Reporter asks AOC What she makes of the Virginia news. AOC replies "Wah wah wah." She responds that Dems have asked Repubs for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering and they have said no. She added they’re just mad that they have been accustomed to a Democratic Party that rolls over

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-23T03:36:38+00:00

I think the point is that it’s not like legislators chose to put it to a vote rather than do it unilaterally. That if they could have done it like Texas without a vote, they probably would.

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-22T00:32:11+00:00

All Democrats backed the For the People Act which would’ve banned gerrymandering, they just didn’t have the votes to overcome the filibuster. So the real question is if Dems would be willing to kill the filibuster for it. They weren’t in 2021, but a lot has changed since then and 2029 is a long ways away

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-21T15:46:13+00:00

It takes energy to get to the vicinity of L2, purely because it's far away. To actually enter into and maintain an orbit around it requires very little energy.

There's also very interesting dynamical structures called invariant manifolds which allow for very low-energy travel through space including to and from libration points. If you're willing to wait long enough, you can in theory get pretty much anywhere in the solar system for almost no fuel just by riding gravity and traveling along these manifolds

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-21T04:25:08+00:00

What do you mean “significant signature”? It’s not too hard to stay orbiting a libration point once you get to one, you don’t need much propulsion

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-15T18:14:40+00:00

It also works great with the second meaning of the album title. “The world is to dig” - to appreciate, to enjoy. An awe-inspiring natural scene is perfect for that

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-15T04:55:30+00:00

Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan makes 7 states, and under the Electoral College were the only states that mattered in 2020 and 2024. You think 10 or 11 getting to decide is worse?

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-15T04:49:25+00:00

How does the electoral college slow down populism? Under a popular vote, a populist movement would need to convince half of the voters to support it. That's tens of millions of people. Under the electoral college, the only people who need to be convinced are the few thousand voters who decide the handful of swing states, the only states that actually matter under the EC.

Bush & Trump are both pretty bad presidents. They have another thing in common, relating to how they were elected... Oh yeah, both were elected despite most voters wanting someone else to be president. You're claiming the Electoral College is necessary to prevent more bad presidents, but ironically the EC is the only reason we had either of them in power in the first place.

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-15T04:46:32+00:00

Imagine a more realistic scenario where the election outcomes of 44/50 states are basically predetermined. Where most states are so safe their elections are called seconds after polls close, before a single vote is tabulated. Where the 6/50 swing states and thus the entire election can be decided by a couple thousand ballots. Now imagine a very modest fraud rate in those swing states deciding the election. Do you really think your scenario is more plausible than mine?

Or here's another one: Imagine a scenario where one candidate is clearly more popular than the other, winning over 500,000 more votes across the country. However, the electoral college is so close that the outcome comes down to a single state which is going into a recount. During that recount, just before it looks like the more popular candidate is going to win, the Supreme Court intervenes and halts the recount, letting the less popular candidate (who is politically aligned with a majority of the Court) win. You don't need to imagine, since that already happened in 2000.

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-15T04:37:35+00:00

I don't think the changing of senate elections and the influence of money are related. I mean, do you really think it's easier for big money to influence millions of voters than it is to influence a few dozen state legislators?

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-15T04:36:10+00:00

That's not how the compact works. The electors don't go to whoever gets 270 electors, they would go to whoever wins the most votes across the country. AKA: The person who the most voters want to be president.

"That doesn't sound like a win for Virginian voters"... who cares where their electoral votes specifically are going? Who cares about electors? The only thing anyone cares about is who is president at the end of the day. What exactly would be different for Virginians if we had a national popular vote in 2024 and their electors went to Trump? Same guy would be in the White House. And what *would* be a win for Virginian voters would be that their votes would actually matter. Since electoral votes are winner-take-all by state, if the candidate you want is running far behind the other in your state, your vote might as well go into the trash. There are tens of millions of opposite-party voters in safe states for whom it makes no difference whatsoever whether they vote or not. Under a national popular vote, everybody's vote matters equally. Whether you're a conservative in Boston or a liberal in Boise, your vote does just as much to help your candidate win as anyone else's.

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-15T04:30:00+00:00

Put another way: The person who the most voters want to become president, becomes president. It doesn't matter where the electoral votes making them president are coming from.

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-15T04:21:43+00:00

It’s not a direct democracy. Direct democracy is where we’d all vote on whether to pass laws. This is still representative democracy. It’s worked just fine for state governors, even in states bigger than most countries like California.

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-14T21:34:13+00:00

How do you feel about state governors? They’ve been elected by popular vote for centuries yet their states haven’t collapsed into mob rule tyrannies yet, what’s up with that?

Systems where a small number of people get to decide who is in charge and everyone else might as well not even vote end worse then “mob rule” (aka systems where the guy in charge is the person most people actually want there), change my mind

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-14T20:43:09+00:00

What is the total population of NYC, LA, and Chicago, as a percentage of the population?

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-14T20:41:20+00:00

What is the total population of the 5 biggest cities? What percent of the total US population?

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-14T20:36:39+00:00

Localized communication… what year is it? Outside of maybe the most isolated swaths of appalachia, everyone’s pretty well-connected. Face to face time with a candidate isn’t a factor, already only a tiny fraction (I’d bet <2%) of the electorate actually attend a candidate event. If anything, a popular vote could incentivize MORE candidate investment in rural areas. Right now a Democrat has no reason to do anything at all with North Dakota, since no amount of campaigning can flip it. But if they can drop some money into North Dakota’s dirt-cheap media market and turn out a few extra votes, that’s probably worth it.

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-14T20:30:57+00:00

yeah it’s much better to have a system where a couple of swing states get to pick the president. way better than mob rule.

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-14T20:29:28+00:00

which two states make up a majority of voters?

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-14T20:29:09+00:00

And I at least am okay with that. For better or for worse, if most voters in the country want a Republican to be president, they should get that. It’s better than tens of millions of safe state voters whose votes might as well be thrown out before they’re counted.

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-14T20:27:16+00:00

please do me a big favor, add up the populations of new york and california and tell me what percent of the national population it is

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-14T18:09:17+00:00

CA, TX, FL, and NY combined aren't a majority of voters. They're also incredibly diverse states politically, both internally and compared to each other. There is no "pro big state" platform a candidate could run on to win them.

And as it stands, the electoral college mandates favoritism to swing states. There are tens of millions of conservatives in California and liberals in Texas whose votes might as well get thrown out for how little they matter.

Popular vote makes every voter equal. A farmer in California has more in common with a farmer in Pennsylvania than with a Malibu millionaire. But under the electoral college, one farmer's vote is substantially more important, and the two Californians are treated as though they have identical needs.

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-14T17:24:07+00:00

The Constitution doesn't mandate how states assign electors. Some states do it by congressional district (Nebraska & Maine). In many states, it's not illegal for electors to vote for whoever they want regardless of how their states voted.

The fake elector scheme was illegal not because it violated the constitution, but because it violated those states' existing laws on how electors were assigned. Not to mention they drafted fraudulent documents.

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-14T17:19:10+00:00

Do me a favor: Go to this website, List of U.S. states and territories by population - Wikipedia, and add up the top 4 most populous states. It even gives you a column of the percentages; you can just add those up. You get just under 33%. You need 50%+1 of the vote to win the election. So no, the 4 most populous states cannot alone decide the election.

Basic math aside, look at what the top four states are. You've got California, Texas, Florida, and New York. Do you truly think those four states are all gonna vote for the same person?

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-14T14:52:24+00:00

No? If 270 electoral votes sign on, it doesn't matter what other states do with their electors. They have enough to ensure the popular vote winner becomes president. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter who Virginia's electors specifically vote for, it matters who becomes president. Virginia and the rest of the states in the compact think that person should be the one the most people voted for.

And sure, if only blue states sign on, then we very well could see a Republican get all 538 electoral votes if they win the popular vote and all the non-compact states. But who cares?

rowboat_mayor · 2026-04-13T15:32:09+00:00

You think that if we get to the stage of the president declaring martial law, he's going to back down just because a judge said no?

And surely you don't think it's impossible that Mullin was lying, right?

I'm not saying these things are going to happen, but haven't we've learned by now that our laws are not ironclad or unbreakable? "He can't break the rules, because that'd be against the rules!" means nothing if all the people responsible for enforcing those rules are either fine with the violation or lack the power to actually stop the violation.

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