Red state Blue state

[I Shrugged]

Is it different living in a red or blue state? Are some states better from a liberty standpoint as a practical matter? Or is it just that the attitudes are different but the laws are about the same?

I understand the differences in concealed carry. But to me that is more symbolic. The whole rest of the laws and regulations are more interesting to me. What I'm saying is, please discuss it re matters OTHER than concealed carry.

Would it make a difference in your life if you lived in one color versus a similar town in the next state over which is the other color? If you have such experience, please tell.

If so, should you consider moving? Are you supporting the economy of a state that doesn't like your beliefs?

Should a lot of us move?

Should there be a big goal here? Is it achievable?

[Pointedstick]

I grew up in a Blue state and now live in a Purple state that is very locally Red. The truth is, don't think of states, think of counties, because things can vary across very small distances. And yes, the experience is immensely different in many ways. Here are my impressions, and keep in mind that these are horrible gross generalizations that may be 100% inaccurate at describing your personal living situation:

Red Zone pros:
- Tight-knit social environment, if you are eligible for inclusion and opt to self-include
- High social trust environment; "small-town" vibe
- Crime generally low
- "Family-friendly" atmosphere: pretty good schools, lots of parks, wholesomeness encouraged, etc
- Very low land and real estate prices; you can feasibly live in a very nice house on quite a lot of land without needing to be wealthy
- Access to nature unspoiled by pollution; clear air, clean water, healthy forests, etc.
- Respect for age and wisdom
- Aura of masculinity: prized qualities are toughness, self-reliance, and initiative

Blue Zone pros:
- Many economic opportunities particularly in high tech, entertainment, and media; high wages for service sector jobs
- The best that diversity can offer; can mingle with people of all different backgrounds who are culturally bound together by the Blue Zone ethos: multicultural, international, and cosmopolitan
- Excellent restaurants, bars, nightlife, etc.
- The best universities are all in Blue zones (in fact, most universities are in Blue Zones)
- Opportunity to live in a way that outsources property-related responsibilities to others (apartments, condos, townhomes, etc)
- Might not need a car and friendly to cyclists
- Youth focus; dynamism and novelty, and lots of cultural events and opportunities
- Aura of femininity; prized qualities are compassion, nurturing, and fairness


Red Zone Cons:
- Few really good economic opportunities; most areas are hollowing out as the brightest folks flee for the Blue zones
- High rates of drug abuse, alcoholism and suicide
- Regressive, provincial, conservative attitudes; people do things "because that's how it's always been done" and low interest in change or innovation
- Christianity can dominate attitudes and institutions; expect to feel excluded if not a believer
- Aura of stagnation; everyone and everything seems to be slowly decaying or dying. My neighborhood is full of old people who die and their house gets sold off by their grandkids
- Low density; car ownership virtually mandatory
- Often very far from the nearest airport, making cross-country or international travel inconvenient
- Aura of masculinity; people can act like dicks

Blue Zone cons:
- Small neighborhoods in Blue Zones become hyper-desirable and drive up rents for everyone, leading to housing becoming insanely expensive and surrounding areas deteriorating into ghettos
- High cost of living in general, particularly if you opt to take advantage of the cultural opportunities afforded by the place
- High levels of homelessness, usually badly managed
- High levels of ethnic tension, especially in Blue Zones with large black populations
- High crime, particularly in the large cities
- High level of wealth stratification
- High levels of pollution and even just ordinary trash and litter clogging up the place (WTF? )
- Haughty, elitist, sneering ivory-tower attitudes
- High taxes, particularly in the large cities
- Not very business-friendly much of the time, particularly in big cities
- Aura of femininity; people can act like pussies

[I Shrugged]

Interesting, thanks.

Do you really see an everyday difference in masculinity/femininity?

I think states are still important because of legal differences. At least I am assuming so. That's a big part of what I want to hear about, whether or not it makes much difference in one's life.

Maybe it all comes down to attitudes, customs, and behavior, not laws.

[ochotona]

P.S. very accurate summary!

[ochotona]

My state, Texas, reddest of the red, really fu##s businesses with the margins tax and property taxes here are punitive and rising fast. Ignore their words, scrutinize their actions.

[MachineGhost]

That was pretty good, PS! I think you hit the mark.

Like that article in the other thread said, blue zones are 4% of the land mass, but 60% of the population and 99% of the culture.

My challenge in finding a place to move to is to find a green zone that has all of the positive attributes of the red and blue zones with none of the negatives. Red zone desperation and the Puritan mentality is far more of a turnoff to me than the overpriced, density-cum-mismanagement shithole of the blue zones. I am leaning towards thinking the trick would be a red zone in a blue state to moderate out the Trump elements.

[Pointedstick]

Interesting, thanks.

Do you really see an everyday difference in masculinity/femininity?

I think states are still important because of legal differences. At least I am assuming so. That's a big part of what I want to hear about, whether or not it makes much difference in one's life.

Maybe it all comes down to attitudes, customs, and behavior, not laws.

IMHO the legal differences matter far less than the cultural ones. It depends on which laws you're talking about anyway, and it's very regionally-specific, as well as particular to what you personally care about. Arizona has few gun laws, but Colorado lets you buy weed. New York City has a city income tax (!) and it's a felony to damage city trees (!!!). Getting a small business license is free in California (or at least was when I did it in 2011) but costs $25 in New Mexico. Many perennial areas of libertarian interest such as professional licensure, land use regulation, gambling laws, and educational freedom are all over the map and not well correlated to Red or Blue zones. Honestly for most people the things that wind up sticking in your craw are car registration fees and homeowner's association rules and things like that.

I do see an everyday difference in terms of masculinity and femininity. In Red Zones, people are more charitable to masculine behaviors, and vice versa in Blue zones. By way of illustration, while I was writing the previous sentence, one of my neighbors drove down the street in a huge 1956 military transport truck that he owns. It's huge and loud and belches exhaust, but it's undeniably cool (even though I have no interest in owning such a monster myself). In a Blue Zone, he probably wouldn't be able to own or drive it (no way it passes smog checks) and there would be substantial social stigma even if he could. In Red Zones, people hunt, they follow professional sports (including boxing and MMA and other fighting sports), and they do their own home renovations. Anecdotally, in Red Zones people seem to own more dogs, and in Blue Zones it's mostly cats.

The differences are far more cultural than legal.

[Tyler]

Blue Zone pros:
- The best that diversity can offer; can mingle with people of all different backgrounds who are culturally bound together by the Blue Zone ethos: multicultural, international, and cosmopolitan

Blue Zone cons:
- High levels of ethnic tension, especially in Blue Zones with large black populations
- Haughty, elitist, sneering ivory-tower attitudes

I've lived in what feels like the two extremes of the political spectrum -- Dallas and San Francisco. I would say that in my experience blue areas are more diverse than red areas but also more intolerant. Sure they have lots of different types of people, but tribalism is rampant and breaking from politically correct paradigms is strongly discouraged. The key word that is repeated a lot is "like-minded", and it's spoken as a complement. In contrast, red areas are generally less diverse but more tolerant. People are friendly and less likely to pick a fight over petty political issues or social grievances.

FWIW, I eventually moved to Austin which is a decent shade of purple. The core city is pretty liberal, but there's a strong red balance around the suburbs. The end result is that I can walk up and down my street and see Clinton signs next to Trump signs, but everyone gets along and nobody is ostracized for their beliefs either way. After experiencing the two extremes, I attribute a lot of that to regular everyday exposure to the "other side" rather than knowing them only by juvenile stereotypes. It's amazing how insular some areas can be.

I personally prefer the mixing of red and blue people rather than stagnant homogeneous politics, as the tension is healthy and constructive. Strict political conformity ("like-mindedness") on either side is problematic.

[Pointedstick]

That was pretty good, PS! I think you hit the mark.

Like that article in the other thread said, blue zones are 4% of the land mass, but 60% of the population and 99% of the culture.

My challenge in finding a place to move to is to find a green zone that has all of the positive attributes of the red and blue zones with none of the negatives. Red zone desperation and the Puritan mentality is far more of a turnoff to me than the overpriced, density-cum-mismanagement shithole of the blue zones. I am leaning towards thinking the trick would be a red zone in a blue state to moderate out the Trump elements.

What you're looking for is basically unattainable (all the positives and none of the negatives! ) but you'll find the next-closest thing in a swing state or a Purple Zone--where there is a decent mixing of old and new. I'm partial to New Mexico myself but I've also heard very nice things about North Carolina, and Colorado may still count, especially outside of Denver. Nevada too, if you can stand the climate and the atmosphere promoted by all the gambling.

[ochotona]

MG look at SE Washington State, on the Columbia River. Richland Kennewick Pasco. Interesting place

[MachineGhost]

MG look at SE Washington State, on the Columbia River. Richland Kennewick Pasco. Interesting place

I read about that area before, but all three cities are very culturally insular... the upper class rich snobs live in Richland, the working class Hispanics live in Pasco and the lower-middle middle class whites/others live in Kennewick. It's also in a high desert area, unfortunately. It also doesn't sound any different from SoCal... dry heat, suburbs and strip malls. I'm so beyond that zombiness.

I've pretty much got climate on the top of my list. I want four seasons but mild ones which culls down a lot of places and requires exceptions like high plateaus in the southeast (which is all generally out of consideration due to the humidity). And next on my list would be not having to have a car to get around. It's so old school and I'll only make an exception to that if I can live somewhere rural where hell is not other people.

Austin is pretty weird as they say but the gawd awful weather and the suburban zombiness around it just won't do it for me. I want something different than the same ol' same ol' B.S.. I was really disappoitned the French Quarter in New Orleans is something like out of Brave New World, a tourist trap surrounded by a metro.

[Pointedstick]

I've pretty much got climate on the top of my list. I want four seasons but mild ones

What a Californian thing to say! C'mon, man up and learn to shovel some snow. Or choose one of those dreaded high deserts--where the sun melts all the snow in a day or two, which is what happens where I live. Unwillingness to live where the weather is even mildly challenging locks you out of a lot of great places. Most of the affordable-but-high-social-trust Blue Zones get very cold and are also humid in the summer (Minnesota, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, etc). And if you want to avoid soulless California-style suburbs you're pretty much limited to places east of the Mississippi. One exception I can think of would be Santa Fe, which is Blue, high social trust, dry mild summers, and relatively mild winters (though it does snow) but you'll be car-dependent, an hour and a half away from a major airport, and surrounded by irritating rich ex-hippies who believe in healing crystals. Housing prices are also surprisingly high, as they are in basically every desirable Blue Zone.

You're an optimizer, but I think you need to learn how to admit when something just can't be optimized any further and accept some compromise. This is sometimes hard for me too, I get it. But in the end, over-optimizing just leads to intellectual masturbation substituting for action. You'll never find that perfect place, and if you did, you'd find that it was ridiculously expensive because other people also found it and drove up the rents.

[MachineGhost]

I've pretty much got climate on the top of my list. I want four seasons but mild ones

What a Californian thing to say! C'mon, man up and learn to shovel some snow. Or choose one of those dreaded high deserts--where the sun melts all the snow in a day or two, which is what happens where I live. Unwillingness to live where the weather is even mildly challenging locks you out of a lot of great places. Most of the affordable-but-high-social-trust Blue Zones get very cold and are also humid in the summer (Minnesota, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, etc). And if you want to avoid soulless California-style suburbs you're pretty much limited to places east of the Mississippi. One exception I can think of would be Santa Fe, which is Blue, high social trust, dry, and with relatively mild winters (though it does snow) but you'll be car-dependent and surrounded by irritating rich ex-hippies who believe in healing crystals. Housing prices are also surprisingly high, as they are in basically every desirable Blue Zone.

You're an optimizer, but I think you need to learn how to admit when something just can't be optimized any further and accept some compromise. This is sometimes hard for me too, I get it. But in the end, over-optimizing just leads to intellectual masturbation substituting for action. You'll never find that perfect place, and if you did, you'd find that it was ridiculously expensive because other people also found it and drove up the rents.

I haven't begin to optimize yet and still thinking in broad strokes. The core issue I have is that what seems to appeal to others who cook up spreadsheets to track most variables from the available data, especially retirees, doesn't appeal to me at all. Golf courses? Zzzzz. Master planned subdivision communities? Over my dead body. College sports towns? Gag me with a pitchfork. Seasonal tourist, resort-style towns? Lord have mercy! I don't know what it is, but Baby Boomers just seem to be pretty fucking boring in what they want out of life. Maybe its because they're just not as techno-sophisticated as the younger generations so they have drastically lower expectations for intellectual novelty?

Oh, I'm willing to compromise, it's just not going to be on the seasons/topography. Nothing leaves you more detached from nature than not having frequent seasonal changes or being forced inside all the time. It's probably unhealthy too, like having an out of whack circadian rhythm is.

I do think you're right about east of the Mississippi. So far most of the interesting places I've read about are all east of that. Just based on what I've learned so far, I suspect the sweet spot would be a relatively small city that's just barely above the minimum level necessary to have all of the cultural & entertainment amenities without all of the negatives that bigger ones have, i.e. overpriced housing options, de facto racial segregation, traffic congestion, etc.. So I may have to put up with humidity and I'm willing to make that tradeoff so long as its not for another suburban shithole like Florida (which is like SoCal but full of boring, old retired people -- communities and communities of them!!!) or the Deep South (deep poverty and hopelesslness).

Yeah, I read about Santa Fe and it was very quirky and interesting but it's too bad its in a desert. Just can't do that anymore. I would actually like to spend time long hours outside without worrying about skin cancer, cataracts, the glare, etc... The way people deal with the weather in SoCal is they focus on shopping, materialism, celebrity status and being insulated from the weather which is just an empty, pointless, treadmill lifestyle I'm not interested in (even if I could afford to live at such a high level). Could the Kardashians have possibly come from any other place? No way!

[I Shrugged]

I suggest Italy.

[Pointedstick]

So you won't compromise on climate and want four seasons, but you don't want any of them to require that you stay indoors all the time, and you don't want excessive sun, dryness, or altitude?

Okay that leaves you with basically some parts of Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Charlotte, NC, maybe?

Honestly you should get over your aversion normal North American weather. California has spoiled you; except for Hawaii, there's no other place like it in the USA during winter and for a very good reason: the easterly winds moderate the climate in places with western coastlines, and nowhere else in the USA other than Hawaii has a westerly coastline so low in latitude. It's the same reason why most of Western Europe is so mild despite being higher up than Maine. The USA is a giant continent, and the farther you get from an ocean coast--particularly a western ocean coast--the more extreme the climate gets. Ain't no way around that.

The winters you get in the southern half of the country really aren't so bad, but there's not much you can do to moderate them short of moving to Florida. Even the relatively mild winter of a place like South Carolina is still gonna present daytime temperatures in the 40s for a few months at a time. It's not like you're really gonna want to be outside a lot at a time like that. Still too cold for much fun.

[Mr Vacuum]

Reading this thread I was thinking just pick North Carolina--Research Triangle or Charlotte--and be done with it.

[MachineGhost]

By "extreme" I mean the winters you can suffer in Montana, North Dakota or Minnesota... that's just way too inhumanly cold to function normally. It would be a dreaded opposite of the eternal desert heat in SoCal... same effect in the end. Personally, I will always choose colder weather over hotter.

The #1 problem with CA is none of the affordable parts to live are on the coast or anywhere near the coast. So getting at that ocean-moderating effect would involve Oregon (no coastline development allowed), Washington and Alaska and we should all know what the Really Big Risk is there by now. Alaska doesn't have a lower COLA anyway, surprisingly. AFAIK, there are no cities in OR or WA east of the I-5 of the type I'm looking for, just more suburban core zombie zones, car dependent small towns struggling to survive on tourism and/or rural desperation further east (until you reach the Doom Preppers in Northern Idaho). And that acursed high desert starts east of I-5 around thereabouts too.

So far on my "places I like" list is a friendly small city in southeast Idaho (high desert), a small town or plateau in Tennesee (walkable or cooler), a small college city in Indiana (70% humidity) and the tri-city area in central-south New York (Great Lake snowbelt). North Carolina seems too pricey-overdeveloped or remotely-ruralish (car dependent) and also unfortunately too expensive in the cooler and higher elevated Blue Ridge Mountains since they're full of artsy-fartsy tourist towns, i.e. Asheville. A blue zone in a red state seems like it can work too. I haven't read much yet about Ohio or non-coastal Maine yet, but that is on tap.

P.S. Agardia or Mars would be a no-brainer, but alas...

[stuper1]

Bend, Oregon is a nice, smallish, hip sort of town.

[l82start]

Bend, Oregon is a nice, smallish, hip sort of town.

expensive.. but nice

[stuper1]

My brother lives in Bend. I've only visited. Is it expensive as compared to California coastal cities, or only as compared to say Toledo?

[l82start]

land and homes are CA pricey if you want to be close in to the hip down town area and pretty much anywhere inside the bend town limits + the close in towns next door.. i don't know exactly how all the other costs compare... it is a no sales tax state which is a plus... but usually those savings are near a wash against higher property taxes...

[MachineGhost]

Bend is definitely expensive ($400K+ish) given its location and lack of any real economy, especially in the new big-ass-front-porch-with-a-close-sidewalk development areas to try to bring back that spontaneous social interaction we lost decades ago.

Of course, it's just another suburban core zombie town, but I digress.

Is it too much to say the Baby Boomers with their gawddamn cars ruined the country???

[Kriegsspiel]

MG, I'm on my own vision quest walkabout. Right now I'm stopped in Portsmouth, NH and I am very impressed. The housing prices aren't completely outrageous from a quick perusal, and the downtown is fantastic. It reminds me of the UK. While I've been here the weathers been fantastic, I don't think it's too extreme.

[Kriegsspiel]

The beers here are relatively cheap too. That might only be a factor for us raging alcoholics.

[MachineGhost]

I loved the UK! Okay, I'll put NH on the list to check out. Interesting that Indiana is also in the top 5.

http://www.freedominthe50states.org/overall/