Totally.
lrhodes
joined 1 year ago
That's a possibility. This case followed a delay where the Court voted to allow the now-rejected maps to be used in 2022. There's a loose standard around whether an unfair map can be used. Realistically, we're far out enough that every state should be able to redistrict in time for 2024. But a lot depends on the lower courts, because what will likely happen is that the states will cheerfully submit different maps that are just as imbalanced, and we'll have to watch multiple rounds of court orders, new maps, appeals, and so fourth. In some cases, courts have given an ultimatum: Provide a fair map, or we'll appoint an independent committee to provide one for you. So that's one way out of the morass, it's just a matter of whether or not the judges involved will go that route, and whether or not SCOTUS will defer to the lower courts when the appeal gets that high.
Intent is a pretty big question when it comes to cases like this. When Congress reauthorized the VRA in the 80s, the rewrote part of it to shift the focus to impact. In other words, districting changes that disadvantaged racial minorities has to be changed, even if the impact was unintentional. That's part of why Republicans in South Carolina a few years back felt safe saying, "No, these districts were intended to disadvantage Democrats." The law forbade redistricting to break up the voting block of a racial minority, but not for partisan gain. It just happened to be the case that the Democrats in the targeted district were mostly black.
Focusing on impact, rather than intent, helps prevent that sort of sleight of hand. And, as a result, some Republicans are deadset on shifting back to an intent-based standard, which is far more dificult to prove. Thomas is a notorious opponent of the impact standard—presumably because he believes that structural remedies to racism are just as bad for Black Americans as unmitigated racism. A stance that starts to seem pretty tortured in light of revelations about his relationship to Harlan Crow.
One common mistake is to think that their reasoning aligns closely with the politics of their parties. Gorsuch, for example, is a conservative, but he'll often come down on the side of Native American rights because their position relative to the government is grounded in contracts and treaties, and he's a hawk when it comes to preserving the right of contract. Once you understand that bias in his thinking, it makes sense as a conservative point of view, but it also means that he sometimes rules in favor of plaintiffs that we'd associate with the liberal side of a case.
Part of what's so flummoxing about Allen v. Milligan is that most of us thought we had Roberts pegged as the anti-VRA guy. He opposed it in the Reagan administration, helped tear down pre-clearance, and has consistently ruled against it. So either something here has recalibrated his position, even if only temporarily, or there's a nuance to position that hasn't really stood out in previous cases.
And Kavanaugh, who knows? I don't have a clear sense of his ideological commitments. Maybe he has none.
Was it a box full of classified documents?
The argument that Trump is being unfairly singled out for conduct of which every president or presidential candidate is guilty has a long pedigree. I remember talking to my dad about Nixon ages ago. He knew Nixon was guilty, but he grew up in a region of the nation where people had largely supported Nixon, and were reluctant to face up to the fact that they had backed an especially corrupt candidate. My dad paraphrased their attitude as, "He didn't do anything that all those other politicians don't also do."
At a certain point, "All politicians are the same" is just a justification for voting transactionally: You put up with a corrosive level of corruption in return for the handful of policies that matter most to you.
That's another service that's not as quick or stable as it used to be. l
It could just be delay from the overload, but it could also be a side effect of federation. Federation is a voluntary relation. There's a solid chance that set of federated instances is different for lemmy.world than it is for lemmy.ml. It might seem like that doesn't matter so long as they're federated with one another, and you're looking at a post from one or the other. The catch is that, if they aren't federated to all the same instances, lemmy.world may not see all of the votes that lemmy.ml sees—specifically, the votes from servers not federated with lemmy.world. And that would explain the divergent results between the way the two servers rank posts.
This is due largely to the way that ActivityPub passes interactions, and where those interactions are stored, and how. There's analogous behavior on other ActivityPub services, like Mastodon, where like totals differ depending on which instance you view a post from. And there are probably ways to fix it, but they would either requires some degree of centralization, or major changes to the protocol.
If the fallout from Twitter's API decision is anything to go by, some of the developers who used to maintain apps for Reddit will likely pivot to making Fediverse apps instead. That's what Tapbots after API changes pushed them off of Twitter. It wouldn't surprise me if Apollo were to relaunch as a Lemmy/Kbin app three months from now.
Good question. My memory is pretty fuzzy, but I think I first heard about Mastodon from @[email protected], who I followed on Twitter after stumbling across their Beldam label on Bandcamp. I don't remember if I was already frustrated with the direction Twitter was taking, or just curious about the new technology, but I set up an account on mastodon.xyz, quickly graduated to running my own server, then decided that was more commitment than I was willing to put in, and relocated to Merveilles.town.
It's been a few months since I've used it, but Writefreely does federate with other ActivityPub services, so you can follow a Writefreely blog or author (if it's a multi-author blog) from, say, Mastodon (and presumably Lemmy). It broadcasts two sorts of ActivityPub post: Notes, which are short, title-less posts that display in their entirety on other services, and Articles, which display the title and a link to the original post.
However Writefreely does not currently receive posts, so you can't follow accounts from other services from your Writefreely account. The reason is that Writefreely is the self-hosted version of write.as, which started development long before they decided to add AP-support, and which was planned as a suite that breaks out the various functions of blogging into separate apps: write.as for publishing, read.as for following, and remark.as for commenting, plus a few others.
Presumably, those will all catch up and you'll be able to use the full suite for interacting via AP, but the last time I checked, it wasn't quite there yet.
That data migration item might be a little cost prohibitive starting June 30th.
As for feature enhancement, I agree that Lemmy should be forward-looking in terms of what it needs in order to enhance the service, but I don't know that catering to expectations set by Reddit is necessarily the best path. Reddit evolved to suit the needs of a centralized, profit-seeking service. Not all of the decisions they made along the way were necessarily optimal for users, conducive to strong communities, or even particular good for society as a whole, no matter how much the Reddit userbase has grown to tolerate or even demand them. And, ultimately, I don't think it's healthy for Lemmy to stake its future on its potential as a Reddit replacement. At some point, it needs to chart its own course. The devs should certainly learn from Reddit where they can, but Lemmy can be more than just where Redditors go when they're pissed off at the admins.