I can’t spend all day talking about this. Thanks for keeping it relatively civil. I hope I’m wrong, and the numbers are smaller than I think and that our institutions are more resilient than I believe. That would make the US gov’t and US citizens global outliers.
Giving them half the country ain’t it! They want the whole fucking thing. If you give them half the country, they will work to come for the rest.
People have given you options. You’ve just dismissed them out of hand because you don’t want to believe that they are options. You’ve clearly made up your mind that many of us are indeed expendable. You might not believe that, but that’s what your “solution” tells me.
No they don’t. The US military does.
Ideally, we deal with this in the courts and via strengthening our democratic systems. It’s not the easiest option, but it is the correct option. Giving away half the country to fascists is a non-starter… It would end up in bloodshed anyway.
It’s been MADE bullshit by right wingers, but it’s really a critical way of thinking about the world.
Yes. We’re not to this point yet. And we won’t be if we work to get the fascists out.
How did that work out for African Americans who left the violence and racism in the south for the north?
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And yet you keep commenting.
Odd…
Don’t be silly, Mindysan; clearly, we don’t count to some folks.
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I’ll leave it at this:
The US is headed for collapse. If we continue to deny that and don’t start making serious plans, we lose our ability to help shape that collapse.
A lot of us agree with the headed for collapse part- just not your one very specific, very flawed “solution”. “There are no easy answers, therefore my answer is the only viable option” isn’t a very good argument. With all respect to your education, I think we can try to do better, and even if that fails, still have better options than your partitioning idea.
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I learned that in history class… 
Oh yeah! Historians are still pretty conservative in general.
Did anyone consult Stalin?
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If too many people are willing to just shrug their shoulders and give up before the fight is even over, then that is a possibility… but contrary to all your hang-wringing pessimism, it’s not a forgone conclusion, already written in stone.
Some of us will always choose to fight rather than giving up the ghost.
I do not go gentle…
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3-2 odds on a Democrat Representative pepper spraying her in the face after one harassment attempt too many.
2-1 odds on someone finally pressing charges against her for stalking, creating public disturbance or an illegal oxy prescription.
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People seem to forget that we’ve been here before with fascists in the 1930s… Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America is an alternative history where Lindberg won election in 1940 and the US aligned with the Nazis. It was a plausible scenario. Fortunately, FDR laid the ground work in his previous terms to ensure it did not. The current administration is attempting to do similar work.
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Also: if you think this is going to be some kind of mass self-sorting, you’re even less connected to both history and contemporary events than I thought. If we went with your idea of splitting up the country, not only would it be a complete nightmare of patchwork borders and crossings that no one would ever be able to maintain or secure, but there’s one group that would be way more interested in driving out the opposition in every single state than the other. Ceding control of states they currently hold would be abandoning everyone in those states to persecution and genocide. The fascists don’t just want people to leave, they want them gone, as in dead. And fascists in the “blue” states aren’t just going to leave because you’ve asked them to. They think the whole country already belongs to them, so why would they accept being forced to move and then live right next to what they think are a bunch of communists who should be shot (or run down) in the street?
Not only that, but you wouldn’t even be able to cleave things cleanly along existing state lines anyway. I can tell you right now Eastern Washington State is not gonna want to be part of the Socialist Utopia Of Greater Seattle. Last election, the vote in Spokane County was 50/45 in Trump’s favor. Let’s simplify things considerably and just say that’s a fully-representative sample of the entire county and not just those who voted. Which of those groups should get to choose what happens to the other? Should they be allowed to join the Idaho And Greater Oregon Enthnostate, thereby condemning 135,765 people to forced relocation across no less than 200 miles of open empty (and now “enemy”) territory? Or should the 45% forcibly throw the other 148,576 over the Idaho border somehow? And what about the city of Spokane itself, which has several Democratic representatives in the Washington State legislature? Does it become an isolated Democratic Vatican City, or will you be expecting half of the city to just move across the entire fucking state? How long do you think that will take, and what do you think will be happening to people while they wait their turn to get the hell out of Dodge?
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Let’s ask BB’ers. Should MTG be…
- …left alone?
- …sunk to the bottom of the Marinara Trench?
- …fired into the sun?
0 voters
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Fingers crossed.
Bullies need to be put in check.
Real talk.
No one is claiming the threat isnt valid; it most certainly is.
But defeatism and just throwing the disenfranchised under the bus is not any kind of ‘solution’; it’s lazy and self-centered thinking.
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I only voted for the Mariana Trench option because it’s way more cost-effective than throwing her into the Sun.
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Even better Runit Island. Its owned by the US, uninhabited and there is a cute dome for people to play with
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We know that “populations swaps” are often violent and bloody affairs (or at least those of us who read history do). There is no “non-violent” ethnic cleansing, which is what we would have to do to get a divided America.
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With themselves “leading from behind”.
Ooh! Ooh! I know this Jeopardy question: “what is the break up of Yugoslavia, Alex?”
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That war is still causing issues in the Balkans today… like as recently as last month, with some border tensions in Kosovo.
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I favor a rigorous study on how it would be done, followed by an extended transition period (20-50 years) if we agree on partition.
By rigorous, it would mean determining how many partitions there would be (could be more than two), what the constitution of each partition would be, how the actual partitioning would be done, how many people would want to be part of each partition (after everyone reviews all the constitutions), how many people would have to move to be put into their desired partition and how much it would cost to make the moves.
Partitioning by D and R states, that is ridiculous. The split isn’t just between states, it’s rural vs urban, college educated vs high school educated, ‘religious’ vs non-religious, etc… It would have to be done at a county level at the highest.
The following assumes ‘red’ and ‘blue’ partitions. Ideally, the new states would be formed by grouping contiguous red counties together, and contiguous blue counties together into new ‘states’. After doing that, we’d see that the red states and blue states aren’t contagious enough to form the new partitions (AKA ‘countries’). At that point, we’d have to start shifting people around between counties until the contiguous countries are formed. I’m guessing that means moving conservative city dwellers together to form conservative cities within conservative states. The same would happen with liberal rural dwellers to liberal states.
Next, we’d have to start reviewing fairness of resource distribution (e.g access to ports, highways, agricultural regions, etc). Again, move more people around at the county level to achieve fairness.
At that point, we determine the cost (financial and otherwise) and decide if it’s worth it. My guess is that some groups would be surprised at how free people want to be part of their partition, other would consider the costs too high. Maybe at that point we can all decide how to live without partitioning.
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I feel like you’ve just described the Gerrymandering Wars.
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