4 ms·

Texas is meaningfully less free than many other states. No legal cannabis, can’t watch adult content without it being attached to your identity, can’t get prope

Texas is meaningfully less free than many other states. No legal cannabis, can’t watch adult content without it being attached to your identity, can’t get proper care when experiencing a miscarriage, etc… For as much as Texans talk about Freedom, states like Colorado seem far more free.

Loughla 2y ago
I find it interesting that discussions of freedom in the context of states like Texas tend to be more about freedom for businesses instead of personal freedom. When did that start happening?
- VonGuard 2y ago
  The 1980's when Reagan turned this country upside down and showed the GOP that cutting taxes wins them elections, even if it makes the debt go out of control and you can no longer pay for anything the government buys.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  The personal freedom thing has always been rules for thee and not for me, particularly in the religious South. Lawrence v. Texas led to legalizing consensual homosexual activity. The personal freedom thing might gain traction again because people are realizing that explicitly endorsing Christianity as core to the identity of the country often goes hand in hand with picking a favorite version of it and demonizing others, which is why the separation was historically included.
undersuit 2y ago
Every state has odd laws but Texas limits the number of sex toys you are allowed to own to 5.
- striking 2y ago
  My goodness, you're not kidding. https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/the-texas-law-that-dictates-adult-toys/ https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/the-texas-law-that-dictates-... I dug a little further and apparently there's an "obscenity" law that prevents you from selling sex toys as sex toys, according to https://www.houstonpress.com/news/opinion-yes-texas-has-a-law-limiting-dildo-ownership-but-not-guns-13497950 https://www.houstonpress.com/news/opinion-yes-texas-has-a-la... > Like Heather, she spent her time in Dallas lying to people about products to stay ahead of vice officers. > “This was my first experience as a white girl from Wisconsin at fearing the police,” she says. “My heart was in my throat. I had to say with a straight face, ‘no, this three-pound dildo is a cake topper.’ I would have to talk around any reference to the body parts these were supposed to be used on. Even with regulars who I knew were okay, I never changed the words in case I got used to telling the truth and slipped up when a cop was around.” Freedom.
- goneri 2y ago
  It's actually 6. https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.43.htm https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.43.htm (f) A person who possesses six or more obscene devices or identical or similar obscene articles is presumed to possess them with intent to promote the same.
  - EmuAGR 2y ago
    Well, you're allowed to 5; from 6 included you're presumed to promote obscenity.
  - freejazz 2y ago
    Read it again.
  - quickslowdown 2y ago
    Read it like this: you are allowed less than 6 sex toys in Texas.
scarecrowbob 2y ago
Texas was literally founded to be a slave state. I know this, because my ancestors were there doing that. No surprise that it's still oppressing big chunks of its population. One thing I will say, it's hard to put all the folks in Texas in a bucket. Several classes of folks live there- most of my friends there are just trying to, like, keep the fresh tortillas in stock at the HEB or serve beers while keeping a functioning automobile. Regardless of the goodness or badness of their ideas (or even fantasies of sovereignty), they are still materially beholden to a powerful and oppressive state. People who get joy out of watching things happen to poor folks in Texas really don't understand gerrymandering, cultural hegemony, or any of the other mechanics of how oppressive governments operate. I can guarantee you that those same folks, in Texas, would be the conservative folks writing oppressive laws to empower their good ol' boy buddies to do horrible stuff to the population. Because at it's base, the inability to see oneself in oppressed people is the same everywhere we go. The view that the idiot lumpen serfs deserve to be oppressed (or, if you prefer, "deserve the government they 'elected'") is the same aesthetic position that leads the folks who own Texas to conclude they can do whatever they feel like to the people there.
- snarf21 2y ago
  Don't forget about the slave handle of Oklahoma. They gave away over 5000 square miles so they could keep slaves. And the reason they were forced to do this is that they wanted the US government's protection against Mexico and statehood prohibited slavery above the 36th parallel (Missouri Compromise. Quite ironic. (Also, you are right, our country has lost almost all sense of empathy)
  - pdpi 2y ago
    > (Also, you are right, our country has lost almost all sense of empathy) From the outside, it looks worse than that. It seems more like the US has developed a weird active aversion to empathy, to the point where even enlightened self-interest gets rejected because it looks suspiciously like empathy.
  - scarecrowbob 2y ago
    Yup. It's odd what they do and don't teach in Texas History. People tell me about how bad propaganda is in other places. Good thing they don't have it here, or those folks would probably be very mad at the systems who raise them- then they might have to examine their highly conflicted relationships to the abusive powers that be. Personally, though, I do see empathy here and there. In some places (especially among folks who think they are more likely to have been a plantation owner than a peasant anytime someone talks about 'land reform') it's notably attenuated. Empathy is not a lost cause- lots of good folks, and lots of folks who want to be good but don't know how. But it's gonna take some work to get make it louder.
throw0101d 2y ago
> For as much as Texans talk about Freedom, states like Colorado seem far more free. A distinction that historian Timothy Snyder[1] wrote about in his recent book On Freedom, freedom to versus freedom from (positive versus negative): > To the Ukrainians, freedom does not simply mean the absence of Russian soldiers, but also the reconstruction of society — of schools, hospitals, and roads — and making sure everything functions even better than it did before the war began. > The Ukrainian definition of freedom is very different from how it’s commonly defined in the United States, where overuse has divested the term from its true meaning. When contemporary Americans talk about freedom, they’re usually referring to what the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin called negative freedom: freedom from something, like a dictator invading your land, or the government taking away your right to bear arms. By contrast, Ukrainians tend to talk about positive freedom: the freedom to do something, like building robust social institutions. * https://bigthink.com/the-present/freedom-positive/ https://bigthink.com/the-present/freedom-positive/ Interview: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv4dbR7xRfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv4dbR7xRfk (He's on a book tour, so lots of recent talks on the subject.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder
- philipov 2y ago
  The distinction between positive and negative freedom always struck me as a deceptive wordgame. The person empowered to write the definitions can make whatever they wish appear as a positive or negative freedom. If we're only interested in protecting negative freedoms, how about we protect the Freedom From Want? It's not some neutral objective "natural" definition. When you separate freedoms into positive and negative, you get to choose how to do it to suit your agenda.
  - tines 2y ago
    I’m not sure this is totally true in every case. Usually negative freedoms prevent others from interacting with you in some way, while positive freedoms force someone to interact with you in a certain way. For example, trying to phrase “the freedom to eat as many hot dogs as I want for free” can’t really be expressed as a negative right “the freedom from people not giving me unlimited hot dogs” because “giving me a hot dog” is a forced interaction, not a forced non-interaction. It’s not as simple as “negative rights include the word ‘not’” so you just add “not not” and call everything a negative right.
toolz 2y ago
Here's an attempt at objectively measuring freedom that has texas ranking as more free than colorado https://www.freedominthe50states.org/ https://www.freedominthe50states.org/
- gpm 2y ago
  I'm not sure a word like "freedom" has an objective measure. If you click on the "personal" tab it ranks Texas as dead last - I suspect the person you are replying to is using a definition closer to that: https://www.freedominthe50states.org/personal https://www.freedominthe50states.org/personal
  - toolz 2y ago
    yeah, that's a reasonable take for sure, but probably worthy of a call out that there are a lot of metrics that go into defining freedom.
anonym29 2y ago
As someone who's lived in both states (which both hold a special place in my heart), here's my 2¢. While ∆9-Tetrahydrocannabinol remains illegal in Texas, almost all other cannabinoids have functionally been recreationally legal in Texas since Trump's 2018 federal Farm Bill, operationally legal (able to purchase and transport from stores without fear of prosecution) since early COVID in most of the major metro areas (e.g. Austin, Houston, DFW). Now to your credit, a handful of police departments are being pains in the rear about this, but even more departments have simply stopped enforcing laws against minor cannabis possession. Being unregulated, it doesn't come without risks, but it does come at a price about 1 order of magnitude lower than what you'd pay in Colorado, gram for gram. You can have a gender identity that doesn't conform to traditional gender norms, hell, you can even have a gender identity that doesn't conform to a common notion that gender is a binary value, rather than a spectrum. You can have a sexual and romantic attraction to whoever you want. Just don't go around shoving it in everyone's faces, unable to even discuss anything else without bringing it up. That's annoying in the same way a car guy who never shuts up about cars is annoying. I say this as someone with an identity that doesn't conform to traditional gender stereotypes, with a partner of the same biological sex, so trust me when I say that I also understand how unforgiving Texas can be when you do go around doing PDAs in a relationship like mine, especially out in the more rural areas. Thankfully, that's what firearms are for - protecting yourself and your loved ones from crazy bad guys who aren't acting rationally and might pose a danger to the life of myself or my loved ones. But hey, you can also watch whatever you want. There shouldn't be anyone on all of HN that believes the state government of Texas is actually logistically capable of blocking all adult video entertainment from the entire internet from ever being streamed into their state without photo ID verification. I can (but won't) name a half dozen such sites that haven't appeared to perform any amount of effort to comply with the Texas law whatsoever, probably hosted in jurisdictions that Texas can't even do anything about. I say this after having returned from Colorado's front range last year - a magical place full of whimsy and charm, my favorite kind of climate, and the most breathtaking natural scenery I've ever seen in my life. It was also full of a bunch of condescending, unkind, prejudiced, close-minded people who seemed almost incapable of engaging in an honest, good-faith dialogue on the lived experiences and perspectives of people from outside of their cultural "tribe", and as a relatively decent income earner, I felt that the price I was paying to live there (a state income tax bill over $2000/month, more than my rent), was too much for a place that felt very culturally intolerant of me based on dehumanizing stereotypes that serve little purpose other than to vilify and otherize, and which I felt unfairly compacted the nuances of some of my lived experiences into trite anecdotes to be mocked, so I respected their wishes and I left. Colorado talks a good game about their empathy, kindness, diversity, and tolerance, but I sure feel a whole lot more empathy, kindness, and tolerance from the middle aged southern waitress in Texas that calls me "hun" and actually listens to me when I'm talking to her, than the tatted up cute bartender chicks in Colorado that would roll their eyes at me in smug condescension and start using words with fewer syllables after I respond "Texas" to her question of where I'd moved from. Those two couldn't be any better representations of my lived experiences in TX vs CO.

Loughla 2y ago

I find it interesting that discussions of freedom in the context of states like Texas tend to be more about freedom for businesses instead of personal freedom. When did that start happening?

VonGuard 2y ago
The 1980's when Reagan turned this country upside down and showed the GOP that cutting taxes wins them elections, even if it makes the debt go out of control and you can no longer pay for anything the government buys.
bobthepanda 2y ago
The personal freedom thing has always been rules for thee and not for me, particularly in the religious South. Lawrence v. Texas led to legalizing consensual homosexual activity. The personal freedom thing might gain traction again because people are realizing that explicitly endorsing Christianity as core to the identity of the country often goes hand in hand with picking a favorite version of it and demonizing others, which is why the separation was historically included.

undersuit 2y ago

Every state has odd laws but Texas limits the number of sex toys you are allowed to own to 5.

striking 2y ago
My goodness, you're not kidding. https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/the-texas-law-that-dictates-adult-toys/ https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/the-texas-law-that-dictates-... I dug a little further and apparently there's an "obscenity" law that prevents you from selling sex toys as sex toys, according to https://www.houstonpress.com/news/opinion-yes-texas-has-a-law-limiting-dildo-ownership-but-not-guns-13497950 https://www.houstonpress.com/news/opinion-yes-texas-has-a-la... > Like Heather, she spent her time in Dallas lying to people about products to stay ahead of vice officers. > “This was my first experience as a white girl from Wisconsin at fearing the police,” she says. “My heart was in my throat. I had to say with a straight face, ‘no, this three-pound dildo is a cake topper.’ I would have to talk around any reference to the body parts these were supposed to be used on. Even with regulars who I knew were okay, I never changed the words in case I got used to telling the truth and slipped up when a cop was around.” Freedom.
goneri 2y ago
It's actually 6. https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.43.htm https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.43.htm (f) A person who possesses six or more obscene devices or identical or similar obscene articles is presumed to possess them with intent to promote the same.
- EmuAGR 2y ago
  Well, you're allowed to 5; from 6 included you're presumed to promote obscenity.
- freejazz 2y ago
  Read it again.
- quickslowdown 2y ago
  Read it like this: you are allowed less than 6 sex toys in Texas.

scarecrowbob 2y ago

Texas was literally founded to be a slave state. I know this, because my ancestors were there doing that. No surprise that it's still oppressing big chunks of its population. One thing I will say, it's hard to put all the folks in Texas in a bucket. Several classes of folks live there- most of my friends there are just trying to, like, keep the fresh tortillas in stock at the HEB or serve beers while keeping a functioning automobile. Regardless of the goodness or badness of their ideas (or even fantasies of sovereignty), they are still materially beholden to a powerful and oppressive state. People who get joy out of watching things happen to poor folks in Texas really don't understand gerrymandering, cultural hegemony, or any of the other mechanics of how oppressive governments operate. I can guarantee you that those same folks, in Texas, would be the conservative folks writing oppressive laws to empower their good ol' boy buddies to do horrible stuff to the population. Because at it's base, the inability to see oneself in oppressed people is the same everywhere we go. The view that the idiot lumpen serfs deserve to be oppressed (or, if you prefer, "deserve the government they 'elected'") is the same aesthetic position that leads the folks who own Texas to conclude they can do whatever they feel like to the people there.

snarf21 2y ago
Don't forget about the slave handle of Oklahoma. They gave away over 5000 square miles so they could keep slaves. And the reason they were forced to do this is that they wanted the US government's protection against Mexico and statehood prohibited slavery above the 36th parallel (Missouri Compromise. Quite ironic. (Also, you are right, our country has lost almost all sense of empathy)
- pdpi 2y ago
  > (Also, you are right, our country has lost almost all sense of empathy) From the outside, it looks worse than that. It seems more like the US has developed a weird active aversion to empathy, to the point where even enlightened self-interest gets rejected because it looks suspiciously like empathy.
- scarecrowbob 2y ago
  Yup. It's odd what they do and don't teach in Texas History. People tell me about how bad propaganda is in other places. Good thing they don't have it here, or those folks would probably be very mad at the systems who raise them- then they might have to examine their highly conflicted relationships to the abusive powers that be. Personally, though, I do see empathy here and there. In some places (especially among folks who think they are more likely to have been a plantation owner than a peasant anytime someone talks about 'land reform') it's notably attenuated. Empathy is not a lost cause- lots of good folks, and lots of folks who want to be good but don't know how. But it's gonna take some work to get make it louder.

throw0101d 2y ago

> For as much as Texans talk about Freedom, states like Colorado seem far more free. A distinction that historian Timothy Snyder[1] wrote about in his recent book On Freedom, freedom to versus freedom from (positive versus negative): > To the Ukrainians, freedom does not simply mean the absence of Russian soldiers, but also the reconstruction of society — of schools, hospitals, and roads — and making sure everything functions even better than it did before the war began. > The Ukrainian definition of freedom is very different from how it’s commonly defined in the United States, where overuse has divested the term from its true meaning. When contemporary Americans talk about freedom, they’re usually referring to what the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin called negative freedom: freedom from something, like a dictator invading your land, or the government taking away your right to bear arms. By contrast, Ukrainians tend to talk about positive freedom: the freedom to do something, like building robust social institutions. * https://bigthink.com/the-present/freedom-positive/ https://bigthink.com/the-present/freedom-positive/ Interview: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv4dbR7xRfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv4dbR7xRfk (He's on a book tour, so lots of recent talks on the subject.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder

philipov 2y ago
The distinction between positive and negative freedom always struck me as a deceptive wordgame. The person empowered to write the definitions can make whatever they wish appear as a positive or negative freedom. If we're only interested in protecting negative freedoms, how about we protect the Freedom From Want? It's not some neutral objective "natural" definition. When you separate freedoms into positive and negative, you get to choose how to do it to suit your agenda.
- tines 2y ago
  I’m not sure this is totally true in every case. Usually negative freedoms prevent others from interacting with you in some way, while positive freedoms force someone to interact with you in a certain way. For example, trying to phrase “the freedom to eat as many hot dogs as I want for free” can’t really be expressed as a negative right “the freedom from people not giving me unlimited hot dogs” because “giving me a hot dog” is a forced interaction, not a forced non-interaction. It’s not as simple as “negative rights include the word ‘not’” so you just add “not not” and call everything a negative right.

toolz 2y ago

Here's an attempt at objectively measuring freedom that has texas ranking as more free than colorado https://www.freedominthe50states.org/ https://www.freedominthe50states.org/

gpm 2y ago
I'm not sure a word like "freedom" has an objective measure. If you click on the "personal" tab it ranks Texas as dead last - I suspect the person you are replying to is using a definition closer to that: https://www.freedominthe50states.org/personal https://www.freedominthe50states.org/personal
- toolz 2y ago
  yeah, that's a reasonable take for sure, but probably worthy of a call out that there are a lot of metrics that go into defining freedom.

anonym29 2y ago

As someone who's lived in both states (which both hold a special place in my heart), here's my 2¢. While ∆9-Tetrahydrocannabinol remains illegal in Texas, almost all other cannabinoids have functionally been recreationally legal in Texas since Trump's 2018 federal Farm Bill, operationally legal (able to purchase and transport from stores without fear of prosecution) since early COVID in most of the major metro areas (e.g. Austin, Houston, DFW). Now to your credit, a handful of police departments are being pains in the rear about this, but even more departments have simply stopped enforcing laws against minor cannabis possession. Being unregulated, it doesn't come without risks, but it does come at a price about 1 order of magnitude lower than what you'd pay in Colorado, gram for gram. You can have a gender identity that doesn't conform to traditional gender norms, hell, you can even have a gender identity that doesn't conform to a common notion that gender is a binary value, rather than a spectrum. You can have a sexual and romantic attraction to whoever you want. Just don't go around shoving it in everyone's faces, unable to even discuss anything else without bringing it up. That's annoying in the same way a car guy who never shuts up about cars is annoying. I say this as someone with an identity that doesn't conform to traditional gender stereotypes, with a partner of the same biological sex, so trust me when I say that I also understand how unforgiving Texas can be when you do go around doing PDAs in a relationship like mine, especially out in the more rural areas. Thankfully, that's what firearms are for - protecting yourself and your loved ones from crazy bad guys who aren't acting rationally and might pose a danger to the life of myself or my loved ones. But hey, you can also watch whatever you want. There shouldn't be anyone on all of HN that believes the state government of Texas is actually logistically capable of blocking all adult video entertainment from the entire internet from ever being streamed into their state without photo ID verification. I can (but won't) name a half dozen such sites that haven't appeared to perform any amount of effort to comply with the Texas law whatsoever, probably hosted in jurisdictions that Texas can't even do anything about. I say this after having returned from Colorado's front range last year - a magical place full of whimsy and charm, my favorite kind of climate, and the most breathtaking natural scenery I've ever seen in my life. It was also full of a bunch of condescending, unkind, prejudiced, close-minded people who seemed almost incapable of engaging in an honest, good-faith dialogue on the lived experiences and perspectives of people from outside of their cultural "tribe", and as a relatively decent income earner, I felt that the price I was paying to live there (a state income tax bill over $2000/month, more than my rent), was too much for a place that felt very culturally intolerant of me based on dehumanizing stereotypes that serve little purpose other than to vilify and otherize, and which I felt unfairly compacted the nuances of some of my lived experiences into trite anecdotes to be mocked, so I respected their wishes and I left. Colorado talks a good game about their empathy, kindness, diversity, and tolerance, but I sure feel a whole lot more empathy, kindness, and tolerance from the middle aged southern waitress in Texas that calls me "hun" and actually listens to me when I'm talking to her, than the tatted up cute bartender chicks in Colorado that would roll their eyes at me in smug condescension and start using words with fewer syllables after I respond "Texas" to her question of where I'd moved from. Those two couldn't be any better representations of my lived experiences in TX vs CO.