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Comment by nus07 | Hacker News Reader

Yes great city and used to be very livable . But despite everything I cannot justify paying that recent increased cost of living to still be governed by Texas laws of no abortion, guns, capital punishment and pretty much every wacky right wing law possible. Great city to visit though.

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So you feel strongly enough about these issues that you don't want to live somewhere where there's more work to do, and where your vote could make a difference in the coming decades. Just "get this gross stuff away from me."

Like the way conservatives discuss coastal cities?

I lived in Texas for nearly 20 years, most of that time in Austin, and by all measures the politics has gotten more evil, not less.

My “vote could make a difference” while stripping myself and more importantly my wife of rights we get to enjoy in every other state we’ve lived in. And while there are a dozen other unrelated reasons you couldn’t pay us enough to live in Austin again, it’s nobody’s duty to live their lives as an oppressed martyr to be a fraction of a number for your cause.

You are not going to executed, shot, denied an abortion, or otherwise turned into a martyr. I know that with high confidence because you're here, and because you're lightly talking about what major city you'd like to live in.

The politics are important because of the people whose lives and bodies they impact, not because of our distaste for them. We live above the real consequences of the policies you named (outside of the very unlikely chance that we catch a random bullet.)

I have been a block captain with the Democratic Party in Austin for almost as long as I've lived here, and a voter deputy registrar since 2018. It hasn't made a bit of difference, and that's intentional. Anything good you do at the local level, the state government preempts. And the state legislature is so gerrymandered that even if you flipped the governor and lieutenant governor, you still couldn't roll back any of the awfulness that's already been passed. And there is no ballot initiative -- all the amendments on the ballot have to be proposed and approved by that gerrymandered legislature. That's why Oklahoma, Missouri, and Utah have medical marijuana and expanded Medicaid, and we don't.

you're worried about capital punishment? What are you planning?

an IUD?

A mixed marriage

Capital punishment is just secular human sacrifice. Be as open minded as you please but I could see not wanting to live somewhere with that.

What's the alternative though? Paying to keep people in prison forever?

Prison labour is bad as it undercuts workers and unions outside prison.

Perhaps organ donation and medical trials is the most utilitarian?

> What's the alternative though? Paying to keep people in prison forever?

Unironically yes. The cost of executing someone is higher than keeping them in jail for life[1].

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Is_the_death_penalty_more...

Innocent people are not only executed in Hollywood Westerns but in the real world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution#United_Stat...

This fact alone makes capital punishment an atrocity.

Here is a recent example of how easy it is to get convicted while innocent (non-capital in this case, but highly illuminating):

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10239429/Innocent-m...

Illinois had to instate a moratorium because of their track record of convicting innocence people to death. A conservative estimate is 50 innocent people have been executed in the US in modern times, and over 200 on death row are also innocent. Also, consider the harsh sentences of mandatory minimums for petty drug crimes where there's now an elderly warehousing problem where harmless people lost their lives but are too frail to care for themselves. Furthermore, America has the highest incarceration rate in the world overrepresented by mostly brown and poor people. Rich white people use drugs at similar rates but don't go to jail for it.

Lol yes because preventing the murder of unborn children and being allowed to own guns are "wacky right wing laws".

Speaking as a non-American, to the rest of the world those are indeed wacky right-wing laws. You have to have been brought up in a political monoculture not to see that.

You being a "non-American" doesn't give you the right to speak for the rest of the world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law#:~:text=Wade%E2....

If you look at that map you'll see that abortion is legal for the majority of people on planet earth.

What that map actually shows is that Texas has more liberal abortion laws than the majority of the world.

No, Texas bans abortions from 6 weeks onwards (except when the mother's life is in danger). That's decidedly not more liberal than the majority of the world.

I'm sorry but the map disagrees

> Speaking as a non-American

Then why do most European countries have more restrictions on late term abortion than the US?

Because they’ve allowed themselves to be infected by religion too.

Or maybe they're just humane and don't believe in taking away an unborn humans opportunity at life?

Easier to believe in Europe where socialized healthcare is the norm. But, no.

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