Yep. The slave masters have already taken all the "nice" places to live.
The question is, do you value liberty over convenience?
Other states may be more convenient, but they will be much harder to turn into a free state. If you are land locked and have small borders, you are easy to control.
Alaska is defensible, resource rich, primed for freedom, and desires growth.
ITs not the convenient choice, its the only choice.
I sympathize with your appraisal of Alaska as an ideal location for an autonomous state, and have argued many of its finer points.
You are correct in that Alaska is perfectly positioned in many different ways, and its riches would easily support an autonomous state, if you could ever actually tap and exploit them. The people are already an independent lot, and they are physically as well as somewhat mentally detached from the rest of the country. People from the "lower 48" often have to be reminded that Alaska even exists, when there's not an on-going Senate debate on drilling in the ANWF, that is. The Alaskan Independence Party is also a very strong contender in the state and would likely be a willing and useful ally.
The greatest problems with the state center around Washington's heavy military interest in it, its status an environmental sacred cow, and the blessing/curse of abundant oil reserves beneath its soil. On the
"Alaska, nothing comes close" thread, I argued that the federal government might actually benefit from a more autonomous Alaska in several ways. And while I still believe that this is true, I think that it would be a dangerously precarious coin-toss for us to make. It would be inherently dependent upon what administration controls the White House and what party controls Congress, to say nothing of a thousand other variables.
If Republicans control the government, they're probably not going to allow Alaska to become more autonomous because of military/economic interests dealing primarily with missle defense and oil. If Democrats control the government, they're probably not going to allow Alaska to become more autonomous because of the environmental lobby. Our biggest bargaining chip would be to play off Democratic environmental restrictions against a Republican administration/Congress in order to allow them more access to Alaska's resources, while at the same time guaranteeing a substantial, continued military interest in the state. This could conceivably work, but it's a long shot at best, and it would take quite some time to negotiate/implement...by that time, the political situation could have reversed and negated all of your efforts. This is a special consideration of course, but then, Alaska is a special place.
I'll more than gladly move to Alaska if the FSP chooses it, but the above factors are genuine difficulties that we would encounter, not just smoke and mirrors.
There is also the problem that perception accounts for so much, even among our number. So many people view Alaska as so forbidingly harsh that I don't think we'd ever get a majority vote on it. There's more discussion of weather factors over on the Yahoo list than there is here, but this is a major concern to some people who seem willing to hinge their vote on it. For this reason, I would much rather reach a consensus on one of the western lower 48 that has a much better chance than Alaska currently does, rather than end up splitting our votes to the point where we land ourselves in Delaware.
Accordingly, we must not only take our most ideal choices into account in the final vote, but also the worst, and then try to cast our votes in such a way as to contend for several best choices so that we do not end up unwittingly painting ourselves into a less than desirable corner. Right now, I just don't see that Alaska has that strong of a chance, no matter how much I like it. In that way, it's something of a double-edged sword.
