Account inactive @literorrery@awoo.space

@starkatt All I can say is it made sense to my addled brain but that's only half the equation at best. Apologies again.

@starkatt ... that was supposed to be a take on an old joke but now I can't tell if the humor translates to modern text. Apologies if it doesn't. =u u=

@starkatt Gender? Damn near killed 'er!

@Azure @Elizafox @green Every expression of solidarity I've ever understood starts with "put your own oxygen mask on first." You can't take good care of others if you're not in a good place yourself. You certainly can't sustainably support others if you can't support yourself. Yes, I know about mutualism and interdependence, but let's build a sustainable baseline from which to build. Right now, we don't have that, and we should.

@Azure @Elizafox @green I'm saying that the argument "if you leave, things will go so much worse for the people who don't" is a really dangerous line of thinking. Under that train of thought, anyone choosing to emigrate to get away from Trump is culpable for the harm perpetrated on those who don't, secession or not. It's shifting the blame from the bad actors to the people trying to get away from the bad actors.

@green @Elizafox @Azure Under that thinking, we should never fight anything ever on the grounds that it could always be worse, that we should be grateful for any crumb of respect we ever get, and that to push for more is to put more-vulnerable people at risk. I cannot accept that argument or its moral precepts.

@Azure @Elizafox @green That's the language of hostage negotiations. "Stay or your friends will suffer." Please consider future word choices very carefully.

@Azure @Elizafox @green I do worry about that, but at the same time, I tend to think of it more in terms of whether it's doing more harm to marginalized people asking them to stay under a comfortably illiberal and increasingly authoritarian right-wing war machine to try to fix it from the inside.

@Azure @Elizafox @green Seeing the efforts that both Democrats and Republicans have put in against Maine's RCV referendum (( https://theintercept.com/2017/11/03/maine-ranked-choice-voting/ )), and the knowledge that such an effort in a bigger state would invite more efforts to kill it, I'm not convinced that such work is guaranteed to succeed in my lifetime, and I don't think it's fair to ask me to simply resign myself to living under a broken system because it doesn't want to get better.

@Elizafox @green @Azure The deeper problem is that America's voting system is flawed up one side and down the other, and no amount of incremental reform can rectify some of the foundational problems in how America picks its leaders. No amount of voting for a lesser evil is going to produce a greater good -- see the constant complaints about third-party spoilers -- and neither party in power is particularly inclined to embrace real systemic reform.

@Azure @green @Elizafox That all assumes that the other party in the discussion is willing to respect the constitutional process, and the issue at paw is that we're seeing that they don't. Hell, many people on "our team" don't either, but the problem is egregious on the nihilistic right, and opening the door to constitutional reform is likely to make things worse, not better. And this assumes we're even talking about being able to get reforms through our broken system.

@Azure @green @Elizafox I'm perfectly aware that there will always be people with whom we don't agree, but the question is whether we have to submit ourselves to being endlessly in the minority and subject to tyranny for being so.

No system is ever perfect; the question is whether a system can or should be expected to be better, and what happens when you lose faith in the ability of an existing system to actually fix its problems.

@Azure @green @Elizafox I'm pretty sure Spokane won't be that heartbroken if we split the state at the Cascades. Similar divides of urban/rural blue/red carry through to Oregon as well. I've heard numerous jokes in my time up here of "we should redraw the state line north-south instead of east-west." Doing that would provide a convenient line of demarcation, as well.

@Azure @green @Elizafox I rather like the quote from Thomas Jefferson on that page: "I would rather the States should withdraw, which are for unlimited commerce and war, and confederate with those alone which are for peace and agriculture." (( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession#Justifications_for_secession ))

@Elizafox @green @Azure Plus, Estonia's not the only example, merely the first one I grabbed. There's a fairly extensive like on the Wikipedia page on secession, as well as a list of identified causes of which I think a Cascadian secession movement would easily qualify: self-determination, preserving diversity, ending discriminatory redistribution, providence of superior constitutional systems.

@Azure @green @Elizafox I would argue that it's stronger than you give it credit for being, if not in the sense of a shared culture, then at least in a shared set of values that aren't shared by the dominant cultural rivals. It's not universal -- looking at Bellevue, here -- but I do think it exists. Not at the state level, but then, the whole state doesn't have to secede. It's not like if we're talking about breaking one political union, we can't break two or three.

@green @Elizafox @Azure How do the conditions on the ground of Cascadia's independence differ from those of, say, Estonia's in the 1980s?

Is it that "secession is a bad idea", or is it that "this instance of secession is a bad idea and it's distinguished from these other cases that we generally consider good ideas by these reasons"?