-This needed to be preserved (from Larry’s Facebook page) -Jack
Trust me, kids. This is a tale of adventure! If you missed yesterday’s Live One, I’ve got to do an Internet Zoology highlight reel, because this dork’s behavior is such a perfect cliché that I may finally earn tenure!
As a professional Internet Zoologist I love observing the patterns of strange internet creatures and documenting them for you guys. (being serious for a minute, I find learning their strategies and tactics for arguing fascinating)
The original subject, gerrymandering.
FB is awful at linking to itself, but if you go down my page it’s the gerrymandering post that’s got like 400 comments. I’ll zelda below, but you know how that goes, and FB will show you whatever it decides to show you in its mysterious and unknowable ways.
The subject, Had Sheik, blunders into my page, having followed my trail from where we clashed briefly earlier on a mutual friend’s page where Sheik was boldly defending the poor innocent Disney megacorporation from the evils of Gina Carano.
Seeing the hulking, brutish form in the distance, I tried to identify the creature. Upon initial observation I thought the subject was too ponderous to be a Common Internet Shit Gibbon, and from his profile pic appeared to be a subspecies of Mayonnaise Goblin.
The Mayonnaise Goblin loudly approached the herd of innocent Normies gathered around my internet watering hole, and immediately attacked! His two pronged offense consisted of declaring that republicans gerrymander more than democrats (lol), and he posted a link to “prove” it. But wait, there’s more! He then cited a bill that would have banned gerrymandering, but republicans all voted against it.
I was shocked! It is rare for a liberal Mayonnaise Goblin to be able to formulate TWO thoughts simultaneously! Could this possibly be one of the legendary Greater Mayonnaise Goblins? But they supposedly went extinct in November of 2024!
His attack might have worked against lesser Normies, but sadly for the MG, this particular herd is battle hardened. His link got laughed at because it came from a left wing think tank (it’s basically the Democrat Committee To Elect Democrats In Perpetuity Institute of Liberalism, so I can’t imagine why people don’t trust it’s integrity!) and that super nice and good law he cited had a few minor side effects like making DC the 51st state, and basically ensuring that democrats automatically win every single federal election for eternity. I can’t believe republicans would vote against that, those dicks!
But thus would begin an EPIC BATTLE that would continue for the entire day!
Undeterred, the Greater Mayonnaise Goblin circled, and produced a new link! This one was a list of the 10 most gerrymandered states! 9 of which were red! TAKE THAT FOUL REPUBLICANS.
Except my state made the list, and if you look at our map, it’s mostly squares, based on county lines. How’d we get on there, while the spaghetti noodle states didn’t? If you walk across dread O’Hare to get from A gate to C gate you’ve crossed like 7 congressional districts.
So the GMG’s second attack was parried, because it turned out his “peer reviewed study” was some bullshit blog, with no actual data or criteria, and its “sources” were editorials from places like Axios and Salon whining about republicans. (remember kids, only republicans “gerrymander”, democrats “tactically redistrict”).
However, in the chaos of facebook battle, this was when the fight broke into multiple subthreads. Now we were fighting about election fraud! And voter ID! Madness! Pandemonium! Autism!
It was then that I learned the Greater Mayonnaise Goblin’s legendary power didn’t come from it’s wit or speed, but from it’s SHEER FUCKING SIZE! GMG’s individual attacks are weak, but they can barf up to THIRTY SIX dumb ass points and links* at a time.
*note, GMG’s are large and gassy, but they are not clever. Their “research” consists of googling, finding the first link they think helps them and confirms to their preconceived notions, and pasting it without reading it first. This is funny when their own link contradicts their dumb ass point, but GMG’s never take any accountability anyway.
The GMG relentlessly charged the herd, over and over again. But being dimwitted, it settled into a predictable pattern. Endlessly roaring that it’s super impossible for women, minorities, poor, and rural people to do something super dooper complicated and ridiculously expensive like get an ID.
Like all liberals, GMGs are deeply and profoundly racist, in that they believe minorities and poor people are basically helpless vegetables who can’t survive without being cared for like pets, so our GMG’s next attack used a “peer reviewed study” from the “non-partisan” League of Women Voters which said that 25% of black Americans don’t have IDs.
Wow… Okay. I want you guys to think about that one. This dude, actually believes that 1 in 4 adult black people in America have no ID. Right now. Today, in the year 2025. Not just voting, he actually thinks a QUARTER of black people can’t drive, have bank accounts, or jobs, or go to the doctor, or buy or rent houses, or buy cigarettes or alcohol, or fly on an airplane, or buy a gun, or do basically ANYTHING. Like… wow. Holy shit. 😀
But no matter how absurd, illogical, and frankly ridiculous that is, this fat, greasy, beast ran with that narrative all day. Except there’s more, because the “non-partisan” League of Women Voters he got this super genius, totally honest stat from, when you look at their webpage what do you see they’re fighting for? Abortion, climate change, DEI, open borders, and pretty much every democrat cause you can imagine.
When challenged, the disgusting beast, Had Shrek, rolled his bloated carcass over, screamed out “They are non-partisan because their by-laws say they can’t support any political party or candidate!” and then sprinkler sprayed shit like a hippo for FIFTY YARDS!
When I asked this dimwitted thing if he thought Antifa meant they were the good guys because it was in the name, he did not respond, because he was too busy licking the worms from his own butthole. (It turns out GMGs are infested with parasites. Gross)
GMGs do not care about truth or even basic observable reality. They stampede through a fantasy world of their own creation. When challenged by my fellow Internet Zoologist, Professor Ian McMurtrie about how poor people in 3rd world countries could get IDs to vote, but these hypothetical Americans couldn’t, the GMG’s said those countries didn’t have republicans trying to stop them!
Sadly, for poor, fat, stupid, Sheik, Dr. McMurtrie lived much of his life in Africa and put up with none of that bullshit. 😀 Because yes kids, American liberals are so dramatically up their own ass that they really think walking 10 hours through blistering heat and biting flies, while dodging machete wielding rebels and literal fucking LIONS is easier than getting somebody to drive you to the nearest DMV in rural Alabama.
On that note, I don’t know where this corpulent sack of crap comes from, but he twice made the mistake of citing states I’d lived in. From the most backwoods places in Alabama, you’re like 45 minutes from a DMV. Hell, the place I stuck Cazador, it’s like an hour drive and that’s isolated enough to have a COMPOUND! With Orcs!
The battle raged on! The herd pounced, repeatedly pummeling the GMG, but encased in a thick hide of impenetrable porcine lard and brain fog, the monster was impervious to shame or self-reflection. All it could do was barf up more “studies”.
One note on that, which is seriously fascinating about how the game is rigged, if you google search any of the terms related to voter ID, ALL THE LINKS are from the same handful of crappy, ultra left wing, activist groups. If you search for something tangentially related which uses any of the keywords (even something innocuous, like what percentage of black Americans have drivers licenses) again, ALL THE LINKS are to the same handful of lefty activist (sorry, “non-partisan” institutes that are all about moderate causes like abortion, climate change, open borders, and single payer healthcare) sites about voter ID. Ain’t that curious.
I can’t summarize 400 posts of mayonnaise fueled bloviating, but you get the idea. Voter fraud never happens. Okay it happens but it doesn’t make any difference. Okay it happens all the time but only republicans do it. Here is a non-partisan study from the Institute of Liberalism Committee to Elect Democrats Eternally that says so.
So on and so forth. FOREVER!!!!!!!!! You’d think something so corpulent would get gassed out, but apparently typing takes very little cardio.
Seriously, his most “conservative” source ever cited was Princeton… And when I looked democrat faculty outnumbers republicans something like 8 to 1, and that was the MOST conservative thing he barfed up.
At one point the beast let out a piteous wail, about how it could no longer respect me even though it liked my books, and I was like Thank goodness! Because if dorky, lying ass monstrosities like this respected me, I need to repent and examine my life choices.
The battle continued, and most of the herd grew weary and went back to playing Xbox. I took my wife out to dinner (fancy ramen) and the moron continued bleating in my absence. And this morning when I got up, HE WAS STILL THERE! Lying in the watering hole, festering and bloated, covered in moss and feces, turning the water salty from all his tears because only fat dumb liberals can save the rural poor!
(and being rural, the real reason we live out here is to get away from these dorks! And no, none of us listen to NPR either!)
This one was such a perfect encapsulation of what it’s like to argue with libs on the internet that it took my breath away, like a beautiful sunset.
After the curious among you get a chance to take a look, I’ll get out my elephant blocker and do my part to return the GMG to the endangered species list. 😀
Congressional districts don’t have to be “spaghettified” to be badly gerrymandered.
Oregon, for example. Picked up a seat after the 2020 census, now has six seats instead of five, and had to re-draw districts.
In the 2020 map, they had all the eastern (rural) counties in one district, and the rest of the state divided into four areas; the overall run-down was one solid-red seat, two solid-blue seats, and two that were purple in theory — blue in practice, but closer votes than the solid-blue seats. Not coincidentally, if you look at the 2020 map, the vertical line that makes most of the western border (before it cuts west to carve in Medford) of solid-red District 2, aligns with the Cascade Mountain range that physically separates western and eastern Oregon.
In the 2022 map, they stretched District 5 from the (solid-blue) Portland Metro area to cover part of (solid-red) central Oregon, including the city of Bend. District 2, after losing Bend, was extended to cover the more rural (but still west of the Cascades) areas of southern Oregon, and is still solid-red. The other four districts (1, 3, 4, and the new 6) were divided amongst the rest of the solid-blue areas.
In 2020, Oregon had one solid-red district, two purple-in-theory, and two solid-blue. In 2022, they had one solid-red, ONE purple-in-theory, and FOUR solid-blue.
It’s almost like the re-drawing committee — almost-certainly filled with career Democrats — realized that there was no way to make all six seats reliably run Democrat, so they made the 2nd District redder in order to make the rest, including the new 6th District, that much bluer, and managed to do it without obviously (to outsiders) “spaghettifying” the districts … though lumping Bend in with Portland comes close.
Gerrymandering doesn’t always mean drawing crazy district lines. It just means dividing the opposition into smaller chunks that can be more easily out-voted. The actual lines on the map don’t matter as much as that divide-and-conquer principle.
Yeah, that’s a tactic common enough that it has a name: packing and cracking.
if I were to try to write an anti-gerrymandering law, I would allow multiple maps to be posted, score each one and the best score(s) would be the ones to choose between.
measure the perimeter of all districts, shorter (more compact districts overall) scores better
having a district cross a political boundary (city, county) would lower the score
It would be good if neighborhoods were defined well enough to count splitting them to lower scores.
This isn’t foolproof, there are still lots of ways to game such a system (it would be VERY sensitive to the starting conditions) but it would be a good starting point
After reading your comment, I’m now envisioning a scoring system that measures how well a potential map follows and coincides with culture, lifestyle, and geographic and political boundaries. It also measures and scores the amount of deviation from the previous map and how well the result aligns with the voting population. That might be similar to what you’re thinking about.
Basically, maps that follow urban-rural divides, existing county lines (including rivers and mountains that form natural boundaries — and are often the basis of county lines), how evenly the state’s population is divided amongst the new districts, and how likely the result will match the left-right ratio of the state population, etc., are likely to score better than maps with “tentacles” that reach across those things to lump very different cultures into the same district.
Under this system, Oregon’s new map (again, for example) likely would not score well, not with that chunk of rural Central Oregon pulled into the urban Portland Metro area, the district lines not matching county or geographic boundaries, or the disproportionate 5/6 Democrat delegation; the state has hovered around 40% Republican in every Presidential election since the ’80s (read: the past three censuses). The only thing it probably does well is divide the population evenly.
A hypothetical map which followed the existing county lines and the Cascade mountain range, was closer to the old map, maintained the urban-rural divide, and resulted in four solid-blue House districts, two solid-red, and one toss-up would be more … well … representative of the people — and score much better. (Compare to the old map, which had two blue, one red, and two purple districts, which is more likely to accurately represent the 40% Republican population, especially if the purple districts went opposite ways and they got 3 Democrat and 2 Republican reps.)
The current “shut out your opponents as much as possible” is what results when two things happen: 1. Political “win at all costs” partisans are put in charge of redistricting, and 2. The new map is adopted with no vote or input from the people it’s supposed to represent.
On that note, another rule could be that any new map must meet the approval of 80% of voters (or make that threshold “all of the majority party plus half the minority party” … which coincidentally in Oregon would be near that 78-80% after adjusting for the 3-5% of independent and third party voters). Requiring a significant portion of the minority party’s approval is intentional and key; a simple majority vote will always go to the ruling party and continue shutting out the minority — exactly what we’re trying to avoid.
Is it still possible to game the system under these rules? Sure, it’s always possible to find loopholes and weaknesses (for example, you could get 20,000 Democrats to re-register as Republicans for a couple years, just to approve the new map). But this would make it significantly more difficult, which is the point.
There are 9 Northeastern states with 30% up to almost 50% Republican voters, all of which have ZERO Republican congresscritters, and very few Republicans in their state governments. Far fewer than the proportion of voters, anyway. Not possible to achieve that with honest districts.
There’s an old joke from the 60’s about why Massachusetts had a Republican senator: “There was one Republican in Massachusetts and they had to get him out of the state somehow!”
I lived in Massachusetts long enough to know that any Republican there is a RINO.
Yep, you have the right idea.
I wouldn’t go with the citizen vote for the map, simply because of the question of what happens if they don’t approve one before the next election (especially the next congressional election)
I would give maps some sort of numerical score, give a window (6 months??) for anyone to submit maps (all maps and who submitted them being public) and then the legislature (or a body they define) would pick between the top maps with the top scores
not the top N maps, but rather something like normalize the scores so the top one is 100 and they can pick any of them with a score > 95 (I think there needs to be some room for judgement, and I don’t want people gaming a system that allows for selecting the top 10 by submitting 10 versions of a map that score the same, but move a block from one district to another)
Indiana is like that. Andre Carson’s district is Solid blue by compressing all the inner city voters in Indianapolis into one district. The concentration of Democrats in the Chicago corner is concentrated into a district, which is only Democrat +6 due to the need to include Crown Point and Valparasio in with Gary/Hammond/South Bend to meet total population requirements. The 7th District – mine – in Red +7, and the remaining four are Red+12 to Red+16. I live in a town that has a MAJOR university (40K+students, 4K+faculty) and we still see more Libertarian than Democrat candidates at the County level. ALL of this was done while maintaining compact, “square,” districts.
The Governor threatens to call a special session to redistrict and gerrymander the state, which is a joke because there is no way to make the map more favorable to Republicans. Any changes to try to eliminate a Democrat seat are going to have to make some existing GOP districts (like mine – it borders BOTH Blue districts) purple. Basically, the legislature developed this map to favor the GOP after we lost a seat in 2000, and the only way to safely add GOP seats is to get more after the 2030 census.
Wouldn’t it be simple to just score the number of districts that vote vs blue against the state’s overall ratio of blue vs red to determine how gerrymandered or not any given state is?
Tangential note on your whole rural and not listening to NPR: That was the dumbest part of the CPB defunding fight, “without NPR, where will people get important information in rurale communities?!”
Uh, the 3 country, 1 top 40, 1 oldies/classic rock and the 2 AM talk radio stations? Oh, and the internet. And the TV stations. NPR in the rural towns I grew up and live in were only listened to by a VERY narrow segment of the population, most of us listened to the other ones that actually cared to play what we were interested in.
And don’t forget the “modern rock” and “new pop hits” radio stations … that don’t play anything more recent than about 2010.
(Srsly, the rural town I moved to, pop-culture-wise it’s like living 20 years in the past, minimum. Some things from the 80s and 90s aren’t seeing a resurgence; they never went out of style here.)
There’s a video on youtube where a guy asks liberals about blacks getting ID. They all state that it is super hard. He then goes and asks blacks if they have IDs. They all say that of course they do. And they think white people thinking they can’t get IDs is weird. And racist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW2LpFkVfYk
It’s almost like all those white liberals on TV “representing black Americans” haven’t actually met or interacted with any black Americans and are basing their rhetoric on racial stereotypes. Or something….
There’s a word for someone who makes assumptions about individuals from stereotypes based on skin color or ethnic background. What is it again? Hmmm….
My high school had a pretty diverse racial mix. I joke that it taught me to be classist instead of racist.
No, they totally dated a black guy once.
And had a black uber driver the other day!
What’s the over-under that their “black Uber driver” was actually Indian or Pakistani — and born and raised in England — but with the darker skin they couldn’t tell the difference?
(Fun tangentially-related fact: There’s a question of “when did Americans lose their British accents?” And the most likely explanation is that we never had one. The source of the “British accent” is, based on linguistic analysis, probably from establishing colonies in India and other places and transferring citizens and diplomats in and out; the “British accent” is a hybrid accent resulting from a couple hundred years of teaching English to native Hindi speakers and transferring them to England — along with other non-native English speakers from all over the world — so Americans never had it.)
There are two (or were two) pockets of close-to-English regional dialects, but they were regional dialects spoken in England in the late 1600s-early 1700s, not “BBC English.”
Well said, and always remember, it’s ‘rules for thee, not for me’… sigh
Maybe you could work in a CSG vs GMG death match: nuoc mam vs. Mayo…?
He-yah in the great Gunshine State of Florida, we have a farked up district that runs from Jacksonville down to near Orlando that was specifically put in place to give democratic blacks a district. And they elected a woman to Congress that makes Mad Maxine Waters seem like a challenge to Enstein for mental capacity.
That sucker snakes and shakes harder than ever in order to avoid white family settlements.
But every year that the Repubs try to redistrict it the sniveling and whining and outright crying ‘Ray-shists’ fills the air.
Me, I’m happy that the normally squishy-too afraid to do anything about corruption and stupidity-republicans are finally getting off their collective butts and doing something. Grudgingly for the most part, and facing being fired by their constituents if they show any real resistance to the new right movement.
Ahh- Corinne Brown!
Not sure links are permitted here, so look on YouTube for her wonderful speech, “Go Gata!”
She since has been convicted of some kind of corruption…
These need to be compiled into a book, With Illustrations!
Maybe Larry could work up some table top miniatures of the different ones and use them for the Monster Hunters table top game? It could be an expansion for the game and another kickstarter campaign.
Upon further review of the carcass, Necro Ops has determined that this was not a Greater Mayonnaise Goblin, it was the more pernicious Giant Miniature Mayonnaise Goblin. You are lucky you weren’t digested.
Jack, you now owe me a new shirt – you made me spit coffee laughing.
“next attack used a “peer reviewed study” from the “non-partisan” League of Women Voters which said that 25% of black Americans don’t have IDs.”
People rarely lie in statistics by fudging the numbers they lie by definitions. Mass shootings- how many people do you need for it to be a mass shooting? Most would not guess 3-4. School shootings- sounds like it was in school shooting kids. nope a drug deal in the football stadium at 2 AM in the middle of summer is a school shooting.
So with this 25%, it is 25% of African Americans, but when you look at the numbers 25% of African Americans are under age. How many 6 year olds have government issued photo ID, none.
The 25% is basically below 18 yr olds. But people hear it and assume they must mean adults, and repeat it as adults.