Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

I like coffee, Philly, Pittsburgh, Arabic language, anything on two wheels, music, linux, theology, cats, computers, pacifism, art, unity, equity, etymology, the power of words, and getting high off airplane glue. Will use Adobe Illustrator for food.

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  • 45 Comments
Joined 24 days ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2025

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  • Not a stupid question. Our government is confusing. It’s basically still being carried out verbatim, and the entire thing was built and architected in an era when the fastest anyone could travel is by speed of wind.

    In the US, government is generally federalist, meaning, each state is its own independent entity (legally speaking) with the autonomy to describe, create, and manage laws specific to their culture in their state. This boils down even further with municipal zones, which are typically related to city or township governance (covering shit like local police, trash, fire, streets).

    Each state has the power to define both its voting districts, as well as the way they vote. For example, states in the West traditionally had fewer people over sparser distances, so traditional paper balloting was foregone in lieu of ‘caucusing,’ which is literally about measuring the amount of bodies or the scale of voices.

    In the early 1800s (roughly 40 years after the founding of the country we know now), a man named Eldridge Gerry figured out that it was technically legal under federal law to flip the way districting happens on a per-state basis — instead of people choosing their district, the district chooses its voters.

    So, over time, Gerrymandering proved to be one of the only successful ways to gain an edge in a population where conservatism was shrinking and leftism and socialism were building in popularity. It has continued simply because it is a foundation of power in our bicameral (two parties) system.

    Just FYI, it is so named “Gerrymandering” after Eldridge Gerry, as well as the fact that his resulting districts looked on a map like a slithering salamander.






  • I will echo the other poster and say that all anyone has gotta do is CTRL+R in their minds, and replace gendered general addresses (“bro, guy, my man, me mate, girlfriend, mama, baby, girlie, gurl, woman, miss, ma’am, mister, etc, etc, etc”) with the word “friend.”

    Easy, simple, quick, uses pathways in your brain that already exist, and it’s just something that makes people feel good and included. Sure, maybe it’s a generic greeting at first, but I think eventually people will actually start softening their hearts and making more random friends that way. 🤷 Nothing wrong with a little more sunshine in a world where fucking everybody feels like a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit.










  • My unpopular opinion is that Flash was perhaps one of the greatest media standards of all time. Think about it — in 2002, people were packaging entire 15 minute animations with full audio and imagery, all encapsulated in a single file that could play in any browser, for under 10mb each. Not to mention, it was one of the earliest formats to support streaming. It used vectors for art, which meant that a SWF file would look just as good today on a 4k screen as it did in 2002.

    It only became awful once we started forcing it to be stuff it didn’t need to be, like a Web design platform, or a common platform for applets. This introduced more and more advanced versions of scripting that continually introduced new vulnerabilities.

    It was a beautiful way to spread culture back when the fastest Internet anyone could get was 1 MB/sec.