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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

An extra large irony here is that "left-leaning cities in right-leaning states" is much more common than the reverse, so what we often see in practice is rural state dwellers telling city dwellers in those states what to do. Look at the mask stuff for Atlanta vs Georgia from today, for instance.

That's without skewing the strength of the vote, even!

So, no, I'm far from convinced that we have to protect the poor rural folks from their fellow citizens.

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?

While city dwellers vote may be technically less powerful on a per capita basis, they make up for it in numbers. There are simply more of you with similar needs/wants. Not to mention far more money to achieve those needs and wants. In a city an individual's needs from his/her government are just less unique.

You seem to fundamentally misunderstand how voting should work.

The idea is not "the rules should be set up so people like me get a bigger voice". It's _one person, one vote._

You don't get an extra vote because you're "unique". What?

It strikes me that you basically want the voting system to be be biased to your advantage against a group of people you probably don't like very much.

If this is true, it speaks extremely poorly of your sense of moral fairness.

No, I want both minority and majority voices heard. What I am saying is that city voices are strong. They get the majority of the funding and influence when it comes to politics, regardless of voting power on a per capita basis.

The difference is you are arguing that rural citizens should get no say whatsoever. I care about everyone instead of only those living in a small geographic circle and understand that the needs of those living outside of that circle are unique from city dwellers themselves.

> What I am saying is that city voices are strong. They get the majority of the funding and influence when it comes to politics,

your experience of the american political system is vastly different from mine. You have a whole house in congress devoted to making sure low-population states get disproportionate representation, the other congressional house and the state legislatures have boundary lines that are gerrymandered to disproportionately benefit and empower you, a rural farming state has the first say in primaries and an incredible amount of pandering from legislators, the electoral college gives you disproportionate power over selecting the president in the general, you get incredibly disproportionate amounts of federal spending (military bases, road funding, etc) - far more than they contribute, I can go on.

Hell, in some cases the states themselves have been explicitly drawn to increase the amount of rural power - the only reason the Dakotas aren't a single state is so they'd get extra senators and representatives.

Again, you are coming off as a member of a rural minority who is crying that they don't have total and utter political power over the urban majority. You already have a hugely disproportionate amount of power, influence, and funding in the American system.

A vote in Wyoming is already 3.2x more potent than a vote in California based on electoral weighting, and the same is effectively true for most other areas of the government that involve voting in any form. How much higher, exactly, do you think that should be?

Cities are much more diverse than rural areas in terms of ethnicity, religion, economic class, linguistics, etc. To claim that city dwellers have "similar needs/wants" simply doesn't make any sense.

And having "similar needs/wants" doesn't have a logical connection to justifying taking away their voting voices.

No, it isn't. One person, one vote. If there are more farmers than city dwellers, the farmers have more say. If there are more city dwellers than farmers, the city dwellers have more say.

Let me get this straight. You think that some people should get effectively more votes, just because of where they live?

And if these people don't get extra votes, it's "the tyranny of imperialism"?

That is an argument for federalism, not vote tally inequality.

You do have a say in what happens there, that's why there's local elections.

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