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State populations are not monoliths. I live in exurban Atlanta. I have more in common with someone in Atlanta than with my neighbors. There are people who want

State populations are not monoliths. I live in exurban Atlanta. I have more in common with someone in Atlanta than with my neighbors. There are people who want Atlanta to break off from the rest of the state, and people further downriver who don't appreciate that Metro Atlanta has so much control over their water supply. There's no amount of division that can neatly contain a group's interests. Gerrymandered maps are an extreme example. 60m vs 300m is no more meaningful a distinction than 500k (Atlanta) vs 6m (Atlanta MSA).

wallace_f 9y ago
It's certainly nice that in our healthcare predicament that we can at least point to other countries and ask "what are they doing that causes them to have better healthcare outcomes and cost 1-/3 to 1/9th the price--as is the case with countries like Germany and Japan." Another example is marijuana legalization, which seriously benefits people with certain diseases and psychosis. Further, it has shown in Colorado to reduce crime and increase tax revenue. It would have been significantly delayed if the federal government imposed authority of federal law in this case. So there is a pretty compelling argument to be made that some issues seriously benefit from not being under one bureaucracy.
mercer 9y ago
> There's no amount of division that can neatly contain a group's interests. Gerrymandered maps are an extreme example. 60m vs 300m is no more meaningful a distinction than 500k (Atlanta) vs 6m (Atlanta MSA). While technically true, surely there's degrees of 'containing group interests'? I've been part of various groups with different sizes. Family > friends > Christian denomination (Evangelical) > Class (highly educated but very 'middle-class'), Country (The Netherlands), etc. To me it seems obvious that as the group gets larger, as well as more 'abstract', the group interest becomes vaguer and broader and less cohesive. While I don't agree that comparisons on a state-level are the right kind of abstraction (perhaps more rural versus urban?), I do think that there's a huge difference in 'contained group interests' on the level of something like 'The Netherlands' versus 'The European Union' (the 'umemployed leeches' are at least my unemployed leeches, and not brown-skinned, etc.). And while I think the USA cannot be directly compared to the EU, I do think the USA is more similar to the EU than to one particular country within it. Or at least enough so that it makes that comparison very shaky. I often find it difficult to remember this, because from the perspective of a Netflix-guzzling European the USA is a monoculture. But if the differences within the relatively small and relatively (globally speaking) homogeneous eurozone are any indication, the USA might be much less monocultural than it appears.
libertyEQ 9y ago
>State populations are not monoliths. I never made that claim. It is simply that state level democracies is what we have in the US. I live over 1,000 miles from my nearest relative because that is where I feel most comfortable, even though I know very few people and have no connections.

wallace_f 9y ago

It's certainly nice that in our healthcare predicament that we can at least point to other countries and ask "what are they doing that causes them to have better healthcare outcomes and cost 1-/3 to 1/9th the price--as is the case with countries like Germany and Japan." Another example is marijuana legalization, which seriously benefits people with certain diseases and psychosis. Further, it has shown in Colorado to reduce crime and increase tax revenue. It would have been significantly delayed if the federal government imposed authority of federal law in this case. So there is a pretty compelling argument to be made that some issues seriously benefit from not being under one bureaucracy.

mercer 9y ago

> There's no amount of division that can neatly contain a group's interests. Gerrymandered maps are an extreme example. 60m vs 300m is no more meaningful a distinction than 500k (Atlanta) vs 6m (Atlanta MSA). While technically true, surely there's degrees of 'containing group interests'? I've been part of various groups with different sizes. Family > friends > Christian denomination (Evangelical) > Class (highly educated but very 'middle-class'), Country (The Netherlands), etc. To me it seems obvious that as the group gets larger, as well as more 'abstract', the group interest becomes vaguer and broader and less cohesive. While I don't agree that comparisons on a state-level are the right kind of abstraction (perhaps more rural versus urban?), I do think that there's a huge difference in 'contained group interests' on the level of something like 'The Netherlands' versus 'The European Union' (the 'umemployed leeches' are at least my unemployed leeches, and not brown-skinned, etc.). And while I think the USA cannot be directly compared to the EU, I do think the USA is more similar to the EU than to one particular country within it. Or at least enough so that it makes that comparison very shaky. I often find it difficult to remember this, because from the perspective of a Netflix-guzzling European the USA is a monoculture. But if the differences within the relatively small and relatively (globally speaking) homogeneous eurozone are any indication, the USA might be much less monocultural than it appears.

libertyEQ 9y ago

>State populations are not monoliths. I never made that claim. It is simply that state level democracies is what we have in the US. I live over 1,000 miles from my nearest relative because that is where I feel most comfortable, even though I know very few people and have no connections.