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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Yet another terrible thing about prisons - they target policing in urban areas where the population is high and tends to vote Democrat. Once arrested, tried, and convicted, that person is sent to a prison in the middle of nowhere - and now counts toward the population of that area, but cannot vote themselves.

    Population is used to determine how congressional districts get allocated, and they haven’t increased the number of congressional seats in decades. So as the prison population rises, they are gaining seats at the expense of urban areas losing the same number.

    It’s literally an updated version of the 3/5 compromise.






  • Because they know a lot of people agree with them on individual policy ideas, but if they claim/accept that label in particular, it will alienate the low information people they target.

    English only education
    Immigration quotas
    Policing policy and methods
    Incarceration
    Tons of other things

    All of these have racial implications, and a huge swath of “middle America” will buy into specific stances. Their MO is to get them agreeing on anything, and then gradually ramp up the rhetoric to get them to more extreme views.

    As a normal looking white guy, it is shocking the number of times people will say borderline racist things to feel you out. Depending on your immediate response, they will either cloak themselves in whatever plausible deniability they built into their initial comment and stop talking to you, or they’ll continue with gradual escalation until you match them, at which point they know they’ve found a kindred spirit.




  • This is a good idea in theory, but it doesn’t really hold up when you look at what we ask reps to do.

    They have to maintain two households, basically, and have a lot of travel expenses.

    State legislatures are a great sandbox to review how pay impacts the folks who can afford to hold seats. Turns out, the less they’re paid, the more likely they are to be independently wealthy. You will never “show them what it’s like” to be poor by paying them less - you’ll just ensure that actual normal people can’t afford to take the position.

    I think it was Maine that had a fully volunteer legislature? And had the richest legislature ever.

    Ultimately, this is another problem of America trying to retain an agricultural mindset (part time legislature so that everyone could go home to farm), despite the world having changed.