ongoing racist bullshit in arizona thread

we are arguing about whether states are good things or bad things and there really isn't any way to do that without making up hypothetical otherworlds. are there some progressive policies that can be passed on a state-level and eventually might benefit the whole country? yes. sure. does that make up for the contributions statehood has to our fucked up politics? no. not even close.

none of that good gov't shit even matters because it doesn't come anywhere close to making up for the inherent democratic and economic distortions that come w/ statehood. the alternative to statehood doesn't have to be a fully top-down government, there are flexible middle-ground possibilities where you can ensure that local and regional leaders have independence without ensuring that people in wyoming get 70x the democratic representation as people in california.

Seems to me that "states" are this weird, arbitrary creation that doesn't really have a lot of relevance in the 21st century. City/county governance makes a lot of sense, seeing to the needs of a small area, governed by people who understand the specific needs of that area. National governance also makes quite a lot of sense, governing on matters that should transcend borders, i.e. the civil rights of citizens. States exist in this middle ground that was very important when simple information took days to travel a few hundred miles, but just doesn't fit into the way the contemporary world work anymore.

xpost like the man said

contemporary world works

yeesh

i personally think that state-level governance has been quite successful in the US, though it has often provided safe haven for bigots and hampered the fed's ability to impose what i view as necessary national policy. then again, like gay marriage, the fights for the social policies i really value have often begun at and boiled up from the state level. i mean, local government just makes sense. one of the reasons we didn't have massive starvation and chaos following our revolution (as has happened so often elsewhere) was that there wasn't anybody trying to set agricultural policy for the entire nation. when it comes to agriculture, to continue the example, a lot of our most asinine and backwards policies are those enacted by the fed. i'm not saying it's a perfect balance, but it's far to easy to write off state-level governance as a mere smokescreen for bigotry - though it certainly can be just that.

there are flexible middle-ground possibilities where you can ensure that local and regional leaders have independence without ensuring that people in wyoming get 70x the democratic representation as people in california.

― iatee, Friday, February 10, 2012 11:11 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

okay, yeah, this i agree with. the present system is deeply flawed.

a lot of our most asinine and backwards policies are enacted because rural *states* have disproportionate political influence at the federal level

yeah, that too, state reps gaming the system. point taken.

and again, the alternative to states isn't 'barack obama makes every law in america'. there are lots of ways to do regional government that would be more efficient, democratic and logical.

take california. that is a huge place. it should not be 'a state'. it should be 5 states probably. ignoring everything else, the fact that it is 'a state' creates thousands of problems. there's no reason why bakersfield and san francisco should be governed by the same regional body, and there is no flexibility in the state-model to fix that problem. likewise there is no reason why kansas city should be governed by two separate regional bodies.

Absolutely. I grew up in metro0east St. Louis, and it is absurd that East St. Louis, IL is governed by the same regional laws as Chicago, instead of St. Louis, MO, seeing as how the operate as the same metro area.

I mean, this is all Poli Sci 101 flights of fancy, we all know that the current states will exist until the Nuclear/Climate wars of 2073 split the USA into 76 distinct fiefdoms, but it's worth discussing anyway.

or the fact that the new york city region is in fact, 3 states, creates bullshit problems. bloomberg had to give the company freshdirect tax breaks so that they would not move the headquarters across the river, to a part of new jersey that is part of greater nyc. that's ridiculous - nyc shouldn't have to pay a business that's gonna stay in nyc to 'stay in nyc'. you can argue that some types of regional competition are good, but this is competition *within a region* - freshdirect was gonna stay here regardless.

while at the same time voters in upstate new york get to elect people who get to decide how much funding the subway system should get. there are very few states that would be drawn w/ anything close to their current boundaries today, and that's not a small issue, it's an enormous economic and democratic inefficiency that affects things for everyone, everywhere.

this is also an argument against our system of city boundaries fwiw

okay, i'm gonna call a TO here for a minute, because this is drifting a little to quickly for my comfort. my basic argument is that "states' rights" has value as a concept, whether or not we like that language, and that it's not fair to reduce the idea entirely to a simple smokescreen for bigotry. i do believe that. beyond that, i do see value in local government at various levels, including something like what presently = the state level. i think we agree on that point?

okay, that's thing one. thing two, is that i'm not much of a utopian. i don't do ideal societies or radical changes. i'm more concerned with identifying where things are and finding a reasonable next move, given my ideals. so talk of dismantling the senate or breaking california up into however many pieces doesn't interest me much. there's no way to say what the outcome would be if such things did happen, and this is doubly true since i can't imagine likely circumstances under which such things might even become possible. i certainly can't see any reason to actively work towards these things.

i mean, i do tend to agree that the senate is a obsolete organ of state and that california is unwieldy...

this is sort of a different argument than the one we began with -- i'm all for making local governments stronger and more representative. i suppose i read 'federalism' as 'division of power' rather than 'pro-state.'

'states' rights' doesn't have any power that 'regions' rights' can't. unless you think there is some real advantage to the clunky, inflexible regional boundaries we have today, there is no reason to defend 'states'. you can defend strong regional and local power without defending 'states'.

there's no reason why 50 states is an ideal number of regional boundaries, and there's also no reason why regional boundary lines can't be redrawn at least *once in a while*. if 50 is the ideal number of regions today, then it surely wasn't the ideal number when we had half our population and it won't be the ideal number one day.

and I didn't even mention bigotry, which is pretty clearly a huge issue but not even one that *needs* to exist for states to be a shitty idea, really something that fucks us in so many ways we don't even think about.

arizona is sort've the textbook example of a state government that's running roughshod over what remains of the independence of its city and county governments.

there's no reason why 50 states is an ideal number of regional boundaries, and there's also no reason why regional boundary lines can't be redrawn at least *once in a while*.

Well, no *real* reason, but Constitutionally we're not allowed to make states out of any portion of an existing state.

internet konked out last night, so this is like 12 hours late, but uh...

this is also an argument against our system of city boundaries fwiw

― iatee, Friday, February 10, 2012 11:39 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, it's an argument that identifies problems in the way things are. and that's valuable, but are you really proposing a solution to any of this? if we redraw city and state boundaries every few years to reflect changes in populations and industries, then we create this massive, awful political football that gets tossed around endlessly. there's efficiency in inefficiency, reason to let sleeping dogs lie. just because a problem can be identified does not mean that a fix is required. better to have no answer than a bad one. but yeah, i agree w/ n-i-c-k that it's useful to discuss this stuff, even if no solution is forthcoming.

well am I proposing a solution that could happen w/ our current system of gov't and w/ the assumption that in the big picture americans are rational political actors? no. our current system has vested interests. people who currently benefit from our ridiculous state boundaries might not even know they have vested interests, but if the subject ever came up, nobody is going to give up what they have. people in wyoming are not gonna say "wow it's pretty ridiculous how much power we have considering that we only exist as a regional body for historical reasons, let's vote for a senator who votes his office out of existence and a system that ensures that we don't get a disproportionate amount of resources sent to the magical lines that constitute 'wyoming'.

congressional districts already are a political football that get tossed around endlessly. it's annoying, gerrymandering is awful and there should and can be a a better way, but nobody argues that it would be better if we still had the same congressional district boundaries as we did when america had 50 million people.

in the end you're going to have to draw a line in the sand w/r/t how often regional boundaries are redrawn, how they're redrawn and why. but should they be, at least, idk, once every hundred years? yes. and should they be roughly equal in political representation on a national level, so we don't allow rural interests to run a country in the 21st century? yes.

people in wyoming are not gonna say "wow it's pretty ridiculous how much power we have..."

^^ this is why any radical (or even signifigant) political reorganization of the USA will not happen without a deep, rather fast-developing political crisis to drive it.

iatee otm

Not racist, but still lol Arizona. Seriously, this place is just Crazypantstown.

Five GOP Senators in Arizona have introduced a bill in Arizona that would make the lives of teachers and professors a living hell inside and outside of school. Senator Al Melvin, Senator Andy Biggs, Senator Don Shooter, Senator Lori Klein, and Senator Steve Smith are the sponsors of SB 1467, which would prohibit teachers from engaging in “speech or conduct that would violate the standards adopted by the federal communications commission concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity if that speech or conduct were broadcast on television or radio.” In other words, teachers can’t do things that aren’t allowed on television.

what the fuck

that seems . . . unconstitutional

haha mookie

what on earth

i wonder if there is even the thinnest membrane of a real issue behind that. did a teacher get caught with a party video on youtube or something recently?

probably just fucking with the teachers' union

does that include, like, reading out loud from/discussing books in an English class? wait, Arizona already banned all the books.

xp seems like it's got to be in response to something, yeah. and spectacularly ill thought-through.

i am assuming this is meant to be a blanket code of behavior even beyond school hours.

yeah that's certainly how it reads!

So their sex lives will all be 'fade to black'?

Make sure to click through for the full text of the bill. It's just bonkers.

they're occasionally allowed to show their butt iirc

even in class

can you subscribe to a teacher's life to get more racy content?

i have tried and the answer is no

Great way to give in to big Washington government bureaucracy - it's unaccountable FCC that regulates what you can put on the airwaves.

this is next-level

So...they can't ever use the bathroom.

Yeah I mean

they're occasionally allowed to use a public restroom but each time they do there has to be something interesting that happens, like they bump into a celebrity

lol

it's weird that republicans at this point have basically become life trolls

They're...I dunno, suicide bombers of a sort.

it's weird that republicans at this point have basically become life trolls

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 12:28 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah I've been saying they're the Troll Party for several years. They're now purely reactive and oppositional.

It makes them funnier than democrats, and people love that.

New GOP symbol:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7172/6395001733_51958dea3b_z.jpg

I just called my state senator and the intern on the phone says voting for it isn't on the agenda this week, next week is a House bill, if it doesn't get attached to another bill, it's not going anywhere. According to her. But I ranted to her about my emphatic desire for a "no" vote anyway. Why the hell would I look for a job here or live here after I graduate and become a teacher with a bill like that in place? There's so little incentive to be a teacher here in the first place.

haha yeah i keep reminding myself not to look for teaching jobs in AZ