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That is by design. I wish our state (Oregon) was of similar design so that all interests are represented. As it is now the populous centers, mostly Portland and

That is by design. I wish our state (Oregon) was of similar design so that all interests are represented. As it is now the populous centers, mostly Portland and Eugene, dictate their values to the rest of the state.

axaxs 6y ago
I've met two 40-50 something ex-Oregoners who've said the same thing. They were extremely libertarian, and truly unlike anyone I'd met before. Almost like they came from some foreign(to me) culture. Both complained about how the population influx of Portland ruined the state, whatever that means, and both left looking for new adventures. I'm really curious what Oregon in the 70's-80's was like. The way they described it almost reminds me of Appalachian culture.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  You will still find those types in Roseburg, Medford, parts of Clackamas county (I'm looking at you, Damascus), etc, where they refuse to pay for things like local libraries. Ask them why Coos Bay is full of drugs and see what sort of look you get from them.
paulmd 6y ago
Rural areas are already heavily overrepresented in the american system. We certainly don't need to put the thumb on the scale further. The ultimate problem is that "the rest of the state" (for virtually all states) is empty, hardly anybody lives there, and letting a minority override the will of everybody else is tyranny of the minority. Taken to the extreme, this is ultimately what killed South Africa and Rhodesia and other countries - a relatively small minority imposing their will on the majority, things getting worse and worse with no recourse for the people whose lives were actually affected until things boiled over. At its core, this is ultimately an argument for anti-democratic principles.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  You don't think the people who live somewhere should have a say in what happens there? Having city dwellers decide what happens in rural areas is the tyranny of imperialism.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    So it's better to have rural dwellers with an outsized voice in deciding what happens in city areas? You also are performing a convenient geographic sidestep where suddenly "where you live" isn't the country or even the state but is really only concerned with the local. So the rest of the people who live in the nation are diminished. Localism has led to lots of problems in American history, now we can add a shitshow of a Coronavirus response on top of the others. The party of localism tends to be gung-ho about that huge federal military operation... yet refuses a necessarily-similar intervention in a pandemic.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      You paint the not-city with way too broad a brush, and nowhere did I say that people outside of cities should control the city. But you are literally advocating for subjugation without representation. The opposite of localism you describe is imperialism/colonialism.
  - vmladenov 6y ago
    That is an argument for federalism, not vote tally inequality.
  - Paradox0 6y ago
    No, it doesn't make sense that people should have greater voting power based on their location in the same polity. Your argument is equally valid in reverse -- there's no reason why rural dwellers should decide what happens in cities. Why should your vote count for more because I have more neighbors than you do?
    - nightski 6y ago
newacct583 6y ago
Do you have examples of state level legislating in Oregon that you think needs to be changed? The big right-wing bugaboos in the PNW tend to be about federal policy (c.f. land use regulation), and the most impactful progressive laws tend to be at the city government level (Portland's $15 minimum wage, say). I mean... what exactly are you complaining about? The straw ban?
ninkendo 6y ago
The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say. Moreover, why does people's location on a 2d grid matter at all for grouping people under representatives? Why not the first letter of their surname? Their age? Maybe the altitude of their home? Seems just as arbitrary.
- Proziam 6y ago
  > The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say. This is a rather short-sighted position. There's a reason the tyranny of the majority was avoided, and it's because the majority will always vote for their own benefit. If they do so, it almost always hurts the 49%. You have to balance the needs of a state as if it were a living organism. You can't simply optimize everything for the heart when the lungs have needs as well, or the body dies.
  - ninkendo 6y ago
    > tyranny of the majority I keep hearing people say this, and it baffles me. If the majority of people feel a certain way, who's to say it's not the right way? If you start picking this apart it really just comes down to "yeah but the majority can sometimes be wrong", which, I have news for you, applies to the minority as well. At the end of the day, representative democracy exists instead of "pure" democracy because there's issues scaling the operation of government into something where everybody votes on everything. So we decide to have 1 representative for every N people. To do this, we need to break people into cohorts somehow, such that each cohort is roughly the same size. There's lots and lots of ways to do this, but we seemed to have settled on geographic locations, and sizing so that they (mostly) have similar numbers of people. But since populations can be extremely concentrated in some areas, cohorting people by geographic location becomes less and less useful. It seems to me in an ideal world, everyone would be randomly assigned to a cohort via some sort of consistent hash, and they would be evenly distributed. Mind explaining to me why this would be inferior to cohorting on geographic location?
    - Proziam 6y ago

axaxs 6y ago

I've met two 40-50 something ex-Oregoners who've said the same thing. They were extremely libertarian, and truly unlike anyone I'd met before. Almost like they came from some foreign(to me) culture. Both complained about how the population influx of Portland ruined the state, whatever that means, and both left looking for new adventures. I'm really curious what Oregon in the 70's-80's was like. The way they described it almost reminds me of Appalachian culture.

selimthegrim 6y ago
You will still find those types in Roseburg, Medford, parts of Clackamas county (I'm looking at you, Damascus), etc, where they refuse to pay for things like local libraries. Ask them why Coos Bay is full of drugs and see what sort of look you get from them.

paulmd 6y ago

Rural areas are already heavily overrepresented in the american system. We certainly don't need to put the thumb on the scale further. The ultimate problem is that "the rest of the state" (for virtually all states) is empty, hardly anybody lives there, and letting a minority override the will of everybody else is tyranny of the minority. Taken to the extreme, this is ultimately what killed South Africa and Rhodesia and other countries - a relatively small minority imposing their will on the majority, things getting worse and worse with no recourse for the people whose lives were actually affected until things boiled over. At its core, this is ultimately an argument for anti-democratic principles.

nitrogen 6y ago
You don't think the people who live somewhere should have a say in what happens there? Having city dwellers decide what happens in rural areas is the tyranny of imperialism.
- majormajor 6y ago
  So it's better to have rural dwellers with an outsized voice in deciding what happens in city areas? You also are performing a convenient geographic sidestep where suddenly "where you live" isn't the country or even the state but is really only concerned with the local. So the rest of the people who live in the nation are diminished. Localism has led to lots of problems in American history, now we can add a shitshow of a Coronavirus response on top of the others. The party of localism tends to be gung-ho about that huge federal military operation... yet refuses a necessarily-similar intervention in a pandemic.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    You paint the not-city with way too broad a brush, and nowhere did I say that people outside of cities should control the city. But you are literally advocating for subjugation without representation. The opposite of localism you describe is imperialism/colonialism.
- vmladenov 6y ago
  That is an argument for federalism, not vote tally inequality.
- Paradox0 6y ago
  No, it doesn't make sense that people should have greater voting power based on their location in the same polity. Your argument is equally valid in reverse -- there's no reason why rural dwellers should decide what happens in cities. Why should your vote count for more because I have more neighbors than you do?
  - nightski 6y ago

newacct583 6y ago

Do you have examples of state level legislating in Oregon that you think needs to be changed? The big right-wing bugaboos in the PNW tend to be about federal policy (c.f. land use regulation), and the most impactful progressive laws tend to be at the city government level (Portland's $15 minimum wage, say). I mean... what exactly are you complaining about? The straw ban?

ninkendo 6y ago

The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say. Moreover, why does people's location on a 2d grid matter at all for grouping people under representatives? Why not the first letter of their surname? Their age? Maybe the altitude of their home? Seems just as arbitrary.

Proziam 6y ago
> The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say. This is a rather short-sighted position. There's a reason the tyranny of the majority was avoided, and it's because the majority will always vote for their own benefit. If they do so, it almost always hurts the 49%. You have to balance the needs of a state as if it were a living organism. You can't simply optimize everything for the heart when the lungs have needs as well, or the body dies.
- ninkendo 6y ago
  > tyranny of the majority I keep hearing people say this, and it baffles me. If the majority of people feel a certain way, who's to say it's not the right way? If you start picking this apart it really just comes down to "yeah but the majority can sometimes be wrong", which, I have news for you, applies to the minority as well. At the end of the day, representative democracy exists instead of "pure" democracy because there's issues scaling the operation of government into something where everybody votes on everything. So we decide to have 1 representative for every N people. To do this, we need to break people into cohorts somehow, such that each cohort is roughly the same size. There's lots and lots of ways to do this, but we seemed to have settled on geographic locations, and sizing so that they (mostly) have similar numbers of people. But since populations can be extremely concentrated in some areas, cohorting people by geographic location becomes less and less useful. It seems to me in an ideal world, everyone would be randomly assigned to a cohort via some sort of consistent hash, and they would be evenly distributed. Mind explaining to me why this would be inferior to cohorting on geographic location?
  - Proziam 6y ago