51–60 of 673 posts
A town in Vermont voted multiple times to join New Hampshire. It unsurprisingly never happened. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killington,_Vermont_secessio...
https://www.flowofhistory.org/the-rebellion-in-western-new-h...
As an Oregonian not living in one of those sparsely-populated counties that voted for secession, I wonder why the folks who want to be part of Idaho don't just vote with their feet and move there? There's no border wall keeping them in Oregon. These votes are just symbolic and won't get them to their Idaho paradise near as quickly as a U-Haul could.
Maybe they like their home, their community, and their neighborhood, but what they don’t like is having a bunch of people living in population centers far away who don’t share their values telling them how to live their lives?
One of the things I periodically mentally noodle with is, what would the world look like if it was a lot easier for units to choose what larger units they would aggregate into? Like, cities choosing a county, counties choosing a state, states choosing their country, etc. I originally was noodling with this in the context of a space civilization, where there is no equivalent of "solid ground", everything's always movi…
I wonder if what you have in mind is like what Germany was before it was unified. Lots of city states that essentially ally together or don't. I don't think it is a stable situation once someone gains the means to conquer by force.
Obviously, it hasn't been historically.
But an interesting long-term trend (across the last few centuries) is that "conquest by force" is becoming less and less effective. In the ancient world, "conquest by force" meant you got to take their land, take their food, take their livestock, and just in general take all their stuff that they worked for without you having to work for it, and this is clearly an advantageous move. If you destroyed their infrastructure, meh. It was easily replaced.
As our world becomes more and more technological, though, an increasing amount of our wealth is in people, infrastructure, and relationships. It is effectively impossible today to "conquer" a country in the conventional sense and enjoy their wealth as a result. You can force a slave to harvest wheat, but you can't force them to participate at full capacity in a software engineering role with a hundred other people. (Part of why as many people have observed, slavery was on its way out in the South whether the civil war happened or not, albeit perhaps decades later.) Militaries remain an important component of how countries relate to each other, as a chess understanding would suggest, even the threat of mass destruction is (whether we like it or not) a very big and important stick, but today the threat is military destruction... not conquest.
If we continue even farther into this direction, well... what would the effects be?
(An interesting test case for the point of view I am propounding here is China's attempts to militarily conquer Taiwan. If they do undertake it, it would be one of the most interesting such conquest attempts in a long time, because unlike the Ukraine/Crimea where I think Russia wanted the land rights more than anything else, China wants the people of Taiwan. Will the people of Taiwan just acquiesce and continue generating wealth for China to take? Or will China discover that the jewel is much less desirable than they thought? Stay tuned.)
I'll end with, please note the difference between "less and less effective" and "ineffective". Military conquest isn't necessarily ineffective. But it used to get you a much higher percentage of the "good stuff" of the conquered territory. Today, if you "conquer" a nation, but had to wipe out its entire industrial infrastructure in order to finally convince it to stop resisting you, percentage wise you've won a lot less of what there was before you started to conquer them. It's not hard to get to the point where you won less than you would have had you just taken what you put into your military effort and used it to build locally instead of destroy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently moved from Eagle Point so probably not too far away from where you were. It's certainly a strange and diverse set of people. Everything from weed growers to hippies to evangelicals to conspiracy nuts and everything in between. Most of the people I met there generally distrusted the government and couldn't care less about what you did on your own land.
It really is kind of a weird place. I recall that soon after we moved there one of my dad's colleagues explained the situation something like this: "You know about Appalachia, right? Well, it's like there was a part of the Oregon trail that went directly from Appalachia to Southern Oregon - this is Appalachia West." The KKK was really active in that area for a long time which seems weird for a place on the West Coast…
Idaho, too -- the Aryan Nations had their headquarters in the Hayden Lake area for a long time, until the early 2000s if I remember.
It's only in the big cities that you get a lot of a liberal/progressive presence, outside that you get anywhere from libertarians to evangelicals to the outright racists/alt-right types.
One of the things I periodically mentally noodle with is, what would the world look like if it was a lot easier for units to choose what larger units they would aggregate into? Like, cities choosing a county, counties choosing a state, states choosing their country, etc. I originally was noodling with this in the context of a space civilization, where there is no equivalent of "solid ground", everything's always movi…
Why not just move to Idaho then? Or some other red state?
Guessing they like some combination of geography, neighborhood, house, job where they live?
There is no political back and forth like there used to be where you'd have republicans controlling things for a time and then democrats. It's been mostly Portland democrats controlling the state for over 20 years now. The needs of most of the state, by geography but which has a lower population, are not the same as those in the 1 big city the state has, so a lot of people are interested in changing that with democratic votes.
Since Portland pays the lionshare of taxes for the state, you'd think they'd be happy getting rid of the poorer parts of the states that they have to currently subsidize. Seems like it would be a win-win for everybody involved. What are the downsides?
If you look at the state senate map, there is a lot more red land mass than blue. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oregon_Senate_map.pn...
Doesn't Eastern Washington also have a similar demographic? Maybe combine them too.
Here is a proposal from greateridaho.org: https://www.greateridaho.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Grea... It includes chunks of OR and CA but not WA for some reason. It may be explained in the doc.
> Idahoans are very concerned about keeping their state as conservative as possible. They had 2.46 conservative votes per liberal vote in the 2016 presidential election, but eastern Washington only had 1.43.
> Moreover, eastern Washington has a population of 1.6 million in 2017, as compared to Idaho’s population of 1.7 million. Idahoans don’t want to be outvoted by others in their own state, so they’re not likely to want to include such a large population into their own state. If Republican-voting southern Washington state is included, that’s an additional 0.8 million.
> When we created the modern Greater Idaho proposal in 2019, we searched diligently for any possible combination of Washington State counties that would be both as prosperous and as conservative as Idaho. We only find this group of three counties: Columbia, Garfield, and Asotin counties. We are including these counties in our proposal.
> Here is a plan for rural WA liberty that is more likely to get approvals than joining Idaho is: https://redstatesecession.org/washington-state-should-become...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if what you have in mind is like what Germany was before it was unified. Lots of city states that essentially ally together or don't. I don't think it is a stable situation once someone gains the means to conquer by force.
"I don't think it is a stable situation once someone gains the means to conquer by force." Obviously, it hasn't been historically. But an interesting long-term trend (across the last few centuries) is that "conquest by force" is becoming less and less effective. In the ancient world, "conquest by force" meant you got to take their land, take their food, take their livestock, and just in general take all their stuff t…
Typically, there's a kind of time dilation where things that have happened recently seem both historically normal and of a longer duration than they really are.
How is the 6-Californians proposal going, I wonder? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Californias
I love how gerrymandered these proposals are. Make sure that the Bay Area is split across two states, so that both stay blue.
West California would still be one of the most populous states in the union, coming in just behind Ohio in 7th place and South California would be nipping on its heels. Silicon Valley would be ranked near Tennessee. As crazy as this proposal sounds, it's probably less crazy than having almost 40 million people be represented by just 2 senators when Wyoming has the same number of senators for barely half a million people.
Our state legislature is regularly shut down and forced to cater to far right views. Like, these conservative congressman refuse to show up and literally shut it down so nothing gets done. Liberal congresspeople in general not willing to do anything besides chastise them for it. So the whole legislature doesn't get big progressives projects done as much as they might otherwise.
I imagine the biggest impediment to the counties leaving is the centrist portion of our legislature not wanting to give up the bargaining power having right winger congresspeople shut things down.
They want their conservative great state with Idaho, go for it. I sincerely hope Idaho can provide as much needed relief for disaster and public funding for fires and such. We do that now but I have to imagine Idaho has a lot less money.
