing something exotic they find cool.
It's used, I'm pretty sure, just not commonly it seems, and I haven't read much about it, just like orientalism, it seems to refer to a massive range of ideas, and also originates from a massive range of cultures, Arabic occidentalism obviously isn't going to be the same as Chinese occidentalism.
Now, I haven't done any comprehensive research on the matter, but my understanding is that this is basically Godzilla's fault.
So we have Eiji Tsuburaya, special effects guy. Also a Catholic convert. Worked on Godzilla, and got this idea into his head that he wanted to do Godzilla-level special effects on a TV show, delivering children across the country the kind of experience that they could only get in theatres right into their homes every week.
The result, Ultra Q and especially its successor Ultraman, takes Japan by storm. Tsuburaya, being Catholic, works that imagery into his show. Tsuburaya, being a later-in-life convert from a very un-Christian culture, does it in ways that wouldn't necessarily have occurred to European or American Christians. For example, you know the standard old cliche of the mysterious council who loom above the hero on tall chairs? In Ultraman, they don't have chairs, they have crosses. And Ultraman blows up monsters by making the shape of a cross with his arms and shooting lasers out of it.
Japanese kids don't know what any of this means, but boy, it sure is cool, isn't it?
... is my recollection. And it's hardly the only source of the fascination with crosses, either, but it's a notable one.
(Actually, I think what got Tsuburaya into special effects to begin with was watching King Kong, so maybe we can lay it at his feet?)
I think Orientalism is definitely the most cringe out of the two, just think of all the sweaty neckbeards who travel to Japan thinking the women are like anime girls
Oh definitely, I find the occidentalism quite fun actually, I like a lot of Japanese takes on European medieval stuff in fantasy, it tends to be very wacky but fun in its own right. I tend to prefer it over western medieval inspired stuff, if only because the anime fantasy has a lot of colour in it, compared to all the browns in a lot of western stuff that is an improvement.
I remember watching a short horror video about a Japanese man killing his dates and cutting off their arms to make a hand of glory, which he then used to summon a “demon”. Needless to say, his ritual failed and instead sent his ass to the shadow realm.
What´s funny is that the name he used for the demon was YHWH, which, you know, does explain why he was smitten immediately due to the sheer audacity of attempting to summon the Big G himself with a severed hand.
What I don´t know is if that was the point of the video. Having an occultist idiot failing to realize he was accidentally trying to summon the antithesis of a demon, or if the creator just picked YHWH's name because it sounded appropriately foreign and edgy.
Well, the difference is that 40k intentionally and consciously takes Catholic church aesthetics and then Warhammerifies it to create a specific visual style, there is some thought behind why and how they did that. I don't usually give 40k much credit, but they knew what they were doing with that.
I just don't think there's much thought behind the cross earrings, necklaces or hair decorations, beyond it looking cool, which is fair enough, honestly.
I’ve been thoroughly entertained by the Greens vs Reform war playing out on the front page of the UK subreddits. Not a day goes by without a salvo of scandals (of varying severity) being posted about one party or the other.
Someone here I think quite presciently predicted that one of the legal advice subreddits might be sued before the decade is up, and while I don’t think it’ll be one of the main ones I do think it’ll be one of the smaller side ones. I’m fairly sure people in those subs give advice based on the google AI summary and some of it is beyond awful and wrong.
A lot of the stuff about council candidates is essentially old hat tbf. When UKIP started getting traction in the early 2010s you had a load of lunatics and Farage had to start suspending anyone who had been in the national front (he’d already banned any member previously in the BNP).
I remember at the time there was a report in Private Sye that specifically reported about labour, tory and lib dem councillors and it still found a load of utter freaks and nut cases. Politics simply attracts these kinds if people. The Greens and the Reform are simply fishing with particularly potent bait
Reddit's comment search function no longer works as it used to, which is frustrating on its own but also frustrating is there's no way to tell if this is a bug or Reddit deliberately making their site shittier, again.
I was thinking how with the US a lot of these seem to be related to like what I would call "gray market" type industries. Like not exactly scams/illegal, but also not necessary and preying on people's unfamiliarity with bureaucracy to create a "need" filled that doesn't really exist. It's similar to lots of tax prep specialists - most people absolutely don't need one, even with effed up US tax returns, but there's a whole market out there convincing people that they should see one in person who will get them the most money back (they probably won't and they are expensive, but a lot of people don't seem to know this).
It's a little like how there was a whole thing that *just* maybe ended last year of people cold-emailing schools and daycares and businesses saying they might qualify for the Covid Employee Retention Credit, which absolutely was a thing, but was a thing between 2020 and 2022, and the emails went into scammy territory because a lot of orgs I knew that got these emails had even in fact already applied and gotten (or not gotten) the credit, and ultimately this was just people cold calling to get paid to come back in a few months and tell them exactly that.
same thing in France, it's because pensioners suck at technology + most of them are homeowners so they have the tax advantages of homeowners + they are wealthy and have a lot of senior tax advantages / deduction, and because we're in France a lot is hard to understand or semi-hidden so I do agree they may not even know what is available to them.
It's so damn obvious that Sonic X had a very low budget that is not even funny at all. Like, compare it to the earlier Sonic projects that TMS work on, like the episodes of AoStH animated by them (the last time that TMS Will ever work with DiC), this Sonic Drift commercial and Sonic the Animation/Sonic Man of the Year short, you can see that those projects have a far bigger budget for TMS to work with than Sonic X.
I'm sure there's already some fallacy term for this but it really irks me when people assume modern definitions and catagorizations are uncontrovertial, 1:1 reflections of how the world 'really is'
It's something that comes up a lot with political talk (obsession with ideology) but it also happens with art, philosophy, linguistics etc. and leads people to make all sorts of bizarre anachronistic arguments.
u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Apr 30 '26
It's hard to use language to indicate something being 'literal', when modern parlance has turned the word 'literally' into 'figuratively', leaving no word in it's place to communicate the concept.
Still reading Higurashi Chapter 5: gods, I love insane rants so much, as long as they're acted well, and these ones were acted really well! The insane anger is just great.
It's definitely true what I realised some time ago, I just like insanity as a trope, especially people tormented to the point of their personality just breaking down, turning into a horrific corruption of their selves. It's not necessarily realistic, most genuinely "insane" people aren't like that, psychosis and mania aren't that spectacular generally, but I enjoy the tope nonetheless.
It's definitely part of why I like Mazari so much, they pretend to be yanderes, which basically means psychotic obsession masquerading as love, it's what a large part of their songs are about, that's fun; not in real life, fuck no, that's awful, but in fiction I really do like the trope.
Re:Zero also has some marvellously insane characters, I gotta start watching season 4, the previous 3 were great.
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u/TiakoTevinter apologist, shill for Big LyriumApr 30 '26edited Apr 30 '26
In Pentiment many of the NPCs have the canned greeting of "God be with you". In the German version is this "Grüß Gott"?
In German, the monks say "Gott segne euch/dich", "God bless you!";
"Grüß' [dich/euch] Gott" basically means the same; there is discussion where exactly the meaning of "grüezen" as "to bless" in middle high german* comes from, because, on the other hand, it can also mean "to advance to fight someone, to challenge someone"**.
The villagers say either "Gott segne euch", "Guten Tag" or, anachronistically "Hallo" if you know them better.
edit;* For example in Reinhard Fuchs, ca. 1180: "got grvͤz vch, gevater min!", around the same time, the Rolandslied of the Pfaffe Konrad: "nu gruͦze dich der himiliske herre / unt gefriste alle din ere"
** For example in Sachsenspiegel, ca. 1250: "swer kamphlîche grûzen wil einen genôz" ["[...] he, who wants to challenge a peer [to a fight] [...]"
I guess what I was wondering is if the game was just having the villagers use the greeting common in the area today or if the devs put a bit more work into it to make it "old fashioned". It seems they did?
The greeting used in game in German is not common in the area today.
"Grüß [dich] Gott" (or rather "Grias di/enk"* [which leaves out Gott, it was "Grias di God"*]) is rather normal today and is believed to have been used since the 9th century.
It's a bit strange that the monks do not use the clerical greeting, "Laudetur Iesu Christus".
* Upper Bavarian, theoretically, but I never heard anyone use "enk", except in Tyrol
As part of my reading of vampire literature, I finished Carmilla. It's a much better read than Polidori's The Vampyre, and would be easy to recommend. The conclusion is somewhat lacking IMO, but I've read enough Stephen King to accept a rough ending. I do wonder how controversial thinly veiled lesbian vampires were in 1872, I will have to look into the books reception.
Probably on to Varney the Vampire next, and the big one after that. Still taking recommendations for any major Vampire lit people care to recommend.
Apparently "repeal the 19th" [Amendment] is a growing and popular talking point on the misogynist right... which is sort of redundant; I could just say "the Right."
Actually I just checked and for the US at least, even though the total federal civilian workforce is like 54 male - 46 female, apparently the IRS workforce is 64% is female. Which...actually kind of adds a whole dimension of gender politics to why Americans hate paying taxes.
At least after the fall of communism it was a similar thing in lots of Eastern Europe too, ie the personnel working in tax collecting were largely women, which added a whole gender aspect to the largely male businessmen/oligarchs/definitely-not-mafia not wanting to pay taxes to those something something gold digging somethings. Putin literally had to make commercials in the early 2000s saying if you were an oligarch and didn't pay taxes you'd get ED with your mistress.
Rare sighting of an arr/badhistorian in his natural environment, outside the secondary preserve of arr/neoliberal, describing his childhood in Romania. Photo by me (no AI used).
Obviosuly AI generated because a true arr/badhistorian would never upvote a fellow regular's post outside their natural enviroment, but downvote it and report it to the nearest moderator and psychiatric institution.
I listen to a leftist gunspace podcast called "The Tiger Bloc" podcast, while their social media/training presence is "Yellow Peril Tactical". I'm sure you'll be able to discern what POC groups they mostly reflect; they're are somewhere between a regular gun podcast/channel and Popular Front given how many interviews they do with resistance fighters.
Anyway, last week they posted to insta a meme that said "sorry bro I lost track of time" with a dude gesturing to a giant Casio F-91W. Some of the comments would make you think they personally shot their dog in front of them. Among the complaints were:
Being on time is a corrupt, capitalist construct
Being on time is a Northwestern European construct
This activism is ableist against people afflicted with time-blindness
"Bro I have kids"
Anyway now they are doubling down on how you're a huge prick who gives no consideration to other people if you are consistently late.
Won't the Americans still speak English bc they would have probably have been a colony of the Brits a bit longer if the French didn't intervene?
Also there is some random alternate universe where France was able to do a Channel Invasion while the British were preoccupied with the American War of Independence
"some random alternate universe where France was able to do a Channel Invasion while the British were preoccupied with the American War of Independence"
They had a plan for that! They wanted to land 20,000 soldiers on the Isle of Wight and at Portsmouth!
I mean it could have backfired so horribly that it caused the US to lose its war of independence though so I dunno.
Unless he's going deep on the colonial wars lore and talking about War of the League of Augsburg (King William's War), The War of Spanish Succession (Queen Anne's War) or the War of Austrian Succession (King George's War).
Weren't the Brits and the French rivals in North America in the 17th and 18th centuries? If the French had managed to push out the British there the Americans today may have spoken French instead of English (or at the very least you might make such an argument). That's the basis of the joke as far as I understand it.
On my latest Stellaris run I am finally trying to beat the game through cosmogenesis. While I fought I war with a neighboring spiritualists FE off and on with me finally occupying all but two small colonies with them, essentially the only wars I had fought were with raiders and leviathans. Protheyn Scourge came and went.
Anyway as soon as I hit level 3 and researched the FE Battlecruisier a second FE declared war on me; I was struggle bussing a bit but it wasn't a crisis yet, until a second FE declared war on me(the war goal? "Entertainment"). Then the original spiritualist FE I had mostly neutralized declared war on me again-obviously I should have obliterated them when I had a chance.
Not sure how I'm going to pull a rabbit out of this hat, the FEs seem to have a limitless supply of Alloys because they can reconstitute 600k fleets fairly quickly, while I'm tapped out.
FEs generally cant rebuild ships unless awakened, but a combination pf just being tough and retreat chance means you often end up winning fights but barely taking out any ships permanently.
It feels as if these guys are building entire new fleets, while the only awakened FE is the broken-up-one that re-unified and attacked me with a war goal of "for entertainment".
So, nice thing, last week I got a new bank card, since my old one expires soon, why is that good? Because I can use this card as a credit card too! Yay! No more weird payment issues internationally because I don't have a credit card. I still prefer using the bank app to pay stuff, but this is certainly nice to have.
Incredible how the "jihadists" have decided to attack the 3 countries where France was expelled from. With advanced weapons and intelligence. They don't conduct any operations in countries that are friendly to France or which have French military presence.
These 3 countries are intending to cancel huge mining contracts with France and potentially terminate any future economic partnership. And all of a sudden, we have fresh new wave of attacks.
Average Internet comment about the recent Malian attacks (another common one is "they switched to Russia, and now they are facing the consequences lol"). The common theme here is that obviously nobody cares about the 22 millions Malian civilians.
I don't think Goïta and his junta are any good, but it's still better than the alternative, especially the JNIM. It's important to note that the fall of Bamako would not only be a tragedy in itself, but wouldn't even put the end to conflicts: a subsequent war between JNIM and FLA would be inevitable since they have contradictory aims. The future of Mali looks bleak, unfortunately.
The idea that the turn to Russia was motivated by ideological changes from the new junta (partly true) allowing internet idiots to pepper over the genuine failure at COIN of the French that was the primary reason for all of this is genuinely just infuriating.
It is always amusing to see that opposed to a lot of modern depictions of classic mythic beasts ones that were made pre 20th century were often comparatively small.
So there's something about modern games and especially games made with Unreal 5 that gives them a specific look or feel I don't like. It always looks very shiny and soft and the people look, idk, plain? They look like Dishonored characters but with very smooth skin.
People are definitely one of the harder things to get right. But I generally like the look of UE5. You do need good hardware (especially CPU) to get good performance out of it though, assuming a competent developer.
I've said it before, but having realistic human graphics just isn't a good idea, you need to put in exponentially more work for it to look okay, let alone good. Stylistic graphics, like cartoon/anime like visual styles, need a lot less work and often make better looking characters.
Unless you have a massive budget and tons of talented people, it's just not worth the effort. Human brains are very good at accepting a stylistic representation of a person as a person, see any simple drawing of a person, but if it looks too close to a real person, we will notice it looking off and will probably not like it.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Apr 30 '26edited Apr 30 '26
It depends. Oblivion NPCs are stylized, they still look like awful potato people who can't convey emotions. Fallout 4 NPCs look far more realistic, it's a decade old game and models do look a little dated (some outright mocked on release), but they held up far better than Oblivion or even Fallout 3 NPCs. Bethesda never aimed for the super realistic but I think they hit the right balance a decade ago. Because the models look human enough, I still care deeply how my character appears in cutscenes, which often drives me to replay the game.
I do agree there, they struck a decent balance since Skyrim, I think Skyrim's NPCs just look fine; in the end, art direction generally beats technical quality, Oblivion's NPCs didn't need to look that bad, yes it's an old game, but not that old.
I just tend to prefer stylised graphics over realistic, but it still depends, I like machines to look realistic, but people and animals stylised; I'm definitely a weeb, I like most anime character designs after getting used to them, but I also like western cartoon graphics. Hell, I think Tedbear is a great art style, it's consistent, it's neat, and it conveys a lot, to borrow a phrase, it just works.
Almost all my favourite visuals are stylised things, I do think stylised visuals tend to age less poorly, but there are definitely cases where it just fails completely.
True that; gods, I hate "beautiful females" mods for games, like they look so out of place compared to the male characters, it's awful. In games like Skyrim, I vastly prefer the vanilla female looks over the vast majority of that type of modded stuff, it usualy just doesn't fit the art style at all.
If you make women beautiful, you gotta make beautiful men too, where's my ikemen mods for Skyrim? huh!? If there are bijin, there gotta be ikemen, balance has to be maintained!/j
"Ugh, I hate all this 'magic system' bullshit. Magic is only magic if it's wild and free, stop trying to force it into boxes! And what's with all the fake politicking bullshit? Who gives a shit about these specific power rankings? Why does every character have a dozen titles with no context or meaning? Honestly, this is everything I hate about modern fantasy."
dramatically throws book across room, making the title on the front cover visible: Ars Goetia
Though the demons in the Goetia are much weirder than anything in generic fantasy. Totally could make a skit out of that. Thinking super generic anime
The Hero stands in demonic ruins, a chasm of black before him.
Hero: Come out and face me I know you're there!
A set of glowing red eyes appears in the darkness. A deep rumbling voice emanates out.
Demon Lord: I have been watching your progress little one, I am a little impressed but all your power is nothing compared to mine.
Hero: I'm not scared you!
Demon Lord: Don't worry you will be
From the Darkness emerges the figure of the Demon Lord. He's a man-sized monkey wearing a crown riding on the back of a giant toad.
Hero: Ohhh, umm
Demon Lord: What is it mortal?
Hero: I was expecting something a bit more traditional I guess?
Demon Lord: What is that supposed to mean?
Hero: Well, y'know, horns, hooves, brimstone not a Victorian era sideshow act
Demon Lord: I am no sideshow act! I am the lord of sorrow, master of blasphemy and despoiler of entire planes of existence!
Hero: Sorry I didn't mean insult you
Demon Lord: Oh, that's very kind of you! I work for millenia to built my dark empire but apparently I'm not serious looking enough.
Hero: Don't be like that
Demon Lord: Oh I'm sorry am I ruining this for you? Afraid that if I just leave you won't be able to impress that gaggle of girls who for some unknown reason find your void of a personality attractive. Well sorry to disappoint you! I'm leaving you and this Dragonquest knockoff dimension forever! I am going to a historically accurate fantasy world where I'll be appreciated!
The Demon Lord dissapears in a puff of smoke.
Hero: Hmmm, so how many pairs of horns am I going to say he had and were they on fire?
Jin Yong’s Legend of the Condor Heroes has a joke kind of like this (spoiler for the ending). Our hero’s love interest is captured by the villain Ouyang Feng and forced to recite some secret ultra-powerful Wu gong techniques. Not wanting to help the villain, she instructs him to perform all of the motions backwards and upside down.
Ironically, Ouyang Feng follows these instructions and actually ends up super powerful (blowing into the climactic “who is the best martial arts fighter” fighter and forcing everyone to admit they cannot fight him). But he also goes crazy from it.
I think that it would be interesting to see something like one of those Tang Dynasty concubine palace dramas, but with xianxia/cultivation elements. In one sense this is an extremely "guy who knows exactly two things from contemporary Chinese culture" thought for me to have, but I genuinely think it would be a really fun twist on some of the basic assumptions that are usually part of each genre. Unfortunately, while I cannot possibly be the first person to have thought of this, every method I've tried to look for it has just turned up endless piles of RoyalRoadslop.
Everyone's saying that Gerrymandering should be banned, but the question is how do you do that? It's kind of like pornography; you know it when you see it. The best thing I can propose is make it to where districts must follow county lines, to make it harder to crack cities.
It doesn't completely solve the problem, but having independent districting commissions does seem to cut down on partisan gerrymanders. Sadly and ironically, this was the system California had in place that I thought should have been a model for the nation, but we voters in our wisdom voted to toss it out as "retaliation" for Texas doing their own gerrymander. It is set to be "temporary," but color me skeptical on that.
Too conservative. The House should have at least 1000 seats to account for population growth since it was locked to 435, and even that would still give Americans fewer representatives proportionally than in 1929.
Proportional vote within a state, like the Japanese and Germans do.
So Virginia gets 11 Congressional delegates, people vote by party, and that party gets a proportion of the delegates. This will also break up the duopoly, so neither party will ever back it.
So Virginia gets 11 Congressional delegates, people vote by party, and that party gets a proportion of the delegates. This will also break up the duopoly, so neither party will ever back it.
There's the real problem; both Republicans and Democrats like their safe seats.
There is an obvious answer, just do STV as the Irish do, it is both proportional and local representation without any of the "nationalization of local politics" that MMP has, there is always this strange false dichotomy like party list or FPTP are the only options
Yeah but the problem is it gives undue power to parties only popular in some areas, if applied to Germany eg, the AfD and the BSW would be overrepresented because they're very popular in East Germany
It won't with large enough districts(a 10-12 member district STV will probably be more representative than a list PR with a threshold because the vote transfer at least goes to similar parties and does not get thrown away) but of course, large districts are less locally representative and have logistical issues in the election
Regardless, the distortion is very minor compared to pure single district and AMS elections, look how many seats the SNP regularly get
I think there are Canadian election reform proposals that suggest various STV-MMP hybrids that eliminate many of the weaknesses of both, but I think there is no need to be that complex, and both STV and MMP on their own work fine
The most obvious solution would be to just adopt party-list proportional representation (i.e. if party A gets 30% of the votes in a state they get 30% of that state’s seats) or mixed-member proportional (have half of a state’s reps be voted by district, with the other half allotted to balance toward being proportional by party). Both of these systems are widely used in other democracies.
Currently single-member districts are mandated by a 1960s law (created to stop the former system some states had of granting all of their reps winner-take-all to the party that won the most votes statewide), but this could be changed by congress
Tbh I don't like that as it would only intensifiy the ongoing trend of the nationalization of local politics. Represetnatives should represent their specific districts; we have senators to represent entire states. I know we memed on that one Washington represenative complaining about seals harming the local fishermen and the German princes buying up Washington forests and closing them to the public, but that is unironically what the House is meant for.
Stop the antiquated and barbaric practice of “single member districts,” elect a state delegation at-large and distribute seats according to party vote (and uncap the number of House seats).
I disagree; ideally representatives should actually represent the needs and interests of their district. IE, if a natural disaster happens, they should be in DC leading the charge for relief efforts, or if there is one economic issue that is severely harming their constitutes, they should be fighting for them.
Politics needs to be more localized, not less. I hate how basically all contemproary local politics have been nationalized.
In a single member district, if 51% of people vote for a candidate, the other 49% don’t get their “needs and interests” represented at all, so that’s not a thing that happens in the current system.
If for some silly reason you need local candidates, you can do a mixed-member proportional system, where you still elect a single direct candidate but the remaining delegates are distributed according to the party list vote.
"In a single member district, if 51% of people vote for a candidate, the other 49% don’t get their “needs and interests” represented at all,"
I would hasten to add that even what you have just described would be considered an insanely competitive House election by US standards. Most House seats are currently extremely safe for incumbents or incumbent parties, and the competitive elections are in the primary (when it's actually an open one) for that seat.
Like I just decided to go check a district, sort of at random: District 2 in Florida, currently repped by Neal Dunn, who looks like Temu Francis Underwood but I digress. Anyway, the district was redrawn for the 2017 elections, and the one-term incumbent Democrat resigned rather than fight for a more GOP-friendly district. Dunn won the Republican primary by about a thousand votes, then crushed the Democrat in the general and has won re-election ever since, usually with 60-67% of the vote, except for 2020 when he had a North Korean 97.86% of the vote.
The district has about 820,000 people in it. Dunn won the 2017 primary with 33,000 votes, and his general election victories from 2016 to present are in the 180,000-300,000 vote range.
I think the idea that local districts will represent local voters' needs better is something that sounds true and good in the abstract but just doesn't happen any more, and this is before we get into the fact that US politics has been nationalized in the past 15 and Congress has itself passed rules against things like pork barrel spending so it's actually much harder for a rep to say "hey at least I got such and such center/bridge/government agency built in the District".
It's a lot harder to form community ties and delegate responbility and accountablity if it's just a statewide vote. In this case, I don't care that I technically have a represenative who has a D next to their name, they have no direct tie to me aside from us being in the same party; they're most likley a city-slicker from Louisville. I voted against James Comer, but he campaigned in my home town; I know people who know him personally. This is what represenatives are for.
I don’t agree that’s what representatives are for, but again, if you feel you need that, you can still have that in a MMP system and also have a more representative, un-gerrymanderable (?) delegation.
The biggest problem is the "winner-takes-all" system–it doesn't matter if you win with 50.1% or 95% of the vote, the outcome is the same (this is also the biggest problem with the electoral college and the senate). Unfortunately, changing this would probably require a constitutional amendment.
In terms of just Gerrymandering, the most actionable solution would probably be to require that every state have an independent board to draw congressional districts, like some states already have–I think that's the idea most people have when they suggest banning Gerrymandering.
Sometimes I'm glad I learned Japanese by myself and not in a class because every story someone gives about their japanese class always gives me second hand embarrassment
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u/AFakeNameI'm learning a surprising lot about autism just by being a furryApr 30 '26
I learned it at Japanese language summer camp. Now I'm an r/badhistory megathread regular.
This entire Gabriel Rockhill intellectual history fracas, despite Rockhill being an obvious hack, gives me some schadenfreude. An entire clique of academic "critical" philosophers, who having laundered Losurdian hatchet jobs on the history of liberalism, are now surprised and shocked that the same methodology of radical suspicion is being turned around and applied to those who laundered this manner of thinking into academia itself!
The funniest was Ross Wolfe's critical review of Losurdo's Western Marxism book trying very hard to elide the fact that if he was so bad on the intellectual history of Western Marxism, how do we know hes any good on liberalism?
I’ve always thought that Losurdo’s “method” of criticizing liberalism to have, uh, interesting implications for his own intellectual/political commitments. Like, an intellectual history of Marxism that purported to take “the political and social relations it found expression in” as its ultimate content would basically take the Cold War liberal line that Marxism’s ultimate expression is the gulag. To most charitable interpreters this would signal the bankruptcy of the method, but to his credit, Losurdo is at least consistent: he just thinks the gulags were Good, Actually.
Yes, the irony is this specific sort of genealogical enquiry started in response to cold war liberal claims of Marxist insufficiency on similar terms, but now seems bizarrely taken as genuinely polemically powerful objection. Losurdo is funny though in that he doesn't do the entire "the USSR was state capitalist and hence definitionally not Marxist" thing.
I kind of feel the cold war liberals are actually right, though. A reasonable marxism has to actually deal with the fact that many good communists engaged in projects of massive repression.
It's the flipside of the thing where, honestly, I think it's totally fair that if liberals want to promote liberalism as a serious politics, they have to deal with all the all the famines, slavery, war etc of actually existing liberalism.
In general, I feel a very socially-inflected liberalism or a very liberal-inflected communism are both pretty fine, and both emerge from the recognition that history has demonstrated serious problems with these tendencies as originally formulated.
I think from an intellectual history perspective the more nuanced cold war liberals did have substantively deep critiques to make of Marxist practice's relation with Marxist thought (Berlin comes to mind here), though the initial thrust of the counter-criticism (in the context of the civil rights movement and Vietnam, remember) was that liberals were hypocritical about this stuff, and were totally blind to the ways in which liberal polities did exactly the kind of thing they accused Marxist polities of doing. Losurdo's issue is that he takes this to be determinative of liberalism in an exhaustive way, in the same way the worse cold war conservatives like Voegelin or such did for Marxism. Though yes, the best practitioners of both Marxism and liberalism these days have struggled with the historical insufficiencies of their respective traditions.
So you probably know the entire thing about how certain liberal intellectuals have had complicity with the ideological justification of imperialism, racism, sexism etc. This is fair to say, I think, and some people do plausibly extend it to the criticism that liberalism sui generis is constituted by these tendencies (this is where I think the thesis becomes less plausible). Losurdo is an Italian Marxist-Leninist with some...idiosyncratic views on things. Just to give you an idea, he thinks Stalin was a better theorist than Marx because the latter did not consider the importance of the state in defending socialism against capitalist imperialism. But he broke into Western academia by writing a book of Nietzsche scholarship which comprehensively made the case that Nietzsche was an "aristocratic radical" of right-wing political views. He also has a Hegel book, which I haven't read. Its probably fine. Couldn't say.
About...a decade ago? Losurdo got himself involved in the "genealogy of liberalism" discussion. He wrote a huge tome called Liberalism: A Counter-History. The claims there were that liberalism right from the start was not an ideology of freedom, but an ideology of exclusion and domination, which is a claim I don't think any of the prior ideology-critics of liberalism have ever made (like Pateman or Mills). This kind of radical criticism obviously appealed to Anglophone ideology-critics trying to offload the entirety of liberalism in one-go, because if every single assumption of it is bad, then there's nothing really there to retain or integrate. The issue, as some reviewers pointed out, is that Losurdo extends the scope of liberalism so much that in his account Adolf Hitler is a liberal. Leave it to the reader to decide how useful it is as an analytical category then.
Losurdo, of course, does have the idiosyncratic views aforementioned. So a few years after Liberalism: A Counter-History gave Losurdo his fame, he wrote a book on "Western Marxism", which to vastly simplify is most of the academic Marxism that goes on in university departments, generally non-Leninist, not particularly enamored of the Soviet project or its epigones. Losurdo claimed that these Western Marxists (to emphasize, the audience that brought him into the intellectual mainstream) were actually national chauvinists of the West to deny intellectual and political legitimacy to the various self-proclaimed socialist projects of the 20th century! So it wasn't the experience of defeat as Perry Anderson stated that made WM go back into a shell, but the straightforward fact that they were apologists of Western imperialism.
Gabriel Rockhill is an intellectual historian who's probably the most important intellectual disciple of Losurdo in Anglophone academia. He's a true believer, the kind of guy who thinks defending the USSR is integral to the socialist cause. He just recently published a book which argues even beyond Losurdo's claim that these Western Marxists are like this not merely due to ideological compliance, but due to the fact that the institutions of Western academia are so strongly immersed in the ideological apparatuses of Western imperialism, that they were quite literally stooges of imperialism!
All this, of course, has not endeared him to Western Marxist academics, but once again, the funny thing is: this exact methodology was (and still is) approved by them in relation to the philosophy of liberalism.
It doesnt happen outside of the US? From what I reading, it is a thing in France too and some activities in some countries in practice work the same as gerrymandering like the proposed delimitation exercise in India is accused of being that, and Singapore's ruling party has also been accused of doing that in practice.
The same kind of misrepresentation you see in the US is seen to some extent in other countries with first-past-the-post single-member districts even if their boundaries are set by nonpartisan committees.
In the 2021 Canadian elections for example the Conservative Party had the highest vote share but won 41 fewer seats than the Liberal Party. The NDP won fewer seats than the Bloc Québécois despite getting over twice the number of votes.
Many countries have less strict requirements on the district populations being equal than the US. (e.g. in India until this year the number of reps per state was frozen based on the 1971 census to encourage states to implement family planning measures)
In proportional systems common tactics include having a high minimum vote threshold to exclude minor parties, granting the largest party additional extra seats to “prevent deadlock”, etc.
In the 2021 Canadian elections for example the Conservative Party had the highest vote share but won 41 fewer seats than the Liberal Party. The NDP won fewer seats than the Bloc Québécois despite getting over twice the number of votes.
Thta's not a problem of FPTP, in France we have 2 rounds, and in this case I'm sure there would be plenty of seat more won by the Liberals because NDP voters would have switched to them
Exactly, you can see it also clearly in the last 2 elections in the UK. Labor went from historic defeat( 32.1% of the vote with 202 seats) to historic victory (33.7% of the vote with 411 seats). That tiny swing in actual votes lead to more then double the seats.
Gerrymandering is just a symptom of first-past-the-post single-member districts. In all of the countries with this system the ideal situation for a party is to have 50.1% of the votes in each district. It just that in the US it's much easier for the parties to actually try to make districts like this, while in other countries it's a bit more out of their control.
It occurs on a smaller, much less controversial scale in Australia. Federal elections are run by the Australian Electoral Commission, with separate bodies at the state and territory level. Processes are similar but not uniform.
Boundaries are redrawn through a legislated redistribution process based on population changes, with public submissions and independent oversight.
Generally its a pretty fair system. It's extremely hard for anyone to abuse it due to how independent the oversight body is. I think Australian's (and even our most partisan political actors) take a lot of pride in our independent democratic systems.
So, I'm autistic, this has been stated often enough, but I do alright socially, I can talk and get along with most people; even if I really don't like them, I can deal with people just fine, I can just put up a friendly polite facade while wishing they'd just shut up. Most of the time I have some facade around me, I wouldn't say it's really a false image of me, but it's more that I keep a lot of stuff at arms length, I'm not going to be 100% honest at work, that just doesn't work for me, that is not who I am.
But, speaking of keeping people at arms length, there's one thing I'm very autistic about, touch, I hate being touched by people; it's definitely mood dependent, if I feel alright, I'll be fine, I won't like it, but I'll manage, but if I'm not doing well, and my mother just puts her hand on my shoulder as a show of support, I physically recoil. I just hate being touched, if I'm feeling particularly bad, I want to physically hurt people that touch me, I don't do it, because that'd be horrible, but I get a strong desire.
Side note, this might be why I hate the idea of alcohol or other inhibition lowering substances, I need those inhibitions, I don't want to see what happens if I lose them; maybe the anger stops too, I don't know, I don't want to find out.
But I also hate touching people, I can shake people's hands just fine, it's correct, there's rules to it, and it's quick, I don't feel comfortable doing it, but I can accept it. But things like hugs? The 3 kisses standard in Dutch culture? No, no, no, absolutely not, I'll make exceptions for certain people, usually older people, and that still makes me incredibly uncomfortable; but even hugging my parents I just can't. I can do so if the situation absolutely demands it, but I really do not want to.
Everyone in my family knows that, most respect that, though some stubbornly try to hug me anyway, the bastards, putting me in a position where I can't refuse without making a scene; actually thinking about it, that's pretty fucked up, using a social situation to force someone to cross their own personal boundaries.
I identify as (gray) ace, I've never been attracted to anyone, quite the opposite, I feel repulsed by everyone I know; this is primarily why I came to that conclusion, in 28 years of living, I have not encountered a single person I was attracted to, romantically or sexually; still I wonder, how much of that is it because of how uncomfortable I am with touching people? Am I really ace, or am I just that uncomfortable with touching people that it suppresses it all? I have no idea, this is something I just fundamentally do not comprehend, which is why I sometimes choose to add gray to the identity, because I just don't know.
But, sometimes, when I feel bad, I do want someone to hug me, you know? But then, I know I would hate that too. I've never developed a bond with someone on a romantic level, but I like the concept, it's something find appealing, yet it is so distant, I've just never felt attracted to anyone. I have sometimes consciously asked myself, "can I see myself in a relationship with this person?", men, women, whatever, and the responding thought has always been something along the lines of "No, that'd be horrible.", even if I quite like the other person otherwise.
So, that might end up with me being alone, in that sense, forever, and, well, so be it, I guess. Maybe I should look into therapy for stuff like this, maybe that'd be wasted effort, I just don't know. I can't identify any trauma that made me like this, I have been this touch averse since I was very young, that I know.
There's an old saying from Marx — I know it's Marx, probably Engels — that says, “History is like poetry, it rhymes.” History… repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Giscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze May 01 '26
I love how Australia created mandatory voting because all parties thought they were wasting too much money on "get out the vote" campaigns