Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Imagine instead if the Abraham H Parnassus Fund chose to use its institutional resources, and by extension its site, for uhhh actually doing something that developed human capacities. Then they would have a right to occupy the town square, for purging abusive actors (out of protection for good-faith participants), and they wouldn't actively harm to Polis around them.

And this really rubs me the wrong way in dense urban centers where these shitty community gardens represent a theft from the common value of density created by the Polis.
These powerful institutions usual have monopolize sites in dense urban spaces, meaning that they have a lot of direct control over the value of the commons. And what they choose to do with their sites by creating shitty half-ass gardens is they either cede these sites to abuse or turn them into walled gardens. Both are insults.

So since only plant life seems to be blameless in the Oppression Olympics, all the big institutions that command power, money, status, etc. license themselves to cede all of their power, money, status, to the barest appearance of plant life.

I guess this is my real gripe: no one on the cultural left really has a solid idea what "oppression" is anymore. Oppression is power targeted at the wrong targets, and Ingroup gets to say what the right targets are and even what power is. Maybe the melting of an ice cube is oppression. Maybe the power to melt is the ultimate form of power. Give me enough whacks at the PoMo theory apparatus and I can make the melting ice cube a vector of oppression.
Only plant life seems to get a pass.

I think there was a switcheroo in the 60s where a lot of Faustian progressivism got retranslated as "do good stuff in general," and since then "good stuff" has been interpreted by left-sympathetic people as "end (what we consider to be) oppression."
And it almost goes without saying that the academic left has been hard at work redefining everything from parking tickets to literacy standards as oppression.
So now the Abraham H Parnassus Fund is emptying its treasury to pay for parking tickets.

"The Library Board had decided that when the bloodthirsty tycoon Abraham H Parnassus built the Cathedral of Truth with the mission 'to render from that slumbering continent of Man his vital and Promethean magma of Reason,' we think that he really meant that people should be kind and gentle and the kindest and gentlest thing we can think of is to just have a nice empty lot with some half-assed sunflowers in it where hobos will sleep on the bench."

The Borg are just a polycule that got out of hand.

"Here's Shittoria, the world's worst, country, where everyone gets punched in the face every hour."
me, googling images of the campus of University of Shittoria: "It can't be all bad, though"

I am easily impressed by large, dense architecture.

I have this suspicion that I just can't shake that most of the insiders in left-sympathetic institutions would be perfectly happy to turn all of the establishments they've inherited into community gardens. It's like the community garden is the final evolutionary telos for the predominant type of mainline protestantism, liberal arts colleges, etc.

I used to think ducks were a satisfying weight, but on reflection I think they're probably lighter than they look.

On the other side, the state-level poobahs can approach the federal poobahs with a sophisticated range of bids: packed-and-cracked gerrymanders to keep the winning coalition tightly targeted, or an array of swingier options for more operational freedom in assembling the winning coalition.

Basically, the game that the feds played on the state-poobahs is now a two-way street. The state-level poobahs have more moves to compel certain demographics into the winning coalition.

Under the District Plan, the state-level poobah gets to approach the neighborhood boss and the local rentier and say, "I'm drawing lines. Do you want your base of support to be all-in on a coalition or split up between the two?" Packing gets you machine politics efficiencies at the risk of fragility. This opens up a lot of sharp-elbowing between the neighborhood bosses after which the state-level poobah gets to play kingmaker. It's a game homologous to the one the federal poobahs are playing

What I like about the District Plan is that it gives the state-level poobahs some of the same moves that the federal poobahs have EXCEPT the state-level poobahs also get a much sharper tool to directly fuck over local rentiers in favor of being part of the winning coalition and getting club good X.

... maybe the winning coalition will simply give up on Wabash and cultivate Fremont as a winning state instead. You can't be the tall poppy. So you'd better stick in the middle of the pack of state-level poobahs looking for club good X.

The federal level poobahs extract their cash by playing these games: maintaining the narrowest possible coalition that can still win through to getting some club goods. They're always playing the permutations, comparing the odds of success vs the expected value.

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.