this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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What is Politics, and Why Should Anyone Give a $#&%?
I think scale is the problem.
With something like national politics, for example, the politicians can be thousands of miles away from you and really have no accountability to you as an individual.
In state politics, the politicians may be a hundred miles away or so, but that's at least a doable trip, and you are able to make your voice heard better than you would if the politicians were a thousand miles away, because you can actually make that trip.
The mayor of your city and your city hall are probably only going to be about 20 or 30 miles away at the absolute maximum and you can very easily get to that local meeting point and make your voice heard on issues that affect you.
I've had the idea for a while that something like the United States is just too big to effectively work. Also, the smaller a country is, the less war making power it tends to have, so somewhere like the United States or Russia could wipe out the entire human population of the planet, whereas a place like Ethiopia could affect a war locally but would not be able to affect a war across the world.
How big would a country need to be before it is too big, and what mechanism or entity would effectively enforce it from reaching or exceeding that size?