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For as much as Texans talk about Freedom, states like Colorado seem far more free.
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.
(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.
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.
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/
Interview:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv4dbR7xRfk
(He's on a book tour, so lots of recent talks on the subject.)
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.
The US view, called out specifically in the Constitution, is that all freedoms and rights are inherent in being, and not granted by the government. As such, the government cannot give or guarantee rights, it is only capable of taking them away.
The role of the Constitution and the amendments (in particular, the first ten known as the bill of rights) do NOT specify what rights people have, they specify those rights that the government may NOT curtail.
Hence, the discussion of negative versus positive rights is entirely not about what rights exist, but what authority the government may or may not exercise over them.
Of course, any brief look at America's history shows the government failing to abide by its own restrictions. The government we have now is significantly different from what the original authors had intended, as they were more concerned with finding a way for the disparate states to coordinate at all after the failure of the previous Articles of confederation.
Now, we have an overarching federal government that renders individual states to be little more important that municipal organizations, much more in line with other countries.
Furthermore, do you really think this is a plausible way of managing disease outbreaks, which affect large populations in aggregate and not just single individuals? Systems like private insurance don't work if all the individual risks are correlated.
Under the original framing, anything not specifically mentioned by the Constitution was delegated to the individual states to decide. It wasn't until after the civil war that the amendments to the Constitution itself applied to the individual states.
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.
But I agree that some things are obstacles, and others are creative acts. But so what, I'm not going to let you or somebody called Snyder tell me that one of these is virtuous and the other is mean-spirited, because that's bullshit, and the two sides of it go together, and he's only trying to prise them apart because he's more comfortable in a world where people declare their intentions in advance so that they can be vetted for constructiveness by some overbearing authority.
And you can definitely virtuously overcome obstacles, or be creatively evil.
I might disagree with the positive/negative freedom argument on a more fundamental level than he does, but he's not engaging with it because he's trying to promote it.
His lecture series on the Making of Modern Ukraine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rN...
Snyder has a framework for discussing how ideologies relate to time in these sorts of ways.
On the other hand, Musk kind of likes looking toward the future. So this thing about a mythologized past is at most a tendancy, and a way of stirring up a sense of injustice, while your non-authoritarians don't have the monopoly on looking to the future. In fact I don't see that these are even polar opposites, I think authoritarian progressives would make sense as a concept, and we may be seeing a bunch of them rise to power.
The distinction between negative vs. positive freedom sounds like word play to me.
Consider the freedom from being infected by disease. Does your positive freedom to use a public space trump my negative freedom from you interfering with me by bringing a contagious disease to it?
From some book reviews:
> “Freedom is not just an absence of evil,” Snyder writes, “but a presence of good.... It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.”
> In other words, we are not born free; we are born helpless. Many others are involved in making us free, including our parents, the builders of our playgrounds, our fellow citizens and the caregivers of our old age. “We need structures,” Snyder says, “just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.”
> He sees five “forms of freedom” that create free individuals within society. There’s sovereignty, which Snyder defines as “the learned capacity to make choices”; unpredictability, “the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes”; mobility, “the capacity to move through space and time following values”; factuality, “the grip on the world that allows us to change it”; and solidarity, “the recognition that freedom is for everyone.”
> So a child on the way to sovereignty becomes familiar with both their own body and a world containing other people and objects, and can imagine how to change the world. By choosing a mix of values in dealing with the world and choosing a future, the sovereign person becomes unpredictable.
* https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2024/11/14/Timothy-Snyder-Our-Pro...
> Negative views of freedom foster a zero-sum mindset, as though each of us must strive to be free from the burden of being part of a society. This fuels racism, xenophobia and misogyny as tools to keep others from getting a piece of the pie. A population so resentful of others’ progress is an easy target for leaders who promise a strict government regime to curb others’ access to education, health and safety. Even now, mass incarceration mimics an apartheid state, depriving millions of civil rights such as voting, largely along racial lines.
> Snyder takes readers through historical and contemporary examples to demonstrate how we can make progress, and are much better served, by embracing positive freedoms. A positive freedom that guarantees everyone access to affordable healthcare would give many in the middle class the liberty to pursue career opportunities without losing health benefits. The development of children’s minds in well-funded schools ensures creative and thoughtful individuals who invent new solutions that will benefit our nation’s future.
> What we see in the United States today — attacks on the governmental institutions that provide support to all and the emergence of an educational system devoted to maintaining white supremacism — robs the American people of the critical skills they need to recognize authoritarian rhetoric and to see the promise of democracy and equality.
* https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-09-13/on-freedom-...
I have not yet read the book On Freedom yet (on hold list at my library), but have read some of his other work (e.g. Bloodlands). I have listened/watched some of his book tour talks and find he makes a reasonable argument (and given his knowledge of history, he has plenty of examples to show how things have gone down in the past).
When did that start happening?
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.
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-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.
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.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
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.
I generally like Texans but your government is wack. Also the property taxes are pretty insane so I wouldn’t exactly say you have no tax burden there.
You aren’t wrong about prejudice towards southerners in blue states though. Sorry you had to deal with that.
I'm a renter, property taxes are baked into my rent. I live in an exceedingly safe and quiet area, a high income, low crime primarily suburban zip code. This isn't a discrimination thing, this is part of how I've learned to cope with feelings that I struggled with after being the victim of a traumatic, violent, and unprovoked attack I experienced a few years ago in a less safe environment. I have an attached fully enclosed garage in a townhouse-style apartment where I have nobody above or below me, and I pay less in rent for that than I paid for a condo-style apartment in a rough part of town in the cheaper southern side of the front range.
My (rent + state income taxes) in CO were about $2400/mo more expensive than my (rent + property taxes) here in TX, and that was living in a place with 6x as much violent crime per capita. To get somewhere as safe in CO as I am here in TX would've been even more expensive.
For as many downsides as you point out, there is still a lot to be said about the power of the market efficiencies made possible through the lax regulatory and pro-business environment that Texas has produced for itself.
As for your assumption, I absolutely understand the frustration with the changes to medical care laws down here, but that doesn't affect my partner or I, as neither of us are engaging in any kind of activity that could ever get either of us pregnant, so the question of medical care in the event one of us ever did get pregnant is functionally moot for us.
> For example, he says, if one data center is considering five different locations to open up shop in Texas, "the way that the law was written, we have to consider it like all five of those data centers are coming."
definitely sounds like a bureaucracy free utopia /s.