The General US Politics Thread

I'd almost like to see them go completely crazy. It might Scare 'Em Straight with regards to the rest of the country and the dogged belief that Republicans are the party of sensible government.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

It'll mean the Democrats will be left in charge for at least 10 years — a perfect chance for the progressives to make irreversible progress, I guess?

Keep Rolling On

We can hope for a spate of progressive movement that'll finally seal the deal on handling climate change, money in politics, and the like, but I'm not holding my breath.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Bad. Pretty much every time this happens it's a dark red area that wants to split off for free senators.

HIV only cripples the system — it doesn't take it over.

They're really more like cordyceps.

Since 9/11, my personal comparison of choice would be that the CIA, NSA, other intelligence groups, and the police are like an autoimmune disease. The parasite and other outside infection would go more to the Halliburtons, Blackwaters, and Wall Streets of the world.

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |

That might not be all that is to it. In California, Illinois, and New York it always seems to be based, in part, on being ignored by the state government.

In those states it's easy to say who the government is ignoring them for, I'm not sure how that applies to Florida.

edited 23rd Oct '14 11:07:07 AM by LSBK

"Ignored by the state government" is usually code for, "We want to be special snowflakes," and/or, "We don't want to pay taxes to support those people."

You have to decode the buzzwords.

edited 23rd Oct '14 11:12:45 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

It's just a matter of considering what you give more important than what they give. I'm not saying what your saying isn't true, but I've heard some arguments that I can't say are entirely unreasonable, even if there may be some more political reasons behind the general movement.

This is backwards in Florida's case, actually. South Florida is much less red than the panhandle in general (while central Florida is a mix, with the typical urban blue/rural red split). In particular, the proposed state of South Florida includes Miami, Orlando, and Tampa — all Democratic bastions — while the northern panhandle counties are generally deep red (with the exception of the areas around Tallahassee and Gainesville — not coincidentally the homes of Florida State University and University of Florida, respectively).

Of course, splitting up states solely for the purpose of manipulating federal politics is shortsighted in the extreme, no matter which side actually benefits from it. But there is a pretty significant cultural, economic, and environmental divide between the south and central part of the state (which has more in common culturally with the northeast and midwest than it does with the south, is dependent on the dual pillars of tourism and agricultural for its economy, and in environmental terms is basically "the Everglades and everything that feeds into it") and the northern part of the state (which is more related to the rest of the south in pretty much every way).

edited 23rd Oct '14 11:31:39 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I think the northern half of Florida — if population were split evenly — would probably still have enough metro areas to be not too red. Maybe something like Georgia.

Of course, though, gerrymandering.

edited 23rd Oct '14 11:28:47 AM by GlennMagusHarvey

I'm not actually sure where the dividing line would fall if you went by population, but the border they drew in that article put essentially everything from Orlando down under the State of South Florida umbrella. That leaves the aforementioned Miami, Tampa, and Orlando in South Florida, while North Florida's biggest metro areas would be Tallahassee, Jacksonville, and Pensacola — the later two of which are pretty red despite being sizable cities.

Edit — for reference, here's a link to Florida's 2012 election results by county. From top to bottom, the blue zones are Miami in the southeast, Orlando in dead center, Tampa in the middle of the western coast, Gainesville in the middle of the northern section, and Tallahassee in the northwest. Notably, Jacksonville (northeast corner) and Pensacola (northwest corner, farther west than Tallahassee) are both red.

edited 23rd Oct '14 11:39:43 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Hmm, this may be one of the first times I've seen a blue portion of a state show interest in seceding — from the state if not from the nation. It makes a certain amount of sense demographically, I suppose, but I generally don't support efforts to break up political entities along cultural lines. We're supposed to be a melting pot, not a checkerboard.

It is my opinion that states and local jurisdictions should be administrative entities only, not political ones.

edited 23rd Oct '14 11:52:54 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Blue portion also kicks the idea around in North Carolina, but NC is also chafing under the tea party experiment right now so the whole thing could flip soon.

That's also part of the idea: better to chafe under bad leadership until said leadership discredits itself than to try to pull away, fixing nothing.

edited 23rd Oct '14 12:22:05 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

@Fighteer

Not quite so simple in regards to NY split - I can count on one hand the times we've had a State Senator in Western NY in my lifetime. There is quite a bit of influence that comes from the NYC area, and reasonably so - they have as many people in a few square miles as Western NY does in a few counties. But because of that, there's reasonable backlash over things like the SAFE Act - for those in the cities, it makes perfect sense, but for those in rural areas where you've got hunters, it's overly restrictive.

And for some clarification, I used to fall into the camp of thinking the SAFE Act was completely reasonable - until someone pointed out the threat of feral hogs in recent years. I've seen pictures (my half-brother used to work with APHIS, if I recall the right gov't organization) from the Pacific NW of killed hogs that literally fill the back of a pickup truck. If I had one of those pissed off and bearing down on me, it's safe to say I'd want more than 10 rounds in a clip available. In the city, though, and especially with a handgun? Anything more than 8-10 rounds would seem (and likely be) excessive.

"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"

Or it means very large swaths of the country get completely ignored at the state level. Oregon's state legislature barely bothers hearing arguments made by anyone further south or east than Salem/Portland (i.e., the overwhelming majority of its geographical area), and it shows in our legislation more often than it should.

In recent years we've seen a highly topical power grab that makes it unlikely to be the root cause — but dismissing it wholesale as special snowflake syndrome is just as much toxic demagoguery as we see from Republicans of late.

That said, interesting that the Florida thing is being led by Democrats. This is the first I've heard of the recent state breakups being proposed by anyone who wasn't deep red.

I like the low cap mags for handguns.

Well I don't because I like high cap mags for my personal use but you know what I mean.

Especially for handguns and other things it's ridiculously easy to illegally modify them into fully automatic weapons, a low cap mag will easily make that thing worthless. A certain pistol for example, the Tec-9 was infamous for this in the 90s and was mentioned by name in more than a few bans. It was cheap to buy legally off the shelf, you could get 50 round mags for it easily and it took maybe 10 minutes of tinkering to turn it into a fully automatic machine pistol. Criminals adored it.

edited 23rd Oct '14 1:15:50 PM by LeGarcon

Oh really when?

The urban/rural divide in politics is one of those things that seems like it stems from a false dichotomy. One can have laws that vary between the two settings without causing any terrible problems.

But here's the thing: population-wise, most Americans are urban or suburban. It's simple demographics, and mathematically speaking you either give them their due proportion of the vote or you decide, arbitrarily, that rural voters have more individual say than urban voters.

If we want to pretend to be a democracy, why do we insist that some of our people are only allowed three-fifths of a vote, so to speak?

More to the point, rural states tend to have higher poverty rates, weaker economies, and more backwards social environments than heavily urban states. They'd be disenfranchising themselves economically if nothing else.

edited 23rd Oct '14 1:30:54 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

To use a cliche that's tired enough that it should probably count as a Dead Horse Trope, it's concern over a tyranny of the majority. When people have their valid concerns dismissed out-of-hand, it will provoke ire, and that goes for any debate about any topic you can name.

The funny thing is that I think a fair amount of opposition (at least the more rational opposition, anyway) would figure it's perfectly fair if it only applied to handguns, as that's a proven link to criminal activity in urban centers - not too many crooks would be willing to tote around a rifle or shotgun compared to a pistol.

Of course, my mentality on gun control is that we should have started discussing it after the Virginia Tech shootings, and that some of the pushback stems from those advocating for gun control were shushed from even discussing it because it "wasn't time yet" or "let the victims grieve"... only for the next big news story to break and have it all-but forgotten.

edited 23rd Oct '14 1:43:40 PM by ironballs16

"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"

While I acknowledge the problem, I don't see that the proposed solutions offer anything to recommend themselves. Maybe if we work on getting money out of politics, the need of politicians to kowtow to wealthy (and therefore urban) donors will diminish and they can spend more time working inclusively on issues.

edited 23rd Oct '14 1:43:44 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I doubt getting money out of politics would resolve much on that end - as it's been said, urban centers are densely populated, so you reach far more people in 5 square miles in NYC than you would traveling to Conesus or Palmyra, NY.

"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"

So, rather than rural areas being ignored in politics, they want to be banana republics?

edited 23rd Oct '14 2:16:57 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Your argument in your previous post kind of comes off as "Well, urban people always know more and can do everything better than those rural pumpkins so even if we ignore them, they're better off" which I don't think you were trying to say, because of how that comes off, but if that is the jist of it...yeah.

You can make laws for a majority while still taking into consideration their could be a considerable minority your inconvenicencing or even hurting.

edited 23rd Oct '14 2:41:25 PM by LSBK

I never meant to suggest any such thing. I'm saying that the solution to the problem is not to split rural and urban areas into separate political entities in order to give the rural areas a higher weighting when it comes to votes.

edited 23rd Oct '14 2:28:25 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Oh, I agree then.

edited 23rd Oct '14 2:32:19 PM by LSBK