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Comment by yingw787 | Hacker News Reader

Well, that was quick.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22828354

Today it is pandemic resolution. I fear that tomorrow, it might be economic ties, lockstep voting at the federal level, and National Guard drills, deployments, and contingency planning, where the West Coast slowly splits away from the rest of the country, with other states teaming up and following suit.

This isn't the end, and it's the only appropriate response to a federal government that cannot or will not execute on behalf of all states. It is, however, a reflection of the true state of our Union, and a sign of things to come if we don't reconcile our national identity.

I'm saddened, but not surprised, that a step like this was necessary given the circumstances.

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> I fear that tomorrow

Why fear? This is my dream!

The Senate is irreparably broken. There is no conceivable way that it can become more fairly representative of the people without a breakup of the United States. The smaller less populous states aren't going to just give up their outsized power voluntarily.

California is suffering the most due to the Senate's structural unfairness, and it has the most to gain from succession. I hope it happens in my lifetime.

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."

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

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.

> 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.

The last time we had secession, we had civil war.

If any states try to secede in order to keep people as slaves, I would support another civil way to prevent it.

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.

> 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).

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.

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.

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.

> California is suffering the most due to the Senate's structural unfairness, and it has the most to gain from succession. I hope it happens in my lifetime.

Someone needs to secede so the rest of us can divest our tens of trillions of national debt.

The idea of secession is a horrific nightmare that no one should wish for.

There are conceivable ways that things can be fixed - constitutional convention.

A constitutional convention opens the doors to at least as much disruption as a few states seceding. Absolutely everything can be relitigated.

40 million people is more than enough to be an independent country, why would it be so horrible? Peaceful secession has happened before and can happen again.

The last time that happened, it started a civil war.

The last time states tried to secede it was to preserve their "right" to enslave people.

Instead of California succeeding, maybe it should be broken up into to smaller states:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_and_secession_in_Cal...

> The Senate is irreparably broken. There is no conceivable way that it can become more fairly representative of the people without a breakup of the United States.

This is untrue. We could simply add more Senators by admitting more states into the Union. Kinda like we did with Alaska and Hawaii.

Millions of citizens in DC are without Senatorial representation not to mention Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Guam or many other "protectorates".

It can be done without dissolution of the US. It requires a simple majority vote in the Senate and House and Presidential approval.

Structural unfairness in the Senate is a weak argument for splitting the Union. Once the Union is split, Russia, China and probably other countries start playing one fragment of the former Union against another. The reason the Chinese government is trying so hard to stop China from splitting (beyond the existing mainland-Taiwan split) is to avoid a repeat of the bad old times when Japan and European powers were able to play one Chinese-language-using polity against another.

It's not going to happen, if nothing else, because CA is going to be grasping for federal budget bailouts later this year. Lockdown is going to crush state budgets.

I hope so, man, for our country's sake. Every day we're together is a second chance at making things right.

CA has a pretty big rainy-day fund. It'll be exhausted eventually, but I'm not sure it will be this year. The most recent sources I've found suggest the state has around $20bn in reserves, which probably is enough to buffer us through a bad year unless tax incomes completely drop to 0.

The budget for the year was $208 billion, so you only need a 10% haircut to need help. And the budget is HEAVILY funded by (1) Silicon Valley IPOs, and (2) Hollywood. Both of those are going to generate $0 near-term.

Not to mention retirement funds which are going to be obliterated, but that's a somewhat separate issue from the budget.

> National Guard drills, deployments, and contingency planning

That seems pretty far-fetched.

Much more likely (and welcome) would be a sort of "legal coup", where the states that still have functioning governments band together in the task of reshaping the federal government through voting and legislative power.

We're certainly approaching a breaking point in the dysfunction of the federal government and its inability to do its job and serve a society; something has got to give. But I still think any kind of civil war scenario remains far, far out of the question.

Maybe. I mean, I would acknowledge that given post-9/11 deployments of National Guard troops to active combat zones, all you would need to do to mess up any planning would be to deploy those troops separately and randomly far away. Then it wouldn't matter if the governor called up the National Guard in self-defense and if they wanted to obey despite being federalized, because they wouldn't be in-theater. You'd have to raise fresh troops and train / arm them and by that point it'll already be far too late. Not to mention the firepower of existing federal garrisons in-state, complete air supremacy by federal air assets, and existing tensions between urban/rural areas preventing a retreat to the hinterlands. Whether these facts will change remains to be seen, but secession today is impractical.

I think the situation we're in right now is pretty much a "legal coup" by a motivated minority. It'll be a slog to get back to representative democracy.

I read "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb recently, and he mentioned how his home country of Lebanon went from diverse paradise to all-out civil war in six weeks, or 1.5 months. About the same time as "just a flu" to today.

For all our sakes, I hope to God I'm wrong and I hope to God you're right.

At the very most we might see Hong Kong-like civil unrest or something. But I see no path for any states to assemble a standing army under the nose of the federal government. Even if they tried to use the national guard; who's to say it would be more loyal to the state than to the fed?

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