I've noticed lately that on certain social media websites, particularly Reddit and Facebook, there has been an uptick in articles about fake hate crimes and false rape reports. The comments on these articles especially fan the flames on the subjects of homophobia, racism, and sexism. While the articles themselves are still noteworthy and deserving of attention, the amount of attention that they've been receiving has been disproportionately high (especially when considering how fairly unknown the individuals involved are) and the discourse on those articles particularly divisive.

On top of that, there are clear disinformation campaigns going on to attack current Democratic presidential candidates in the U.S. It seems pretty clear that we're having a repeat of the last presidential election, with outside parties stoking the flames of discrimination and disinformation on social media in order to further ideological divisions, and the consumers of that media readily falling for it.

I would caution readers to be mindful of the shifting representation of historically controversial or contentious topics moving forward. Even if the articles themselves are solidly factual, take note of how frequently you're seeing these articles, whether or not they're known to be contentious topics, and how they're affecting online discourse.

In short: make sure that you can still smell bullshit even when it's dressed up in pretty little facts.

A while back I saw a cool link on Tildes, I think it was before the save feature was implemented, which is why I've lost it. It was an article with an accompanying JavaScript toy to demonstrate the point: if a system starts clustered, equality alone won't bring the system to equilibrium because the system has momentum. You have to swing hard in the other direction to get to actual equilibrium. (i.e. it was a defense of affirmative action.)

Basically, you set some conditions meant to represent demographics. The people were represented by little squares in the simulation. The conditions were things like "start X% concentrated" and "squares must have 2/3/4 different colored neighbor squares."

I think it was on Medium, but I'm not sure, and I can't for the life of me find it again even after scouring Tildes, Reddit, and Google. Anyone know what I'm talking about and where I can find it again?

The current US Senate majority continues to support the president. However, the current president may have been compromised by the Russian government.

The connections that several senators have to Russia (Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, to name two) raise the very real possibility that the current Republican majority in the Senate owes its existence to Russian help.

The FBI, a renewed Republican target, has suggested as much in briefings given to that same U.S. Congress.

What are the chances of the House investigating sitting menbers of Senate, and what twists and turns might occur should it happen?

Personally, I strongly dislike it. Every aspect of every film is way overblown there.

If there's a funny scene in a movie, they LITERALLY die laughing and wake their whole neighbourhood up.

If there's a scene that is in the slightest bit sad, they're going to cry their eyes out for months.

If there's a movie that's decently good, then it's an absolute masterpiece and the best movie of the decade.

And so on... Everything is always really exaggerated.

On top of that, there's always the circlejerk hivemind aspect. Threads are closed after 6 months, so the whole discussion about the film is divided between many threads, but because every thread is small and new, you often get the same fluff comments.

For more popular flims, it is the absolute worst. With half the thread being just funny quotes from the movie with no additional commentary or anything valuable, yet having thousands upon thousands of upvotes. It's kind of sad.

I used to go to IMDb boards, –which, admittedly, had their own issues– but they were still pretty useful for discussion. And shutting people up wasn't as easy as it is on Reddit, so the opinions there were much more varied. However, since they shut them down, Reddit is the closest thing I've found. Moviechat.org is supposed to be a replacement to the IMDb boards, but it's pretty inactive.

So, even though I kind of despise r/movies, I'm sort of forced to use them. But reading it makes me somewhat bitter.

What about you?

Now that the ballots for the 2018 House of representatives election have been counted, how badly was the vote gerrymandered?

Gerrymandering is the creating of political districts to maximize the number of representatives a political grouping gets per vote.

The degree of gerrymandering can be approximated by calculating the difference between the outcome of a proportional voting system and the actual districted representatives each party gains.

Here's a look at the last 5 elections to the House of representatives.

In this congress, the Democrats have 235 representatives, the Republicans have 199 and there's 1 other representative.

Voter turnout was 50,3%, the highest for a midterm election since 1914.

The Democrats got 53,5% of the popular vote and 54,0% of the seats. The Republicans got 44,8% of the vote and 46,0% of the seats. Others got 1,8% of the vote and a single seat.

Since the Republicans are no longer getting vastly outsized representation, is gerrymandering dead?

If the US would have had a proportional voting system, 7 of the 435 seats would have been distributed differently in 2018.

The Democrats would have had 3 fewer representatives, the Republicans would have had 4 fewer and others would have had those 7 seats.

Here are the similar figures for the last five elections.

The change from getting 27 seats "wrong" in 2016 to 7 seats "wrong" this year is large and changes the historic trend.

Turns out that higher turnout led to more accurate representation in 2018. Who would have guessed.

(There are many other additional possible explanations for why this has changed too)

If we just look at the two major parties, what does this mean in real terms?

Here's an overview of the average difference in the number of voters the Democrats have needed for each seat they actually got in the last five elections compared to the Republicans.

There are other ways of trying to engineer specific election results.

This basic overview only looks at people who actually vote. Therefore it obviously doesn't consider those who are prevented from voting in the election process, whether that's from voting requirements, accessibility of polling places, registration requirements, etc.

It will be interesting to see what happens in 2020.

Is this a trend that'll continue?

Is it just a blip because those gerrymandering haven't been able to predict what party voters vote for in today's political climate?

What about turnout?