Author: Crowhill Report

The left seems to be gearing up for an attack on the Senate, spurred in part by Sen. Joe Manchin’s ability to stop Biden’s big spending bill. (See, for example, Liberals irked by Manchin call for new Senate apportioned by population.)

They have a point. If each state gets two senators, regardless of its population, that means a person in a low-population state gets more representation than a person in a high-population state. For example, California has 68 times more people than Wyoming, which means that each vote in Wyoming is 68 times more significant than each vote in California. (When it comes to choosing a senator.)

While that’s true, to some extent it begs the question. Is the point of the vote to represent the individual voter, or is the point of the vote to represent other interests?

To illustrate the need to represent other interests, independent of popularity, let’s say somebody is building an athletic facility. They have to decide where to put their resources. Do they divide resources equally among activities — basketball, track and field, weight training, swimming, martial arts, hockey, yoga — or do they divide them by the popularity of each sport? In that case, if 90 percent of the people who use the facility want to play basketball, the other sports would only get 10 percent of the resources.

If you did that, you’d have a big basketball court with an extra room on the side that didn’t meet the needs of any of the other activities (except maybe yoga).

IOW, a purely democratic approach would all but eliminate the interests of the less-popular activities. Generally speaking, we don’t think that’s a good thing. We don’t go too far in the popularity direction, but we also don’t go too far in the “represent each activity equally” direction. Otherwise we’d spend just as much on curling and fencing as we spend on basketball and football. We take popularity into account, but we also want to support the less popular activities.

You can run the same sort of thought experiment with disciplines in a college or books in a library. The solution is almost always not to divide up resources by popularity. The result is that the less-popular disciplines / books get represented more than mere numbers would suggest.

In fact, the opposite phenomenon is a common complaint about big box stores. They only carry the most popular items. If you want something special, you need to order it online, or go to a specialty shop. That works okay with Walmart, since the long tail gets handled online. But it doesn’t work for libraries or sports complexes or governments.

I’m looking at this from a purely organizational perspective, because the historical argument isn’t going to persuade some modern people. (Briefly, it would have been impossible to form a government in the U.S.A. that did not give disproportionate representation to the smaller states.)

The point of all this is that proportional representation is not always a good thing, and we can see that in many ways. Our system gives disproportional representation to the states, but even if we were to abandon that (states don’t seem quite as important today as they were in the past), it would be a mistake to turn the Senate into a smaller version of the House.

Every source of power needs a check. The popularly voted House of Representatives needs to be counter-balanced by a less representative power, and no matter how you organize that, you’re still going to have Joe Manchins — people who have power out of proportion to the number of people they represent.

I was looking up various personality indices — the one from Galen, the MBTI, the five love languages, the Big Five, etc. — and I suddenly remembered a scene from “Kim’s Convenience” where Janet is dating some weird guy who’s into astrology. He mentions how absurd it was for him (being whatever sign he was) to be dating some other woman (being whatever sign she was), which got me wondering — what do the astrological signs say about personality?

So I looked it up. It’s actually quite interesting.

I’m not claiming this site has everything right (whatever that would mean, in this context), and I’m certainly not endorsing astrology in any way, but when you click through the various signs on this page and read the descriptions, they sound like great models from which to design a character in a novel. And they do describe some interesting character types.

For example …

Aries — No filter; Gets angry, then forgets why they were angry; Thinks everything is a game they can win; Will do anything on a dare; Easily bored

It is absurd to believe that everyone born between March 20 and April 19 has these personality characteristics, but … it is a nice picture of a type of person. I could see the utility in memorizing all these and saying, “Oh, he’s an Aries” — not referring to when he was born, but to what kind of a person he is, very generally speaking.

Having said that, I probably won’t do it.

Imagine a new Covid variant comes out. Let’s call it Omega. We learn these things about it.

• Vaccinations don’t prevent infections.
• Neither masks nor lockdowns stop the spread, and it spreads very rapidly. I.e., infections skyrocket.
• It’s not as lethal as the original virus. Hospitalizations and deaths drop, but it will send some people to the hospital, and it will kill some people. Most people will just get the sniffles.
• It’s taking over — the other variants are dying off.

It’s possible Omicron has these properties, but never mind that for now.

The rational response to this variant is to forget about masks and shutdowns and just go on with life. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’re probably going to get it eventually, and you’ll probably be fine. But some people will die.

Are we even capable of that sort of a response any more?

I don’t think so. I think we’re too addicted to fear, and we’re too addicted to the “somebody save me” mindset.

When you search for something vaccine-related on google, they will change the results to make sure you’re seeing what Google thinks you should see. The same is true with other subjects. They “curate” the results.

You may think that’s a good thing if you agree with the way they’re twisting the results. If so, that’s a very short-sighted perspective. What will you say when they curate the results in a way you don’t like?

Since the internet has become the main source of information for most people, don’t we want free and open access to it?

If Google were some little company, with 5 percent of the market, what they’re doing might be okay — so long as there were other alternatives that didn’t massage your search results. I.e., so long as there was real competition.

But Google is a monopoly, or as close to a monopoly as doesn’t matter, and it’s deciding what information people can get. That has to end. It’s absurdly obvious that has to end. But our Senators and Congressmen are cowards, or have been bought off, and they won’t do anything.

It’s that time of year, so we have to have “war on Christmas” stories.

I don’t like it when things that are not wars — no bombs dropping, etc. — are called wars. E.g., the war on poverty.

The “war on Christmas” is a similar exaggeration, but it’s also undeniable that there are people who want to downplay our Christian heritage and make Christmas and Christianity less prominent in the culture.

This year’s example seems to be a little tussle in Europe. Some bureaucrat from the “Union of Equality” in Brussels issued a memo recommending toned-down language. (It’s a fair bet that anything coming from a group called the “Union of Equality” is going to be nonsense.)

This prompted a fairly stiff rebuke from the pope, and even from Macron in secular France. Macron has gone on to criticize “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States.” I.e., wokeism.