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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
"Warring city states"? What, you think this is Renaissance Italy? Don't be funny, man, people have more sense than that! Look, it just could be a looser federation, instead of a single republic.
@ article:Is he impying government has been an adversary to progress all this time? *spits out of spite*.
edited 5th May '13 4:37:39 PM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
I live here.
edited 5th May '13 4:54:00 PM by DeviantBraeburn
Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016Listen, the United States is so interconnected right now that we literally couldn't live well without each other. I mean it: We have three power grids, only one of which is contained within one state. The entire east and west coasts would have to come to some sort of agreement with their neighbors or have their electricity cut off. We have waterways that cross state borders. There are places in the South that would literally die if they stopped getting federal money.
Feudal warring city states might not be realistic, but we sure as hell wouldn't have an easy time if we ended up Balkanizing. This isn't even getting into the fact that secession is illegal, and any situation in which the US separated has the connotation that everything else has fallen to shit to the point that the federal government can't stop it. We'd probably end up looking more like Somalia writ large than like Switzerland. The US balkanizing would not just be a terrible thing, but a sign of other terrible things happening all over the world.
And I highly doubt we'd pull off anything like the EU with balkanization being the context for it, either.
Add into all the internal issues the fact that a balkanization of the US would lead to the value of US Debt plummeting, therefore destabilizing the world economy on a colossal scale, and you should see why, as we have said repeatedly, it isn't anything close to a good idea.
"The marvel is not that the Bear posts well, but that the Bear posts at all."To basically sum it up, the U.S. is pretty much the center of world's economy and breaking it up would pretty much send the entire world into a Depression so bad it would make the Great Depression look like paradise in comparison.
What would come afterwards is anyone's guess.
Also, I'm a Texan. Just so you know.
edited 5th May '13 5:54:27 PM by tclittle
"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."Rowell and Matthews found that one of the messages Mary Murphy had sent came from a domain owned by the Bivings Group, a PR company specializing in internet lobbying. An article on the Bivings website explained that “there are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organization is directly involved … Message boards, chat rooms, and listservs are a great way to anonymously monitor what is being said. Once you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party."
The Bivings site also quoted a senior executive from the biotech corporation Monsanto, thanking the PR firm for its “outstanding work”. When a Bivings executive was challenged by Newsnight, he admitted that the “Mary Murphy” email was sent by someone “working for Bivings” or “clients using our services”. Rowell and Matthews then discovered that the IP address on Andura Smetacek’s messages was assigned to Monsanto’s headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri(9). There’s a nice twist to this story. AstroTurf TM - real fake grass - was developed and patented by Monsanto.
Reading comment threads on the Guardian’s sites and elsewhere on the web, two patterns jump out at me. The first is that discussions of issues in which there’s little money at stake tend to be a lot more civilized than debates about issues where companies stand to lose or gain billions: such as climate change, public health and corporate tax avoidance. These are often characterized by amazing levels of abuse and disruption.
Articles about the environment are hit harder by such tactics than any others. I love debate, and I often wade into the threads beneath my columns. But it’s a depressing experience, as instead of contesting the issues I raise, many of those who disagree bombard me with infantile abuse, or just keep repeating a fiction, however often you discredit it. This ensures that an intelligent discussion is almost impossible - which appears to be the point.
The southern revivals weren't about "keeping religion from dying out" at all. Almost all of them happened because they thought the previous established denomination was hideously corrupt and money-driven rather than actually adhering to their tenets. Which about half the time was, you know, entirely right — even if the new denomination wasn't always the sanest and most often distinguished itself at first with extreme fundamentalism.
edited 5th May '13 8:27:54 PM by Pykrete
New NRA leader says Obama seeks 'revenge' on gun owners

As much as I enjoy watching foreigners talk about the US collapsing into a bunch of warring city-states, it really doesn't have anything to due with modern American politics.
You clearly have never heard of the term 'Real American'.
Governor Pat McCrory: Government should act like a smartphone
edited 5th May '13 4:30:32 PM by DeviantBraeburn
Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016