Okay, but I want to put this in every classroom

Indeed. Complaints about redistricting are invalid. Republicans did it everywhere and invalidated a Constitutional Amendment so they could do it on explicitly racial lines.

There are two choices: use the same levers of power as Republicans do, or let them win. There is no "principled" opposition.

Republican voters are free to pressure their reps into supporting proportional representation to end gerrymandering and improve the visibility of non-majority voters. Weirdly they never do this.

”How is this legal” is a really funny thing for a republican to say in 2026

(I say all of this recognizing that in a denationalized local political environment, my choice of political parties would be “good governance sewer socialists with one to four really stupid ideas that will make things worse” and “ideologically pro-corruption centrists”)

It’s actually really bad to live in a state with no local competitive general elections and bad for the Democratic Party ultimately, since it produces shitty results and shitty politicians, but like… what can you do? We can’t unilaterally disarm at the national level, so we have to crush them.

the only redistricting energy i will accept, at this time

But the only way you can have peace with people like the Republican Party is if they fear the costs of gerrymandering war more than they desire victory, so first we must do the most hackish possible maps known to man until they beg for a nationwide ban.

Look, on gerrymandering: there is a peace deal that Republicans can have literally any time they want. Just ban partisan gerrymanders nationwide. If the GOP got their folks on board it’d pass by acclamation in both chambers.

The problem is that they hold SCOTUS.

If this isn't your baseline state of existence you've got no business being in the admin that's going to be inaugurated at 1200 20 Jan 29

One big political divide is between people who believe germs cause disease and people who believe Those People cause disease. It was pretty evident right away during the pandemic

So uh… you ever cover the urban voters in Wisconsin or North Carolina these past couple years? How they might be angry and upset at the Orban-esque cracking and packing they didn’t even get the chance to weigh in on?

I genuinely don’t recall reporting like this, focused on angry Dems in Houston or Austin, when this all kicked off in Texas (without any ballot initiative or referendum).

A reminder while Republicans bitch about Dems finishing the redistricting fight they started: they have full control of gov’t— they can pass a law banning gerrymandering any time they want. They won’t. Republicans aren’t mad gerrymandering exists; they’re mad that they’re not the only ones using it.

No! Wait! “Conservative Commentators Defended Gerrymandering, Until It Happened To Them.”

The article is just comparing statements exclusively from NoVa pundits with “who lives in a four bedroom home in Arlington” asides.

Every now and then I like to imagine bizarro world NYT headlines on this moment. “Conservatives Once Defended Gerrymandering, Until Virginia”

The implicit media consensus is that urban voters should not be able to overrule rural voters, but that rural voters should be able to overrule urban voters, an assumption so axiomatic and unquestionable that nobody even understands they're making it.

Linda Y posting about a marginal tax on second homes worth over $5M in NYC as if it's the second coming of a Stalinist purge really clarifies what's going on in those group chats

Agreed. We should not gerrymander as revenge. That implies that we wouldn’t gerrymander if they voluntarily didn’t. We should gerrymander because it’s good when Democrats win elections, and if there’s a danger of revenge, we can just congressionally ban gerrymandering nationwide. With our majority.

the question, the same one asked by Jimmy Carter before he lost 44 states, is how the hell to pivot while you're still in power and everything bad is still Your Fault

I don't really approve of gerrymandering, but our wise and enlightened Supreme Court has said it was totally in accordance with the law and custom Constitution, and who am I argue with the Sainted John Roberts? 🥺🥺🥺

The appeal of alt medicine isn’t ’capitalism alienated us from healing ‘ or whatever, it’s that it has no evidential foundation so it can make claims like ‘ouchie needles are bad for you but yummy milkshakes are good’

The ‘public trust crisis’ in science largely comes down to ‘scientists tell people things they don’t want to hear’. Applies equally to climate science

IME a general purpose AI model is best when you can use project folders system prompts and skills to customize it and your workflow. Unfortunately we, and our corporate overlords, have been sold it as an out of the box experience.

Notably, this incident does not correspond to any of the videos posted online by SOUTHCOM.

Far be it from me to defend my stupid fucking profession, but I am gonna note that every lawyer on this site is calling this guy a putz.

This specific stupidity really feels more like a specific kind of FedSoc law prof nonsense.

What is the "Mamdani Act"? GOP bill would ban socialists, Marxists from US Chip Roy's "Mamdani Act" would make socialists, Marxists and Islamists deportable and inadmissible to the United States.

As a liberal, I am against this kind of thing.

I hate that this would work on me.