I just want to say that I LOVE the irony here. The party that has long pushed for States Rights is now, through their own federal-level decisions against the states, triggering states rights fights.
> it's rich irony seeing the states raising these issues
Decentralised decision making is a large component of the American system’s resilience. At its worst, it’s a pressure release valve which shows us the negative effects of bad policy in a controlled setting (e.g. North Carolina’s bathroom bill). At its best, it promotes policy experimentation which can later scale, having been demonstrated to work, to the national stage (e.g. California’s clean air rules).
Please don't post ideological rants or personal attacks to Hacker News, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
Also, could you please take the following guideline to heart in the future? "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Not doing so leads to the bottom of the barrel, and we're trying to do a bit better than that here.
Very few people ever supported “state’s rights” on principle: not a single of 5+ political issues mentioned in this threat have different answers from state to state. If you’re for legalization in Oregon, you’ll also be for legalization in Mississippi.
Claiming “state’s rights” is therefore never more than a convenient argument when you want to avoid the substance of the issue. And if that substance is racist, you are likely to be called a racist no matter what.
That's not a good argument at all. Thinking that legalization should happen in every state has nothing to do with thinking that it will probably happen in some states before others. Why would a legalization supporter want to make it a federal issue when fewer than 50% of states support the idea?
If people with different views are concentrated in different areas, we can maximize total democracy (i.e. representation of citizen's opinions in government) by allowing them to pick their own local laws.
I believe that local control is a very important aspect of a free people, especially in a country as large and diverse as the United States. States right is not a convenient excuse, it is a protection against totaliarism. The Constitution and Bill of Rights protected blacks, and States had to comply, and States right was a specious argument. It was a matter of Constitutional protection.
But I firmly believe that most laws of governance should be state and local so there is choice, reasonable chances for an individual to effect change, and a lower bar to experiment with policy.
> not a single of 5+ political issues mentioned in this threat have different answers from state to state
This over constrains "legalization" to a single dimension. Cannabis is a difficult policy space, marrying the complexity of liquor laws with the harm reduction imperatives of medicine and drug policy.
Sample: medical versus recreational standards, personal limits (if any, and if so, what?), tax levels (quantity? dollar amount?), where to apply the taxes (consumer, retailer, distributor, and/or grower?), constrain grower or distributor size (+: more independent shops, -: higher costs), give this to alcohol regulators or create a new regulatory umbrella, what about the cash (state-chartered bank or credit union? criminality and money laundering concerns?), monitoring adolescent usage, risk education, heavy metals monitoring, et cetera.
Many Americans who live in former Confederate states say that the civil war was fought over the autonomy of the states vs. federal unification. Many Americans who live in former (and current, haha) Union states say that it was fought for the economic interests of rich Southern slaveholders. There's a lot of bad blood in this discussion as you can see!
As a Montana resident, I applaud Governor Steve Bullock's action to require net neutrality in the state of Montana. Agit Pai's controversial FCC decision to drop net neutrality seems to me to be a bad one, one which will be partially mitigated here by requiring network neutrality to be the local law of the land in Montana.
I was a bothered by the down-voting of a block of 13 comments although Moderator Dang was right to tag the comments as "shallow" and "partisan" and, therefore, inappropriate, since they stray substantially from the topic at hand.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 25.7 ms ] threadThe Dems are all for state rights now, particularly in California. Some have even become secessionists!
Trump and friends now control the WH and want to use that to drive their agenda.
The truest rare politician is the one, from principle, goes against his advantage.
So, no, being a racist bigot trying to justify the civil war by trotting out "states rights" still gets you labeled as such.
But yes, it's rich irony seeing the states raising these issues.
Decentralised decision making is a large component of the American system’s resilience. At its worst, it’s a pressure release valve which shows us the negative effects of bad policy in a controlled setting (e.g. North Carolina’s bathroom bill). At its best, it promotes policy experimentation which can later scale, having been demonstrated to work, to the national stage (e.g. California’s clean air rules).
Also, could you please take the following guideline to heart in the future? "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Not doing so leads to the bottom of the barrel, and we're trying to do a bit better than that here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Claiming “state’s rights” is therefore never more than a convenient argument when you want to avoid the substance of the issue. And if that substance is racist, you are likely to be called a racist no matter what.
If people with different views are concentrated in different areas, we can maximize total democracy (i.e. representation of citizen's opinions in government) by allowing them to pick their own local laws.
But I firmly believe that most laws of governance should be state and local so there is choice, reasonable chances for an individual to effect change, and a lower bar to experiment with policy.
This over constrains "legalization" to a single dimension. Cannabis is a difficult policy space, marrying the complexity of liquor laws with the harm reduction imperatives of medicine and drug policy.
Sample: medical versus recreational standards, personal limits (if any, and if so, what?), tax levels (quantity? dollar amount?), where to apply the taxes (consumer, retailer, distributor, and/or grower?), constrain grower or distributor size (+: more independent shops, -: higher costs), give this to alcohol regulators or create a new regulatory umbrella, what about the cash (state-chartered bank or credit union? criminality and money laundering concerns?), monitoring adolescent usage, risk education, heavy metals monitoring, et cetera.
Also, the site guidelines ask people not use uppercase for emphasis: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I was a bothered by the down-voting of a block of 13 comments although Moderator Dang was right to tag the comments as "shallow" and "partisan" and, therefore, inappropriate, since they stray substantially from the topic at hand.