Beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs

States should come together with their neighboring states to start passing identical model legislation for this sort of stuff, if we don’t have unity across the country. It could be easy and voluntary for the states to do.

The US doesn’t have 50 different cultures with totally different values, but probably has like… 7.

This sounds great, until those states hate each other and want to get one over on the other one, even if they're ideologically aligned.

Source: am from Kansas City.

> States should come together with their neighboring states to start passing identical model legislation for this sort of stuff...

Yes! Make a union of states! How should we call that? States Union... Union of States... United States! Yeah, that should work.

The US would make a lot more sense if it split up between two or three different countries. There's a lot of stuff in US politics which people feel strongest about but are absolutely mutually exclusive.

I think it's going to happen one way or another and the most peaceful way to do it would be sooner rather than later.

Getting ~340M people to agree on anything is too hard, and now a good chunk of us seem to think the government can’t do anything productive at all. IMO, it would be nice to have an in between layer to do bigger things.

This is true.

Source: am from St. Louis.

Sure. But the idea was to have neighboring states pass matching laws. Oregon borders Washington. Washington borders Idaho. Idaho borders Montana…etc.

At some point it makes more sense to pass such a law at the federal level since we end up there eventually either way.

Ok, sorry for the poor writing. I mean states could form informal groups with likeminded states. So, the northeast could all pass the same law, the pacific coast, Texas and friends, wherever else.

Expecting laws to instead propagate from neighbor to neighbor as I accidentally suggested—this wasn’t what I meant to suggest, but in defense of the idea:

> At some point it makes more sense to pass such a law at the federal level since we end up there eventually either way.

I do think there still could be some value. Laws could propagate across states that are more receptive to them, and then people can see if they work or not. Porting Masshealth to the whole country at once seems to have been a little bumpy. If it has instead been rolled out to the rest of New England, NY, then down to Pennsylvania… might have gone a little smoother.

> The US doesn’t have 50 different cultures with totally different values...

Indeed. It has far more than that. The US is astonishingly diverse.

Yeah, increasing political tension--and not just any political tension, but political tension between states--doesn't seem good.

We tried that. It didn't go well for any involved.

The US is astonishingly homogenous for its size and population. I'm not sure what possible metric you could use to claim otherwise?

Or Balkans?

Historically speaking, the tension in this case (between Missouri and Kansas) is low.

No cities are on fire and there aren't raiding parties crossing the border.

At the time only side wanted to leave. That's no longer the case.

So basically fallout style commonwealthes?

Vast parts of the US are not economically viable and basically propped up by blue states.

They wouldn't be "united" in many things though.

Sounds more like a... Confederation? of states. Or maybe... a Confederacy?

Probably not? I didn’t play it but I don’t think anybody would target a postapocalyptic fiction setting as a goal.

More like: look at the EU, extrapolate how it would look after a little more unification, and then take advantage of the fact that we’re made up of small states already that can group ourselves up as fits. Germany and France seem all-right, so we should organize ourselves into Germany and France size units.

We’re better as one country, we just need a France or Germany sized organizational unit that can do interesting projects but is still small enough to be agile.

Ever spent any time in Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, San Jose, Casper, Traverse City, Nashville, New York, Buffalo, New Orleans, Cortez, Lubbock, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Jackson, Boston, Seattle?

In your mind, are these all filled with people who look the same, sound the same, practice the same religion, immigrated from the same place?

Who says you have to have 340 million people agree? Congress's approval rating hovers around 20% for years and years— they haven't been interested in the will of the people for a long time.

Instead of just relying on your intuition, you can just look this up, because it's a well-studied question. One simple search is for "fractionalization". If you'd like me to save you the trouble, then, with respect to your claim here: no.

Not a great line of argument. Vast parts of the US are not food secure and are "basically propped up by" a conservative bread basket. Large portions of the agricultural industry are not economically viable without illegal immigrants. Much of the defense industry and military is populated by conservatives. Such examples are as numerous as they are irrelevant to sensible discussions of policy.

It seems relevant to the chain of comments they were responding to. They are disagreeing with the comment that says multiple states might want to split up the country now, by pointing out that some of them might not be economically viable if they did.

You’ve come up with more reasons not to split up the country, by pointing out some ways the other parts of the country might have trouble.

I think (correct me if I’m wrong) you disagree with the partisan jab at the end, not the actual line of argument.

Fair enough. Indeed I object to the partisan framing but I suppose there is a valid point to be made about the generalized case here.

I wasn't thinking carefully enough because I've grown accustomed to such lines of argument being simultaneously partisan and irrelevant.