Cole Younger wrote: ↑Tue Nov 03, 2020 7:18 am
I was going to talk about this the other day and I got sidetracked in all that foolishness with chuck. This is what the people who make all the “dumbfuckistahn” type comments are missing and I’ve never really known how to get them to understand until right now. In more urban areas you have lots more people and they’re living a lot closer together so you sort of have to have more rules and things have to be more restrictive. That’s stating the obvious but I’m doing so to contrast it with way people live in places like here in rural Georgia or most other Southern and Midwestern states or “dumbfuckistahn” and the “slave states” for those who prefer that. I live on a hundred and twenty acres if woods with a fifteen acre field. It’s surrounded by miles of woods owned by other people. I have another piece of land two miles up the dirt road from me that is another hundred and twenty. It has two ponds on it with a creek running through it. Most people around here live this way. Of course there are folks who live in town but a lot of them own land that is outside of town. I’m by no means a rich guy. I have done pretty well for myself and my family but I’m far from being wealthy in terms of money. Now in other ways I absolutely feel that I am but that’s a separate conversation.
Considering the contrast that you described in the way you and I live and even more so with the additional information that I just provided, is it any wonder that we don’t think we should have to live exactly like people in big cities with all the rules and restrictions that come with that different life? I bet you don’t know many people who own a gun. I own a lot of them. Everybody I know around here does too. When you live out in the woods owning a bunch of guns is an entirely different thing than it is in a city. When your closest neighbor is half a mile away through a bunch of woods it’s just not the same thing as a big city where people live right on top of each other. This is one reason the electoral college makes perfect sense to me. Why should people who live a completely different type of life from me get foist their wants and what makes sense where they are onto me just because a bunch of people live where they live who aren’t even really aware of how different a big chunk of the country lives? If nothing else I hope this helps in providing an understanding for why some states vote differently rather than they just must be racist and stupid. No, they live a completely different type of life and what makes sense for people in densely populated areas doesn’t make sense for us. Personally I think we have a lot more freedom and it’s why you get the backlash when people from some big city in some other part of the country retire and move to “dumbfuckistahn” and then want to start trying to implement the same restrictions they had where they cane from. No. It doesn’t apply here. Two totally different worlds almost. And this is a big part of the divide in this country.
I agree w/ this almost completely. In particular, I think I have posted here several times over the years that the biggest problem underlying the Second Amendment flashpoint is that "gun" (or rifle or what have you) means very different things in different parts of the country. It is hard to have a conversation, much less make decisions, when we don't even agree on what words mean. Besides having a huge influence on our ability to compromise, our failure to recognize this basic problem is just plain embarrassing.
Your comments on the electoral college are interesting both for what they say and what they don't say. I'm tempted to copy a previous relevant post of mine but apparently that was not helpful so I will try to say it differently. Everything you say about the protections afforded to people in smaller states by the electoral college can be reversed and said about the rules foisted upon big states by smaller states who have outsized say in what decisions are made due to the way the Senate and the EC are structured yet have no clue how people in big cities live or how they want to live. It's a problem. A real big serious problem. A good start would be for everyone to realize the nature of this problem and to work on finding the right balance, which may not be the same balance as made sense to a small group of people in the 18th century (see below). It doesn't help when politicians like Mitch McConnell make outrageously incendiary, uninformed and incorrect statements about blue states as he's rubbing our noses into some objectionable action he's taken simply because he can and not because he represents anything close to a majority of this country. A little humility would go a long way in this country and that applies across the board.
I absolutely believe in and fear the potential tyranny of the majority. I absolutely believe in and fear the potential tyranny of the minority. So did our Founding Fathers. They came up with a system that was new in the world and included a bunch of compromises to address these concerns among others. That system and those compromises worked for a long time (at least for white men, etc etc). But I don't think it's at all surprising that those compromises and those systems aren't working so well more than 200 years later especially when we now expect the system to accommodate more states, more territory, more kinds of people and more ways of life than ever before. Can we tweak (or rebuild) our systems in ways that protect both various majorities (depending on the issue) and various minorities (same)? I have no idea. But we ought to be thinking about it a lot more carefully and with a lot more understanding and humility than we currently do.
There is a view of American history which says that our history has been the evolution of a bunch of states into a unified nation. The Civil War is often pointed to as the key moment in this evolution but, having eliminated slavery, it was really commercial developments after the Civil War that define our current circumstances. In everything from the establishment of the ICC and the regulation of railroads, to trust busting, to the New Deal to the interstate highway system we have evolved an overriding Federal system that has permitted the unbelievable economic growth of this country. One can compare and contrast the economic development of Europe where the existence of small separate states was a major factor in limiting growth of all the European countries. This was only addressed after WWII w/ the development of the Common Market and eventually the EU.
It is only in the last, say, 20 to 30 years that the downside of this history has become obvious and has come to dominate our politics. For all practical purposes we cannot unwind our economic interdependence so we better figure out a way to balance our other conflicting interests and to protect all the constituencies that need protecting. The path in that direction is at best unclear.
"they" of course being the enemy of my full blown ego.
