California movement to secede from US cleared to gather signatures

I don't think the Newly Independent State of CA will even bother with a military, knowing that the US will never let a foreign power take either the Bay Area Harbors or the LA/Long Beach Harbors. So this fight you imagine would be between US troops and nobody.

You know that Iceland basically doesn't have a military because it's part of the system NATO would use to contain the Russia Navy, were it necessary. We flood the gaps between GB and Iceland and Iceland and Greenland and the Russian Navy can't reach deep water ocean. Iceland knows that they are a critical piece of real estate that the US and NATO will not let anyone else control. LA and the Bay Area would be much the same.

 

That sounds right to me. When I travelled in the Bay Area, I saw lots of anti-military bumper stickers, and I believe the LA School Board has made it as difficult as possible for the military to recruit among its students. So an independent California would just join the great majority of white middle-class Americans, enjoying the privileges of being protected by a military without having to actually serve in it.

But the conflicts within regions which are undergoing separation begin among civilians, usually trying to make their region ethnically pure and dominated by their ethnic group. This seems to be absolutley standard: a few exemplary killings to encourage the others to leave. California is minority-non-Hispanic white already, so I can see some interesting developments in the wealthy white suburbs, with their many gated communities protecting liberal anti-gun believers. However, maybe Californians of all races will remember that "Diversity is Strength" and we won't have any unpleasant incidents.

And it's certainly true that it would be deeply irrational for an independent California to enter into a military alliance with an American rival, assuming the remaining United States did not threaten it.

However, it was deeply irrational for Hitler to declare war on the US when he didn't have to, and when I was last walking down Market Street in San Francisco, making sure not to step in piles of human excrement, I wondered if rational people were in charge of the place. So counting on rational behavior by our leaders is probably not something we should do.

 

Really?

Here is FBI Director Wray's testimony in 2018 and not one word about white supremacist let alone they being the major threat in America.

Threats to the Homeland
https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/threats-to-the-homeland-101018

And here from Matthew Alcoke Deputy Assistant Director, Counterterrorism Division Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2019

And the same

The Evolving and Persistent Terrorism Threat to the Homeland
https://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/t...stent-terrorism-threat-to-the-homeland-111919

 

Oh, given that you traveled there once, you're an expert.

You seriously form an opinion based on few bumper stickers.

Gawwwwwd let the secession proceed!!!!! I want the fck out of this nut nest.

 

I can hardly be surprised at this point that someone possessed of the clownish insolence required to pretend I'd never read 10A doesn't know there are two clauses in the original Constitution which were not only applicable to slavery but drafted with protection of that institution specifically in mind, which tells us that slavery was indeed within the letter of the document; and of course even if you were constitutionally literate you would not find it convenient to look beyond the letter to America's founding principles, of which you harbor neither ken nor care.

Thanks to people who thought like you, America sowed the wind by ratifying the 1808 and fugitive slave clauses, and reaped the whirlwind seven decades later; and if people who think like you have their way in the present, the Civil War will look like a picnic by comparison.

Actually, to anyone with a lick of sense who has followed this conversation, what's obvious is that I've exposed this claim as a brazen lie.

 

California has more citizens serving in the military than any other State.

The states with the most total active duty and reserve members of the military, as of September 2017, were:

• California: 184,540
• Texas: 164,234
• Virginia: 115,280
• North Carolina: 112,951
• Florida: 92,249
• Georgia: 88,089
• Washington: 64,066
• South Carolina: 55,369
• New York: 48,974
• Colorado: 47,636

https://www.governing.com/gov-data/...duty-employee-workforce-numbers-by-state.html

184,000 is 14% of all people serving.

California has 11% of the total population of the US.

If you see someone in the military, there is a 1 in 7 chance they are from California.

 

The great nation emerging from the West Coast - California, Oregon, and Washington - accounts for 20% of the entire US military.

We also possess many key military centers, ports, and shipyards. We also have a wealth of nuclear weapons.

The other great center of freedom, the nation emerging from the NE, is the home of the US submarine force.

Without the West Coast and the NE, the US will be nothing but an empty shell of its former self.

 

Well, I lived there for several years, but that was long ago. Maybe it has become much more conservative?
I notice you decline to comment on the LA School Board's anti-military actions. Perhaps they're not typical?

I do grant that California has changed. Now the governor welcomes 'refugees' coming over the Mexican border.
But the governor of California once tried to keep refugees out. (No, it wasn't Ronald Reagan.)

[SOURCE: https://www.sfchronicle.com/nation/article/America-s-long-history-of-shunning-refugees-6639536.php ]

However, I am glad to welcome another secessionist to the camp of 'Peaceful Separation'.

 

How will the great nation of California keep that military going without fuel and electricity? How will California control its border? The wall needs maintenance and security.

 

Yes, California alone, I've read many times, could take its place among the top 20 (?) nations in GNP. With (eastern) Oregon and Washington, it would be a mighty power. It would probably then become like Germany, with a notional military, with all the officer corps filled on Social Justice principles, but not one that anyone is afraid of.

Secession would involve, as it always does, mass population transfers, hopefully peacefully. A New Blue America would attract millions of unhappy progressives stuck in Red States. These people would tend to be the college-educated, highly-skilled types, thus adding additional economic strength to the new nation. Symmetrically, low-skilled, manual worker 'deplorables' would want to leave and move to 'Red State' America. Perhaps housing swaps could be arranged, as they were in the former Yugoslavia. The job slots they would leave behind would quickly be filled by people coming over the now-very-very-very-porous southern Border of the new country. (It would, in fact, have a near-infinite supply of unskilled labor to the south, really, an ideal situation economically.)

But you raise another important point: the West Coast is not the only 'Blue' part of America. The East Coast is as well, and the South is rapidly 'Blueing' as well, due to Hispanic immigration. It would be unfortunate if the Blue States were not geographically contiguous, but the 'Left Coast', plus the area of the 'Reconquista' (the Southwest) plus the Blue (urban) parts of the South, linking up to the East Coast, could probably make a contiguous 'Blue' America. 'Red America' would have to be content with the middle part of the country, and hope that population transfers over time would make it more homogeneous. (Of course 'Blue America' would want to be more homogeneous as well, getting rid of its deplorable rightwingers.)

Going by the last election, the people who can be bothered to vote split left/right about 50-50. Assuming the non-voters are (very) roughly of this proportion, that gives each 'nation' somewhere between 100 and 150 million natural adult inhabitants, making both of them quite viable.

Of course, 'Red America', having lost all the clever people, would be economically nearly destitute. But that would be its own choice.
And just as Aquinas said that one of the pleasures of the Saved, would be observing the torments of the Damned in Hell, so Blue America could amuse itself by watching the racist neo-Nazi illiterate rednecks of 'Red America' struggle to feed themselves without the help of lawyers and website designers and marketing managers.

 

Shhhhhh!

They'll do fine.

There are some very tough hombres in various provinces of Northern Mexico -- they just defeated the Mexican military [ https://time.com/5705358/sinaloa-cartel-mexico-culiacan/ ] and they'll be very happy to move in and provide security.

This is how the Mexican upper and upper middle class live now. Indeed, if you go to any Central American country, you find the masses living in poverty (and, now, fear from the drug cartels), while the wealthy do all right behind 'gated communities'. It's already how many middle-class people in California live now: https://californiagatedcommunities.com/communities/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Gated_communities_in_California

They'll just have to add an extra meter or two to the walls, and hire a few more security guards ... perhaps get used to travelling outside their gated community in protected convoys. But life will go on! Indeed, as the current Chinese Communist Plague has shown, you can live a pretty full life just insider your house, provided you've got a good internet connection.

 

What is the lesson of the American Civil War? (The last one, I mean.)

It's this: the compromise permitting slavery to carry on was almost certainly necessary at the time.
But if the Southern slave owners had had good sense, they would have realized, by the middle of the 19th Century, that slavery was becoming unacceptable among Europeans and their colonial descendants. So they could have done what the British slaveowners in the Caribbean did, and negotiated a cozy buy-out of their slaves, and a peaceful transition to a paid-labor economy. (Or, I suppose, move to Africa where it was still perfectly normal among the natives.)

But instead, they risked everything on a stupid, destructive civil war that killed more Americans than all our other wars before or since, added together.

So the lesson is: sometimes it happens that ancient arrangements with which YOU are happy, begin to deeply upset large numbers of other people. If it's the case that continuing those arrangements point to civil war, then see if it's not possible to work out some peaceful compromise, whereby you remain in power, with almost all of the privileges you had before, at the price of accepting some major changes. (This isn't only the lesson of the American civil war: the French aristocracy, the Russian landowners, the Chinese landowners ... should have learned it as well. They didn't, with catastrophic results for them and many others.)

 

What you people don't realize is that the same transformation that California has undergone over the last 30 years is also in the process of happening in other areas of the country. Virginia and Texas, just to name two.

Cutting off body parts won't do any good; you need to identify what went wrong.

 

Identifying the 'problem' doesn't mean dealing with the problem. In fact, we cannot reverse the demographic change. What we can do is to argue for a basic democratic right, that both Left and Right ought to be able to agree on: the right of people to self-determination, to be ruled by those they find congenial. Much of the history of the 20th Century turns around people all over the world, including within Europe, exercising this right. It's a very strong impulse, even when it leads to their being ruled in ways that seem far worse in many aspects than previous rule by others.

If we can agree on this elementary democratic right in principle -- a right that would allow Quebec to separate from English Canada, Scotland from the United Kingdom, Catalonia from Spain, Puerto Rico from the US -- then we can discuss whether allowing people in the US to exercise this right would lead to a better situation for everyone.

Of course, the devil is in the details, but the principle, it seems to me, is unassailable. I would especially expect people on the Left to acknowledge it, the Left being more congenial to democracy than the Right.

And speaking of the Left ... even though they will, within a few years, have an unshakable majority in Congress, and the Presidency, why would they want to retain fifty to a hundred million deplorables, who will slow down their march to a completely Progressive country? A somewhat geographically-smaller America, with a 90% Progressive electorate, would be far easier to transform, than a larger America, with 40% of the electorate challenging things in court, resisting passively, and perhaps actively.

Put it another way: suppose an America which was 75% of its current extent geographically, having ports on all coasts, contiguous, holding most of the major cities, almost all of the intelligent, educated people ... suppose such an America were offered an additional 25% of territory -- not terribly fertile, no ports, nothing special ... but having a large population of deplorable, poorly-educated, bigoted, backward, racist, sexist, Islamophobic, militaristic people. Would it accept such a 'bargain'? Of course not!

 

Yep and send in federal troops to take them over if necessary.

 

I'm saying the demographic change is continuing, in other areas of the country.

What will you do? Keep amputating off states?

 

You can't really count the Reserves. They're federal and those units will be either disbanded or transferred out of California. The reservists themselves, if they stay in California, will be discharged I would imagine.

 

There are 'Red States' and 'Blue States' and states in the process of transition from Blue to Red, Texas being an example, due to Hispanic immigration.

The conservatives/Republicans can buy themselves some time, by becoming 'The Republican Workers Party', ie. stop being the party of their Donor Class, and orient to workingclass Americans of all colors. That means embracing a certain number of policies historically associated with the old Democratic (and new Democratic) Party, but giving them a conservative content.

It also means that conservatives have to support shaking off the chains of empire (giving up on our interventionist foreign policy, which means spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives making various diverse societies like Libya and Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan conform to the insane Leftist mantra that 'Diversity is Strength').

It also means they have to shake off the (anti-conservative) libertarian delusion that anything the state does is bad, and be willing to use the state as an architect of social solidarity and strength.

Trump won the support he did in part because of hints that this was the direction he would take, in contrast to establishment Republicans. Unfortunately, he has not been consistent in this respect, in part because of his personality, in part because he has had to staff his administration with people from the Republican establishment.

I recommend FH Buckley's new book, The Republican Workers Party for more detail on this, and also books and academic papers by Robert Cherry, on how to give welfare a family-friendly, personal responsibility-building, content. (Normally I'd post links to these sources but I have done this a half dozen times on this site and no one has ever shown the slightest interest, so I won't bother.)

But that's just buying time. Conservatives who don't see that we need an amicable divorce, will find themselves living in a very different 'America' ... one where the textbooks teach children that Washington was a white racist slaveowner, as was Jefferson, and that even Lincoln was a white racist, before Sexual Diversity class begins. That sort of America won't last long historically, but what will come out of its disintegration is not now predictable.

Much better to peacefully separate into Red and Blue America and let each group find its own way into the future. Lots of practical problems there, but they will be far easier to deal with than the problems that will eventually arise if we don't do this.

I know that this now sounds completely ridiculous, even insane. And so it would be, if we could just complacently project into the future, what we tend to believe -- 'believe' is too weak a word, it's a sub-belief, part of our unconscious, fundamental assumptions , our doxa [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxa]-- that since today was like yesterday, tomorrow will be like today, and so on forever.

The Chinese Communist Virus has shown us that this isn't true. More shocks are coming.

 

At the moment, that might be possible.
But the time will come, when the kind of people who get to decide against whom federal troops are mobilized, and kind of people in California who want to secede from America, are one and the same.

So we have to anticipate events and try to shape the outcome so that it will be as favorable as possible for the cause of liberty.

That means campaigning now, to convince people on both the Left and the Right, of the right of self-determination, in principle.

Once the principle is granted, we can argue/negotiate about practical things, like in a seceding area, who gets to keep or take ownership of the federal property. My own position: Federal property in a state should be turned over to that state on the basis of what proportion of national taxes that state paid for federal property as a whole. There's some complicated accounting involved here, but that's why people suffer through degrees in accountancy.

For example: if California has, over, say the last fifty years, paid for ten percent of all Federal Property (in the whole US), then they should get credit for that, applied to the Federal Property in their own state. (In short: they can swap out their share of all the other National Parks, applied towards the National Parks in their state). If that still leaves them (or any state) short, then they should be allowed to purchase it, via a long term loan.

I'm sure people who are more experienced in this sort of thing/smarter than me, can come up with better methods. Probably divorce lawyers will prove useful in the process. And for students looking for quality senior, or Master's Degree theses, do your dissertation on how immovable Crown property in Ireland was handled, and/or how the lawyers are planning to deal with the same in Scotland, when it goes.

 

What went wrong? The crazies, hyperliberals, and 'woke' morons took over California. It's like a cancer now, and maybe the best thing for the rest of us to do is let it remove itself before it does any MORE damage than it already has!

. "What could you possibly be talking about?!"

 

One part of the reason we have NATO is that indiviual countries the size of Iceland are never going to have unilateral forces that would be a deterrent to Russia or various other beligerants. By unitiing, a stronger defensive front may be maintained.

 

Such is the natural consequence of the united states not engaging in viewpoint discrimination, and holding that certain beliefs and positions are simply too dangerous to be tolerated.

 

Oh horseshit.

Well, those folks would tend to be with the Blue State folks that want to leave, so they will work that out as they will, but, these folks all tend to have landscapers, gardeners, and personal services from immigrants. They have a long history of successfully exchanging money for services with little no conflict.

In the rural agricultural areas, everyone works with farm laborers from south of the border and have for generations. Watts' black neighborhoods have blown up twice 60 and 30 years ago, but other than that there is much more class strain and not much ethnic strain.

The US barely allowed that with Cuba, no chance in hell it would be allowed with an independent CA.

Well, it was probably invading Russia that actually did him in. Hitler saw himself as a historically unique individual and the only one who could accomplish the things he thought needed to be accomplished. That drove him to continue expanding when he should have consolidated his gains of unchallenged control of much of continental Europe. No analogous issue is part of CA succession.

Further, CA succession is all bluster, those folks aren't going to give up their Social Security and Public Workers think that the Federal Government is going to guarantee their pensions. When push comes to shove, they won't walk.

No. They are out of their minds.

 

Okay, but you have to ask yourself how the US got there.
I would say that until some time about twenty or twenty-five years ago, the electorate of the US did engage in 'viewpoint discrimination'. We swung back and forth between the liberal-ish Democrats and the conservative-ish Republicans. When the Democrats did things that almost everyone liked, such as bringing in Social Security and similar welfare state measures, the Republicans who came after them didn't touch them -- whether out of conviction or fear is another matter. When the Republicans did things that were approved by most people -- the hardline military stance that brought down the Soviet Union, the welfare reforms they forced on a 'triangulating' Bill Clinton -- the Democrats, whether out of conviction or fear, didn't touch them.

Things have changed now. The interesting question is why?

I think one important strand has to do with Vietnam. American 'Boomers' grew up in a time -- the fifties and the first half of the sixties -- in which, so far as we knew from what we learned in school -- America was pristine pure ... well ... okay, maybe not completely pure, but the best, most moral country in the world.

The Civil Rights movement challenged that belief a bit, but ... America as whole -- the national government -- responded to the Civil Rights movement and gave in to its demands. So we were Good after all.

Then came Vietnam. I believe the American role in the Vietnam war changed the outlook of a whole generation, or, rather, the generation who would go on to staff the 'cultural apparatus' of America: its teachers, professors, lawyers, senior civil servants. They were shocked at our behavior in Vietnam, and profoundly disillusioned. It drove some of the best-educated among them politically insane, and made them do things for which at least one of them -- not personally a bad man, evidently -- is still serving time in prison.

In particular it changed the outlook of those who would teach the young of America's elite, its future ruling class. Patriotism was no longer reflexive ... in fact, it became uncool at best, evil at worst.

That influence has multiplied and intensified generation after generation, until now, if a college proposes not to fly the American flag, it might anger the townie deplorables, but is seen as a reasonable thing to do, by the college staff and, presumably, most students.

I don't think this is the ONLY explanation. For one thing part of the "sixties generation"'s change in view was a reaction to the excesses of the McCarthyite fifties. To be an anti-Communist was to be like McCarthy.

For another, we have to fit the US into the world-wide -- or at least advanced-countries-wide -- phenomenon of modernity, which has seen the dimunition, in all countries, of the role of the family and profound change in the status of women.

Another factor has been the deep American belief in equality: the idea that all people, if given half a chance, will be able to prosper. So if they don't, it must be the fault of some external forces, like 'racism'.

Globalization has played a role ... it has created a self-aware class whose personal/material interests are no longer tied to the economic prosperity of their less-educated countrymen. So long as they can get a cheap iPhone, what do they care about a factory closing down in Ohio? Many of them will probably spend part of their working lives abroad, anyway.

Finally, there is immigration. Before the 70s, most immigrants became more American than the Americans. Young Hispanic men made it a point of pride to 'Go Airborne'. The people fleeing Communism were deeply grateful to this country, and many of them still are today. [ https://quangforarizona.com ] But the people coming now are not coming to a nation whose elite is proud of it. There is little pressure to assimilate, to become a real 'American', as opposed to someone who is only an American in the dry legal technical sense, but whose emotional life and self-identity is elsewhere. Of course, some assimilation still happens, but nothing like on the old scale. And the low- and unskilled nature of many immigrants presents a further barrier to assimilation, especially given the fact that the US has not been very good economically for the bottom half of the population.

But these are only stabs at trying to understand the profound change that has overcome America -- which has, in effect, dissolved away the old America, and left something else in its place, still slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

 

Federal lands in states are part of the conditions of statehood. There isn't any form of states paying for that land.

Individuals and states do pay to USE some of that land - but that was not set up to be some sort of lease to own deal.

You idea is like an apartment dweller suggesting that since they have rented their apartment for 20 years, they now own the apartment.