buddha

1 minute ago, Deleterious said:

Reed must have been double secret suspended in the first half.

did ausar catch it from him in the second half?

getting torched by mitchell one on one, so WHERE IS THE BEST PERIMETER DEFENDER IN THE GAME??????

once again with feeling:

paul reed > jalen duren

the game is getting important.  how do you know?  harden is pretending he's injured already.

playoff donovan mitchell has entered the chat.

there's the danniss and caris show i'm used to seeing.

playing like garbage and only down 3 = good.

lavert with 5 points and an assist isnt going to last...

welp, there's two on ausar already.

the  best thing james harden can do to help the pistons is drive at jalen duren so he can get him in foul trouble.

#freepaulreed

59 minutes ago, chasfh said:

If being critical of Israel, and not co-signing onto the resolution flatly equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, is itself anti-Semitic, then the Republican campaign to set the bar at "you can be either pro-Israel or anti-Semitic, choose one" has been wildly successful.

being critical of israel doesnt make one anti-semitic, and conflating the two by the right/social media is going to be disastrous for israel in the long run as the left abandons them.

but what has happened on the left has gone well beyond that.

35 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

I'm sorry I don't remember where but I just read a long piece about the generational divide in the US wrt support of Israel and the journalist's report that in his survey of Israeli opinion people realized it was a problem but thought it would be transient. I have my doubts. 

anti-jewishness has been a problem for as long as there have been jews.  it remains a problem now.  israel is playing a very dangerous game by aligning themselves with trump.  when the iran war fails, the republicans will blame the jews, not trump's lack of intelligence.

1 hour ago, chasfh said:

That would be nice, but the presidential electoral setup all but forbids this from happening. Setting aside structural barriers such as ballot access restrictions, the U.S. uses a winner-take-all, first-past-the-post election system, where once a presidential candidate beats all their opponents by at least a single vote within a state, they are awarded 100% of all the votes in that state that ultimately matter. This discourages voters who might otherwise be inclined to vote for a third party from doing so because of the concept of wasting the vote on someone who's destined to lose (something that also happens, BTW, when your major party presidential candidate loses your state anyway.) There's also the general tendency of countries that have single-member districts, instead of proportional representation, to emerge as two-party countries. Both the US and UK are emblematic of that.

If we truly want more than two strong parties, we would probably need to move from a winner-take-all system to a proportional representation system, at minimum. Almost none of us here will ever live to see that happen.

 

i understand all that and its not something i expect to happen.

however, its been that way for a long time and parties have broken up before.  its possible they could break up again.  iran is fracturing republicans and anti-semitism is fracturing democrats as we speak.  the social media revolution could still have as of yet unforseen consequences.

we shall see.

Jeb!

of course not.

having more than two viable parties would be even better!  

8 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

It's a fundamental constitutional principle that every voter has equal rights, every vote must be given the same weight. If you *deliberately* manipulate districts to effectively vitiate some votes in favor or others that seems as straightforward a violation of the principle as I can imagine. Certainly one that should transcend any state's constitutional election management options. You could argue that the VRA already set a precedent by playing fast and loose with the principle and I wouldn't disagree with you. Sometimes no good deed goes unpunished.

there's a lot about the roberts court i dont like (believe it or not), and their stances on campaign finance rules and election rules are two of the biggest.  the inability of states to regulate their campaign finance rules has led to so many bad results, imo.

i dont think theyve done anything to undermine the principle of one man/one vote, but ymmv.  i dislike gerrymandering in all forms, and that includes racial gerrymandering.  on principle alone, i dont see why people must vote for someone who has the same skin color as they do.  i am perfectly capable of being represented by a black person (and am represented by minorities at all levels) and a black person is perfectly capable of being represented by a white person.

however, that may be a particularly pollyanish view of mine.  

it will be interesting to see how things turn out.  it may be that over time those districts turn out to be less republican or democrat than people think.  but certainly not now.

15 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

Yeah but at some point you run out of places to gerrymander. I think Texas gerrymander could backfire since they are relying on a realignment from Hispanics. I’m not sure how many more republican districts you squeeze from the Texas suburbs. Same with California, you’re likely to get more districts in the Central Valley. 

true

2 minutes ago, romad1 said:

Proportional representation would be nice. 

be careful what you wish for considering you'd need to increase florida and texas too.

1 minute ago, gehringer_2 said:

we've argued about whether this SCOTUS is sane or not before, but there is such and easy straightforward one man/one vote argument to be made to outlawing any attempt to draw districts to favor outcomes of any kind that I don't see how SCOTUS can be defended on this issue at all. The made an ideological decision for bad government when there were easy good government options available to them that would not have required any objectionable legal gymnastics to have arrived at at all. These are terrible people and there there is no way around it.

we can agree to disagree on that one, but there are plenty of folks who would make a similar argument to yours.

the constitution gives the states the right to determine how their elections happen, which includes how their congressional reps get elected.  this may come as a surprise to you, but politicians acted in bad faith in order to draw those districts!  lol.

what do you mean by "one man/one vote" argument?

2 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

BTW how is Iowa not on the list? It’s worse than Illinois. It has four congressional districts and all are republican despite Harris winning 42% of the vote and congressional Dems winning 43%.

iowa has a non-partisan commission that creates their map.  theyve had that in place for 40 years.

12 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

Because republicans across the country have been gerrymandering while blue states like California have unilaterally disarmed themselves. Good for Illinois. Keep going. Maybe Republicans will finally agree with Illinois Democratic senators and end gerrymandering. Until then, I’m not interested in both sides bull****. Illinois has been playing by the same rules as republicans. 

we dont disagree on the basic argument: republicans ratcheted up the gerrymandering game and the democrats responded in kind.  before the republicans did that, many of the democratic run states (but not all, iowa also has anti-gerrymandering in place) acted in good faith in trying to get rid of political gerrymandering.

illinois is just a different animal because illinois is horrible.

3 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

So? That doesn’t make Illinois the most gerrymandered. That 47% isn’t just in one part of the state. Shouldn’t all of the districts be 47% Republican? 47% is not typical. There shouldn’t be a single Republican district in Illinois. 

illinois received an F grade for its congressional map from the princeton gerrymander project.  

this site has it as the 4th worst in the country.

https://ivn.us/posts/10-worst-gerrymandered-states-country-2025-08-18

there are lots of bad gerrymanders out there and illinois is one of the worst.  and it wasnt prompted by republicans, it was prompted by illinois democrats and their attempts to exercise power.

2 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I think one day it will be, but a lot of terrible ****, and then defeat and truth and reconciliation, is going to have to happen first, because we are nowhere near the level of peak fascism the country has to experience to finally wake the **** up. You and I won't live to see that entire cycle, probably, but if I were a bettor, I would bet that sometime in the next 25 to 75 years, the outlawing of gerrymandering will happen.

i hope so.  its killing democracy.

1 minute ago, Motown Bombers said:

Cry me a ****ing river. Look across the border into Wisconsin. Republicans have a super majority in the legislature in a state Democrats won statewide. 

The last republican to get 45% in Illinois was Bruce Rauner in 2014 and that was because of the whole corruption thing with Blagojevich. Don’t overstate republican support in Illinois. 

not sure why youre arguing with me.  

republicans received 47% of the vote in the House of representative races in 2024.