• BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    I swear the US is fucked at this point. We’re watching the collapse of the American empire in real-time. I expect a USSR style split in my lifetime, and a whole lot of upset rubes who thought that they could just pretend reality didn’t exist and things would go well for them.

    I just don’t know which state(s) are going to split off first. Will it be the western states together, a handful of north eastern states, or will some bastard grouping of southern states decide they’ve had enough. Stay tuned!

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      We can’t split up, all too interdependent. For example, I see people on here telling the red states to fuck off to themselves. Good luck eating food.

      How about military presence? Trying to split down on that is a hard stop, not even thinkable. The federal government ain’t going to allow it, no matter what.

      Any Southerners wanting to try again are getting stomped far faster than last time. Even then, you got armed libs like me embedded in the countryside. And yes, it’s worth my life to shoot at “red shirts”.

        • Cosmonauticus@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Good luck growing anything after succeeding. It would severely limit California’s access to the Colorado river and considering California is already in a water crisis being self sustainable wouldn’t last very long

        • Stupidmanager@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Yep. Though until California can pull pure water from salt water, Utah will stop water from coming in. Though in Colorado, we’ll just block it off before it gets there as we battle out our own red vs blue. Fuckem.

      • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        You’re assuming that if they break apart, they wouldn’t trade with each other anymore. That’s not what happened with the USSR, and it’s not what happened with Brexit, and it’s not what would happen if the US split apart.

        The federal government won’t be able to do jack shit if California, Oregon(maybe not), and Washington decide to stop giving it money. Sending in the military wouldn’t work, there’s far too many conflicts of interest within the troops. People who were born there, or have family there, or friends.

        • GiuseppeAndTheYeti@midwest.social
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          2 months ago

          Seceding from the union is illegal. They would just arrest the organizers in the state government and replace them with acceptable politicians to bring them back in line.

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            2 months ago

            Seceding from the union is illegal, unless we all agree that this is going to happen.

            But there’s plenty of other geographical issues with this idea. It’s hard to draw lines around liberal cities and conservative rural areas.

            • GiuseppeAndTheYeti@midwest.social
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              2 months ago

              Yeah, it stopped the United States from breaking up before. What better case study than the exact same scenario. Just this time its a much much stronger union army against a much much poorer economic system for the seceding army.

              Other countries would not supply the secessionists with any military equipment and they almost certainly wouldn’t purchase any products from them either. International sanctions against the seceding states would end the “war” before it even began.

              • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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                2 months ago

                I think you fail to realize how big and important of a country the west coast of the US would be if it broke off. Countries wouldn’t have an option on sanctions, because the headquarters of some pretty foundational companies are located there (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Netflix, etc.)

                California, Oregon, Washington together could split off, and it would be the third largest economy in the world behind only the remaining US and China.

                It wouldn’t be as ugly as you assume, the rest of the country would kind of be forced to accept it. It would look far more like Brexit than the US civil war.

    • Peppycito@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I’m quite interested to see how the national debt gets divided up and how that influences things.

      • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        When the USSR broke apart, the Russians made an international agreement to pay back some of the debt. Pretty much entirely so that at least some creditors would have confidence enough to put more money in.

        So probably something similar.

        • Peppycito@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          That’s what I mean, the states would have to come to an agreement on what everyone’s share is. I don’t expect every state to agree to pay $680 billion.

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      One of the problems I see is that distilling it down more granularly at a state level is you have a huge urban/rural divide. That’s something you just can’t draw a clean line around. You would see a much messier civil war because it’d be “cities against farms”, not just state against state. That’s just one of the many, many issues that would arise.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      I expect a USSR style split in my lifetime

      “Balkanization” is the word, in case you’re wondering

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      2 months ago

      The divide isn’t between states, though. It’s more rural vs urban, and that doesn’t divide up well into individual countries. Illinois and New York, for example, will still be a core liberal city dominating their conservative rural areas. Likewise, Texas will still be a few core liberal cities dominated by conservative rural areas. There’s not a good way to break any of those cases up.