Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

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I think comparing the wrongs of one administration vs another is not really viable. This is in large part because of partisanship but another issue is that we all value different things, and have different worldviews. For instance gerrymandering is an interesting thing, but I think it's entirely political theater, because there's a simple completely self-serving solution.

First off imagine an ostensibly completely fair system where each district was somehow made up of a random person within a state. Contrary to intuition, you would have actually just created the most gerrymandered system imaginable, where a party with only 51% of approval within a state would end up with 100% of representative seats, winning each and every district by 51%.

So counter-intuitively you do intentionally want to pack voters of a similar type into certain districts to create a fair system, which leads to all sorts of weird things, including the "solution"! It turns out the most fair system is to intentionally gerrymander! If you let each party with at least e.g. 1% of the vote take their turn creating an intentionally gerrymandered district for themselves (you can only 'district' your own voters), the self-maximizing solution is to create a 51% district in your favor. But if you mathematically work this out, this actually creates a perfectly fair (as close as possible to x% voters = x% of seats) result in the end! I can give an example if you find this unbelievable.

So all the rhetoric about trying to solve gerrymandering is mostly just theater and gesturing. The solution I gave is not some huge secret, even if most people are not aware of it. The only argument against it is that x% voters = x% seats is not desirable, but I think that's a rather fringe view. Geographic stuff doesn't mean what it used to, especially when there's millions of voters per district.

> I think comparing the wrongs of one administration vs another is not really viable.

Yet this is what we do at every election.

It is true that lies are about different things and have different impacts. People value different things. Lies are difficult to enumerate. Yet if person A says he ate 99 jellybeans when he only ate 98 and person B says he ate 99 jellybeans when he actually ate your mother, we can safely say that person A's falsehood is sufficiently different from person B's that we would rather put A in charge than B.

You can make this abstract argument, but imagine you have two politicians, call them T(rump) and H(arris). You ask advocates for T and H to make lists of the others' politician's lies ranked from most to least egregious and present them for judgement to a third party who will make an effort, showing their work, to evaluate their truth. Neither party may be fully satisfied by this process, but one is going to look ridiculous much faster than the other. When the argument is particular, not abstract, it becomes much harder to sustain.

Throwing your hands in the air and giving up because we cannot calculate a numerical measure of honesty like we can digits of pi is silly, because we still have to make decisions based on imperfect information. Claiming one must do this -- give up on evaluating honesty -- while still advocating for a particular candidate or policy is itself dishonest: you clearly do not believe your own argument but propound it in the hopes that others will and will then withdraw from the debate.

The point is that the example of 98 beans vs eating somebody's mother is obviously nothing like what we have in reality. We have different scales of offenses, many extremely serious in character, but there is no administration has been even remotely likely ethical and above board perhaps since JFK.

And the issue you're not considering is that we all subconsciously, if not consciously, discount the wrongs of those we prefer while blowing up the wrongs of those we dislike. I hate to use contemporary examples, because it's still so emotionally charged for most people - but I think there's too perfect an example not to here, and we've probably scared off everybody else by having responses with more than 100 words anyhow.

The last administration essentially turned the White House into the latest remake of Weekend at (B)ernie's. And they did this in complete collusive coordination with the media, and aggressively attacked and defamed anybody who tried to call them out on it. A person who fancied that administration is largely going to discount this because in the end the arguable net result was not much more than that advisors in that administration ended up playing a much more executive role than they would normally have.

But if you look at it from another person's perspective, it was a complete undermining of democracy that emphasized that the "independent" media is functionally identical to what we pejoratively refer to as state media in adversarial countries. And the response to people saying and seeing what was happening before their eyes (as, for instance, when the President would wander about in a senile stupor) was nothing short of 1984 - "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

One person's molehill is another's mountain, and vice versa.

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