No, Mister Hannity, that is a bad idea.

Same for the Ottoman Empire, though, isn't it?

New California Republic, here we come!

But seriously, the things that Tom is saying in this thread are actually quite correct. The slightest change in oil prices has a ripple effect on all almost all of our other goods, this is why we need alternatives.

Once again algae.

Wait, Balkanization dates back to WW 1? I always assumed it referred to the breakup of Yugoslavia.

^^ Except that he vastly overstates the effects of "speculators". I do agree that we need to find alternatives to oil though.

edited 19th Jan '11 6:01:31 AM by storyyeller

That Other Wiki.

^^

No, the term originates from the fact that WW 1 started due to the Balkan "powderkeg" going off, in the form of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

For the record, I don't think anyone except Balloon Fleet/Warsie thinks it's possible for the US to balkanize.

It isn't. For all the secessionist talk that gets hyped up from some dipshit city councilman in Texas, Alaska or wherever, nobody's ever going to do anything.

Basically for the US to suffer Balkanize Me we'd have to be in the aftermath of something extremely severe such as a nuclear exchange kills over 5 billion of the world's nearly 7 billion people and left literally the whole world in ruins.

Then again in that scenario, where wouldn't suffer such effects? Basically reduce human population below 1.5 billion and you press the Reset Button on nations and civilization.

edited 19th Jan '11 11:22:19 AM by MajorTom

Are they the same person?

Unless another person who talks about black power and balkanization joined right after Warsie got banned.

I see the US Balkanizing with a whimper actually. No time soon, certainly not in my lifetime or the lifetime of my children, but I don't see it being destroyed because of a nuke. I see it suffering the Western Roman Empire's fate.

^ Maybe, but how will the Visigoths get across the Atlantic?

The USSR wasn't composed of provinces, it was composed of satellite states that were forcibly kept under control.

Incorrect. Most of the territory of the USSR was inherited from the Czarist Russian Empire, although the Western frontier expanded somewhat to take territory from Poland, Germany, and a couple other nations over time. The satellite states were always nominally independent, if in practice puppets of the Kremlin, and collectively were known as the Warsaw Pact. The individual "soviet socialist republics" that comprised the USSR were provinces that were integrated directly into the Soviet state. Unfortunately the Russian SSR was by far the dominant region of the USSR, and the others were treated with various degrees of neglect if not outright cruelty. This had disastrous consequences for the USSR's internal stability.

^^ Even a cursory glance at the Western Roman Empire's history would reveal that to be utterly impossible, the most obvious one being that America's basic makeup of a nation is entirely different from the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was a fundamentally Central Italian state run by Central Italian people who advanced Central Italian interests, and other territories were imperial subjects who owed loyalty to Rome. The 50-state core territory of the United States is a fully integrated nation with a single national identity, which is much more enduring and stable than Rome's empire. The US could certainly lose its imperial possessions like Guam, Puerto Rico, etc. in the future (it has already lost most of its most important ones, like the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone), but a serious contraction of the United States proper is extremely unlikely if not outright preposterous.

edited 19th Jan '11 8:11:15 PM by WoolieWool

The people who discuss the Balkanization of the United States generally do so for personal reasons, not actual application of logic.

No argument there.

Number of days since I've heard "Texas should totally secede" on the bus: <45, but I haven't been counting.

^^

Yeah, most of them are just people who would like to see it happen.

I agree that balkanization of the states woudl be with a whimper. The country woudl end up collapsing due to a variety of external and/or internal factors (take your pick, plenty of hypotheticals one can use) and we'll end up becoming a has-been nation.

I'm already stocking up on bottlecaps.

Stock up on magnum rounds and bobby pins instead, those will be harder to find.

...and Rad-Away... I buy that crap like it's drinking water.

A discussion I saw about the collapse of teh USSR had some things going for it - large amounts of stockpiled material due to the inherent inefficiencies of the communist market system, which helped stave off runing out of crap after everything fell apart. That and a decent mass transit system that continued to run, and less diversity in the population overall. We're much more diverse, so we may see more fragmentation along ethnic, racial, class and religious lines than the USSR did, if the USA was to experience a collapse.

Well, that's what the article said. Kind of made sense.

Well not collapsing would be much more awesome than collapsing (and then having random positive aspects).

Total agreement. The upheaval of falling apart, even if it might lead to eventual good things, would be quite painful to endure.

I bet Iraq could tell us a thing or two about that.