Do you support the right of secession?

I can agree that ever since the ongoing series of outrages and stupidities committed by both Idiot "W" Bush and Idiot Obama, the United States has tumbled down into a state of political civil war today.

Bush stupidly gets us into Iraq and Afghanistan... Obama swears he'll get us totally out of both, but gets us totally out of NEITHER... and, both of these simpletons completely surrender all control over every important facet of the economy to the internationalist central bank cartel known in this country as the "Federal Reserve System", beginning in August 2007.

Obama saddles the country with an unconstitutional 'healthcare' bureaucracy called "Obamacare" and rules the country with his "pen and phone" -- especially during his last four years. And here we are....

But what I don't understand is how Vladimir Putin managed to orchestrate this whole thing, Dissily. Old 'Pootski' must be even smarter than I've thought he was if he could really have accomplished all that.... He did it how? By having his 'agents' write posts in Facebook and on Twitter? Who would that have affected but a handful of phone-thumbing Millennials with too much time on their hands...? Maybe his best move was somehow conning Democrats into buying a bullshit 'Steele Dossier' to use against Trump? Now, THAT has caused more 'civil war'-style rancor than anything else....

 

You assume that a civil war is on the way. Very poor assumption.

 

The theme that "Russian agents are among us, manipulating their dupes to control America" was a constant one from the far Right for decades.

I still get emails from fellow conservatives explaining that the problems on American campuses are all due to a decision by the KGB in 1958 to take them over ... God give me strength, how stupid do you have to be to believe that?

Now it's been picked up by part of the Left. That's taking recycling too far.

 

It should not be assumed.
Neither should its opposite.

 

Quoting Abraham Lincoln on secession...

" Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable,---a most sacred right---a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movement. Such minority, was precisely the case, of the tories of our own revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones..."

source -> https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln1/1:444?rgn=div1;view=fulltext;q1=Lyceum

Before 1861 the only contact that most Americans had with the U.S. federal government was the U.S. Post Office.

Before 1865 Americans held their loyalty not to the federal government and the Constitution but to the sovereign state they lived in.

Even during the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War the vast majority of the U.S. military (Army) was made up with state militias not the regular U.S. Army. During the American Civil War when you look at the "order of battle" of Union forces were mostly state militias and regiments that were raised by the individual states not the federal government.

On the Confederate side the CSA army were entirely state armies, Army of Northern Virginia, Army of Tennessee, Army of North Carolina.

It wasn't until 1865 that the CSA came up with a CSA army known as the Army of the South.

 

I agree with every word you wrote, IF you replace the name "Trump" with the name "Obama"!

Think and remember: Who was it who ruled the country with "pen and phone"?! Who broke (BROKE) the law no less than three documented times as a sitting U. S. President during his eight years in office?

I agree that the time has come when we should allow states to secede -- especially, and most particularly, CALIFORNIA! For a number of different reasons, it is a disaster just waiting to happen. And wait until they do actually have a REAL earthquake (not just a little 'wiggler'). It will bankrupt the whole country when any one or two of several different, very dangerous earthquake faults breaks. Wait and see....

Hint: you don't want to be in Oakland when the Hayward Fault breaks! And when it does, the resulting reaction in the San Andreas Fault could put half of San Francisco and all of San Jose in the water! Oh, and then there's the Newport-Inglewood Fault that runs south from Long Beach, becoming the Rose Canyon Fault in San Diego. I could go on and on.... If California wants out, NOW would be a very good time to let them go!

 

While we're in disaster mode, read this article, and then this one. The whole West Coast could become a very bad place to be.
I guess it would solve their homeless problem though.

 

Oh, you're quite right. Dr. Brian Atwater wrote thirty years ago about the disasters that await Oregon and Washington state -- and earthquakes that will be 100 times more powerful than anything that is forecast for California.

A lot of it has to do with the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, and entire subduction zone under the Cascade Mountain range. Enormous tsunamis will result from any of the forecast quakes outside Portland, Ore., and just wait until Mt. Rainier finally blows! There goes Seattle/Tacoma! BTW, the famous 'ice caves' at the top of Rainer have been melting mysteriously. I wonder why....

One thing is for damn sure -- if I lived anywhere near any of these danger zones, I'd make certain that I had insurance for earthquakes, fire, and flooding... and then hope the insurance companies don't go bankrupt when the first disaster hits....

See why I want all these liberal shitholes to secede... and do it NOW?! When California gets clobbered, I don't want the United States to go bankrupt because of it. And not even the Federal Reserve is going to be able to 'print' enough money to paper-over the problem once it lands in our national 'lap'....

 

Because today is pretty much like yesterday, and tomorrow will be pretty much like today . it's very easy, natural, to just do linear extrapolation ... we're not programmed to really consider the possibility of abrupt, radical changes in our collective future. (Whether or not the full hypothesis about Global Warming is true, it's interesting to see that even governments who claim to believe in it, are mainly just doing token things about it.)

So I suppose the good people who live on the Oregon coast just assume that if something terrible happens, it will happen in the distant future and won't be something they will have to worry about.

Sort of like the National Debt.

 

I was actually in Yugoslavia for a few days in 1988. And that was exactly the image I had (from my tour guides); one of mixed marriages and good neighbors. So the civil war was an eye opener and really altered my view of "multiculturalism."

 

Oregon and Washington State residents who live EAST of the Cascade Mountain Range are much less likely to suffer from the damage of large earthquake, and would not be subject to tsunamis at all. If (actually, when) Mt. Rainier blows its top, unfortunately all of eastern Washington will most likely be buried in volcanic ash, and probably much of eastern Oregon, too. The skies will be full of volcanic ash as far away as Chicago.... Hint: Rainier is a much bigger volcano than Mt. St. Helens, and look at what it did in 1980! And its lavaflow will almost certainly end up down in the Seattle metro area.

One thing is for sure -- if either California, Washington, or Oregon gets hit with big earthquakes, tsunamis, or volcanos, they'll never even try to secede. They'll want all the other states to 'rescue' them, even though their radical Democrat government big-wigs do everything they can to harm the entire United States in any way they can imagine....

 

Very interesting.
I had three eye-opening experiences during the 80s.

(1) I had a friend, who was a Tamil, from Sri Lanka. He had actually been back in Sri Lanka in 1983 during the terrible pogroms of the Sinhalese against the Tamils, in retaliation for the Tigers' killing of Sinhalese soldiers. People were thrown alive into their burning homes. A year or two or three later, I happened to read of some atrocity committed by the Tamil Tigers against a Sinhalese village -- the usual Third World horror, everyone killed -- and I mentioned this to him, expecting that he'd have my own view about it -- "Isn't it terrible, this mutual eye-for-an-eye killing?" -- the standard response of civilized people, one assumes. Not a bit of it! He grinned broadly!

(2) As the Soviet Union opened up under Gorbachev, I had some contacts with other academics who were Soviet -- one was an Armenian, visiting at a university in London. The Armenian/Azeri war was just starting, with the usual horrors, terrible deeds on both sides, both sides with their list of grievances... I was talking to him and again expressed the usual "isn't it awful" sentiment -- but he turned out to be an arden Armenian nationalist... no sympathy whatsoever for the Azeri side. (Most European academics will concede that there were no completely innocent sides in any of Europe's wars, including the last big one.)

(3) I then had occasion to deliver a floppy disc of genetics data to an Azeri biologist in Moscow, which my then-wife and I were passing through. And I found the same attitude from him, just inverted. I mentioned some recent atrocity -- an Armenian girl burned alive in blanket in Baku or something -- and once again, nothing but pure nationalism -- "We're right, they're wrong."

I had naively assumed that in these ethnic conflicts, at least the intellectuals would see that both sides 'had a case' -- that you have to compromise -- that these struggle bring out the worst in everyone and would try to rise above pure ethnic nationalism.

Nope.

Americans, in their multi-racial melting pot, have spent fifty years being lectured about the evils of white racism. And rightly so! And it's had a deep effect.

Whites, liberals and conservatives alike, know the realities of race in America. Liberals are a bit better at concealing their inner feelings, but they're no more likely than conservatives to, say, walk through a Black area at night if they can avoid it. (I just read that 40 per cent of the population in California live in gated communities ... wonder why?)

If the American consensus comes apart, as the Hard Left would like it to, we're going to see things that we thought only happened in Muslim countries and in Africa. It will be a tragedy of monumental proportions.

 

I have relatives in eastern Washington, and I recall their describing to me the ash that covered everything after Mt St Helen's went.
Let's hope it never happens -- when I visit the US, one of my greatest pleasures is driving the length of Highway One from Washington State down to LA.

A paradise, now being despoiled by idiots. Nature doesn't need to lend a hand.

 

I doubt virtually anyone who reads those last two sentences, really believes it. But history says it's the likely course.

 

Well, who knows?

In 1960 you could make out a very good case that thermonuclear was between the US and USSR was inevitable, if only by accident. (I was on the high school debating team then and one year we had to debate 'disarmament' -- researching the 'pro' case meant showing how easily a war could start. Scary. And it did almost happen at least twice. But ... we lucked out, thanks to a couple of sober Russians.)

In 1975 you could make out a pretty good case that world communism was inevitable. It had triumphed in country after country, had just defeated the American superpower in Vietnam, was making progress in Africa, had been rolled back nowhere ... so you might think it was just a matter of time. But then ...

So we don't know. I think at some point there will be a huge backlash against Leftist insanity, including among lifelong Democratic voters and even ideological liberals. What we have to hope for is that there is not a development of far Right sentiments and organizational growth among the Republican base. Although the screams of 'racism' from the Left and from weak-minded liberals are mostly bogus, the reality is that there is certainly the potential for the development of real, conscious racism ... some form of 'white nationalism'. The taboo against racism is so strong in the US that it would take a lot to break it, but it could happen.

We have to hope for the emergence of a sensible political force, in either or both parties, which will put the US back on the path that it's been on so successfully for 250 years. Not just hope, but work for.

 

The closest I’ve seen to a ‘sensible political force’ in the US is Pete Buttigieg. However, he’s making little impression on black voters and has homophobes working assiduously to undermine his run for the presidency. On one forum a Christian fundamentalist claimed having a gay president would ‘bring down the wrath of the Almighty’ upon America.
Somethings got to change though as US politics has of late become toxic beyond belief. Many of us who live outside the US are horrified at where things are going , especially the undermining of basic democratic principles by the Executive Branch.

 

We're actually lucky that Trump is such a narcissistic buffoon.

A really smart anti-democrat would proceed in a plan to destroy American democracy in a very different way.
He would appear to be reasonable, uniting, compassionate, reluctant to undertake harsh measures. He would use judo,
letting the Hard Left reveal their true natures, even encouraging them. He would aim to get the support, or passive toleration, of the broad middle, for repressive measures. Above all, he would strenuously emphasize racial inclusiveness -- a large section of the core of the American state [the only part that counts, the men with the guns] is non-white, so any political movement that appears to be white supremacist, in the real sense, is going to have a problem there.

This is how many dictators have succeeded. Many of the coups and subsequent repressions in countries in Latin America, and also in Europe, had the support, or tolerance, of the broad middle, because the Left were able to be portrayed as the real threat to the social order. The radical leftwing Tupamaros managed to destroy Uruguan democracy through their bombings and attacks. Morsi in Egypt has a lot of support, even among liberals there, because he appeared -- and perhaps was -- the only person who could stop the Islamisation of Egypt via its elected Muslim Brotherhood leader.

A would-be dictator would have an organization behind him, both a mass one, and small close group. The latter would seek to provoke something like the equivalent of the Reichstag fire, which gave Hitler his excuse to begin mass repression in Germany.

So a would-be dictator would be calculating, cunning, taking repressive measures more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, apparently conciliatory, an apparent bridge-builder, although on his terms. He would have a well-organized mass movement behind him, members of which wouldn't be strangers to the use of force.

But Trump is none of these things. Thank God.

And the US has been through far worse. Have a look at the Communist Control Act of 1954, which actually outlawed the Communist Party. One of its main authors was a senator named Humbert Humphrey, who was as close as we've ever gotten in the US to a Scandanavian Social Democrat. It's still on the books, although it's clear unconstitutional and no doubt would be ruled as such if it ever came before the Supreme Court.

We survived those years, so we can survive the years to come. I hope.

 

Trump wants to turn the USA into a dictatorship = his dictatorship. So yes, let's stop him by having states secede from the Union. Minnesota will became one great nation-state as we will not have to deal with the deficit Republicans created. Since Texass was not viewed as being treasonous for feeling that way, we can feel that way, too.

Let's roll ...

 

Although I agree that trends are not destiny; I too lived through the era in which it was hard to imagine an end (other than WWIII) to the Cold War; but I'm not seeing a bottom yet to "leftist insanity." In the same week we celebrated our nation's independence, Betsy Ross went from American heroine to racist oppressor, seemingly without discussion. The history czar issued an order that she was unpersoned, and that was that, and now her flag has joined the confederate flag and the swastika as a forbidden symbol of oppression. If common sense were going to rear it's head, I would have thought it would have happened long before now. So what is going to be more ridiculous than that to trigger backlash?

 

"...homophobes working assiduously to undermine his run for the presidency."

They are? Any proof of that?

 

Yes, it's interesting, in a horrible kind of way, to watch. I particularly pay attention to people I think of as sensible liberals, so see how far along they are being dragged by the madness. Of course, in a polarized political situation, people tend to just take sides, and to suppress their doubts, or if they have them, to remain silent about them.

I keep waiting for some coalition of sensible liberals and sensible conservatives to form a counter-movement, especially needed on the elite campuses. There are notable intellectuals on the Left who have stood up, sometimes at personal cost, to this crazyness, but, although individual gestures are welcome, what's needed is a movement, with a statement of principles, around which everyone with common sense can rally.

I think the main problem that liberals have is that they more or less agree with the Left's central premise: if you're well-off, you didn't build that, you stole it (unless you're a socially liberal corporation, of course); and if you're poor, you didn't contribute to your own situation, it was someone else's fault. In other words, the failures of society are attributed to its successes. So they have difficulty arguing with the Hard Left and the addled kids who follow them.

Actual secession, or even a civil war, would have such terrible consequences that we should try to think of alternatives. Perhaps it's not too late to popularize some form of strengthened "states' rights" movement. California could make instruction in gay sexual techniques compulsory in the elementary schools, Mississippi could require Bible classes, and if you didn't like it, you could move. Probably too late for that.

 

Short of civil war, I agree that the best solution would be devolve to what the constitution actually says about the Federal government's enumerated powers and let states handle most other issues. Abortion is a great example. Prior to Roe v Wade, it just wasn't a big national issue because each state set it's own abortion policy, but once the Supreme Court nationalized it, it became an intractable national issue. For no good reason.

From time to time on this forum, I've proffered that compromise, a return to the states to leftist members and none have shown the least interest in it. It's every bit as important to them for Alabama to have a 9 month window for abortions as it is for New York. It would be much easier to get the right to accept a mandatory gay sex in California/Bible classes in Mississippi compromise than it would the left. They can't stand the idea that kids in Mississippi are being forced to go to Bible class when they could be going to gay sex classes instead. That may change as things become more intractable but right now the left wants total victory and isn't interested in compromise.

 

Wow, you people have a lot of serious delusions.

It reminds of the guy from the Portland nutty right something, arguing that crowbars should be illegal to carry. He was marching in an open carry parade. '

Crowbars are weapons, he argued. Guns are tools.

The Blue States would mostly gladly dump the decades-old liability of carrying the red states. So don't give me this "The liberals won't stop" baby cry. We would be glad to be rid of you.

How many righties have written their representatives and Demanded the right of secession? NONE I would bet. Because you all know that blue states have carried this country in almost every respect. So put up or shut up!

 

You all remind me of a bunch of old women.

 

People will need to move. But too bad. The nutty right can run to red states and the oppressed can run to blue states.