This Country Needs to Split

Yeah, I guess.

 

Bilateral secession definitely does not.

Actually even unilateral secession could be nonviolent if the US declined to enforce the law.

No, I mean what I said: secession by consent of both parties, namely the seceding state and the United States.

 

I'm an eternal optimist I guess; people will ask themselves, is it worth it for possibly for myself and family members to possibly die over something like political and cultural differences? Those differences are no good to you nor your family if you are dead from violence. Things might get worse but I believe most of America will think rationally and we'll avoid unnecessary bloodshed. Based on my life experience, as a child during the 60's all we heard was the hippies were going to take over America and kill those who did not follow them like blind sheep. Obviously that never happened; the extreme elements were eradicated by either blowing themselves up making their makeshift bombs, arrested, freeze dried and doing hard time for years, or were largely ignored by mainstream America and died off.

I suspect when it comes down to a unnecessary civil war, a vast majority of Americans would not support either side. Just my viewpoint.

 

I guess I understand.. but the Eternal Pessimist in me says BAD times are rapidly approaching.

 

ummm, those 'hippies' are now in charge of the dnc, & our house of reps... and they still wanna get 'rid' of those that don't agree with them...

 

Never going to happen.

Primarily because I think it's too late.

 

Kind of a fallacy the hippy thing.

That movement was hijacked by the media.

Hippies were actually hardcore libertarians, and not really focused on changing society at large. They just wanted to do their thing.

 

Media, and Communists like the SDS.

Forgot that bit.

 

Suppose Blue state California splits away from America and forms their own country. What's to say down the road, either the Russians or Chinese make overtures to them about coming under their influence like a good part of Europe did after WW II. And California, convinced that it would be a benefit to be under the sphere of influence agrees. Down the road, Russia/China decide to station troops/weapons of mass destruction in California to "protect them" from other imperial American countries. And if other blue states follow suite in some form, now the "red" states might view this as a threat but may not have the resources to combat this threat.

Your assuming that the powers that be in the various states would allow them to continue to live there, but there is no guarantee that the states would allow that to happen. Red states or blue states, depending on their constitutions could make up whatever laws they wanted to regardless of how fair we may think they are or are not. There are no guarantees until the process is complete.

Ideally that would happen, but again, there would be those who would oppose it under any circumstances and what is to say that they would not fight to preserve the union as it exists today. Again, there is no guarantee that a split would be peaceful.

In a Utopian world I would agree with you, however there is no guarantee that cultural/political values would remain intact; blues or reds could grow in numbers and eventually work to switch to a blue state status and vice versa.

 

I'm talking about the Jerry Rubins of the world. The real extremists.

 

Your viewpoint is the absolutely sane and decent and commonsense one. I am sure that at the moment the vast majority of both liberals and conservatives would agree with you.

I lived through -- as a child -- the McCarthy period, when a lot of the far Left thought we were heading to fascism. But McCarthy was fighting the whole American establishment eventually, as well as going against basic American democratic values, so he faded away.

I lived through -- as a young adult -- the Hippie/Weatherman period. I don't think many people feared they would take over America -- not directly. Nixon beat McGovern by a landslide, and anyway, McGovern -- a war hero and a very decent man -- would today stand out like a sore thumb in the Democratic Party.

No, the hate-Amerikkka and Hippy generation did not take over America. Their ideas did. The deep alienation that young elite Americans felt for their own country and its customs and beliefs, due to the Vietnam war, got hardened and rationalized and transmitted to the next generation, and to the next, getting more virulent with each generation. That's what we're living with today.

A civil war is the last thing we want. Violence is the last thing we want. Hatred and scorn for fellow Americans is the last thing we want. That would be utterly ... deplorable.

What we want to do -- or some of us -- is to start a calm, amicable, rational, friendly conversation, about the possibility, the desirability, the difficulty, of doing agains what our forefathers did 250 years ago. Dissolve the bonds that now bind together two increasingly-incompatible peoples.

This isn't Republicans vs Democrats. This isn't even liberals vs conservatives. It's ... I won't characterize the other side ... them, vs, as they see us, white supremacist homophobic transphobic Islamaphobic low-IQ deplorables.

We would see it as increasingly-unhinged people taking the nation into some unpredictably-insane moral chaos, vs people who believe in, basically, commonsense, toleration, live and let live.

So why should we remain bound together in mutual contempt and growing hatred?

It's time to get out. It's time for the Progressive Left to get us out.

 

I look forward to it very much. You sound a lot like a liberal friend of mine in California.

I absolutely agree about how easy it is to get locked in on a view of 'the enemy' and reduce everyone on the other side to the worst example on the other side.
And as for language and thought. I'm an old Whorfian, despite the criticisms of that thesis over the years.

As another conservative on this forum keeps telling me, by the standards of most conservatives, I'm a liberal. And he's probably right ... an FDR/JFK guy really more than a Reagan guy. (Funny -- we're symmetrical opposites. I came from a staunchly Democratic family, and not really Southern Democrats either although we were in the South. We were liberal Democrats, my dad was even pretty radical, having lived through the 30s. He hated Republicans like death itself.)

The problem is, the young 'liberals' (that word's going out of fashion, it's 'progressives' and 'socialists' now) would despise FDR and JFK if they knew anything about them. The values of the young upcoming Lefties are changing.

You're going to have to come along over to our side when we separate. There will always be room for a Loyal Opposition.

 

Did you ever look at General Semantics? And its founder, Alfred Korzybski? I think they take their ideas too far, but the basic idea -- the inappropriateness of the "to be" verb when talking about words -- is brilliant. "Is Socialism state ownership?" "Is an AR15 a weapon of war?" Petajoules of energy wasted in completely meaningless arguments.

Korzybski plus Popper: "So you believe that ______________ .. What evidence would make you change your mind?"

But our distant ancestors got by without such subtle thinking. Kill the other guy and take his woman. Who needs semantics and disconfirming evidence to succeed in doing that?

Going to bed now, hopefully we can talk later.

 

A possible right-left war has been played out in war games. The left gets decimated.

 

Yes, I remember watching Hayakawa on educational TV in the late 50s/early 60s. Then seeing him ten years later courageously defending San Francisco State College wearing his Tam O'Shanter.
I've actually given a couple of talks to their [or one faction -- there may be more than one group of General Semanticists] annual national gathering in New York City (on how language can help or hinder learning mathematics and science). Nice people, but a bit naive. One year, one of my fellow speakers, a Frenchwoman was clearly -- to me anyway -- an anti-Semite. I could tell by how she referred to 'Danny the Red', and other sly references to alien influences, etc. Later I confronted her -- in a gentle way -- and she confirmed it. The full whack -- Jews win all those Nobel Prizes in science because 'they have a network' [I think there is a Swede connected to the Nobel committee who believes this as well], Einstein didn't discover special relativity, Henri-Poincaré did, etc. No one else in the audience picked up on it, although many of them were Jewish. So much for semantic awareness!

You are right about tribal thinking. There's a famous psychology experiment along these lines. The divisions don't even have to be real --- put orange armbands on one group and purple ones on another, and soon they're hating each other.

I always try on online forums, perhaps not successfully, initially to picture a Leftist political opponent as similar to one of my Leftwing friends -- good intentions, but misguided. Perhaps I can change his mind on one or two things over time, plant a seed or two of doubt, if we can have a civil discussion.

What triggers that primitive emotion of outright anger in me though, is perceived dishonesty, or even casual carelessness with the truth. Since I am not arguing with Rightwingers who do this, I don't feel such anger for them, although I'm sure there are people on my side who appear just as egregious to someone on the Left. I think probably the Leftwingers who try to substitute witty remarks, or sly -- or not so sly -- insinuations of 'racism' etc. are probably young people who don't know very much and can't back up their arguments with facts ... I picture them as having lived in a leftist campus environment where there is unanimity of (expressed ) political opinion, with the common view being that any conservative must be evil and stupid to boot They can't handle coming across the kind of conservative you can run into on forums like this, who knows a thing or two ... and so they just react with pitiful insults.

Interestingly, if you look at the comments on 'political' YouTube videos, they're usually overwhelmingly from the Right, almost certainly by young males, and mainly just snappy nasty one-liners. Of course YouTube is not a debate forum, but I find that interesting. Don't leftwing youngsters watch YouTube?

On colors -- don't forget that 'Reds' and 'Whites' have been around a long time, although here in the UK it's 'Red' vs 'Blue'. (Boy, do the Americans confuse the world by turning these meanings around! How did that happen?)

Never mind. The world goes forward anyway. The huge payoffs from the Division of Labor mean over the long term it's more productive to co operate than to fight. It's taking the human race longer than we could wish to discover this, I admit.

 

We must have as much middle-ground public opinion on our side as possible, they must be seen to fire the first shot, we must be seen to be defending the democratic side and ideally the legal one, in order that the men and women who are under arms and have taken an oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies domestic or foreign will either take our side or remain neutral.

I don't want to try to bring down an AC130 with an AR15.

I want to watch while it hoses down the AntiFa types with 30 mm rounds. (Here's something you can light up an American flag with boyos.)

 

The "conservatives" who think this country needs to split can split. They can move to Russia and enjoy Putin's predominantly white Christian conservative paradise.

 

Funny ... for many years it was the Left who thought Russia was paradise.
What is it about that country? Great novelists, yes, good mathematicians, yes ... but what else?
Anyway there are about 60 million of us, and I think that the Russians, if not us, have pretty strict immigration controls.
But I can see why you would want us all to leave ... lots of room for the tens of millions of new immigrants who would come in!

 

Politics is like religion (which is why my father warned me never to argue about either). Not the only thing I've disobeyed him in.

On questions about the dead physical world, people can reach a consensus ... do the continents actually move, slowly, over the millions of years? For a long time, that was a crazy idea ... then, slowly, the evidence for its truth accumulated. Now no-one doubts it (no one who is educated enough to access the scientific consensus). Even where there are 'fringe' groupings -- cold fusion, the 'electric universe' -- usually the debate can remain fairly civil -- if I'm arguing with a 'cold fusion' guy, he doesn't accuse me of being a neo-Nazi or in the pay of the fission power industry. And although I think some of the cold fusion people are charlatans, milking money from the gullible, I know that I have a much stronger case if I discuss the physics of their claim.

Even in science, often radically new ideas are just too much for the older generation. If they're not the sort of thing you can 'prove' -- if they're about interpretations of facts that everyone accepts -- then it's ultimately a matter of opinion. The new radical ideas win, if they do because the older guys die off.

In theory, politics should be like that. An examination of objective claims, testing of alternative proposals, each side willing to change their views if the other side can present enough evidence for their view ... but that's not the way it goes. A few years ago, there was an interesting paper presented by a couple of economists, along the lines of 'Why Do Economists Disgree?'. Wait ... here it is, or a similar one. (The one I was thinking about was older, I think.)

You can see this problem in stark relief if you look at the arguments over AGW. I have to rely on expert opinion here. (If someone wants to tell me all about it, I have a little test to see whether their opinion is worth more than a polite couple of minutes of my time: can they tell me what a second-order partial differential equation is. If not, I change the subject. Or, if they tell me that scientists who believe in it are just trying to get a government grant, or if they tell me scientists who don't believe in it are 'nutjobs' or in the pay of the coal industry. Anyone who argues like that can be dismissed with a wave of the hand.

I shouldn't be like this. But in reality ... even though at some very abstract level we probably, most of us, have the same values -- the human species should flourish -- as you go down, values tend to diverge. It's not so much that Left and Right have different values, but that they put more emphasis on different selections of the common values they share. There is a liberal psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, for whom I have a lot of respect, who has written a book about this. , called The Righteous Mind --Why Good People are Divided by Poltiics and Religion.

Not sure what you mean by 'teams'. If you want to change the world, especially to change it for the better, you've got convince lots of people to believe and act in a certain way, and that requires organization, a team.

Interesting to argue/discuss with you. Your fellow Leftists and my fellow Rightists must think we're pretty weird.

 

LMAO. Fantasy FTW.

 

A 'split' of the USA is of course unthinkable. And one of the reasons is that just thinking about it involves so many distinct issues: practical ones, like military implications, economic implications, division of debts and assets .... and legal implications ... and moral ones. Makes your head spin.

So ... just as a kind of thought-experiment, let's separate out some of these things, and consider the following scenario:

Oregon is a blue state, very blue. Suppose it gets bluer ... liberals and progressives and socialists living in Red States start to transfer in. (It's a beautiful state with a wide range of habitats. Something for everyone.) Red state people living in Oregon become more and more uncomfortable and begin to transfer out. Perhaps the state legislature passes various laws that will help dirve out Red State types: making it illegal for a church not to perform a gay wedding, labelling calling someone by a pronoun they don't want, a 'hate crime', banning all guns except air rifles. So after a few years, Oregon becomes 90% or more 'Blue'.

But imagine that the rest of the US doesn't follow. Politics is not a science, and it's not inconceivable that Trump and then a Trumpist successor who was less impulsive and crude than Trump, thus attracting back that middle 10%, could continue to rule the US: perhaps for some reason the American economy booms, that various Blue states flip because their legislatures go too far and repel moderate Democrats ... and the triumphant Trumpites, with a Supreme Court and Federal Courts increasingly packed by them ... really start throwing their weight around ... an expanded ICE, raiding for suspected illegals around Oregon, Federal subsidies to universities which don't allow Free Speech cut off ...other Federal subventions cut because Oregon wants to protect the environment ...

Remember the Republicans were utterly discredited by the Depression, and the American people returned the Democrats to national office for five terms in a row. Then ... the Republicans came back in 1952, and Senator McCarthy launched his witchhunt ... the country, which had seemed solidly under control by the Left, now swung sharply Right.
The fear of expanding Russian and Chinese Communism helped a lot.

Maybe the Trumpists benefit from a great Islamist victory or an attack on Israel, or some other event to which a robust military response, supported by the Trumpist Republicans and opposed by many Democratic leaders, now with several anti-Zionist Congressmen, convinces lots of Americans that the Republicans are right. Supporters of Israel leave the Democrats.

Maybe the new Rightwing America decides to outlaw abortion, and make all affirmative action illegal.

And finally Oregon has had enough. By an overwhelming majority, a non-binding (obviously), consultative referendum opts for independence from the US.

The leaders of Independent Oregon offer every possible concession: they will apply US tariffs, continue to allow voluntary recruitment to the US military ... practically acting as a 'protectorate' of the US with respect to foreign policy. But they will be a sovereign state, making their own laws, allowing any immigrants in they want, setting their own tax rates.

Why shouldn't they be allowed to peacefully separate? All it would require is a Constitutional Amendment -- we've already done that more than two dozen times -- which could stipulate that an independence vote has to have the support of 4 out of 5 voters and 2 out of 3 of the whole population whether they vote or not, and has to be taken three times, with a year between each vote.

Obviously this is just a thought experiment, like Einstein's imagining himself riding on a light beam. It's designed to isolate the moral issue: America was founded on the idea of the consent of the governed. The great majority of Oregonians have demonstrated (in this thought experiment) that they do not consent.

Why not let them go?

Why not let them go?