Redistricting, Disinformation, and the Aesthetics of Cynicism

Like most anti-MAGAs (i.e. those to the left of, say, Mussolini), it’s been deeply engrained in me that Republican gerrymandering in Texas defied a norm, and Democrats are simply aping that move, exploiting the same norm, only much more successfully (in Virginia and Florida, etc.), and that Republicans are shedding crocodile tears over it.

But just because the other side lies incessantly doesn’t mean “my side” is honest, honorable and sane. It doesn’t, alas, work that way.

In fact, my engrained understanding of the redistricting fight, though emotionally satisfying, might have been spinny bullshit. Argh.

So I had a talk with chatGPT...

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The Dems insist that their redistricting moves in FL and VA were merely tit for tat after Republican redistricting schemes in TX a few months ago. Republicans are accusing Dems of leaving the voters out, but Dems say that’s exactly what the Republicans did in TX.

But I just saw a tweet saying “state legislature elections have different norms for citizen involvement”.

Can you flesh that out, and tell me if Democrats are making a false equivalence? I’m anti-MAGA, but also anti-bullshit.

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Short answer: both sides are telling selectively true stories. The “different norms” point is real—but it explains the disagreement more than it resolves it.

There are three broad redistricting setups in the U.S.:

1. Legislature-controlled (e.g. Texas, Florida)
Maps are passed like ordinary laws. No required public vote.
👉 Mid-decade redraws without voters are procedurally normal here—even if aggressive.
2. Commission-based (e.g. California)
Independent/bipartisan bodies draw maps.
👉 Bypassing them violates the system’s intent.
3. Hybrid / voter-constrained (e.g. Virginia)
Legislatures operate under voter-approved rules, and structural changes can involve referenda.
👉 Voter involvement is part of the design.

So:

* Texas: legislature redraws mid-decade → normal process, partisan outcome

* Virginia: voters approve a change enabling a redraw → more participatory process, same partisan aim

Different procedures, same underlying move. Are Democrats making a false equivalence? Not exactly—but it’s slippery.

They’re right that Republicans normalized mid-decade gerrymandering. But they stretch it by implying: “this is exactly the same thing.” It isn’t—procedurally. It is—strategically.

Republicans, meanwhile, complain about “cutting voters out” even where voters were explicitly involved, leaning instead on a broader fairness argument.

The cleanest read: same game, different rulebooks, identical incentives.

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I’m exhausted by all sides spraying untruths 24/7. “Everyone is lying to me incessantly” leads to Soviet-style cynicism—i.e. there is no truth. It’s a big reason I moved to Portugal.

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That slide is real—but it’s also a trap.

There’s a difference between “everyone is lying” and “everyone is spinning from a position of interest.” The redistricting fight is closer to the second. It feels like the first because both sides are telling true things that are strategically incomplete. A few things remain solid:

• Mid-decade redistricting is now normalized

• Both parties use it for advantage
• States operate under genuinely different rules

The confusion comes from collapsing two axes into one:

* outcome (“it’s the same”)
* process (“it’s different”)

Both are true. Neither is sufficient alone.

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Hey, one does what one can. But my unfamiliarity with Portugal keeps me planted in the immediate and not drifting out into the fluffy storyline strata of it all. Unfamiliarity plants you in the here-and-now.

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That’s a useful constraint.

Operating in a second language narrows interpretation. You track what’s actually said, not the expanding cloud of implication.

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Portuguese culture generally parses as adorable, largely because it’s unfamiliar.

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What reads as “bullshit” at home lands more like “local shimmy” abroad—not because it’s purer, but because it hasn’t yet collapsed into a familiar pattern.

The downside: drift, missed expectations, the 11:00 that becomes 11:40.

The upside: less narrative inflation.

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It occurs to me that I might have missed a critical axis in this equation: tedium.

Maybe I’m not sick of being lied to incessantly, but am mostly tired of being lied to in the same irritating way.

That tracks with cynical Russians I’ve met. They’re more bored than angry. I used to figure they were numb from long suffering. But perhaps it’s more about length and less about suffering. They’re fed up with the form more than the content.

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That’s the sharper cut.

After repetition, the brain compresses: “I’ve seen this move.” Novelty disappears. Attention withdraws. What remains isn’t outrage—it’s boredom. Not “This is intolerable” but “This again.”

If tedium is the driver, then the opposite of cynicism isn’t truth—it’s novelty: encountering something that doesn’t instantly collapse into a known pattern.

So instead of: “Everyone is lying so there is no truth,” you get: “Everyone is running the same scripts so I’m exhausted by the repetition.” Less existential. More like creative bankruptcy.

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Yeah. Nice aikido flip. And I think it’s apt, and not mere “copium” (i.e. just “a nice way to think of it”).

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It helps—but it doesn’t absolve anything. A stale lie is still a lie.

What changes is the affect. Outrage energizes, while boredom anesthetizes

Systems don’t need to persuade you. They just need to out-repeat your capacity to care.

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I guess it boils down to “Lie differently, please!” It’s an awfully odd stataement, but it wouldn’t provoke a knowing chuckle if there weren’t something to it.

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Exactly. It’s not about truth—it’s about repetition.

“I know you won’t stop—just don’t run the same script.”

That’s acknowledged artifice. The joke lands because the pattern is seen.

There’s a catch: better lies can re-engage you without improving anything. You’re asking for better performance, not better truth.

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It’s a huge shift to pin the problem on aesthetic considerations. Tonal considerations. Dramaturgic considerations!

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Yes—that’s the turn. You stop asking only “Is this true?” and start asking “How is this being performed?”

Now you have three axes:

• Truth
• Power/Intent
• Aesthetic (alive vs dead performance)

Tedium is what aesthetic failure feels like from the inside.

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Cynicism could be parsed as interest shifting away from some strata due, largely, to tedium. Even though it’s always attributed as a rejection of substance (“those bastards!”), due to projection. I.e. “The preoccupation that previously drew my passion has failed to hold my enthusiastic attention. My fallen interest must be their fault.”

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That tracks. Cynicism often isn’t heightened clarity—it’s attentional withdrawal. “I’ve seen this scene too many times.”

That withdrawal gets recast as moral judgment, ala “they’re contemptible,” which preserves a sense of certainty. But the underlying shift is simpler:

curiosity → recognition → saturation → disengagement

Seeing that distinction prevents the jump to: “there is no truth”

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If you have no fresh new stratum to shift to and absorb in to replace the one that dried up for you, you’ll wind up listless and defeated. But that’s not the inevitable outcome of cynicism, even though that’s how we imagine cynics. You can always reframe into some new enthusiasm or perspective or movement or general area of concern.

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Right. Cynicism isn’t terminal. It’s local exhaustion. If you can shift frames, you don’t get stuck there.

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Well, we’ve at least squeezed some epistemological takeaway from the current redistricting furor!

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Not a bad yield. A messy political spat becomes a usable lens.

Impermeable Conviction

Even after a solid decade spent with our faces firmly planted in the thoroughly miserable psychological taint of a prodigiously wealthy and powerful man, our assumption that wealth and power constitute "winning" (and their lack compels and justifies aggrieved discontent) will remain fully intact.

Not a single nanometer of firm conviction will have been shaved off by this bitter experience.

Feral Cunning

Two things severely suppress intelligence: arrogance and ambition.

Intelligence flows freely through dilation, while arrogance and ego are constrictive. They pinch the pipes.

Self-pinching produces a certain sharpening: feral cunning. But while feral cunning is a mental phenomenon, I don't equate it with intelligence.

Humans, having comparatively recently come in from the fields and stopped crushing boulders, remain blurry about distinctions between different mental functions. Non-physical activity seems like a single blob, so "intelligence" sloppily covers everything not involving brute strength or steady hands. Feral cunning is done with the mind, so it's lumped under "intelligence".

This reconciles Donald Trump's stupidity with his shrewd flair for survival and dominance. As pinched as any human alive, he possesses extremes of both stupidity and feral cunning.

Going the other way, reducing constriction boosts intelligence.


One can smell constriction. Especially at extremes, it stinks. Literally rank stupidity. Dilation, by contrast, smells like perfume. This is what yogis and shaman mean by "purification".

Frank, the Cocky Loudmouth at the End of the Bar

A friend was bewildered as to why Trump appointed a clown like Pete Hegseth as his defense secretary. My reply:


Let me share an image I've been returning to since Trump was first elected. It explains his presidency pretty well. Not perfectly, but quite effectively:

You're sitting at a bar. Some stupid gin mill. And Frank, at the end of the bar, is a mouthy know it all shitbrain old dude who dominates conversations, so most people ignore him, which bothers him not one bit. Frank brashly spouts (to whoever will listen, or even to empty space) conspiracy theories, racist poppycock, and bitter criticism of those asshole politicians, knowing with all his heart that he could do a far better job than any of them.

From Frank's perch at the end of the bar, and 6 drinks into his late afternoon tear, it seems completely reasonable. Even though he's stupid and feckless and childish and undisciplined and ultimately just two balls and a mouth. Just because he's, y'know, Frank.

Say, through a series of screw-ups and accidents and lucky breaks and Frank's feral refusal to ever quit or acknowledge any limitation of any sort (plus loads of money from his Dad—or at least whatever's leftover that he hasn't squandered—plus a superpower of absolutely zero shamelessness or empathy), Frank gets elected president. Who does Frank appoint defense secretary?

Does he put in the work, flipping through binders of disciplined, stony civil servants and defense experts to determine someone qualified and competent?

Frank? Are you kidding?

No. "Who," thinks Frank, "is that pugnacious guy on FOX who's nearly as loud and cocksure as I am, who goes on and on about how we need to be TOUGH and stop being PUSSIES and HURT THE ENEMY and not be distracted with being NICE to people (gays, minorities, women) when we need real manly men who will SLAUGHTER REMORSELESSLY?"

Frank gets the name, and circles it with his Sharpie. "He seems perfect to me! That's my guy!"

Because of course he does. What else would you expect from Frank? Frank doesn't know anything. He's just that shitbrain from the bar. So of course he appoints the poser hair gel tough guy from the TV. How would this baffle you? What do you expect from Frank? Hey, you voted for Frank, suspecting that he was a paper-thin mouthy shitbrain running entirely on balls-in-your-face cocksure brio. And you're surprised he'd make this move?

For a sightly more satirical version, see Peter Seller's "Being There", a great film about a simple-minded gardener who keeps rising and rising.

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And 1/3 of the country looks at Frank’s climb, and says “He’s just like me!”, and for them, it’s a glorious shattering of the glass ceiling. They’re in love.

Meanwhile, the Left hates Frank, but they're at least as devoted to this sort of political ego projection. According to their doctrine, every identity group pines for, and ultimately deserves, a politician who “looks like me.”

Me, sure, I’d vote for a Jewish president. But if a Presbyterian were an even slightly better candidate, I wouldn’t even need to blink at the decision. I can’t generate a nano-calorie of extra enthusiasm for a president who belongs to some group I belong to. How about someone smart? And competent? And hopefully, god willing, boring? Maybe that’s the way to choose a leader, rather than get one’s ego and victimhood (every American is an aggrieved victim) and self-story-telling all wrapped up in it. That’s how Franks get through!

We need to stop making politics a narcissistic mirror. That’s what frickin’ Instagram is for.

Don’t blame Frank. He’s just a disturbed opportunist. Blame us!

Working Around a Missing Feature in Apple Notes

Annoyingly, you cannot make a Note in MacOS read-only (i.e. unalterable). So if you have a note containing important information which you frequently open in mobile, a stray hand movement might alter its content and you might not notice in time to perform an "undo", leaving you "screwed" as they say in the tech world.

The standard workaround (until Apple finally solves this) is clunky:

Create a new Notes folder

Share the Folder with yourself

Set permissions to View Only

Move the note into that folder

That's a lot of work. And I can't anticipate all the consequences, some of which will inevitably be painful in some unforseeable way.

I'm a fan of lazy, dumb, good-enough solutions one might miss while trying to find a non-existent perfect solution. So here's my move:

Control/Left-click the note in the sidebar of the Notes app.

Choose "Duplicate"

Rename the newly created note so it sorts, alphabeticallly, just beneath the original version, but append the name with "(xxxxBACKUP VERSIONxxxx)".

And never ever open that one.

Dumb. Inelegant. Lazy. Sloppy. Welcome to my world!

On Clobbers and Velvet

When, in an otherwise peaceful, comfortable moment, your mind spasms into the not-here/not-now to present some gratuitous blast of fear/loathing/contempt/sadness/regret/bitterness/trepidation/etc., there is only one sane response:

"That's not here and now. That's gratuitous."

We confuse whims with clobbers—a tiny error that compounds titanically over a lifetime of indulging the mistaken interpretation.

Hardly anyone draws this distinction, even though it's a magic button. Why? For the same reason they conjure up all that immaterial strife in the first place. They wish to torture themselves a little, because the peace and comfort of the current moment feels vaguely troublesome or inadequate. It's unlike them.

"I am not a peaceful, comfortable person who basks in peace and comfort. I am a tough guy, or a punk, or a sullen adolescent, or a weary bitter cynic, or someone who craves sharp sensations—the very opposite of the velvety embrace of the current moment."

In one of my most popular postings, "Ballasting Happiness", I wrote:

If you know a worrier, you've surely discovered that such people play a perpetual game of "whack-a-mole". Alleviate a worry for them, and they'll instantly find something else to worry about. It's all about the mindset, not the worries themselves (if there are no real worries at hand, silly ones will be manufactured). They think they're plagued by worries, but, really, they're plagued by the desire to worry.

When you try to alleviate the circumstances that make an angry person angry or a sad person sad, nothing is accomplished because circumstance doesn't create the mindset, it's the other way around. The mindset comes first. Slings and arrows are sought out and eagerly grabbed at.

Your Uncle Louie is not an Aggravated Person because things aggravate him. Things have aggravated him because he's an Aggravated Person.

How does this happen? Everyone, at a certain point, decides how happy they will be (as with most such choices, cues are taken from the happiness of family members and others around them). This decision becomes a bedrock part of identity - the "I am this kind of person" inner narrative we all maintain.

I trimmed a couple of paragraphs, but recommend reading it all.

Some people can clear their slate—distinguish whim from clobber—if coaxed to simply notice the gratuitousness and the immateriality. They won't do it themselves, for the same reason they deliberately lead themselves needlessly astray. But the lightly gripped can often see clearly for a moment, and let go back into velvet.

Others are more far gone. They cannot perform this reset under any circumstances, because they're way too committed to the bit due to long reinforcement.

"My beloved deceased guinea pig Floyd is NOT something I just pulled out of the recesses of my mind. Floyd was REAL and my grieving is REAL and you can't tell me I don't MISS him every second of every day. The Hell with you and your "reframing". I loved Floyd in a way you'll never understand!"

Sometimes it's said with a near-wink. They recognize their self-indulgence, and are reasserting their whimsy, expanding the storytelling field to include the shmuck who foolishly tried to help. It's like raising a bet—"Not only will I not recognize reality; I will yank you into my delicious and turbulent unreality!"

Of course, the whimsy soon drops away, and one can find oneself locked into a hell of one's own imagining, unable to reverse course and make more grounded choices. Fancy quietly congeals into peril.

I can understand how children and adolescents might be unsettled and knocked off-course by incoming blasts from their mental noise, assuming it's real. It's harder to understand how someone might spend decades in such conditions without at least examining them.

Me, I stuck with the bit until age 47, when I found myself locked in profound oppositional conflict between actuality (a peaceful night planted on a comfy couch drinking sumptuous wine watching a great movie on a vast TV) and incoming blasts from my inner mind (it's Christmas Eve, and, having failed utterly to live up to expectations, I am revealed as a pathetic wretch—all the more so given how plumply and disgustingly self-satisfied I'd momentarily felt amid my pitiful failure).

Read the story here

Back and forth; back and forth. I was so lost that I could not tell which side of that coin was true...even though one was patently, well, true while the other was pure mental confection. Not exactly a mystery for the ages!

After spending entirely too much time grappling with the patently obvious, I literally came back to my senses, recognizing that the desperation, shortfall, shame, and thirstiness were entirely fabricated, while reality is the velvety embrace of the current moment. Reality is a point of return that's always available amid our incorrigible flights of fancy...if we don't lose all touch.

You may dispute my observation that the current moment is always a velvet embrace. Things, after all, do go wrong.

Yes, they do, but only for a moment. 99% of the pain and emotional confection are pre- and post-tremors. And the problematic moment doesn't seem problematic, because (if it's a real problem, and not just some storyline you've created) you're occupied with acting—with solving the problem!

If someone, right now, suddenly pointed a gun at you and demanded to know "where the money is," then, ok. That's not velvet. But you won't know it, because you're not checking. You won't be sensitively dipping a toe into your emotional waters to gauge how far from perfection the temperature's drifted. You'll be entirely occupied with dealing with the situation, not fussily weaving it into your narrative of pain and woe. It only frames as a problem once it's no longer a problem—later, while poised in velvety embrace. That's how you know you're at peace: when you start manufacturing stress.

Agitation is the hallmark of comfort, peace, and velvety soft embrace. And thus an eternally easy flip.

Further reading


Dreams and whimsy are a wonderful human perk. There's no need to use that faculty for self-torture. Creative dreaming leads somewhere good. Buying into gratuitous misery does not. We can be selective with our whimsy, opting out of the sort that doesn't help.

Entitlement

There is nothing more exasperating than to watch someone with a shitty job do a shitty job at their shitty job out of the unshakeable conviction that it's beneath them. They deserve so much more!

Never do they notice that that they're presenting incontrovertible proof that they barely deserve even the woeful predicament they lament.


Related:
Martin Luther King on street sweepers
"Billions, Millions, Thousands"

Iterations

Doing a thing 5,000 times, you'll be rewarded with one of two possible magic tricks:

1. If you try to do slightly better each time, your output will come to seem like more than the sum of its parts. At first, only subliminally. Your cookies "grow on" people, or your prose is "hard to put down". Over time, greatness arises.

2. If you try to maintain quality, you'll nail it even on bad days and under poor conditions. Your magic trick is consistency. A sort of heroism.

But if you don't set a standard to maintain or to push, results will be scattershot, and you'll often find yourself impatiently awaiting inspiration. Magic appears to arrive, erratically, "from above".

This applies to all human action, not just one's center stage activity.

Exceptionalism

Rick Wilson, inventor of the immutable political axiom “Everything Trump Touches Dies”, writes (regarding the Noem and Bondi—and, soon, Gabbard—firings):

You’d think after a decade of watching the Rick Wilson School of Applied Political Thermodynamics, these people would understand the phase change from “loyal foot soldier” to “discarded husk” is an absolute, an inevitability for anyone in Trump’s crapulous orbit.

I mused, as a kid, about how guys who’d stolen girlfriends from other boyfriends always assumed they’d live happily ever after with said stolen girlfriends. What makes them so certain the same fate won’t befall them, given their paramour’s fickle track record?

It’s because everyone, in their heart of heart, thinks “I’m different.”

This, just like “ETTD”, is a peephole into the gargantuan self-superiority and narcissism quietly lurking within the *average* person. Everyone’s exceptional. Without exception. We fail to grasp how narcissistic everyone is, because we’re all far too narcissistic to notice.

The Seminal Facebook Post

The seminal Facebook posting follows. I posted it in reply to comments after my latest attempt to offer a sharp point drew, as always, nothing but slobberingly distant bla-bla-bla from my distressingly intelligent and savvy social media circle.  

I do realize that many people use Facebook by seizing upon a single charged term and unloading their general policy position on that term, regardless of the point being made in the posting. Sort of like kids gathered around a campfire and riffing on a theme like “storms” or “ghosts”.

I don’t mind that people do this, though I do mind greatly that because this is all people do now, they are increasingly unable to engage in on-point discussion of anything anywhere ever. I just find it surprising that someone would judge my feed just another place to plaster their random, keyword-triggered thoughts, when I take obvious pains to buck the trend and be thoughtful and specific, offering interesting thoughts deserving focused consideration and discussion rather than a campfire bullshit session of ghost stories and shit-that’s-been-preoccupying-you. 

I literally can’t remember the last time anyone took a point head-on, rather than sloppily and indulgently releasing their random iddy issues. Y’all couldn’t pass a Turing Test. 

So I’m not going to frame this as a warning or anything, but this might be a bit like musical chairs, because at some point I’m gonna blow my top, and the last person to be caught out might feel excoriated. This is not that, btw. This is me being cordial. Thank you for your attention to this matter.