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Comment by EatingWithForks | Hacker News Reader

> For example I've recently seen news about parts of eastern Oregon wanting to secede and join Idaho, and the primary reason for that is that you have a minority (rural eastern Oregonians) who are permanently disenfranchised with effectively zero agency over the laws and regulations that rule over them, as a result of them being a minority in Oregon.

Isn't this also the case of blue cities in red states? I believe e.g. there's a big hullabaloo in Virginia at the moment where the bluer school district close to DC is resisting anti-transgender top-down demands from the state. If we want to argue about rural people being disenfranchised, by number, way more people in cities are disenfranchised simply because cities are more populated.

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>Isn't this also the case of blue cities in red states? I believe e.g. there's a big hullabaloo in Virginia at the moment where the bluer school district close to DC is resisting anti-transgender top-down demands from the state. If we want to argue about rural people being disenfranchised, by number, way more people in cities are disenfranchised simply because cities are more populated.

Absolutely, and my point isn't about a "rural vs urban divide" at all.

It is a general argument and principle that can be applied to every action of government.

It doesn't matter if oppression is done by a dictator or by a Majority.

The problem is too much state power.

I don't know, let me know if this is slippery sloping or something, but I don't see why the issue is the state has too much power. You will always have a disenfranchised political minority unable to force the majority to follow whatever political position they want. There's conservatives in my city who feel disenfranchised about crime; does the city have too much power, then? What if I feel disenfranchised about no one believing me in an Among Us game?

You're missing the point.

Being enfranchised in driving the state is only important if the state has a significant impact in your life.

The lower the impact (read, the power) of the state, the lower the need to be enfranchised.

For your example: If the state didn't have law enforcing powers, the states policy on crime wouldn't matter much. You could just hire your own private police to protect your interests.

> For your example: If the state didn't have law enforcing powers,

Then its not the state [0], whatever it calls itself, in the same way that Emporer Norton, despite his claimed title, was not the head of state of the United States.

[0] though it may be part of a larger structure involving elements formally outside of its bounds that together constitutes an effective state.

>Then its not the state [0], whatever it calls itself, in the same way that Emporer Norton, despite his claimed title, was not the head of state of the United States.

Plenty of states didn't have law enforcement powers, including the early US. Police is something that only really started showing up in the later half of the 1800s and even then only in certain places.

So you agree that this is a problem then, and we should work to increase agency and reduce disenfranchisement by moving more power to local communities?

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