Let’s not get crazy. If we cut out all the states, especially southern states, where opression is systemic, where do we plan to get our art and music? I moved from the Mississippi Delta (Indianola, home of BB King) to Topsham, Maine and got into a rather heated, albeit drunken and incoherent, argument with a fellow bar patron about which states have produced the genre-busting artists and writers. Longfellow? Oh, okay.
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given facts like the cia funded the mujahedin, and us companies sell more than half of global weaponry - this is basically already the case.
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Is that happening here in NSW as well? It feels like it is happening here.
I’m thinking land swaps with large rural swaths of AR, MS, GA, etc. Win, win, win!
Yeah, I’ll cheerfully trade you three Faulkner’s for basic human decency.
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Nooo… NOOOOO. I really don’t want to visit any of those places. Thanks.
Jesus have you been there in the summer?
Like I said, great lakes region, that was where we were before the French found us.
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Ha! I added an etc.! I guess I just usually think of the 5 Civilized Tribes when I think of peoples relocated to OK. And frankly, all of those places (minus the heat) are actually very beautiful, except for where the white people are (says white person from AR).
There’s a few things this idea ignores:
- Oklahoma was pretty much open desert when the Department of Interior relocated nearly 40 east- and south-coast tribes here.
- The US Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with damming rivers to create lakes and retention ponds during the post-indian removal and post-dustbowl eras.
- The result of the above being Oklahoma has more lakes than Minnesota and more shoreline than Oregon, Washington, California and Florida combined
- Save for the panhandle, Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Oklahoma is a far left state, to the point where it was a target of McCarthyism and not much has changed since.
Combine this with Oregon as being a really quite white supremacist and homophobic place (hell, if you’re white and get a tan you’re called a beaner, and I’ve had my glasses punched through my ear for holding hands with my boyfriend on the MAX in Portland, whereas nobody thinks twice about either in Oklahoma, and Tulsa Pride has the largest parade of any kind in the state, and is well attended outside the LBGQ community in an affirmative manner as well; whereas Portland pride is basically doing the opposite of helping), Oregon and Oklahoma could trade local, county and state officials tonight, and both Oregon and Oklahoma would be FAR better represented. Problem is Oregon and Oklahoma are hipster magnets, Oregon attracts bigot hipsters that vote left ironically; Oklahoma’s relatively open-minded and votes asshat ironically. Same appears to be the case between Ohio and Ontario, for that matter…
Source: I am a bisexual native Portlander with less than ultra-white skin, and didn’t realize how shitty I had it until I left to Oklahoma in 2010.
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At first I assumed that this was a serious (although nonetheless crazy) plan like the one to turn the Congo into a giant lake. http://xefer.com//2005/03/lake
Hey yeah man, Texas 100% lake, cheaper than a wall I say.
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Western Oklahoma is arid but Eastern Oklahoma gets plenty of rain. I think you’re confusing desert with poor soil. Eastern Oklahoma used to be trampled down and treeless due to buffalo, with soil so poor that the Amish formed a new sect that use tractors. After chemical fertilization and tractors became common that wasn’t the case anymore, the dams just helped keep flooding from wiping out civilization every ten years and created a navigable ship channel to the gulf.
You have some interesting opinions about the demographics of Oklahoma. I feel very differently having grown up there. Even though OKC and Tulsa have a different vibe, they’re 2/3 of the state population and are not uniformly progressive by any means. I’ve watched blue dog democrats practically disappear from OK public offices over my short lifetime. The conservative leftists are still too left for Oklahoma’s tastes.
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Well, Joseph Pomeroy Widney wasn’t planning to flood the entire state of California, but back in 1879 he did propose re-creating a version of ancient Lake Cahuilla (to be called the “Widney Sea”, of course) by diverting the Colorado River into the Salton Sink.
He believed it would turn Southern Calfornia’s inland deserts into pleasant lakeside property, and alter the climate propitiously.
In the flood of 1905, the Colorado River breached an irrigation-canal headworks and flowed into the sink for some time, accidentally creating the ecological nightmare of the Salton Sea, a shallow, salty endorheic sea maintained by chemical-laced irrigation runoff. Or was until recently - irrigation’s gotten more efficient, and the Salton Sea will soon dry up without massive amounts of imported water.
(Which it seems unlikely to get, at present.)
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If the cantaloupe cockwaffle builds his wall, then there’s only the left and right coast to block off and Canada could have the best hydro-electric project ever.
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I heard at a seminar on climate change that, regional variations notwithstanding, the expected overall effect of global warming is that it will rain less often but total rainfall will increase. So yeah, that means more droughts and more floods. Hope that cheers you up.
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Rather than make blanket statements, I think you should proceed as we did in the UK.
Faced with a similar problem of which areas are not suitable for investment, and given that political allegiance is mostly too tribal to be useful, we offered a referendum on membership of the EU. Now the results are in, banks and government agencies can easily see which areas will benefit from development, and where it would be wasted. We could probably have predicted that London and the M4 corridor would vote Remain, but there are other patches in the country. We can now see the pointlessness of building a high speed railway to people who don’t want other people coming to visit them.
You could do exactly the same by having a referendum on building the Mexico Wall, and keeping out Muslims. If results were analysed on a by-county basis, areas suitable for conversion to lakes, reversion to pasture, or returning to the Native Americans would be easily visible.
People who didn’t like it could be offered alternative accommodation. There is a large country with a very nationalistic government, a declining population, homophobic tendencies and a lot of open space, which would possibly welcome them. So long as they left their guns behind.
Siberia - the new Northwest frontier land (viewed from Palin’s porch.)
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I understand the humorous intent of this post, but can we at least not get bent out of shape when the we read equally “funny” hate-speech disguised as humor directed at us?
I can roll my eyes at this sort of tribalism, but the hypocrisy of criticizing our opponents when they descend to the same level gets to me.
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Hey, I like Kansas! Lawrence is one of my favorite cities.
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Very not cool.
I get this is a joke but it’s either ignorant or racist. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and explain in case that helps with the ignorance bit. This joke is exactly the same as saying “hey wouldn’t it be funny if we turned Chinatown into a skate park?” or in San Francisco, “how about we just raze the Bayview and turn it into a big park?” Ha. Ha.
In fact it’s even worse than those examples. Nearly all the land you joke about flooding is Native American land. See https://ok.gov/odmhsas/documents/map_tribal_jurisdictions.pdf
And yet in the joke, you propose to save the lily-white cities of Tulsa and OK City. So this is the joke: let’s flood the primary homelands of numerous native american tribes – homelands established after the last time white people stole their land – and save only the white areas! Ha ha! And let’s make sure to joke about it on a super-white tech bro website.
Would be great to see this go away.
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Yes! I’ve been to Lawrence twice and absolutely love it. Not at all what I expected Kansas to be, but that was part of what made it great–challenging my stupid assumptions that all of Kansas is flat fields of grain.
Getting there I have to pass through Kansas City which always reminds me of Ogden Nash: “Kansas City, Kansas proves that even Kansas City needn’t always be Missourible.”
From what I understand though Lawrence is to Kansas what Asheville is to North Carolina.
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Ignorance is the safer bet: the idea of har har har sticking it to the “fly-over country” types (old white farmers and rednecks, Bible Belters, etc) while saving the “authentic”, edgy Tulsa/OKC of S.E. Hinton / Larry Clark fame was probably the initial appeal: I doubt what a slight it is to the First Nations of OK even entered in to it. Which is a bummer.
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