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‘We don’t have a democracy’: why some Oregonians want to join Idaho
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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Democracy works well when people have similar general goals and just disagree about how to accomplish them. It doesn't work well when people have opposing goals. Thus I have a lot of sympathy for these people even though I disagree with their politics. Why should they have to follow the rules set by culturally dissimilar coastal cities far away rather than the rules set by much more similar and much closer Idaho?
If I could remake the US government from scratch, I think I might create something like the self-governing cities of medieval Europe. The Democratic/Republican divide is largely an urban/rural one, and this way both the urban and the rural areas would have the local governments and the representatives that the majority wanted. Real-world state lines do a poor job of demarcating regions where most of the people have similar values. A better system is possible, but in practice there's too much inertia to make such large changes.
What happens to queer people who happen to be born in rural areas, in your model?
They die, of course.
So do the poor and anyone who has the misfortune of not being born a rich landowner.
There are already solid-red states with no blue urban areas. I suppose it's technically true that people die in these states (all humans are mortal) but the implication that everyone there except rich landowners is likely to die prematurely is ridiculous.
Do you not know that life expectancy is lower in the crappy states? They're at the level of third world countries.
The same thing that already happens to most of them now, I suppose: their basic rights are protected by the Constitution but if they want to live in a community that welcomes them then they might need to move. In the specific situation this article is about, the queer people in eastern Oregon would have to deal with the same issues that the queer people in Idaho already deal with.
In general, I sympathize with the desire to rescue people from the customs of their community, but I don't think that doing so by imposing our customs on their community is a good idea except in the most extreme cases. It violates the golden rule: I wouldn't want outsiders imposing their customs on me, even if someone in my community was being mistreated according to the customs of those outsiders. It also doesn't seem to work very well in practice. It has failed in extreme cases like the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and I fear that it is currently failing in the USA.
Do you realize that you are comparing the crappier parts of the US to Afghanistan? It's like you're shitting on yourself. You can move to Afghanistan if you like that culture. We're not going to give away human rights to protect your feefees.
"Don't kill queer people," is outsiders imposing their opinion. A constitution that applies to everyone doesn't necessarily follow what locals are going to want to do.