the states that border the Colorado River go to war over water rights
Have you read "The Water Knife"? This is basically the background to the story (though they're in a cold war, and the US nominally still exists, but is allowing states to close their borders to each other).
I remember reading about that book but have no memory of the details and I bet it stuck in my subconscious
Please dont read it. The author is a huge misogynist and sadist and a total raging lib. The premise is basically the whole book, there are a few points of intrigue that are passingly interesting and the rest is just really fetishistic and male gazey portrayals of extreme torture and sexual violence/exploitation including of minors. I am mad at myself for reading three quarters of that book expecting it to get better and it never does and it is my mission in life to make sure no one ever reads it.
Is he? I always got a bad vibe from his stories. But they are horror stories you aren't supposed to like them. My radar isn't the strongest, but I never read it like that. I got the vibe he was blackpilled and taking it out on the reader. Did I miss some discourse? Or did his later works get worse?
just extrapolating from how he presents himself in 'The Water Knife'. The most charitable interpretation I can give is that he has something like Quentin Tarantino on some level having anti-racist feelings but still desperately wanting to say the n-word: he's torn between sexualizing women and being horrified at exploitation which he synthesizes in a really unfortunate way. Personally, I don't think that charitable interpretation is warranted given the scene that made me finally realize how depraved that book is. (CW: extreme violence)
spoiler
The third main character who is 12 (who has virtually no plot impact and really just exists for scenes like this!) has her hand fed to a hyena after watching her protector be tortured to death. Why? Because she did not pay for the privilege of being talked into sex work by her friend who is also brutally murdered in front of her.
No matter what high-minded purpose he's trying to reach with scenes like these, the obvious glee with which their written make me believe he's just an imaginative creep. Hardboiled Marquis de Sade.
Maybe. In an earlier book windup girl the protagonist character is a women who was doing survival sex work and she was written in a compeletly sympathetic light and to my understanding there was no actual sex scenes. It was about her inner life as it related to her making the best of a bad situation, and then doing a hero's journey. Although, my radar might just be miscalibrated.
Hmm... I wonder if writing dystopian novels about the impendong climate collapse, and then living in the impending climate collapse has been bad for his mental health. I know I have seen sensationalist accounts of catels doing stuff like that.
I think your take makes sense though. I was honestly not going to read it anyway just because I don't need that level of horror in my life. Even though I prior had a positive look on him as a writer. So I am never going to have any more context to examine it.
if you're looking for a similar, more hopeful, if somewhat less here's the science I can't recommend 'Parable of the Sower' enough. Also good contrast in terms of presenting sex work and extreme exploitation as a plot and character element in away that is actually insightful and critical—not just fetishistic.
That is an excellent reccomendation. Howerver, I remain a little baby. I read two of butler's books and it made me too sad. I was trying to expand my horizions or whatever but instead I just ended up with a small depressive episode.
I don't think I am emotioanlly strong enough to handle the emotional weight of empathizing with a margalized story like that. Especially now a days.
I get that makes me kinda a shitty comrade. It's in the self crit pile. But that pile is under trying to make rent or whatver right now. I don't have the strength for it.
It's really good! Classic noir in a realistic near future apocalyptic Phoenix.
I'm getting mixed messages, what would you say to bubbalu's criticisms?
I don't know anything about the author.
As for the book - it's a noir set in a dystopia. It's not pretty in the slightest, and you should absolutely take those criticisms as valid content warnings. That said - it's a noir. It's about the depths to which human beings can sink. I don't think it's exploitative in that sense; all the violence and sexual abuse is portrayed as repulsive and sordid. It's a hyperrealistic painting of Hell.
I don't think any of the factions in the US are going to be regionalized enough to make a war with borders and territory. Instead there'll be a lot of parallel, unrelated conflicts, happening more often and occasionally overlapping. So the police vs BLM clashes of last year, the battle of Blair Mountain, white supremacist terrorist attacks against governing buildings (last year again lol), all that stuff happening at once. There's a bit of city vs countryside in that, but it's not 100% consistent, and neither of those groups has the ability to take and hold territory, so it can't really become a territory dispute.
That'll all continue onwards while the federal government does less, city governments do more, and state governments get used as proxies by their most powerful cities. The federal government won't officially collapse, it'll just do less and less until some group gathers enough power to do something on a national scale again. Then some leader from that group gets elected president, and the official structures have continuity so we can pretend the collapse didn't actually happen.
what if it happens like in czechoslovakia where we just elected a communist to be intelligence chief and he was like 'ok cia? more like communist intelligence agency amirite'
A state is a monopoly on violence. Our states do not have monoploies on violence.
Our cities do. You know how the police have over the years been turned into occupying armies? This has been accounted for.
So it would become rome. A collection of losely affiliated city states. With petty squabbles and trade deals.
Where it gets intresting is in the bandit country. Out in rural places where there is no monopoly of violence it will fall down to clan structure. Which isn't far off from what we have in tbe Philippines from what I understand. So in rural places you will see a stepp like churn of groups trying to come to power and then being displaced.
I think mexico is way more self sufficent than us and will probably take a good chunk of their land back.
Most places would need to lose a lot of population. The west and the south where we grow food could do okay. But new york is completely unsustsinable. So I can't even being to happen how the east will pan out.
I don't see the army being a big factor as its heavy industry has been distrubted across the states for pork reasons. So good luck keeping cohesion when half the soldiers family are dying and there are no more specially made fancy tires for the trucks.
I wonder about hawaii and what they will do.
this is close to my thinking, except the city police paramilitaries are all right-wing extremists. the liberals have no one guarding the gate. they think guns and violence are too icky, but not even 1/6 or the kidnapping plot against Gretchen Whitmer has caused them to consider cleaning out their police forces of fash and, i dunno maybe arming and deputizing a bunch of communists or anfita. clearly, it's not ideal for them to keep servicing capital, but at least commies aren't in a frenzy fantasizing about putting them against the wall the way the fascists are.
Maybe. I think when the time comes the cops won't bother with the pretense of ideology and just go full warlord. Might just be the cops I know in my area though.
Like, I knew the guy that sold my city's swat tream their steroids. When the time comes those guys will be no different than they are now.
I also wonder what the Hawaiians will do to Zuckerberg's compound on Kauai.
:freedom-hater:
I visisted the island once. Saw some meth country. They gonna do alright
America has the least politically engaged population on the planet and conflict generally isn't regional. They wont balkanize. usually when countries fall apart they don't split into a bunch of different countries. the reason why they call it balkanization is because it applies strongest to former yugoslavia. There would be civil war but whoever wins would control the whole country. maybe a state or two will split but it's not going to be each state against each other.
This is a good take. I'd also imagine that the military, feds and intelligence agencies would become more powerful, more corrupt and more openly organized crime operations.
maybe a state or two will split
Not even, once >80% of the US technological/industrial might is brought under control clubbing any state into compliance becomes relatively simple. You wouldn't even need to fight just surround and blockade.
From San Diego to Boston, it's the same corn syrup brain. The US will never balkanize.
Unaccounted in this calculation is New England. They're more the maple syrup sort, so they get annexed by Canada.
Utah when the Second Coming happens and it turns out the Mormons were right.
Mormons being right would honestly be so much better than our actual current timeline. Which really says something.
I'm basically at a point where I'm rooting for any doomsday scenario that isn't climate change, tbh. Gotta love the underdogs.
If we all instantly die from a solar flare or something, I'd be fine with that. We'd all go together simultaneously, and not much we could've done about that.
I unironically considered trying to get close with some Mormons just because I consider them highly organized enough to sustain themselves post apocalypse. They're often underestimated.
They’d only allow you to join them in the post-fallout times as a full member so pick your poison I guess
Yeah, living a lie myself to survive would be one thing but it'd kill me to raise my kid in a cult like that.
Cascadia vs. US Army remnant vs. Idaho Free Dominion over control of the upper Columbia watershed
I don’t really expect the US to Balkanize, I expect it to collapse. I’m expecting Syria but bigger and with more guns
The Dakotas will fuse together and immediately descend into civil war
If it happens, it won't be along state lines. It will be a rural vs urban divide, with the suburbs splitting either way, but probably towards whichever side seems likely to win.
i can't imagine having a strong feeling one way or the other on ohio, it's the most average state
A balkanized America would see Texas have an immediate failure of its power grid and general breakdown of emergency services. Border territory and probably large swaths of the infrastructure would get seized by Sinaloas and Golfos. The only territory I imagine staying part of Texas proper would be the strip of land going from Houston to Port Arthur, only because of international oil trading.
The separately maintained grid is the exact reason for why it's terrible. There was a winter storm that knocked out power for 4 million people in February 2011, and then again earlier this year in February and around 500 people died. People were boiling snow for water. They didn't fix the problem for 10 years and it happened again. A 2019 study showed that Texas is the only region of the US with insufficient power reserves to meet peak demands during summer months. With climate change accelerating I can only imagine the problem getting worse.
remember how the Texas grid nearly collapsed last winter? that was at least partially because it isn't sufficiently interconnected with the rest of the North American power grids (primarily so they can avoid muh big government regulation). it didn't, and still doesn't, have enough power generation capacity to compensate for surges in load (i.e. a bunch of people suddenly need electric heating in an area where they usually don't), and they couldn't rely on the rest of the country's grid to supplement.
tl;dr the bigger the grid the better
Some states are net energy exporters to the grid, and others are net importers.
Assuming that state lines don't break down along with state apparatus (whih is a big "if"), then that should give you an idea of who will be okay and who will be in trouble when the lines are cut.
You're assuming that everything will be cut along state lines. It won't, look up "American Nations" to find out why- and also why Texas would be extra fucked.
If a state produces more power than it uses, it will mostly be okay if the lines are cut, assuming the people there continue to operate on a state level. But the lines will probably cut at a very short distance, likely wherever the culture changes, wherever the radius of "people like us" ends (3 Californias, upstate vs downstate NY, east and west PA, north/south FL, north/south IL, lots of different regions in Texas).
It's possible that states (or groups of states) that are culturally homogeneous enough, and also net energy exporters, might reconfigure a grid on the fly that would be better than Texas'.
But take this "cutting the power lines by local boundary" concept, and apply it to all resources. It'd be a shit show. That's why I think it's more likely that people would start to get used to doing a lot more things locally, and then re-constitute regional polities.
You don't need to read the book to understand the point I'm making, but you do need to at least open it to make a critique. Sure, the author is a lib, and argues on a bunch of lib bases, but he still emphasizes how social relations are more important than political divisions, and points in the direction of understanding history this way.
Charlotte and Asheville differ more in their historical and economic foundations and class structure than do Charlotte and Montgomery. The mixed-European immigrant areas mostly stop at the Great Plains, where smallholder farmers weren't viable. El Paso and Waco might both be Texas, but they have little to do with each other.
State lines are idealism; in America we made arbitrary rectilinear boundaries that fly in the face of geographic, sociological, and economic reality.
For another example, I am quite certain that Washington and Oregon would not stay intact after a collapse scenario. They would each promptly split along the Cascades, and very soon the reactionaries in the east would be trying to invade Seattle and Portland to get access to goods from the global market, which they would otherwise run out of.
You're criticizing my analysis of being non-materialist while saying that "America will split along these straight lines on a map" which is much further from a materialist analysis.
Literally every single country has these divisions and they’ve held together just fine.
No, there is definitely a difference between countries that got their national and subnational boundaries from rapid colonial forces (most of North America, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia), and those that developed theirs slower. Mali and Iraq, 2 examples of non-Western countries with straight-line colonial borders, are not "holding together just fine" the way that Iran or Vietnam or Lesotho are.
IF state borders ceased to exist, you’d probably be right that the new borders would not be the same as the old.
OK that was the pith of the argument.
But you’re expecting the ruling class to play a passive role in all of this.
They're letting the federal government collapse, but for some reason they're not letting the state government collapse? That's kind of odd. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if my memory is right, you have posted before about living in a state that happens to have a rather dysfunctional state government. I can relate.
Other countries have had cultural divisions and have been just fine.
Messrs. Sykes and Picot thought exactly the same.
Not all state borders will collapse. River and mountain boundaries, plus the Mason-Dixon line, will all stay fixed. The use of state National Guards is a good point I hadn't thought of, but it's not enough to prevent CA, OR, WA, TX, IL, PA, NY, and FL (and maybe NC, VA, and OH too) from splitting up and reconfiguring. Look at the Syrian civil war- the only subnational boundary that was reflected on the lines of control was al-Suweyda, around Jabal al-Druze.
In terms of the grid, I would expect some states (or fragments of states) to try to reconfigure regional cooperation. But I don't expect it to extend very far.
The other crux of the point is that cultural divisions follow economic divisions. In this case, New Netherland only extends to NYC plus some of the trade-navigable Hudson, Greater Appalachia follows the economic patterns of the highlands, the Midlands is the farming lowlands of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the Far West is dominated by big ranchers, El Norte is the result of hundreds of years of connected haciendas and missions, and the Deep South is where slavery was most scalable. The back cover says "cultural", but in the actual text the author talks mostly about economic paradigms.
I learned a lot from the book, and it helped me cut through several liberal political illusions and some of the rigidity of Western thinking.
They are literally an example of a country making different cultural groups work.
Yes, and it's a very unlikely history. Only by a certain twist of fate did all the colonies end up rebelling at once; the confederation almost fell apart several times; various states threatened to leave the union many times, with the majority of the first 13 doing so at least once; a central point and tension in the country's history was when the economic and ideological enmity between a handful of regions escalated first to a civil war and then to a continuation campaign of cultural extermination that (unfortunately, imo) failed. It has always been threatening to come undone, because it's forcing things together that are not inclined to stay together. I don't think it's a controversial idea to claim that the United States is far less stable in the long run than many European and Asian countries.
It's not like Woodard's map is going to be the exact outcome- these realignments take a long time to happen, and there's a lot of blurring of the boundaries between them- but there are many fault lines through existing states that he traces that will be very likely to split.
The first states to go to war with each other are most likely going to be coastal California vs. inland California. This is way more likely than PA and MD/VA going to war, or KY and TN, or CO and UT, or MI and OH. I can't really even name a pair of states that would have a likely dispute between them that would cause one to invade the other (besides water wars, which wouldn't clearly have states themselves as belligerents). There are, however, very noticeable strains within states that could rip them apart. It's technically only happened once before, but with even a weakened federal government, it could easily happen more. State governments are not unitary things, they're agglomerations of many different interests. We should not be viewing them as coherent wholes.
Kentucky and Tennessee became their own states, instead of extensions of the charters that Virginia and North Carolina had, largely because the people who settled within and west of the Appalachians had a society with an economic composition and class structure that differs from its counterparts along the coast.
Social structure follows economic structure, and state lines don't line up with economic structure at all, except to the small extent to which they've induced it. I find it really hard to conceptualize the federal government dissolving but the state governments holding strong.
Most people in SC see the people in the northwestern part as "different". Most people in AL see the people in the northern part as "different". In FL, the more north you go, the more South it gets. In Louisiana, you get a couple dozen miles away from the bayou and you're in a very different place. Cleveland and Cincinnati have less to do with each other than with Erie and Louisville, respectively.
I can apply this to other countries with straight line surveyed borders too. Mali, Niger, Libya, and Chad all have conflicts involving the Tuareg and other peoples of the Sahara. Then there's Iraq and Syria, which I've mentioned. Yemen too. All of these have regional economic and social lines that match each other but not the political delineations.
There is an economic reality that is largely a bunch of different patches, and our rectilinear state lines paper over this. In the event of governmental collapse, intra-state conflicts are going to be way more common and consequential than inter-state conflicts; that's my point that I'll stand on and I wonder if you will challenge it.
You keep saying "cultural differences" even though I haven't said it in the past 3 posts. Maybe read past just the publisher's description instead of getting hung up for 20 paragraphs on a single phrase. Forget I ever said "cultural". We're talking about different economies within a country, and different superstructures that thereby have emerged.
China is not a counterexample to what I'm saying. Federal Chinese polities have existed for 4000 years; the US has had most of its territory for just 175 years. The US got most of its population by rapid immigration and expansion and displacement; none of these are true of China. Are you seriously suggesting that China and the US are comparable in the scale of the forces that drive them toward disunity?
A country of 8 farmers... ...homogeneous economic activity is not an advantage
I never argued that. I am saying that it is difficult to bring people together across distances longer than a regular commute or short-distance trade route. Most localities have multiple industries anyway, places with just one are the exceptions. With a territory the size of a metropolitan area, you're not required to restrict activity to 1 industry. That'd be ridiculous.
I'm not interested in going back and forth with you putting words in my mouth. I'll get back to your original question: "wouldn't Texas be better off with their separate grid?"
Logistics are going to break down in the event of collapse, mostly based on geography. Texas might be big but it's not self-sufficient; no place is in today's globalized market. When things start to falter, it's going to become a lot harder to acquire and transport resources. Texas has lots of oil reserves, but those are less valuable than nuclear plants or hydropower for maintaining a baseline for the grid, and they have more vulnerabilities- for starters, most of the refineries are close to Houston and much of the sources are in North Texas. Reliable transportation/shipping infrastructure in Texas after federal disintegration is an unlikely prospect.
Furthermore, it's likely that states on the same power grid will have a strong incentive to work with each other. Wherever there are fault lines, there will be fragmentation, and whichever side has more power generation is going to be better off, and whichever side has less power generation will be worse off in reestablishing a grid.
Would it surprise you if I told you that the Texas Interconnection doesn't actually line up with Texas' state boundary? What if I told you that there's a certain familiar pattern in what that disparity is?
to be more homogeneous.
I have no idea where you're getting that from. It has nothing to do with "being homogenous", you're pulling that out of nowhere and shoving the words in my mouth. There are regions that have different factors that influence their production and markets, and that also have different class structures. It's plain old human geography. It is not such a complicated idea that, for instance, watersheds are more spontaneous/natural ways that people organize themselves, compared to latitudinal/longitudinal rectangles.
Granted, we do see some state borders that are formed by rivers and mountains. Those are the more stable ones.
You seem to be pretty confident that if the federal government (and armed forces) collapsed, that the factors that caused this would leave the state governments untouched. I guarantee you that many state governments (if not the majority of them) are way less stable than the federal government. And you seem to take it for granted that not only would the National Guard be in full operational order, but also ready and willing to engage in battle with and fire on their own citizens.
Let me give you a hypothetical if you want to knock it out. Federal government dissolves or weakens, and then the eastern 2/3 of both Washington and Oregon secede from their respective states. What happens next? Do the governments in Olympia and Portland engage in military campaigns to bring back the status quo ante of imaginary lines on a map?
Okay, then explain exactly what you mean by the 11 nations argument.
There are connections between places, largely resulting from terrain and biomes and climate, that matter much more than imaginary straight lines on a map. People naturally associate with others in their locality (<50 mile radius or so). For associations beyond that, geography matters much more than arbitrary straight lines. In the case of Africa which is not united by a single language, language is another thing that influences how close the association between neighboring countries is. If you were to forget the associations that American history primes you with, and then look at the physical map of the continent, you probably wouldn't divide it up the way it is now. You'd probably have the Appalachians separate from the east coast, and split each coast up into at least 2 parts at the climatic dividing line. You'd also see a continuity between the Rio Grande valley and northern Mexico. American Nations is one of the books that helped me develop a constructivist understanding of geography and anthropology instead of an essentialist one understanding.
Why would the guard, who does not depend on the fed, suddenly collapse?
Because the state governments are not independent of the federal government, and more importantly, the factors that would collapse the fed would also put very heavy strain on the states. You're assuming a situation that's like a person being killed by an explosion, but their brain and heart and lungs and stomach and liver and intestines all staying intact. What rips apart the whole is going to rip apart (at least some of) the components.
I would almost guarantee that any state apparatus would be more than willing to kill and suppress protesters in the event of a federal collapse.
Why would they do it to keep the imaginary line in place though? What matters is securing population centers and resource flows.
[Oregon] would not hesitate to kill some traitorous rural farmer.
The Great Basin is too dry for farming. Between the eastern edge of the Great Plains (concentrations of population in a north-south belt across SD, NE, IA, KS, MO, and OK) and the Western Rockies, you either have extremely unsustainable megafarms, or tiny individuals hanging on here and there, or nothing at all. The Malheur standoff was over grazing rights. I think you'd do well to read stuff about geography.
