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Dude...if we're talking about secession, we're talking about civil war. In a country with the second most nuclear weapons in the world. With a federal governmen

Dude...if we're talking about secession, we're talking about civil war. In a country with the second most nuclear weapons in the world. With a federal government already looking to adversaries for cooperation. You're talking nuclear missiles or chemical weapons fired against San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle from land-based silos in the Dakotas, or mutinies aboard our SSBNs, or Russian troops landing en masse in South Carolina to offer foreign assistance. It will mean the Balkanization of the country, where California has to station permanent garrisons in the Sierra Nevada mountains to ward off invasions from Texas or Mexico. You're not talking about a 40% drop in GDP this quarter, you're talking about famine and starvation, and complete international irrelevance after the dust settles. If only tens of millions of Americans die, that probably counts as a win. "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

onychomys 7y ago
Why would the US government nuke cities they're trying to take back?
- yingw787 7y ago
  Maybe they don't want to use troops as an occupying force. Afghanistan / Iraq already proved how difficult it is to occupy territory, it'd be a lot easier without insurgents resisting. A war of attrition would suck up a lot of blood and treasure the government would need to ward off threats to a much-weakened U.S. Maybe the half life of radioactive isotopes is acceptable enough to relax habitation restrictions in a short enough period of time. People do currently live within the restricted zone of Chernobyl, they just have shortened lifespans, but they are functioning properly. You can probably garrison troops after nuking an area six months after doing so, as long as you cycle them out on a regular basis. Maybe white-collar service workers are less valuable than blue-collar laborers, especially if they're already demoralized. You can torture a blue-collar worker to create output, albeit slower and lower quality and with Byzantine faults. You can't torture an asset management consultant to give you a high ROI. The brain doesn't work like that. So at that point he or she is just another mouth to feed and you can get rid of him or her. Extrapolate to an entire city. Maybe it's just pure hatred. Most cities are highly Democratic and liberal, which today apparently labels someone as less than yourself, as someone less than human.
jMyles 7y ago
> Dude...if we're talking about secession, we're talking about civil war. You begin your comment with this thesis, but without explanation. I think secession, in my lifetime, is likely. I think civil war is vanishingly unlikely.
- tom-thistime 7y ago
  The last time we had secession, we had civil war.
  - spankalee 7y ago
    If any states try to secede in order to keep people as slaves, I would support another civil way to prevent it.
    - jMyles 7y ago
      I don't want to get into a big thing, but I take issue with the idea that this was the motivation for support (in the Union government) for the war. We remember Lincoln as an emancipator, but his words and actions don't support that. He was an advocate of institutional racism and drove away the people who actually wanted to end slavery, whether in peace or by war. He spent much more time discussing and devising his plan to deport and colonize all black people than he ever did working to end slavery. I believe that our country missed a great opportunity to take an actual abolitionist position, which was being articulately and powerfully communicated by plenty of leaders who worked in better faith than the government ultimately did. I also believe that this missed opportunity is a substantial part of the reason that we still endure slavery today under the guise of a criminal justice system.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - jMyles 7y ago
    The conditions were different in almost every way. True, we have another egomaniacal, racist, populist President who pretends to understand economics and business. Hopefully history will remember Trump more accurately than Lincoln. But very little else is similar in these scenarios. Perhaps most importantly, we have the internet now, so the very need for a central government in our daily lives is substantially decreased. And even if the conditions were similar, it's a sufficiently complex situation that merely noting the similarity isn't enough to suppose that war is likely (let alone inevitable) in such a scenario.
nostrademons 7y ago
> You're talking nuclear missiles or chemical weapons fired against San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle from land-based silos in the Dakotas. This is pretty unlikely, if only because the fallout from nuclear weapons launched at the West Coast will blow back over the rest of the country, including over the regions that launch the missiles themselves. There's a reason short-range and battlefield nukes were never used in anger and it has nothing to do with morals. The rest of your point stands. From a global perspective, a break-up of the U.S. is a very bad thing. Aside from the potential civil war here, it also means open-season on any countries that are basically U.S. protectorates (Taiwan, Japan, Israel, and much of Europe are toast); it hands global leadership over to China; it means financial chaos; and it could result in famines and food instability throughout the world (the U.S. is a major food exporter).
- yingw787 7y ago
  I'm not quite sure. We only have nukes in hundreds of kilotons, which might not be enough to crack steel and concrete and burn all combustibles at once. If there's no firestorm, the nuclear fallout might not make it to the stratosphere and the jet stream because it gets dammed in by the mountains and precipitates out. Not to mention, hatred is irrational anyways. At this stage, we're talking about an organization that will reduce its own negotiating lever on the world stage in order to subjugate innocent civilians, which we've already seen take place at various points in Syria and the Soviet Union. I would expect political commissars taking over the nuclear command authority to turn the keys, not USAF or USN personnel.
Press2forEN 7y ago
We can have a peaceful secession. In many ways we've seceded from each other already. I, for one, live in a blue state but find it harder and harder to cope with life here from a cultural and political standpoint. Secession may be the only peaceful way forward.
spankalee 7y ago
This is super hyperbolic. Why would Texas or Mexico invade? Why would the US nuke a people trying to exercise their right to self-determination. It doesn't make any strategic, tactical, or political sense.
- yingw787 7y ago
  Hopefully I'm hyperbolic. I'm not rooting for the collapse of the country I live in, and the country of people who I grew up with and raised me. I just find the truths I trust lie more in laws of nature and laws of power, rather than higher-level societal constructs. The West Coast is abundant in natural resources, provides good natural port access to the Pacific and Pacific nations, and provides a direct conduit to Alaska and its oil fields. The prospects of invasion depend on a cost benefit analysis. Maybe cross-border drug traffic increases exponentially without DEA and Border Patrol, and you want to secure a region bent on escalating retaliation. Might also be an opportunity if half the population is too coked out to put up a fight. This was the First Opium War in China and the Century of Humiliation. Maybe too many Americans are fleeing desperate circumstances into Mexico, and Mexico wants to stop refugee outflows while playing the hero bit. This was Vietnam + Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge. Maybe global warming causes a chain of collapse towards underfunded and overextended governments in South America, and Mexico is itself invaded from the south and is running north. The collapse of Venezuela is a rehearsal of sorts. The Federalist Papers contain examples out the wazoo of a "country" turning on itself, as warnings against disunion. Highly encourage reading them. Quite frankly, it doesn't need to make sense. It needs to be possible.

onychomys 7y ago

Why would the US government nuke cities they're trying to take back?

yingw787 7y ago
Maybe they don't want to use troops as an occupying force. Afghanistan / Iraq already proved how difficult it is to occupy territory, it'd be a lot easier without insurgents resisting. A war of attrition would suck up a lot of blood and treasure the government would need to ward off threats to a much-weakened U.S. Maybe the half life of radioactive isotopes is acceptable enough to relax habitation restrictions in a short enough period of time. People do currently live within the restricted zone of Chernobyl, they just have shortened lifespans, but they are functioning properly. You can probably garrison troops after nuking an area six months after doing so, as long as you cycle them out on a regular basis. Maybe white-collar service workers are less valuable than blue-collar laborers, especially if they're already demoralized. You can torture a blue-collar worker to create output, albeit slower and lower quality and with Byzantine faults. You can't torture an asset management consultant to give you a high ROI. The brain doesn't work like that. So at that point he or she is just another mouth to feed and you can get rid of him or her. Extrapolate to an entire city. Maybe it's just pure hatred. Most cities are highly Democratic and liberal, which today apparently labels someone as less than yourself, as someone less than human.

jMyles 7y ago

> Dude...if we're talking about secession, we're talking about civil war. You begin your comment with this thesis, but without explanation. I think secession, in my lifetime, is likely. I think civil war is vanishingly unlikely.

tom-thistime 7y ago
The last time we had secession, we had civil war.
- spankalee 7y ago
  If any states try to secede in order to keep people as slaves, I would support another civil way to prevent it.
  - jMyles 7y ago
    I don't want to get into a big thing, but I take issue with the idea that this was the motivation for support (in the Union government) for the war. We remember Lincoln as an emancipator, but his words and actions don't support that. He was an advocate of institutional racism and drove away the people who actually wanted to end slavery, whether in peace or by war. He spent much more time discussing and devising his plan to deport and colonize all black people than he ever did working to end slavery. I believe that our country missed a great opportunity to take an actual abolitionist position, which was being articulately and powerfully communicated by plenty of leaders who worked in better faith than the government ultimately did. I also believe that this missed opportunity is a substantial part of the reason that we still endure slavery today under the guise of a criminal justice system.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- jMyles 7y ago
  The conditions were different in almost every way. True, we have another egomaniacal, racist, populist President who pretends to understand economics and business. Hopefully history will remember Trump more accurately than Lincoln. But very little else is similar in these scenarios. Perhaps most importantly, we have the internet now, so the very need for a central government in our daily lives is substantially decreased. And even if the conditions were similar, it's a sufficiently complex situation that merely noting the similarity isn't enough to suppose that war is likely (let alone inevitable) in such a scenario.

nostrademons 7y ago

> You're talking nuclear missiles or chemical weapons fired against San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle from land-based silos in the Dakotas. This is pretty unlikely, if only because the fallout from nuclear weapons launched at the West Coast will blow back over the rest of the country, including over the regions that launch the missiles themselves. There's a reason short-range and battlefield nukes were never used in anger and it has nothing to do with morals. The rest of your point stands. From a global perspective, a break-up of the U.S. is a very bad thing. Aside from the potential civil war here, it also means open-season on any countries that are basically U.S. protectorates (Taiwan, Japan, Israel, and much of Europe are toast); it hands global leadership over to China; it means financial chaos; and it could result in famines and food instability throughout the world (the U.S. is a major food exporter).

yingw787 7y ago
I'm not quite sure. We only have nukes in hundreds of kilotons, which might not be enough to crack steel and concrete and burn all combustibles at once. If there's no firestorm, the nuclear fallout might not make it to the stratosphere and the jet stream because it gets dammed in by the mountains and precipitates out. Not to mention, hatred is irrational anyways. At this stage, we're talking about an organization that will reduce its own negotiating lever on the world stage in order to subjugate innocent civilians, which we've already seen take place at various points in Syria and the Soviet Union. I would expect political commissars taking over the nuclear command authority to turn the keys, not USAF or USN personnel.

Press2forEN 7y ago

We can have a peaceful secession. In many ways we've seceded from each other already. I, for one, live in a blue state but find it harder and harder to cope with life here from a cultural and political standpoint. Secession may be the only peaceful way forward.

spankalee 7y ago

This is super hyperbolic. Why would Texas or Mexico invade? Why would the US nuke a people trying to exercise their right to self-determination. It doesn't make any strategic, tactical, or political sense.

yingw787 7y ago
Hopefully I'm hyperbolic. I'm not rooting for the collapse of the country I live in, and the country of people who I grew up with and raised me. I just find the truths I trust lie more in laws of nature and laws of power, rather than higher-level societal constructs. The West Coast is abundant in natural resources, provides good natural port access to the Pacific and Pacific nations, and provides a direct conduit to Alaska and its oil fields. The prospects of invasion depend on a cost benefit analysis. Maybe cross-border drug traffic increases exponentially without DEA and Border Patrol, and you want to secure a region bent on escalating retaliation. Might also be an opportunity if half the population is too coked out to put up a fight. This was the First Opium War in China and the Century of Humiliation. Maybe too many Americans are fleeing desperate circumstances into Mexico, and Mexico wants to stop refugee outflows while playing the hero bit. This was Vietnam + Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge. Maybe global warming causes a chain of collapse towards underfunded and overextended governments in South America, and Mexico is itself invaded from the south and is running north. The collapse of Venezuela is a rehearsal of sorts. The Federalist Papers contain examples out the wazoo of a "country" turning on itself, as warnings against disunion. Highly encourage reading them. Quite frankly, it doesn't need to make sense. It needs to be possible.