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US Politics: The Transition Continues


Altherion

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19 minutes ago, Commodore said:

There's also an inherent tradeoff; the more you spread your voters to capture more districts, the more vulnerable those districts become to flipping. 

Which is a good thing.  More vulnerable seats means less polarization and more working together to solve problems.

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19 minutes ago, Weeping Sore said:

It's Wyoming individuals that are currently treated as 70 x more important than individuals in California.

Increasing the sizs of the House of Representatives would go a long way toward ameliorting that disparity.  The 438 fixed number is arbitrary 

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Just now, Arch-MaesterPhilip said:

And common bone of contention between the Mayor and Governor is we don't get what we send to Albany. 

Not even close. *sigh*.  It is, in fact a redistribution of wealth from people like me to folks who live up North of Westchester County.  

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13 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

I don't know that it is. Many states have urban hubs with large rural areas (even New York).  

federalism can apply from state to municipality as well

best way to limit corruption of power is to distribute and decentralize as much as possible (along with checks and balances)

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20 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

 Butterbumps,

So, vegetarianism by force?

Do you genuinely believe that that is the only and inevitable outcome I could be suggesting?   (Or were you just kind of teasing?)

I think the food industry is a wasteful, destructive, corrupt, health-crisis-inducing mess in this country.  That farmers and ranchers are paid to produce food far beyond what's necessary (and the excess gets bought and inserted into all sorts of shit that barely qualifies as food, if not just outright wasted) tells me that maybe a lot of these farmers are redundant, and perhaps already a bit too overrepresented.  Especially when they get to interfere with things like public health when they lobby USDA to advocate for more of their products of questionable nutritional value to go into health guidelines and the like.

Not for nothing, but Your focus on rural food producers comes a little close to those highly romanticized narratives of the homesteading American farmer, the "true American", for my comfort.  

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1 minute ago, Commodore said:

federalism can apply from state to municipality as well

Pipe dream and not feasible.  On some level you need administrative units that are large enough to function aw such.  While NYC is such a unit, not every county is so for all things. Some redistribution is what is going to happen.  We are not a collection of city states and modern life doesn't work like that.

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4 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Increasing the sizs of the House of Representatives would go a long way toward ameliorting that disparity.  The 438 fixed number is arbitrary 

I would up it to 10,000 (better yet, make it increase with census so a Rep always represents the same number of people)

10,000 would mean 1 rep for every 25k eligible voters. You don't need alot of money to reach 25k people. At that level there is severely diminishing returns to having a campaign $$$ advantage. 

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12 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Not even close. *sigh*.  It is, in fact a redistribution of wealth from people like me to folks who live up North of Westchester County.  

Isn't that almost the same? My life experience is very different from yours so all I've got to be upset about is that we're sending too much to Albany and not getting enough back. If my circumstances were different I'd be upset for a different reason. 

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6 minutes ago, butterbumps! said:

Do you genuinely believe that that is the only and inevitable outcome I could be suggesting?   (Or were you just kind of teasing?)

I think the food industry is a wasteful, destructive, corrupt, health-crisis-inducing mess in this country.  That farmers and ranchers are paid to produce food far beyond what's necessary (and the excess gets bought and inserted into all sorts of shit that barely qualifies as food, if not just outright wasted) tells me that maybe a lot of these farmers are redundant, and perhaps already a bit too overrepresented.  Especially when they get to interfere with things like public health when they lobby USDA to advocate for more of their products of questionable nutritional value to go into health guidelines and the like.

Not for nothing, but Your focus on rural food producers comes a little close to those highly romanticized narratives of the homesteading American farmer, the "true American", for my comfort.  

Bingo!

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28 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Kalbear, 

The interests that prompt them to vote very differently from urban voters.  I can agree it may not be rational.  However, pretending those differences don't exist could create real problems.

And again I ask - what differences are those? You've failed to even state one. 

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22 minutes ago, Commodore said:

federalism can apply from state to municipality as well

best way to limit corruption of power is to distribute and decentralize as much as possible (along with checks and balances)

It may limit the scope of corruption, but local government is corrupt as shit, and they get away with it in large part because nobody reads newspapers that cover local government.

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Speaking in generalities, and without getting into specific policies, the rural vs. urban divide is all about how rural people perceive the need for government.  Rural areas have less infrastructure, and of course are much less crowded.  Even if those areas are subsidized heavily by the urban centers of business and population, people living in rural areas don't see the day-to-day need for government involvement in their lives the same way that urban dwellers do.  They have a much lower level of exposure to the very real need for cooperation required to make society function properly.  

It only takes a short period of time living in any city to see that you really NEED some kind of governing body to oversee and enforce things or else the entire thing will be a major clusterfuck.  Traffic has to be managed, infrastructure has to be maintained, trash has to get picked up, people have to be transported around, etc.  People living in close proximity with one another have a clearer understanding that in order to have a functioning society some level of give and take is required between each citizen, other citizens, and the government. 

In rural America, the feeling is that government could vanish completely and not all that much would change, really.  And that perception is not completely off-base, a lack of government would certainly harm urban areas far more than rural areas, therefore the government is viewed as a hindrance to the rural way of life rather than a necessity.  Even while those areas benefit from the relative prosperity of the urban centers, that isn't something that is readily visible and it's extremely easy to promote the narrative of soft, weak urban dwellers wanting to extend government control over the hearty, hard-working rural folk.  

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2 minutes ago, S John said:

In rural America, the feeling is that government could vanish completely and not all that much would change, really.  And that perception is not completely off-base, a lack of government would certainly harm urban areas far more than rural areas, therefore the government is viewed as a hindrance to the rural way of life rather than a necessity.  Even while those areas benefit from the relative prosperity of the urban centers, that isn't something that is readily visible and it's extremely easy to promote the narrative of soft, weak urban dwellers wanting to extend government control over the hearty, hard-working rural folk.  

Without government, rural America would miss having subsidies and a protected market for their agricultural goods, as well as the infrastructure to allow those goods to reach their markets. And presumably there are some disputes that arise in rural areas that require higher adjudication (water rights, location of your neighbor's septic system, etc.)

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Just now, Weeping Sore said:

Without government, rural America would miss having subsidies and a protected market for their agricultural goods, as well as the infrastructure to allow those goods to reach their markets. And presumably there are some disputes that arise in rural areas that require higher adjudication (water rights, location of your neighbor's septic system, etc.)

Agreed, they would miss several things, but that isn't painfully obvious in the day to day life of a rural person the same way it is to an urban person.  But still, the overall threshold of government management necessary to prevent a given geographic area from becoming a hell-hole is much lower in rural areas than it is in urban areas.  That's why when the zombie apocalypse comes, or society otherwise collapses, you get the hell out of the city.  It's just going to be very difficult to get a rural voter to think like an urban one because when it comes to voting people are going to vote anecdotally, based on their own experiences and perception of reality, and no amount of fact-based argumentation is going to overcome that gut instinct - for most people anyway.  

 

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The vast majority of 'farmers' in this country, particularly in the midwest, are corporate entities that have no resemblance or connection to FARMING and FARMERS pictured in most people's heads when they hear those words.  It is Big Agriculture Business -- with the emphasis on Big and Business.  And it is heavily, heavily subsidized by the federal government, thanks to the the Agriculture lobbies -- and there are many of them.

Even if owned by a family -- these huge corporate cash crop entities are exactly that. They operate like the cotton and sugar plantations did in Dixie -- and which some are still in the ownership of the families that owned them before the Civil War -- sugar and cotton too, are 'agriculture' and 'farming.'  And like the cotton plantations most of the land is in the ownership of a very few people.

I grew up on a small family working farm.  I know the difference.  The changes from what that was to what was coming were underway as I was growing up.  There are no small family working farms left in the county where I grew up.

It's another veil of deceit -- to speak of the rural areas as filled with farmers.  They aren't.  What they really mean are all those small towns that used to live from the small family farm, providing the machinery and other services the farm families needed.  But as there are no farm families any longer, that entire economic base is gone.  It's all massive corporatization.

Also -- don't forget the vast swathes of land in the southwest and southwestern California bought up by the Saudies, to suck up the aquafir to irrigate the hay that they ship back to Saudi to feed their prize pedigree horses.  That's also 'farming'. 

 

 

 

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First there was the Japanese PM with Trump's kids. Then there was the diplomats being invited to Trump Hotel to get them to stay there when in town to curry favor. Now he's asking the Argentinian president to help with some permits for one of his projects. I expected him to do this but didn't expect him to be so blatant or do it so quickly.

 

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