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It's another way of pointing out people get hung up on state differences when the real divide in the US is urban and rural. LA has far more in common with Houston or Nashville than it does with the Central Valley.
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Apr 3, 2024 17:05
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Grand Fromage posted:It's another way of pointing out people get hung up on state differences when the real divide in the US is urban and rural. LA has far more in common with Houston or Nashville than it does with the Central Valley. This is true. Red state blue state these days is really is the states urban or rural/exurban population larger or in Florida Texas and Ohio’s case is the rural population big enough and the cities margins close enough that overwhelming 90% Republican dominance in the rural areas overpowers the 70% democratic cities with notable exception of Vermont
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Apr 3, 2024 17:15
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:This is true. Red state blue state these days is really is the states urban or rural/exurban population larger or in Florida Texas and Ohio’s case is the rural population big enough and the cities margins close enough that overwhelming 90% Republican dominance in the rural areas overpowers the 70% democratic cities with notable exception of Vermont Many "red" states are states that by happenstance were Republican controlled when the age of computerized gerrymandering really got into swing, and they've managed to lock in minority rule ever since. There's pretty much a straight line from gerrymandered state legislatures to people having to stand in line for 8 hours to cast a ballot so yes even the presidential elections are affected.
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Apr 3, 2024 17:53
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Meaningless without percentages, since there are more people in California than there are in Texas, more people in Texas than there are in New York, etc etc. The only place the pattern doesn't hold is New York (8.3 million) vs Ohio (11.76 million). No it means exactly what it means, there are a shitload of people voting the other way in states that otherwise show as solid one color who are only circumstantially unrepresented in the current balance. You can't just disregard millions of people existing indefinitely. A little shifting around could wildly change all your preconceived expectations. But also you've pulled the wrong numbers for New York. There are around 8 million people living in the city proper, and then 19 million people living in the state (and to confuse things, 20 million in the NYC metro area, much of which is not in the state).
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Apr 3, 2024 18:09
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SlothfulCobra posted:No it means exactly what it means, there are a shitload of people voting the other way in states that otherwise show as solid one color who are only circumstantially unrepresented in the current balance. You can't just disregard millions of people existing indefinitely. A little shifting around could wildly change all your preconceived expectations. Of course, the rest of NY state isn't actually rural, it's a bunch of smaller cities and their suburbs and only then you get to rural stuff.
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Apr 3, 2024 18:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:No it means exactly what it means, there are a shitload of people voting the other way in states that otherwise show as solid one color who are only circumstantially unrepresented in the current balance. You can't just disregard millions of people existing indefinitely. A little shifting around could wildly change all your preconceived expectations. I don't want a solid colour, I want a pie graph or similar. Like yeah, there are a shitload of people voting the other way in states where there are a shitload of people because that's how it works. It's like saying "did you know that more people in Greater London voted for Brexit than did in North East England? makes you think!" Greater London has a population of ~5.4 million compared to NE England's ~1.9 million. ~1.5 million voted Leave in London compared to ~778 thousand in NE England. The Leave percentages were 40.07% and 58.04% respectively, which is a much more meaningful metric Gravitas Shortfall fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Apr 3, 2024 |
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Apr 3, 2024 18:41
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Absolute numbers are still relevant when Londoners claim that all Brexit voters are thicko Northerners (or conversely when Brexiteers claim that all Londoners are metropolitan elites).
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Apr 3, 2024 18:47
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:I don't want a solid colour, I want a pie graph or similar. Like yeah, there are a shitload of people voting the other way in states where there are a shitload of people because that's how it works. It's like saying "did you know that more people in Greater London voted for Brexit than did in North East England? makes you think!" It does make you think though. In the US, there's a real phenomenon where people tend to look at a map and see e.g. state is red = irredeemable shithole full of chuds (or vice versa). The whole point of that raw numbers view is: if you're a chud in Texas and you think CA is a commie hellhole where you dare not tread, you're ignoring that there are actually more chuds total in that state than in your own.
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Apr 3, 2024 18:50
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Family Values posted:Many "red" states are states that by happenstance were Republican controlled when the age of computerized gerrymandering really got into swing, and they've managed to lock in minority rule ever since. There's pretty much a straight line from gerrymandered state legislatures to people having to stand in line for 8 hours to cast a ballot so yes even the presidential elections are affected. Cope
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Apr 3, 2024 18:53
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alnilam posted:It does make you think though. In the US, there's a real phenomenon where people tend to look at a map and see e.g. state is red = irredeemable shithole full of chuds (or vice versa). The whole point of that raw numbers view is: if you're a chud in Texas and you think CA is a commie hellhole where you dare not tread, you're ignoring that there are actually more chuds total in that state than in your own. Yeah, those block colours are misleading for sure. I think heat-map style maps are more useful in that regard, since it tells a more nuanced story.
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Apr 3, 2024 18:53
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:I don't want a solid colour, I want a pie graph or similar. Like yeah, there are a shitload of people voting the other way in states where there are a shitload of people because that's how it works. It's like saying "did you know that more people in Greater London voted for Brexit than did in North East England? makes you think!" this is the conceit behind https://purplestatesofamerica.org/ with diverging color ramps and cartogram-esque bubble plots even
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Apr 3, 2024 18:56
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alnilam posted:It does make you think though. In the US, there's a real phenomenon where people tend to look at a map and see e.g. state is red = irredeemable shithole full of chuds (or vice versa). The whole point of that raw numbers view is: if you're a chud in Texas and you think CA is a commie hellhole where you dare not tread, you're ignoring that there are actually more chuds total in that state than in your own. That's not how it works, though... You could also argue that there are, let's say, more native English speakers living in China than in Wyoming, therefore English would be more useful to you in China than in Wyoming. People don't care about the abstract fact that there are millions of people of a certain persuasion distributed over a given area, they care that in their daily activities they are more likely to encounter a liberal or a conservative, and how it colors local culture and materially affects their life. The problem of a false political binary would be solved by a simple color gradient.
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Apr 3, 2024 18:57
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The problem would also be solved by kicking Texas out of the union.
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Apr 3, 2024 19:01
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the notion of a false political binary could also be overcome through some sort of great proletarian cultural revolution. but, sure, you could also try some different normalization schema or a bivariate color map or something
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Apr 3, 2024 19:04
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steinrokkan posted:That's not how it works, though... You could also argue that there are, let's say, more native English speakers living in China than in Wyoming, therefore English would be more useful to you in China than in Wyoming. People don't care about the abstract fact that there are millions of people of a certain persuasion distributed over a given area, they care that in their daily activities they are more likely to encounter a liberal or a conservative, and how it colors local culture and materially affects their life. Yeah, I really don't think it's a very interesting observation that an arbitrary number of people voted x, despite a certain area being known as y. That's always going to be the case if the population of a state is large enough, that's how numbers work. Modern-day California leans Democratic to an extreme degree, and far more than it used to. That's the reality regardless of just how many millions of people voted Republican in the country's largest state. A more interesting angle to me would be to examine just why the GOP has been unable to restore the balance, despite California suffering from serious long-term problems, including a declining population due to domestic migration.
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Apr 3, 2024 19:11
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The "more Democrat voters in Texas than New York etc" point is meaningful specifically to talk about how much first-past-the-post and the electoral college render huge populations irrelevant to the outcome. The idea isn't just to talk about how individual states are more nuanced than a hypothetical person might think (for which percentages are more meaningful, yes) but to look at weird large discontinuities in our election systems. Ditocoaf fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Apr 3, 2024 |
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Apr 3, 2024 19:17
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:I don't want a solid colour, I want a pie graph or similar. Like yeah, there are a shitload of people voting the other way in states where there are a shitload of people because that's how it works. It's like saying "did you know that more people in Greater London voted for Brexit than did in North East England? makes you think!" When you think of a Trump supporter and fail to imagine someone from California, that's a mistake. There are a ton of Trump supporters in California. Just because it's not majority Trump supporting does not mean that there aren't more Trump supporters there than live in half the individual states that were majority for Trump. This is meaningful to keep in mind because we've divided up the country into very unequal subdivisions that are nevertheless thought of as equal in some ways. That can play tricks with our perception that this thought exercise is an interesting way of overcoming. In the unit of Texas-California, if you think of a "normal" Trump supporter, they're probably Californian. And yes, that is just because of how huge California is. That's the point of the exercise. To make you think about the unintuitive implications of having subdivisions with very different sizes.
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Apr 3, 2024 19:22
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Ditocoaf posted:The "more Democrat voters in Texas than New York etc" point is meaningful specifically to talk about how much first-past-the-post and the electoral college render huge populations irrelevant to the outcome. It's a really dumb system, especially for presidential elections, but it works in both directions, it's winner takes all regardless of who the winner is. That's why you can never get rid of first-past-the-post once it's been instituted, it ultimately benefits both parties, who therefore have no incentive to abolish it.
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Apr 3, 2024 19:24
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Tree Goat posted:this is the conceit behind  Probably still misleading in another way though, that it shows geographical size rather than population
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Apr 3, 2024 19:25
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mobby_6kl posted:Thanks. that's why you gotta hit the "population" radio button and it makes a kind of cartogram thing
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Apr 3, 2024 19:26
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Meaningless without percentages, since there are more people in California than there are in Texas, more people in Texas than there are in New York, etc etc. The only place the pattern doesn't hold is New York (8.3 million) vs Ohio (11.76 million). And again, this is based on a civil war map, not electoral politics, and the former absolutely does not have to match the latter. The right owns the organized and "legitimate" purveyors of violence, which means they can dominate even as a minority, and likely convert "moderates" to their side with promises of protection/"law and order".
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Apr 3, 2024 19:39
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Phlegmish posted:A more interesting angle to me would be to examine just why the GOP has been unable to restore the balance, despite California suffering from serious long-term problems, including a declining population due to domestic migration. Well for the Republicans, they generally seem uninterested in solving problems. Especially these days, the party mainly has been trying to hammer down on playing to its strongest supporters rather than finding issues with broader appeal. When the party hammers down on the "culture war" angles, it often absolves it from any promises to actually do anything in particular, just it vaguely hopes to make the people that you don't like suffer. Also on a lot of California's actual problems, the California Democrats often tend to lean fairly conservative anyways, so there's not as much room for California Republicans to outflank them even if they were in the mood to make big promises for real action.
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Apr 3, 2024 20:10
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Texas and California are the same, says person who lives in a flyover state. New People's Army has like, 12 people in it. Whoever created this has no idea how distance works in a geopolitical sense. Can you imagine Nevada like that not being incorporated into the New California Republic?
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Apr 3, 2024 20:24
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Meaningless without percentages, since there are more people in California than there are in Texas, more people in Texas than there are in New York, etc etc. The only place the pattern doesn't hold is New York (8.3 million) vs Ohio (11.76 million). It’s … really not meaningless. It’s not comparing Wyoming to California, it’s comparing very large and roughly similarly sized states. Dismissing a state as "red" or "blue" vaguely makes sense for the electoral college (although even then not really, e.g.: WVa, Florida, Nevada) but it’s completely nonsense in terms of saying the US is geographically polarized. I mean it has regional differences, but not even remotely to the extent that an electoral college map shows. There’s no "north versus south" 1860s style polarization, but as others have said a rural vs city - and even then within rural or within city there are very substantial fractions leaning towards D/RTrump/RTraditional.
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Apr 3, 2024 21:06
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SlothfulCobra posted:My theory has been that they very consciously don't want to tap into specifics of current political alignment, which is why the factions don't really make that much sense on those grounds. It looks like it's gonna be every modern zombie movie, sans zombies.
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Apr 3, 2024 21:36
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If California and Texas both seceded it would make sense to form a military alliance to prevent re-annexation by the USA even if they're governments had wildly different political ideologies. Like, a 20XX California and Texas are going to have way more in common with each other than say, 1942 USA and USSR.
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Apr 3, 2024 22:03
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Jehde posted:Guess the map is dumb. Yes. I thought this was something the thread had Decided upon, though upon reflection this may have been like 6 years ago. Anyway, include the label as a spoiler. Everyone wins.
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Apr 3, 2024 22:26
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Except it's literally not everyone wins, because some people enjoy the existence of the guessing game, and the guess game doesn't happen when there's a spoiler. The actual everyone wins is indeed "always just post the correct answer within a few posts."
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Apr 3, 2024 22:41
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alnilam posted:It does make you think though. In the US, there's a real phenomenon where people tend to look at a map and see e.g. state is red = irredeemable shithole full of chuds (or vice versa). The whole point of that raw numbers view is: if you're a chud in Texas and you think CA is a commie hellhole where you dare not tread, you're ignoring that there are actually more chuds total in that state than in your own. This happens most often in terms of whether you want to move there/live there, and in those terms, the absolute red/blue alignment of a state is relevant. It doesn't matter how much your neighbors agree with you or respect you if the state government is implementing policy hostile to you. Zesty posted:
and most of those 12 people are probably KKK members, mormons, or both. why are they calling themselves something as commie-sounding as new peoples army?
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Apr 3, 2024 22:46
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Might as well throw the map I've been looking at lately into the mix.  Which isn't really that controversial on its own, but I've been looking at it as part of this 
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Apr 3, 2024 22:50
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Mister Olympus posted:This happens most often in terms of whether you want to move there/live there, and in those terms, the absolute red/blue alignment of a state is relevant. It doesn't matter how much your neighbors agree with you or respect you if the state government is implementing policy hostile to you. Eh, that same area also has Seattle and Portland which are by far the overwhelming bulk of the population. The rest of the New People's Army is very sparsely populated. The entire West Coast being one country would be way more likely, where you often have literal mountain ranges separating the red and blue areas.
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Apr 3, 2024 22:53
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Mister Olympus posted:and most of those 12 people are probably KKK members, mormons, or both. why are they calling themselves something as commie-sounding as new peoples army? Both? I had assumed the Protestant supremacist KKK would be extremely hostile to Mormonism.
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Apr 3, 2024 23:06
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Mormonism is racist but in a different way to the KKK. They've even technically allowed Black people from 1978. Also the Mormon secession from the United States was even more short-lived than the CSA.
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Apr 3, 2024 23:14
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Eiba posted:When you think of a Trump supporter and fail to imagine someone from California, that's a mistake. There are a ton of Trump supporters in California. Just because it's not majority Trump supporting does not mean that there aren't more Trump supporters there than live in half the individual states that were majority for Trump. yeah but when people talk generically about "Trump supporters" they don't mean people from Alabama or Mississippi specifically. they mean people from the whole region
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Apr 3, 2024 23:29
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https://twitter.com/mikesimonsen/status/1775683012598079639 Eclipse path is obvious but I wonder if WrestleMania (Philly) is also visible.
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Apr 4, 2024 04:51
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FreudianSlippers posted:Also the Mormon secession from the United States was even more short-lived than the CSA.
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Apr 4, 2024 06:14
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The modern US security services is apparently full of Mormons (due to their lifestyles being very compatible with getting security clearances) But then again wouldn't that make them more susceptible to honey traps? No one would be surprised if James Bond got caught in a gay orgy, but a Mormon family man? Latter makes for better blackmail material.
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Apr 4, 2024 08:10
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Perhaps that would be better for what the rules SHOULD be for getting security clearances, but that's not the same as what the rules ARE for security clearances, which is "Don't smoke weed."
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Apr 4, 2024 08:20
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reignonyourparade posted:Perhaps that would be better for what the rules SHOULD be for getting security clearances, but that's not the same as what the rules ARE for security clearances, which is "Don't smoke weed." They changed this fairly recently, so that the security clearance is "you can't smoke weed from now on, and you must have not smoked within the last 90 days before the interview," rather than "you can never have smoked weed at any point in your life". Which is still kind of restrictive considering how ubiquitous marijuana is, but it's not completely out of touch with reality. E: Apparently it's 12 months for the FBI, 3 months for the CIA and most other (all other?) government agencies with security clearances. Changed in the last 3 years, at various times depending on the agency: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/30/...&smid=url-share Saladman fucked around with this message at 10:04 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 09:59
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Saladman posted:They changed this fairly recently, so that the security clearance is "you can't smoke weed from now on, and you must have not smoked within the last 90 days before the interview," rather than "you can never have smoked weed at any point in your life". Which is still kind of restrictive considering how ubiquitous marijuana is, but it's not completely out of touch with reality. Good that its changed slightly finally, but the drug policy has still been selective for decades at weeding out people who had normal college social experiences and even lightly experimented with soft/party drugs. It'll take a long time for the institutional culture to evolve.
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Apr 4, 2024 12:11
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