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[ggreenapple]

Ah, see. There I am, on the libertarian left. For comparison, politicalcompass.org puts both Obama and Clinton in the Authoritarian Right, along with all but two of the current presidential hopefuls

Comments

[san_grail]

Oh, hey - we're on there

[ggreenapple]

I think it's more likely you met the kind of people that were more like yourself. Not a lot of conservatives are hanging out at burning man. :)

[san_grail]

I'm aware of that - I accidentally ah, reworded things more unclearly?

What was worrying was that that San Francisco felt a lot like Wellington, that I met many lovely people and that just wandering around San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, in the woods in Oregon, travelling around via Greyhound, from all over the US at Burningman, and that they were like me, like people I know here, and that they weren't represented by their government at all. That there was just as much culture gap between them and their government as between, well, me and your goverment. And that was what was worrying and a little sad.

[ggreenapple]

But you realize, yes, that Northern California (Berkeley, for heaven's sake), and western Oregon (especially Portland) are very liberal areas of the country. If you had traveled to every state, a more varied picture would emerge. People choose to move to places like Portland and Berkeley because they wish to be near people who remind them of themselves. And people move away from places where they don't feel as if they are a valued part of the community, or that despite their own individual civic activity, their cities and her people fail to represent who they are. So, yes. You get "red" states and "blue" states (although the reality is not quite as simple as some make it seem).

It's as if you had attended a meeting of the Association of Purple Dinosaur Haters, and then declared... "Well, I didn't meet anyone who voted for a purple dinosaur. The system is obviously faulty