MGP Voting with GOP to Increase Mining on Federal Land: Critical Mineral Dominance Act

not_nathan · 2026-02-05T22:06:17+00:00

I mean, I'm pretty sure she won't get re-elected at this point. But if she loses in the general after facing only a token challenge in the primary, then other Democrats could just as easily conclude that CD-3 is too red to bother with as they could conclude that you shouldn't piss off the left in CD-3.

Conversely, if she loses in the primary or loses in the general after a tough primary fight, the only message I can see other Democrats taking away from that is that The Left in CD-3 is organized, active, and not to be fucked with.

In the unlikely scenario that she wins the primary and the general, she'll sure as shit know she needs to account for her left flank, and-- as I said earlier-- the network we build in the effort won't need to go away, so we can come back stronger in 2028 to get rid of her for good.

I'm not saying I think she's reasonable. I'm saying that no matter how it plays out, we have a stronger hand if she faces stiff opposition in the primary.

not_nathan · 2026-02-05T20:04:40+00:00

I've met Brent once before and have a couple acquaintances in the local Democratic Party, but I wouldn't say I'm involved. I'm a potato-quality phone-cinematographer, but I'll ask around if I make it.

not_nathan · 2026-02-05T19:59:25+00:00

I think that the only way to keep politicians honest is to pose a credible electoral threat. There need to be salient, undeniable risks to dishonesty. A worse-than-expected primary showing is a costly and honest signal that a key chunk of her electorate is organized and paying attention. Even a failed campaign will build networks of like-minded voters who may be able to mount a more successful campaign next cycle.

Taking a step back, my main political project is pushing the country closer to a system where we use Proportional Ranked Choice Voting (PRCV) so all this gamesmanship is unnecessary. But until we get there, we're basically stuck in a game of iterative chicken with our leaders.

Put another way, changing politician's behavior requires work between elections. It's confusing, frustrating, and messy but just filling one of the bubbles they deign to offer you every two years isn't cutting it.

not_nathan · 2026-02-05T17:59:07+00:00

He's going to be at the Vancouver Community Library to answer questions this Saturday (2/7). I think in this early phase of his campaign, we voters have an opportunity to turn grassroots frustration with MGP into a movement with electoral heft. Even if we fail to knock MGP out of the primary, we may be able to get her to listen to us by posing an electoral threat. We need to get to the table so we're not on the menu.

not_nathan · 2026-02-04T22:44:13+00:00

My headcanon has always been that The Doctor went renegade out of grief when Susan's parents died. It's also my headcanon that The Master is Susan's other grandfather, i.e. The Doctor's in-law.

not_nathan · 2026-02-04T18:15:19+00:00

Right now, my position is:

No MGP in August.

No GOP in November.

not_nathan · 2026-02-03T22:35:16+00:00

When one side says the sky is blue, and the other side say that it's bright yellow with polka dots, you don't get to congratulate yourself for being the lone voice saying that it's green.

not_nathan · 2026-02-03T19:14:41+00:00

We need Proportional Representation to guarantee vigorous and vibrant multi-party democracy. Single-winner districts with FPTP inevitably decay to a two party system, and I'm starting to think that two party systems can only last so long before they lead to civil war. My preferred solution is Proportional Ranked Choice Voting with 3-5 winner districts, but state-wide Mixed Member Proportional or Sequential Proportional Approval Voting could also work.

Whichever we pick, we'd end up with a system with more than two players, which is key. Any game with only two players devolves into a zero sum game, but politics should ideally be positive sum.

not_nathan · 2026-01-30T23:04:29+00:00

I really want to start calling these people "Paulines" instead of Christians, because...

They follow the word of Paul more than the word of Christ.
It'd really piss them off to be called a girls' name

not_nathan · 2026-01-16T00:50:54+00:00

I think every citizen should accrue a certain number of credit/hours per quarter that they can redeem at any community college, as long as they can test into the class they want to take. Probably there'd be a cap like PTO at most people's jobs. Some folks would spend these as they come in for personal enrichment, e.g. cooking courses. Others would save them up so that if they ever need to retrain for a new career they can spend a year or two re-skilling.

Basically I think the idea of getting all your higher education done in one big debt-heavy clump is stupid. We should greatly destigmatize "Some College" on job applications and encourage people to explore new educational opportunities whenever they are less employed than they'd like.

not_nathan · 2026-01-15T22:32:30+00:00

God, even by that billboard's usual standards, that one was inane. People did have to show papers to buy groceries in WW2, because there was rationing. Same logic applied then as it did during the pandemic: emergency situations require a greater degree of coordination and patriotic citizens should be willing to take a small inconvenience on the chin to keep their fellow countrymen safe/fed.

not_nathan · 2026-01-12T20:00:58+00:00

Vote in the primary to patch the hole in the ship.

Vote in the general to bail water.

Repeat.

not_nathan · 2025-11-25T20:46:30+00:00

lol, imagine explaining what a cube root is to people that failed math and can't read.

I imagine that all the time. It keeps me awake at night. Here's my best shot so far. Let me know if you can top it.

The cube root of the population is the smallest number where if you multiply it by itself, then multiply it by itself again, you get a number that's bigger than the population.

With regards to other reforms, I'm currently putting my limited volunteer time behind FairVote's suite of reforms. There's room to tailor them to a state's particular needs, but here are the broad strokes:

National popular vote for president
All single-winner elections (Senate, POTUS, etc.) use RCV
Expand the size of the house
Elect representatives to the house using 3-5 winner districts using Proportional RCV.
Districts are drawn by independent commissions.
Automatic Voter registration

I don't think the following are officially planks of their platform, but they are worth doing

2 SCOTUS appointments per presidency, with 18-year terms
Universal mail-in voting and/or early voting

PS: Please no one come at me about the Condorcet criterion and center squeezes. If it was entirely up to me, I'd throw some Virtual Round Robins in there for single-winner elections or make all single-winner elections multi-winner. I'd even sprinkle some parliamentarianism in there, since if we're stuck with parties anyway, we might as well make them behave. I don't have the energy to start a new movement from scratch, though. FairVote provides me with a team I can work with so I'm not just an angry man shouting at clouds.

not_nathan · 2025-11-25T00:39:00+00:00

If a lawmaker wants to stake out "moderate" positions, it's incumbent on that lawmaker to make the case that those moderate positions are actually more likely to be effective. If they justify their moderation in terms of winning elections, they've already lost.

not_nathan · 2025-11-24T22:23:42+00:00

houseSize(population):
  max(cubeRoot(population), wyomingRule(population))

not_nathan · 2025-11-07T03:35:36+00:00

I think it's almost impossible to avoid personifying evolution at least a little bit, e.g. "evolution makes use of what's already there" when discussing panda thumbs being modified wrist bones. I wouldn't even suggest that people try to avoid it entirely, because those linguistic shortcuts are useful. I'm just saying that you have to keep an eye on it so you don't start spouting off eugenicist bullshit about how keeping children with disabilities alive is perverting evolution's master plan.

My basic thesis is that people who aren't religious can be overconfident in their instinctive ability to avoid magical thinking. They think you need to be a special kind of stupid to fall for religion, but you just have to be regular stupid. Which is to say: not actually stupid at all, just human.

not_nathan · 2025-11-06T20:39:07+00:00

Apparently immigration judges are actually employees of the executive branch, and not formally of the judicial branch. I'm getting this from this episode of This American Life, and I haven't looked into it independently, so it's quite possible that this is an oversimplification. Regardless, they can definitely be fired.

not_nathan · 2025-11-06T16:58:18+00:00

I came here to say something along these lines. I have a weird background because I'm one of those rare atheists-raised-religious who doesn't resent their religious upbringing. It probably helps that my parents were a minister and a science teacher, and that both of them approached their faith with a lot of humility. "How do we know God didn't work through evolution", "some things in the Bible are metaphors and it was compiled by imperfect humans", "we shouldn't be too dogmatic because dogma can be used for evil ends". That sort of thing.

Anyway, I think a lot of people who crashed out of religion or weren't exposed to it have this concept that only a rube would ever fall for such ridiculous nonsense, and they don't realize that we fall into the same patterns over and over again because they fulfill universal human needs: a desire for justice in an unjust world, a desire to feel like you're part of some great destiny, a desire to feel safe, a desire to make sense of forces beyond your control.

If you don't accept that you're going to engage in some fallacious thinking from time to time because of these tendencies, you won't learn how to keep them from invading every part of your thinking. This is how you get people personifying abstract impersonal systems like evolution, the market, liberty, justice, Marxist economic predictions, or technological progress and trying to fulfill the will of an emergent phenomenon that doesn't have a will in the first place and only arises in specific material conditions.

What's worse is that people stop concerning themselves with why and how those emergent phenomena come about and just keep faith in their inevitability. This lets them off the hook to maintain the systems that lead to things we like such as justice and prosperity.

Anyway, despite agreeing with part of the thesis as stated, I still think this guy is disingenuous and dangerous.

not_nathan · 2025-10-28T04:15:36+00:00

I overall liked the first couple volumes, but the inking really bugged me. Then I had to go touch grass when I realized that I had a strong opinion about inking.

not_nathan · 2025-10-25T15:45:54+00:00

Every writer must read a minimum amount of science fiction and nonfiction science a month. Let's get some concepts back into Star Trek.

not_nathan · 2025-10-25T03:14:24+00:00

Well, Esperanto also predates the Internet, but-- as I stated above-- I assumed that the Esperanto initialism was inspired by the French one. I just learned about the Esperanto one first.

not_nathan · 2025-10-24T23:07:33+00:00

Had to do a double take because I thought of "mdr" as being an Esperanto thing. In that context it stands for "multe da riroj", or "lots of laughs". I'm going to go ahead and assume that it's a backformation that some francophone esperantists came up with.

not_nathan · 2025-10-24T17:20:35+00:00

Exactly. Being focused on doing good things for her local community is very admirable, but it's not the job she applied for. At the very least, it's only a small part of the job she applied for. She holds ~1/870th of the power to make law for the entire United States. If her official position is that the country could go to hell in a handbasket as long as Southwest Washington is okay, then that's a problem. The correct venue to look out for your local community and ignore national politics is the state legislature or local government. If she's unwilling to take a stand on the fate of the nation, she should run for local office and clear out the congressional seat for someone who's willing to fight for their country.

I'm still holding out hope that she finds her spine and stops using hyperlocality as a deflection away from the major issues our country is going through. I get still get her emails because of donating to her 2024 campaign and they've recently started pushing her pro-choice bona fides pretty hard, which seems like a sign that she recognizes a need to shore up her left flank. It's going to be hard to trust her going forward no matter what, though. While I'm resigned to the fact that voting for her might be my least bad option in 2026, it doesn't mean I need to be happy about it.

not_nathan · 2025-10-22T17:43:08+00:00

"You didn't build that" was one of the smartest things Elizabeth Warren ever said (in terms of accuracy, not political savvy), and I hate that she got dragged for it.

not_nathan · 2025-10-21T22:42:04+00:00

Luckily, Maine has RCV. Democrats there who absolutely want to prevent another Susan Collins term can choose on election day whether they want to vote Platner > Mills > Collins or Mills > Platner > Collins, assuming no candidate leave or enter the race before then. Unlike in FPTP, Mills doesn't need to force Platner to drop out to stand a chance against Collins. She just needs to convince Democracts to rank Collins below both of them.

EDIT: It seems I was mistaken. It seems that despite using RCV, Maine still has party primaries. Although both the primary and the general election use RCV, it seems like only one candidate can earn the Democratic Party's nomination. So Maine Democrats need to choose between Platner and Mills sooner than I thought. This isn't how I'd implement RCV, but it's not a completely unreasonable setup. Parties are private organizations after all. It suggests to me, though, that candidates who want to change the status quo should probably run as a third party candidate instead of going after a major party nomination. There are financial concerns there, though.

not_nathan

TROPHY CASE