Of course we all know this isn’t really a red-state/blue-state conflict, it’s an urban-suburban/rural-ex-urban divide. So any separation is not really at all geographically feasible, although as somebody who would wind up in the blue section, it’s a little amusing to think about every Republican area in the country turning into rural Mississippi in terms of flailing economy, infrastructure, education, etc. Nice Federal safety net you’ve got there….shame if anything happened to it.
I personally wonder if the Civil War blather is just misdirection and cover for the fact they are trying to steal all future elections so they can rule over all of us. What they really slaver over is bending the REST OF US to their will – owning the Libs, indeed.
Huzzah! In these here parts, I've heard hoary old racists moan "we need another Civil War" all my life. That this particular area was doubtful territory for the Confederates, and often actually hostile to it granularly has been plastered over with over a century of "Southern Heritage" at odds with the actual history. (It wasn't that they were less racist in aggregate, just didn't have a slave economy and were often at odds, politically, with the Plantation elite who ran the South under "the Aristocratic Principle"..)
It is of course madness, and the threat of the folks who are being lead by the party of Fear snapping is real, but again granular: the militias are the same sort of scared creeps they always have been (just with more meth, it seems...)
An actual national divorce would dwarf the disaster that the partition of India was, with more guns: a shitshow that would not end cleanly.
The thirty percent of non MAGA voters here are as armed as everyone else...
The CW talk always makes me laugh. At election time, all the Trump signs are in front of $300k suburban McMansions with Trump flags stuck in their $80k F-150s in the driveway. Yeah, these jokers will be down for a civil war right up until someone dings their truck or sets a foot wrong on their manicured lawn.
I’m anti- any kind of war, but I would welcome more civility from the white supremacist faction of our national discourse. Hell, I’d settle for less obscene lying. But why don’t these disgruntled citizens move to where they’d be happy? Texas is on track to be the dystopia they dream of and there’s lots of room for more homes on the range. Austinites can come north in exchange.
Thank you Roy! The New Civil War is just some cosplay click at drama point.
I wonder who pays these new Confederate Warriors . I guess they plan on overthrowing the government so there's no checks there .
I figure Clint gets 10 days off a year from the parts department down at the John Deere dealer. Now half those days go for the Week at Myrtle Beach. They've already rented the house . Then there's three more days for the trip to Dollywood. The missus likes to talk about how that's their yearly "honeymoon" which really means the old lady spends the goddamn Fortune at the outlet malls and Clint gets a blowjob for his trouble. Then there's a long weekend deer hunting. This leaves Clint maybe two days for being a civil warrior. After that somebody needs to be coming up off a check. Title loan place don't mess around - three days late and the Ram truck is down at the impound yard. waiting on the auctioneer. Plus somebody needs to come up off of some ammo. That shits expensive!
So back to my dotard, outlier theories (h/t to the Afghanistan retreat for the inspiration): War isn't or shouldn't be limited to military actions only. Clearly, we've been at war with -- excuse me: against -- Afghanistan since 1978-79. Crippling the economy, using proxies and cut outs to destabilize both government and nation, etc., continuing to this very minute.
So this civil war stuff. The South and its symps have been opposing everything good about this nation and holding back everything that we do or could do to live up to its ideals since at least the 1870s, and arguably decades earlier. The military angle was a brief four years, but the war... So we've been having a non-military civil war forever. (Which gets to my beef against Lincoln: By 1861 or so, the nation could afford the south seceding and given the tension of a nation of some slave states and some non-slave states, a division was good, right and economically affordable.)
But secession is actually not viable. Many if not most of the states seeking to secede are net parasites taking more from the feds than they pay in. That won't stop them, maybe, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory.
That said, nothing -- well, little -- would make me happier than seeing them gone.
The fuckers are literally toxic. Not healthy to retain poison.
"By God, they keep forcin' us to take these $300 a month child tax credit payments and payin' for Junior's free community college and NOW they want to give Meemaw free dental and a hearing aid! Next thing you know they'll be pavin' our streets and filtrin' the pig shit out of our water! Where's mah rifle? I can take this librul oppression NO MORE"
Whenever people on my side fantasize about secession (or, more to the point, expulsion of the red states), I always ask them how they would like the sudden appearance of a heavily armed enemy country right on our borders. Even setting aside all of the other reasons against, that never fails to shut them up.
The Civil War pimping is no different from everything else they have to say--it has literally no meaning. It's just a performance to keep the rubes riled and unthinking.
"...but since there are more of us than there are of them, we don’t need a civil war to accomplish it."
I've been looking at a lot of county red/blue maps, and while "land doesn't vote", it's still a granular way to see the urban/rural divide. EVERY, and I mean every state, red or blue, consists of islands of high-density population urban blue surrounded by a sea of low-density population rural red. There are more of us, AND we hold the infrastructure dense "high" ground.
A civil war is highly unlikely for the simple reason that in any state, even including Wyoming there are at least some liberal, non-red voters and, in red states like FL, TX, GA and NC there are tens of millions of them. Likewise CA, IL, NY, PA, etc. have plenty of red voters and MAGAts.
So civil war simply wouldn't be practical and it would destroy the economies of virtually every state. Two other outcomes are more likely: One, the hard right will take over the federal government through voter suppression and disenfranchisement into the indefinite future. With the consolidation of the Supremes in the hands of the hard right, the right would take the opportunity to finish dismantling the federal government - what Bannon calls the administrative state - effectively returning us to the Articles of Confederation. We know how well that turned out. Essentially, the national economy would be wrecked and it would be up to the non-insane Republican voters to vote out the gangsters who are ruining their lives. The second alternative is that the hard right instead chooses to dismantle voting rights, civil rights, all remaining reproductive rights, the ACA, federal environmental protections and labor laws, Medicaid, Medicare and to hollow out Social Security, leaving the country in appalling poverty and misery. Except, the blue states don't play along and simply ignore the radicalized Congress, presidency and judiciary, daring the federal government to try to enforce their very unpopular laws by armed force. This will lead to, at best, a cold war between the states. Either alternative is a national security nightmare for the military as it faces foreign exploitation of grave US weakness.
Most of these guys with a boner for a new civil war (at least the ones I see at demonstrations, loaded down with kevlar vests, helmets, and assault rifles) appear hopelessly out of shape, fat if not obese, middle aged if not elderly, and plainly completely unsuitable for military activity. I can't see these guys handling an ingrown toenail, much less serious opposition. Plus, I still think the sane outnumber the insane in this country by about two to one, although I wish the margin was higher. If we simply pulled together, we could just say f&*k these guys and ignore them.
The USA central government is too well organized for any separatist movements or insurgencies to succeed. In order for a civil war to come about the central government must be weak and ineffectual... something the fascist party is working on.
So no, there won't be any civil war anytime soon. But maybe sometime down the road when conditions for it are more conducive.
The Civil War talk is instructive in that it tells us what's been taken off the table: Actually winning some fucking elections by persuading a majority of voters to vote for them. They know as well as you and I do (maybe better than we do?) that's no longer an option.
Of course we all know this isn’t really a red-state/blue-state conflict, it’s an urban-suburban/rural-ex-urban divide. So any separation is not really at all geographically feasible, although as somebody who would wind up in the blue section, it’s a little amusing to think about every Republican area in the country turning into rural Mississippi in terms of flailing economy, infrastructure, education, etc. Nice Federal safety net you’ve got there….shame if anything happened to it.
I personally wonder if the Civil War blather is just misdirection and cover for the fact they are trying to steal all future elections so they can rule over all of us. What they really slaver over is bending the REST OF US to their will – owning the Libs, indeed.
Huzzah! In these here parts, I've heard hoary old racists moan "we need another Civil War" all my life. That this particular area was doubtful territory for the Confederates, and often actually hostile to it granularly has been plastered over with over a century of "Southern Heritage" at odds with the actual history. (It wasn't that they were less racist in aggregate, just didn't have a slave economy and were often at odds, politically, with the Plantation elite who ran the South under "the Aristocratic Principle"..)
It is of course madness, and the threat of the folks who are being lead by the party of Fear snapping is real, but again granular: the militias are the same sort of scared creeps they always have been (just with more meth, it seems...)
An actual national divorce would dwarf the disaster that the partition of India was, with more guns: a shitshow that would not end cleanly.
The thirty percent of non MAGA voters here are as armed as everyone else...
The CW talk always makes me laugh. At election time, all the Trump signs are in front of $300k suburban McMansions with Trump flags stuck in their $80k F-150s in the driveway. Yeah, these jokers will be down for a civil war right up until someone dings their truck or sets a foot wrong on their manicured lawn.
I’m anti- any kind of war, but I would welcome more civility from the white supremacist faction of our national discourse. Hell, I’d settle for less obscene lying. But why don’t these disgruntled citizens move to where they’d be happy? Texas is on track to be the dystopia they dream of and there’s lots of room for more homes on the range. Austinites can come north in exchange.
Thank you Roy! The New Civil War is just some cosplay click at drama point.
I wonder who pays these new Confederate Warriors . I guess they plan on overthrowing the government so there's no checks there .
I figure Clint gets 10 days off a year from the parts department down at the John Deere dealer. Now half those days go for the Week at Myrtle Beach. They've already rented the house . Then there's three more days for the trip to Dollywood. The missus likes to talk about how that's their yearly "honeymoon" which really means the old lady spends the goddamn Fortune at the outlet malls and Clint gets a blowjob for his trouble. Then there's a long weekend deer hunting. This leaves Clint maybe two days for being a civil warrior. After that somebody needs to be coming up off a check. Title loan place don't mess around - three days late and the Ram truck is down at the impound yard. waiting on the auctioneer. Plus somebody needs to come up off of some ammo. That shits expensive!
So back to my dotard, outlier theories (h/t to the Afghanistan retreat for the inspiration): War isn't or shouldn't be limited to military actions only. Clearly, we've been at war with -- excuse me: against -- Afghanistan since 1978-79. Crippling the economy, using proxies and cut outs to destabilize both government and nation, etc., continuing to this very minute.
So this civil war stuff. The South and its symps have been opposing everything good about this nation and holding back everything that we do or could do to live up to its ideals since at least the 1870s, and arguably decades earlier. The military angle was a brief four years, but the war... So we've been having a non-military civil war forever. (Which gets to my beef against Lincoln: By 1861 or so, the nation could afford the south seceding and given the tension of a nation of some slave states and some non-slave states, a division was good, right and economically affordable.)
But secession is actually not viable. Many if not most of the states seeking to secede are net parasites taking more from the feds than they pay in. That won't stop them, maybe, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory.
That said, nothing -- well, little -- would make me happier than seeing them gone.
The fuckers are literally toxic. Not healthy to retain poison.
Magas are evidently flying a black flag to show their Solidarity with the New Civil War.
Henry Rollins just texted "WTF?!?" to Greg Ginn.
"By God, they keep forcin' us to take these $300 a month child tax credit payments and payin' for Junior's free community college and NOW they want to give Meemaw free dental and a hearing aid! Next thing you know they'll be pavin' our streets and filtrin' the pig shit out of our water! Where's mah rifle? I can take this librul oppression NO MORE"
Whenever people on my side fantasize about secession (or, more to the point, expulsion of the red states), I always ask them how they would like the sudden appearance of a heavily armed enemy country right on our borders. Even setting aside all of the other reasons against, that never fails to shut them up.
The Civil War pimping is no different from everything else they have to say--it has literally no meaning. It's just a performance to keep the rubes riled and unthinking.
"...but since there are more of us than there are of them, we don’t need a civil war to accomplish it."
I've been looking at a lot of county red/blue maps, and while "land doesn't vote", it's still a granular way to see the urban/rural divide. EVERY, and I mean every state, red or blue, consists of islands of high-density population urban blue surrounded by a sea of low-density population rural red. There are more of us, AND we hold the infrastructure dense "high" ground.
A civil war is highly unlikely for the simple reason that in any state, even including Wyoming there are at least some liberal, non-red voters and, in red states like FL, TX, GA and NC there are tens of millions of them. Likewise CA, IL, NY, PA, etc. have plenty of red voters and MAGAts.
So civil war simply wouldn't be practical and it would destroy the economies of virtually every state. Two other outcomes are more likely: One, the hard right will take over the federal government through voter suppression and disenfranchisement into the indefinite future. With the consolidation of the Supremes in the hands of the hard right, the right would take the opportunity to finish dismantling the federal government - what Bannon calls the administrative state - effectively returning us to the Articles of Confederation. We know how well that turned out. Essentially, the national economy would be wrecked and it would be up to the non-insane Republican voters to vote out the gangsters who are ruining their lives. The second alternative is that the hard right instead chooses to dismantle voting rights, civil rights, all remaining reproductive rights, the ACA, federal environmental protections and labor laws, Medicaid, Medicare and to hollow out Social Security, leaving the country in appalling poverty and misery. Except, the blue states don't play along and simply ignore the radicalized Congress, presidency and judiciary, daring the federal government to try to enforce their very unpopular laws by armed force. This will lead to, at best, a cold war between the states. Either alternative is a national security nightmare for the military as it faces foreign exploitation of grave US weakness.
But actual 1860s style civil war? Nope.
Most of these guys with a boner for a new civil war (at least the ones I see at demonstrations, loaded down with kevlar vests, helmets, and assault rifles) appear hopelessly out of shape, fat if not obese, middle aged if not elderly, and plainly completely unsuitable for military activity. I can't see these guys handling an ingrown toenail, much less serious opposition. Plus, I still think the sane outnumber the insane in this country by about two to one, although I wish the margin was higher. If we simply pulled together, we could just say f&*k these guys and ignore them.
They don't need to take anything but a few buildings in the State's Capitals.
The USA central government is too well organized for any separatist movements or insurgencies to succeed. In order for a civil war to come about the central government must be weak and ineffectual... something the fascist party is working on.
So no, there won't be any civil war anytime soon. But maybe sometime down the road when conditions for it are more conducive.
The Civil War talk is instructive in that it tells us what's been taken off the table: Actually winning some fucking elections by persuading a majority of voters to vote for them. They know as well as you and I do (maybe better than we do?) that's no longer an option.