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🤣LOL! They really did Eve Washington dirty with this one!
Imagine being a highly skilled Black woman with a degree in CompSci from the top journalism university in the US. You write code to debunk the myth that the VRA gave Black people an unfair advantage.♥️👍🏿
And they frame it like this?🤡
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/upshot/redistricting-race-court-gerrymanders-elections.html
@mekkaokereke Am I reading that summary right -- i.e. "the act wouldn't be needed if the problem it is intended to solve didn't exist".
Yup.
If we could just get a check on all these burglaries, then we wouldn't need a law making stealing illegal.🤡
@mekkaokereke If it didn’t rain in the South, no one would need the Umbrella Act
This new screenshot you’re sharing is so much worse. “If partisan gerrymandering were checked”?!? It isn’t, that’s the entire point. But I would never expect better from Nate Cohn.
@mekkaokereke Ooof, yeah, that really reads like "We don't need the Voting Rights Act, because the results would be the same without it!"
Instead, it should be "The districts created under the Voting Rights Act were fair & balanced, very similar to those generated with a colour-blind, non-partisan algorithm."
And the article is completely missing the comparison of how distorted things *could* get with an unhampered partisan districting process.
The simplest explanation of gerrymandering for non-Americans:
And yes, you do need to know this, even if you are not American. Because yes, the majority of white Americans really do want to vote for people that really, genuinely, want to start a new World War. They really do want to invade your country. Yes, including Europe. No, they are not joking.
Every state gets a number of Congress people based on population. Imagine a hypothetical square state divided into 9 districts. Most people in the state are white. Imagine that there is one majority Black city in the center of the state. The candidate that white candidates prefer, will win in 8 districts, and the candidate that Black voters prefer might win in that 1 district. 8 to 1.
A racist person might decide to redraw the district maps, so that the state is instead divided into 16 pizza slice shaped districts. In this scenario, the candidate that white Americans prefer will win 16 times, and the candidate that Black Americans prefer, will not win any districts. 16 to 0.
Racist people try to draw the racist version of the map every chance they get. Every. Chance.
The only thing stopping them from doing that, was a law called the "Voting Rights Act." White people like MLK jr. because his speeches make them feel warm and fuzzy inside. Black people like MLK, because he got the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act passed.
The Voting Rights Act is now neutered by the Supreme Court. Which means Black voters can't use their congressional votes to stop racist white Americans from getting everyone killed. 🤷🏿♂️
@mekkaokereke I remember learning about gerrymandering from CGP Grey 14 years ago. I was like "wtf?". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY
@mekkaokereke
> And yes, you do need to know this, even if you are not American. Because yes, the majority of white Americans really do want to vote for people that really, genuinely, want to start a new World War. They really do want to invade your country. Yes, including Europe. No, they are not joking.
I don't suppose you are aware that the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea etc. are paying attention, and are as a result decoupling from the USA at a fairly brisk rate?
I said what I said.
De-coupling, however you define that, won't protect you from being invaded.
The people that wrote the papers calling for ending the VRA and installing a new fuhrer, genuinely believe that EU governments are not racist enough, and so in order to "save," the white race, Europe must be invaded and the governments replaced with a more explicitly pro white ethnostate one.
"Well, then we shall buy slightly fewer Buicks and Fords! We have de-coupled from the US!🤡" will not save you.
@mekkaokereke @ermo The main problem with regards to war if almost all European militaries are dependent on US weapons... So yeah "decoupling" will help
Y'all haven't won a war in a while too you have a too high opinion of US power
Perhaps it's language barrier, but you all are arguing against points that I'm not even making? 🤷🏿♂️
I said what I said, de-coupling won't prevent an invasion of the EU. De-coupling will help fight a war if one starts, but it won't prevent one. Either way, reducing EU dependence on US weapons is already happening.
😕Ukraine is a weapons factory, again:
https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3mi7mper2fk2a
The bad news is that EU rearmament will probably cause a war within Europe in the next 25 years. This rearmament is like a Wild West Saloon going from "No one has a gun," to "Everyone has two guns!🤡" Someone is going to get shot. (Probability of some EU country electing a violent, expansionary fascist) x (countries in Europe) x (25 years). I don't like those odds.
Too high an opinion of US military... No. The US military is the most lethal in the world. But that doesn't mean that US can defeat everyone unilaterally, without a coalition. And most importantly, lethality doesn't mean winning wars. That's what Trump doesn't understand. I made calls that people thought were wrong at the time. Within days of the Ukraine war starting, I called that Russia would not topple and hold Ukraine, for the exact same reasons that the US could not topple and hold Afghanistan or Vietnam, and would not topple and hold Canada.
Ukraine, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Canada, are all countries with populations ~40M, that know how to fight asymmetric war, using their terrain to horrifying advantage. Of all of those countries, Canada is by far the most lethal, most highly trained, most well resourced, and most able to inflict retaliatory damage on the US. Invading Canada would be similar combined casualties to the US Civil War, which for the US, exceeded WW1 and WW2 casualties. Seriously. My concern is not that the US could invade and conquer Canada easily. It can't. My concern is that the US would be foolish enough to try.
The US military is close to as *lethal* as it was 5 years ago, but is much less *effective*. It's like we were the toughest guy in the prison while also being the leader of the largest prison gang. Terrifying! But... we've insulted and attacked all of our fellow gang members, and now we have no friends. Now we're just one big tattooed guy.🤷🏿♂️
@mekkaokereke We are under no illusions re. how the current US admin has now become the enemy within NATO.
In response, the EU and its reliable allies are quietly building satellite networks, DARPA-like entities, Defense investment funds, command structures and exercises that explicitly do not involve the US, and is thus increasingly capable of operating completely independently of it.
We're at the point where our 40 country coalition is straight up ignoring the US Strait of Hormuz blockade.
Gerrymandering for both political and racial purposes should be banned. If you allow one, you need the other, because the first is a stand-in for the second.
@mekkaokereke Non-Americans also need to know about gerrymandering in case local right-wing politicians try to import the practice!
Canada has a long tradition of non-partisan committees generating electoral maps. But when the committee this year in the province of Alberta recommended fewer seats in rural areas & more in fast-growing cities, the government decided to
a) increase total # of seats (OK)
b) assign politicians to make a new map (not OK), saying they can use AI to replace research!
@mekkaokereke One day I'd love for some state in the US to adopt Ireland's representational voting method: https://www.electoralcommission.ie/irelands-voting-system/
IIRC, it means that the districts can be drawn in any fashion anyone wants -- each district elects multiple members to the legislature. Everyone's vote gets represented. Every group gets representation.
"Main features of the Irish electoral system:
Several candidates are elected to represent each constituency"
@mdm @mekkaokereke Ireland definitely has one of the best electoral systems. There's a slight complexity argument, it leads to comparatively long ballot papers, but that's kinda the price of getting the system right in other ways.
@JubalBarca @mdm @mekkaokereke There is no necessary difference whatever in the length of the ballot paper. There have many instances of more candidates standing for single seat constituencies in the UK than multi-seat ones in Ireland.
The more significant difference is in the repeated counting of votes to determine preference votes.
https://www.progressivepulse.org/uk/towards-a-better-voting-system-why-we-need-stv
@JubalBarca @mdm @mekkaokereke And yet you are a neoliberal …
Multi-member districts have been used historically in the United States to disenfranchise Black Americans: Racist white Americans would deliberately dissolve state Congressional districts so that they could elect white supremacists for every Representative from a state.
Congress had to pass a law to stop that practice very shortly after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Congressional_District_Act .
Unless fair elections need to be specifically enforced.
@mekkaokereke
Thank you for this explanation.
When I searched for videos about gerrymandering, I liked this one by John Oliver:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-4dIImaodQ
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