Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

The main reason why local rentiers don't freeze you out and put their idiot nephews in office is because they don't like the oblique uncertainty involved in political gamesmanship, so they let you take the risk and exposure. And the federal coalitions try to can leverage the 50% of non-contested states against you: the Wabash poobahs want the winning coalition to pay for club good X, but the Fremont poobahs want the winning coalition to pay for club good Y, so don't get greedy because ...

At first glance, it seems obvious that the state-level poobahs are only interested in extracting club goods by way of throwing their state majorities behind winning federal coalitions. It's a mass-scale operation and it rewards a lot of the actions that we (poobahs) already have to do to control the political machinery.

The downside is a lot of the day-to-day client service that you have to thanklessly provide is going to make upper and lower levels think that they're calling the shots.

We're putting in this organizational effort to buy table stakes at a game of uncertain influence. We're betting on our odds to be either elite enough that the rentiers will bribe us with the loot extracted from the little people, or that our majority coalition will be broad enough to improve the chances of winning some club goods from a winning federal coalition.

Imagine that we're grand poo-bahs who run the political machinery of the great state of Wabash. We sit at the top because we have either rallied together a successful crew of other political elites, or maintained the value proposition of elite in-group membership in some way, or stand a credible chance of doing so in the immediate future. Our state-level political elites are not quite as rarified as the national political elites, but not quite as entrenched as the neighborhood-level poobahs

I have an odd inkling that this would actually enable states to surface more diversity into the federal process. "Packing and cracking" gerrymandering is purely quantitative. But selecting what to demographics pack and what to crack is qualitative. Florida's politicians would want to pack and crack different constituencies than Maine's, Nebraska's, and so on.

The crazy thing is that under the District Plan, the political influence at the level of the state onto the federal government wouldn't disappear. If anything, the district plan would move the target of state-level political actors from large-scale mobilization to delineation and articulation. The district plan would shift the influence of the state into constituting publics, IE choosing which redistricting plans could influence the state selectorate's powers over the federal government.

It appears that the "district plan" was killed by majoritarians in each state. Pure selectorate shit.

"The leading statesmen
of both parties, including Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, James Wilson, Albert Gallatin, James Bayard, Rufus King, Na-
thaniel Macon, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren,
Robert Hayne, Daniel Webster, and many others, supported a version of
the district plan. "

Madison wanted to pass "district plan" amendments, and a version of the plan passed each house in his time, but no one passed both together.

And the fuckiest part of all of is that the particular shape of that the US prioritized expanding the franchise due to the particular pressures of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian coalition. If that coalition had confronted different institutional frustrations, or John Quincy Adams hadn't gotten distracted with anti-masonism, maybe the Electoral College would have gotten the push instead.

If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to defend one of these it would be the property requirement.

IMHO the Electoral College has less intellectual merit than the demand that all voters must own property.

"I'm not saying I'm a Gracchist. I'm just saying that if the logos structures the entirety of the Empire, it has to be entirely pervasive, and that means that the servile classes also have the potential to be internally governed by logos. So when I see these silly little barbarians trying to talk about the logos, an inner spirit that surpasses their bizarre ritual laws, I think 'Good for them! More power to you!'"

Zeno of Citium: da man of da millennium

It's funny to imagine how virtue signalling would work in a political order that Nietzsche would tell us was unaffected by Christian slave morality.

The sincere answer is that stoicism introduced a slave morality in Roman society that was highly regarded among elites, but which sat VERY uncomfortably with the tendency of Roman elites to violently suppress slave revolts and populist movements.

Sympathizing w/ Christians probably let Roman elites signal slave morality in spite of this tension.

Seems fair to infer that there were multiple moments when Roman elites could signal their social virtue by conspicuously sympathizing with the barbarians with trendy a neoplatonist-ish religion (Christianity).

Why can't I talk to my inbox?

It's astonishing to me that none of the AIs are integrated with email inboxes. I'm imagining a killer app that can transform your inbox into a voice-interactive service you can talk to on your phone. Think of the way that an administrative assistant in 1960 would be able to give her executive the skinny on all the inter-office memos, even if he just called in on the phone: that's what I want.

Or maybe I need to be negative about being negative about being negative. What's the fucking point? There's no coming back from being negative about being negative. It's never been more over than when being over is over.