3 ms·

What makes you think it will be repaired? I’ll go for America splinters into at least two countries.

inglor_cz 2y ago
For this to happen, the US population is probably too old on average, and too overweight. Civil wars and the like are usually based on youth bulges, as they need a lot of breathing bodies to fight it out. Preferrably slightly hungry bodies, as hungry people are easier to provoke into fighting.
- apeescape 2y ago
  Who knows what the next American civil war would look like.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    Lots of destroyed keyboards?
    - rvnx 2y ago
      Stealth donations to unauthorized political parties through OnlyFans or meme coins.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Despite all the 2nd Amendement talk, it mainly comes down to the military. The military have the tanks, the air support, the logistics, the surveilence net, the miscelaneous support equipment, and all the training to use everything. A split within the military, that gets real ugly real fast.
    - ty6853 2y ago
      I think any civil war would have a split within the military, because in your premise that they're using tanks and aircraft, some people are not going to want to bomb the place where their mother or child lives, not to mention the supply chain of all that fancy stuff relies on a somewhat functioning domestic society to make and deliver much of the underlying goodies and support.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Yes, almost certainly. But I meant more of a split between those on opposing sides; not between those who refuse to fight at all because they had just been asked to fight the very people they signed up to defend, vs. those who will follow any order. And then, because there were demonstrably some absolute sadists demonstrably present in the armed forces during my lifetime (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hooded_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hooded_Man), perhaps the conscientious objectors will be convinced to fight anyway, to stop the sadists. It also matters what such a civil war be about — Is it between those who would seize power and those who would prevent it? Is it the same borders as the old Civil War? Is it city-vs-rural? If there is one (still an if), and if it is Trump vs. the constitution… it's still not impossible for such a conflict to be without a single shot fired. Conversely, if it's between two groups of cities neither of which will consent to the other's choices for president, it could have every major city in the US reduced to radioactive debris.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  The youth are also of poor quality these days. It was one thing in 1860 when a given 18 year old was built like an ox from hauling bales of hay or whatever else. Today most 18 year olds are sedentary. We don’t even do the mile run in gym class anymore.
  - klipt 2y ago
    Halfway to WALL·E
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    Well, looking into really old draft records, you will find a lot of disqualified recruits with bad health - tuberculosis, parasites, or general bodily problems caused by malnutrition. But yeah, there also was a lot of physically strong young people to choose from.
    - nradov 2y ago
      Yes, exactly. Some of the federal farm subsidy and low-income nutrition programs we have today came out of findings in WWII that many potential recruits who had grown up during the Great Depression were literally malnourished: too weak and underweight to be combat effective. While the new HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is kind of wacky and has terrible policies in many areas, he at least recognizes the serious state of youth obesity and poor nutrition.
      - epistasis 2y ago
        Has there been a single HHS secretary that did not acknowledge the youth obesity problem? Our expectations are so low that we ignore the real things that qualified people have done, to pretend that an anti-science wacko has some semblance of sanity.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    Don't forget school lunch programs were pushed by the military in the 1946 National School Lunch Act (America's Great Age to MAGA) to improve the fitness of potential recruits. Programs the Republicans now attack as 'woke' nonsense.
- giantg2 2y ago
  What is more likely is that significant portions of rural America break off and the part that's left doesn't feel it's worth it to take it back by force.
  - Kon-Peki 2y ago
    A lot of rural area across the country have movements to break states into pieces, or join other states. I don’t think most are very serious but at least two of them are serious enough. One, there are a few counties on Oregon that want to redraw the boundary so that they become part of Idaho. This, I think, is only mildly serious. The second is the border of Indiana and Illinois, which is serious enough that the Indiana state legislature has voted to create a commission to work on it. It was a bipartisan vote, too. Because there are a number of rural counties in Illinois that would like to join Indiana, and two urban counties in Indiana that say if the option is on the table they’d rather be part of Illinois. Such a thing would need both states to agree and then send it on to Congress, but ultimately I don’t think anything will come of it. When you look at state funding, these urban counties are sending more tax dollars to their respective state capitols than the states are spending in their counties. In the case of these rural Illinois counties, the state is spending between $5 and $6 per tax dollar collected. Does Indiana really want to take on such welfare queens? And give up some of their few donor counties in exchange? It seems hardly likely! That’s the rub all across the US. The urbanized areas are subsidizing the rural areas. Are the rural areas prepared to do without such subsidies? They can say “the cities can’t live without the food we grow”, but the entirety of human history shows that the cities always come out ahead in these transactions.
    - giantg2 2y ago
      The Jefferson area of CA seems about as serious as Oregon. With out current structure of governments, as we get around/over 80% urbanization, the rural areas will just get steamrolled and want to break away due to a lack of agency. If you study people in the "western Idaho" area and on the Oregon coast, it would be easy to see that they are two different nations. Also,do you have e a source for the 5x tax collected number? The 5x seems really high. I couldn't find one for Indiana, but Illinois shows it's <2x.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Three countries. Boston Dynamics vs Figure & 1X vs Tesla
- lukan 2y ago
  Well, also overweight people can create havoc with drones.
araes 2y ago
Most authors that look at the subject have usually proposed 3+ groups post-balkanization. Tends to depend on whether it's simply an "After America" balkanization or a complete apocalypse scenario. Table top roleplaying games are full of speculative fiction on those kinds of concepts. Nukes, or zombies, and sometimes black swan "magic" tend to be rather popular. After America would be like the Fall of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Chinese Jin (romance of the three kingdoms) and Tang (five dynasties, ten kingdoms) eras, usually because of human bickering over power and control. Occasionally, systems like Shadowrun have a "mild" apocalypse that mostly serves as a catalyst for balkanization. Whatever vestiges of a state remained fall apart under the stress. Complete apocalypse tends to be something like large scale devastation from a known threat that final gets used (nuclear, biological, dangerous machine sentience) and everybody's too busy dealing with their own issues to care about larger ideas like a continental federal state of "America." Either way, tends to result in 3+ most of the time. From looking at the Roman Empire and the multiple collapses of China though, it really does not take anything especially dramatic to result in pretty severe balkanization. Often its the old "Blue and the Grey" divide and then most of the West just does their own thing. Occasionally it's more like East Coast, Heartland, and often the West still is not really included. The result for the West has actually been one of the weirder parts of reading a lot of those settings. Often this undercurrent that the West has never really been a part of "America." The heavily populated East is still mostly fighting over the same issues with each other, the lightly populated West is just some far away land they occasionally pay attention to (mostly California and Texas).

For this to happen, the US population is probably too old on average, and too overweight. Civil wars and the like are usually based on youth bulges, as they need a lot of breathing bodies to fight it out. Preferrably slightly hungry bodies, as hungry people are easier to provoke into fighting.

apeescape 2y ago
Who knows what the next American civil war would look like.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Lots of destroyed keyboards?
  - rvnx 2y ago
    Stealth donations to unauthorized political parties through OnlyFans or meme coins.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Despite all the 2nd Amendement talk, it mainly comes down to the military. The military have the tanks, the air support, the logistics, the surveilence net, the miscelaneous support equipment, and all the training to use everything. A split within the military, that gets real ugly real fast.
  - ty6853 2y ago
    I think any civil war would have a split within the military, because in your premise that they're using tanks and aircraft, some people are not going to want to bomb the place where their mother or child lives, not to mention the supply chain of all that fancy stuff relies on a somewhat functioning domestic society to make and deliver much of the underlying goodies and support.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Yes, almost certainly. But I meant more of a split between those on opposing sides; not between those who refuse to fight at all because they had just been asked to fight the very people they signed up to defend, vs. those who will follow any order. And then, because there were demonstrably some absolute sadists demonstrably present in the armed forces during my lifetime (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hooded_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hooded_Man), perhaps the conscientious objectors will be convinced to fight anyway, to stop the sadists. It also matters what such a civil war be about — Is it between those who would seize power and those who would prevent it? Is it the same borders as the old Civil War? Is it city-vs-rural? If there is one (still an if), and if it is Trump vs. the constitution… it's still not impossible for such a conflict to be without a single shot fired. Conversely, if it's between two groups of cities neither of which will consent to the other's choices for president, it could have every major city in the US reduced to radioactive debris.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
The youth are also of poor quality these days. It was one thing in 1860 when a given 18 year old was built like an ox from hauling bales of hay or whatever else. Today most 18 year olds are sedentary. We don’t even do the mile run in gym class anymore.
- klipt 2y ago
  Halfway to WALL·E
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Well, looking into really old draft records, you will find a lot of disqualified recruits with bad health - tuberculosis, parasites, or general bodily problems caused by malnutrition. But yeah, there also was a lot of physically strong young people to choose from.
  - nradov 2y ago
    Yes, exactly. Some of the federal farm subsidy and low-income nutrition programs we have today came out of findings in WWII that many potential recruits who had grown up during the Great Depression were literally malnourished: too weak and underweight to be combat effective. While the new HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is kind of wacky and has terrible policies in many areas, he at least recognizes the serious state of youth obesity and poor nutrition.
    - epistasis 2y ago
      Has there been a single HHS secretary that did not acknowledge the youth obesity problem? Our expectations are so low that we ignore the real things that qualified people have done, to pretend that an anti-science wacko has some semblance of sanity.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  Don't forget school lunch programs were pushed by the military in the 1946 National School Lunch Act (America's Great Age to MAGA) to improve the fitness of potential recruits. Programs the Republicans now attack as 'woke' nonsense.
giantg2 2y ago
What is more likely is that significant portions of rural America break off and the part that's left doesn't feel it's worth it to take it back by force.
- Kon-Peki 2y ago
  A lot of rural area across the country have movements to break states into pieces, or join other states. I don’t think most are very serious but at least two of them are serious enough. One, there are a few counties on Oregon that want to redraw the boundary so that they become part of Idaho. This, I think, is only mildly serious. The second is the border of Indiana and Illinois, which is serious enough that the Indiana state legislature has voted to create a commission to work on it. It was a bipartisan vote, too. Because there are a number of rural counties in Illinois that would like to join Indiana, and two urban counties in Indiana that say if the option is on the table they’d rather be part of Illinois. Such a thing would need both states to agree and then send it on to Congress, but ultimately I don’t think anything will come of it. When you look at state funding, these urban counties are sending more tax dollars to their respective state capitols than the states are spending in their counties. In the case of these rural Illinois counties, the state is spending between $5 and $6 per tax dollar collected. Does Indiana really want to take on such welfare queens? And give up some of their few donor counties in exchange? It seems hardly likely! That’s the rub all across the US. The urbanized areas are subsidizing the rural areas. Are the rural areas prepared to do without such subsidies? They can say “the cities can’t live without the food we grow”, but the entirety of human history shows that the cities always come out ahead in these transactions.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    The Jefferson area of CA seems about as serious as Oregon. With out current structure of governments, as we get around/over 80% urbanization, the rural areas will just get steamrolled and want to break away due to a lack of agency. If you study people in the "western Idaho" area and on the Oregon coast, it would be easy to see that they are two different nations. Also,do you have e a source for the 5x tax collected number? The 5x seems really high. I couldn't find one for Indiana, but Illinois shows it's <2x.
fragmede 2y ago
Three countries. Boston Dynamics vs Figure & 1X vs Tesla
lukan 2y ago
Well, also overweight people can create havoc with drones.

araes 2y ago

Most authors that look at the subject have usually proposed 3+ groups post-balkanization. Tends to depend on whether it's simply an "After America" balkanization or a complete apocalypse scenario. Table top roleplaying games are full of speculative fiction on those kinds of concepts. Nukes, or zombies, and sometimes black swan "magic" tend to be rather popular. After America would be like the Fall of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Chinese Jin (romance of the three kingdoms) and Tang (five dynasties, ten kingdoms) eras, usually because of human bickering over power and control. Occasionally, systems like Shadowrun have a "mild" apocalypse that mostly serves as a catalyst for balkanization. Whatever vestiges of a state remained fall apart under the stress. Complete apocalypse tends to be something like large scale devastation from a known threat that final gets used (nuclear, biological, dangerous machine sentience) and everybody's too busy dealing with their own issues to care about larger ideas like a continental federal state of "America." Either way, tends to result in 3+ most of the time. From looking at the Roman Empire and the multiple collapses of China though, it really does not take anything especially dramatic to result in pretty severe balkanization. Often its the old "Blue and the Grey" divide and then most of the West just does their own thing. Occasionally it's more like East Coast, Heartland, and often the West still is not really included. The result for the West has actually been one of the weirder parts of reading a lot of those settings. Often this undercurrent that the West has never really been a part of "America." The heavily populated East is still mostly fighting over the same issues with each other, the lightly populated West is just some far away land they occasionally pay attention to (mostly California and Texas).