• jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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    6 hours ago

    Cities matter more. Sorry, but that’s the reality.

    Cities are where people live. People matter.

    Cities are where culture happens. Culture matters. You’re not going to have a big art/music/anything scene in bumbleweed, NE because there aren’t enough people there to constitute a scene.

    Cities are where economy happens. Money moving around matters. There are more transactions per day in the corner shop by me than a whole week in some country town with 700 residents.

    Rural people still have the Senate and local government. Their rep in the house (which should be expanded) also should speak up for their region.

    Everyone deserves some minimum respect, but the idea that nowhere-utah is just as important as Queens is insane. A minority holding the majority garbage is not good. Especially when that minority seems fixated on terrible ideas like climate change denial and xenophobia.

    • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
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      38 minutes ago

      With respect sir (or madam), you are personifying the ‘ivory tower elite’ attitude that so many conservatives make fun of. 'I matter, others don’t.

      You think there’s no culture in rural areas? That you need a giant festival to have culture?
      That corner shop that has 100 transactions an hour… where do you think the bread they sell comes from? The flour? The avocadoes on the avocado toast? (sorry, I had to :P ) Sure as fuck doesn’t come from the city. You can write the rest of the nation off as unimportant and then see how unimportant they are when your fridge is empty. They matter.

      the idea that nowhere-utah is just as important as Queens is insane.

      And the idea that Queens should be able to dictate policy that applies nationally including Nowhere, UT is just as insane.

      Especially when that minority seems fixated on terrible ideas like climate change denial and xenophobia.

      I’ll give you that- most of the conservative platform these days is a bit on the batshit side.

      But there’s other parts that make sense. Take guns for example. A liberal in NYC has the 11th largest army in the world 3 digits away. Police response time is seconds or minutes. So ‘nobody needs a gun’ is a common urban liberal position.
      Go out in rural areas, there might be two deputies for an entire county with police response time in the range of 30-120 minutes if at all. And that county may have 4-legged predators like bears, wolves, etc that can threaten humans. So that guy wants a GOOD gun to defend himself and his family, because if there is a problem nobody else is gonna arrive until it’s too late.
      The urban liberal doesn’t consider the rural conservative POV, and they want to apply their position nationally. Should the rural conservative have no useful defense against that?

      Guns are just an example, but that overall is why I think the electoral college has a place. House is based on population, Senate based on statehood, Presidency is in the middle with influences both from statehood and population. That’s a good way to go.

      And FWIW, I also support INCREASING the population representative in the House. The current cap of 437 has not served us well with the expanding US population, and there’s now over 700k citizens per representative. That’s far too many to get voices heard, and one rep covers far too many disparate people. And it also in the House increases influence of smaller states (to a minimum of 1/437th).
      I believe the cap should be raised to a very large number, perhaps several thousand. It may no longer be possible to have the entire House convene in one building, but technology has solved that problem. If you have one representative for every say 10,000-25,000 citizens, it becomes much easier for a representative to truly represent their citizens in detail and gives a citizen much greater access to his or her representatives.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      I say it all the time - places like California and New York are strategically more important, too. Most of the game development, the movie/tv industry, software, even a lot of our food, happens in CA. And then a great deal of finance happens in NYC. Lots of defense industry stuff is clustered around DC as well.

      It’s called “flyover country” for a reason. If you want to partake in what is happening, then move to those locations. Unfortunately, our backwards slave-era system gives wayyyy too much power to regions that just don’t matter as much.