Eccentric Flower talk:201001/Three Fantasies

Jweader:

But look around. How much is that actually happening these days? How's that theory working out for you right now?

"All politics is local"

There is the appearance of less discourse at the national level these days (not that I have 100 years of experienced observation to compare to), but I do think the conversations are still happening on a person-to-person level. Debate still happens in coffee shops, bars, the stands of sporting events, etc.

Some areas are more self-selecting than others. With its reputation for being quite liberal, Boston certainly attracts like-minded folks. And there are very few people who are both extroverted enough and strong of conviction and spirit to be outwardly very conservative in casual company when the expected demographic is waaaay on the other side. ("It's not the sort of thing you mention to a band of heavily armed Christians.")

-- 18:27, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

As an interesting and wholly coincidental side note to this mess: If the Senate Were Based on Population. That is, if the US were divided into fifty sectors of roughly equal population.

Interesting that the power of New Orleans is not enough to separate it from the rest of the "Sabine" region - which, by the by, I think should be "Atchafalaya" after the basin which is its central feature.

-- 19:25, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

P.S. If you don't see why that link above is at all germane to the main entry, read comment #19 here.

-- 19:30, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Iain:

And needless to say, this gives the humans who have to live around them - especially the government of Detroit - utter fits.

As a matter of purest curiosity, do you mean perhaps the government of Michigan, rather than Detroit? After all, if they've bought everything around downtown Detroit and bought out everyone else, then they are effectively the government of Detroit. (And if you have some other model in mind, I would suggest you study the history of Chicago and Bensenville, the community between the city and the airport. It's effectively worked out that Chicago buys -- through eminent domain, used in what is very technically a correct way, albeit one which was never envisioned to be used that way -- bigger and bigger tracts of Bensenville, and its government becomes more and more helpless as its population is relocated and its tax base is decimated. Detroit is perhaps the only major city you could do that to and not have some sort of intense unpleasantness -- of the sort that would result in the metahumans probably accidentally committing some sort of atrocity because the regular humans were trying to commit atrocious and violent acts of their own -- but I wouldn't lay odds on it.)

What I wonder sometimes is whether it wouldn't be better to just come apart at the seams, and let everyone pick and choose where they want to be. Imagine living in an area where you knew that everyone else living in your nation-state was, by virtue of being a self-selecting set, very similar to your point of view on social issues and the role of government - or, in some cases, the lack of role of government. The social liberals could have a nation-state where (to cite only one example) everyone can get married without any fear that some asshole group is going to try to take over the government and revoke people's rights - because all those asshole groups left; it became unpleasant for them to live in that climate. (It means the residents of that nation-state have to do without the Catholic church, but it turns out they were barely missed.)

You should read the comic book DMZ by Brian Wood. Leaving aside the fact that it's largely based on the Balkan War and contains a relentlessly romanticized view of Sarajevo imposed on New York City, it probably has a reasonably realistic -- for certain values of "realism" -- view of how something like that might actually work out. (The answer being, not very well for anyone.)

The white supremacists have their all-white nation-state where they finally, at long last, have no one to blame for their problems but themselves. There's an all-black one too, and it really pisses off the all-white one that its economy is doing better than theirs. The anti-immigration nation-state exists, and it spends four-fifths of its budget on border defenses, despite the fact that very few people want to go there anyway.

The first and third states would be the same place, belike. And where, pray, would you find someplace in this country willing to host the second one? And there would, after all, be many people of various races who would not be willing to be forced out of those places to live where they were "supposed" to live.

It would be a noble experiment.

It would be an experiment, yes. It would not be in the least noble. It would be gruesome and gory and begin and end with unspeakable atrocity. Because that's what civil wars do.

Interesting that the power of New Orleans is not enough to separate it from the rest of the "Sabine" region - which, by the by, I think should be "Atchafalaya" after the basin which is its central feature.

Post-Katrina, it really shouldn't be enough. The city has lost something like half its previous population, hasn't it? I know it's down quite a bit, anyway. And other cities around it have grown fairly abruptly as a result.

-- 21:22, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

As a matter of purest curiosity, do you mean perhaps the government of Michigan, rather than Detroit? After all, if they've bought everything around downtown Detroit and bought out everyone else, then they are effectively the government of Detroit.

No, because their population density is quite low and even if they voted, they wouldn't have a bloc big enough. They haven't displaced the ENTIRE population of Detroit - just a ring. (I actually have a map marked up but I can't reproduce it here.)

Respond to your other points in a bit when I get home.

-- 22:02, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Iain:

They haven't displaced the ENTIRE population of Detroit - just a ring. (I actually have a map marked up but I can't reproduce it here.)

So why a ring rather than a more coherent shape? For that matter why in Detroit and not outside it? Being located away from people would surely minimize the potential for conflict. (And yes, I do realize that elsewhere, I go on about there not being enough conflict, but in both cases, the issue is the way people actually behave. They don't tend to scatter like that, and they don't tend to put themselves in the way of obvious conflict unless they're the sort of people who like that kind of thing.)

-- 22:10, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

The ring is roughly the shape of the area of Detroit where property values have plummeted - the half-abandoned bits. It's not choice but geography. It's also not THAT huge an area compared to the overall Greater Detroit area. I'd show you details but it's really not worth the speculation here. As for, "why not just pick a cheap area somewhere else?" the reasons for that are also too complex to go into here. It is part climate, part access to various things, and part venegance. Long story.

-- 23:08, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

It's effectively worked out that Chicago buys -- through eminent domain, used in what is very technically a correct way, albeit one which was never envisioned to be used that way -- bigger and bigger tracts of Bensenville, and its government becomes more and more helpless as its population is relocated and its tax base is decimated.

As I understand it, this is the story of the last few decades of Detroit as well.

-- 23:09, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

It would be an experiment, yes. It would not be in the least noble. It would be gruesome and gory and begin and end with unspeakable atrocity. Because that's what civil wars do.

You think so? Because I'm not sure where the war comes in. I was thinking more of a relatively amicable division among ideological fault lines which are already there. I was thinking something like, the coasts secede, and various groups who feel their ideology is being tainted/persecuted go out, Mormon style, and claim enclaves in the middle of the country. (Of course, being coastal all my life, I assume there's nothing in the middle of the country anything wants. Joke! Joke! Just kidding!)

Anyway, I guess the question of whether there'd be war - if we assume the original breakup was essentially non-violent - arises, as all wars do, from population pressure - e.g. the Catholic stronghold gets too big for wherever it is and decides it needs more room. (That's the trouble with Catholics - they breed too fast.) I know people like to think that various fundamentalist sects fight wars just from power of ideology ("We must convert the heathens or kill them!") but in fact the historical record suggests that's not the case - they fight over two growing populations having to exist in the same space. (Which, by the way, is why the next front on the potential-vaguely-Islam-motivated-trouble watch is the ghettos of France, which now has the highest Islamic population of any nation in Europe and whose Islamic population, unlike most other European nations, has not assimilated to any real degree. But I digress.)

Anyway, it wasn't intended to be a real exercise, just a point about how attractive some days the idea of, say, putting up a wall around Massachusetts is. Of course, we'd have to deal with the middle third of the state which hates Greater Boston's guts ... hmm, maybe this isn't workable after all.

I've got it! We'll take all the densely populated urban centers and move them into one enormous conurbation. We'll leave the rest of the nation to cows and idiots. And then we'll die slowly of starvation as they cut off our supply chain, but we'll die gloriously for principle! Heh. No.

-- 23:22, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Shmuel:

I'm ready with my reply, which is: Yes, in theory. But look around. How much is that actually happening these days? How's that theory working out for you right now?

Pretty well, actually. One of the very few things I like about my life is the diversity of the people I'm friends with.

I honestly think the nation isn't nearly as Balkanized as the media would have us believe; that "red states" and "blue states" are a myth; and that barring a tiny but vocal minority on either end, most of us are various shades of purple that can get along just fine.

-- 23:33, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Shmuel:

You think so? Because I'm not sure where the war comes in. I was thinking more of a relatively amicable division among ideological fault lines which are already there.

I think that was attempted in the 19th Century. Oddly enough, it did not go well...

-- 23:35, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Iain:

You think so? Because I'm not sure where the war comes in. I was thinking more of a relatively amicable division among ideological fault lines which are already there.

Well, yes, but the ideological fault lines don't come along those nice geographical divisions, and the people who believe in one way are mixed in with people who believe something entirely different. As a f'rinstance, Illinois elections tend to be Chicago vs Almost Everyone Else; Chicago plus some of the other urban areas is just about enough to counterbalance the rest of the state, which is significantly more conservative. (Though not nearly as conservative as the local GOP would like to pretend it is.) So that sort of breakup might produce, say, an isolated strip running from Chicago to Madison and Milwaukee, surrounded by a more conservative and just as populous chunk of the Midwest. That Would Not Go Well, to put it mildly.

Something of an aside: if you want to see something nasty, you should come out here and watch the water ... negotiations, let's call them. Basically, thanks to historical precendent and international treaty, we get to say to the suburbs, "Lake Michigan is ours! Back, you fiends! Back! Not one drop of our precious lake shall you have! (Except you people down there in St Louis, you can have our sewage. Thanks!)" A drought comes along, the burbs say, "We need more water! Our lawns are dying! Our cars, we cannot wash them! Our toilets, we cannot flush them!" And we basically say, "Yeah, that's too bad. We can't do lawns and cars either, but that toilet thing, that's tough. But ... well, no. Sorry. Can't do it." And then there's much official yelling and the governments of the US and Canada step in and say, "No, really, they can't let you have more water," (at this point, Milwaukee and Cleveland look at what Chicago is allowed to take out of the lake and say, "Hey, why do they get so much more than us?" to which the answer is "Because a century ago they had really sharp negotiators") and the suburbs subside, grumbling about what they'd do if they had the power.

Anyway, I guess the question of whether there'd be war - if we assume the original breakup was essentially non-violent - arises, as all wars do, from population pressure - e.g. the Catholic stronghold gets too big for wherever it is and decides it needs more room.

I point out that, statistically speaking, you live in one of the Catholic strongholds of this country. So if that battle's coming, you live near the front lines. (Frankly, I think that schism is going to come faster than civil war. Though I am surprised that it hit the Episcopalians first, and so spectacularly, and over THAT issue. But I digress from my digression. I think.)

-- 23:45, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Shmuel, I didn't miss Iain's Civil War reference either, but I don't consider that was ever even remotely an amicable separation. There was simply too much either side needed from the other for it ever to remain "civil" for long. But that does bring up supply-chain issues. As I've noted, the liberal areas tend to be mostly urban and not very self-supporting, so the other factions could simply starve us out. We of Massachusetts, for example, would have to annex some New York farmland or some such. Or maybe we could do good things with the abandoned middle of the state once we form Greater Bostonia and they all move out in disgust ....

Heh. One wonders where they'd go. They're not small/anti-government enough for Vermont and New Hampshire, they're not rich and snotty enough for Connecticut, and New York probably wouldn't let them in because its urban area would be too busy trying to secure its upstate portions and New Jersey for supply reasons of its own. They'd have to have a Great Migration, possibly leaving a trail of tears ....

(Yes, that was indeed a mean and insensitive joke on the past mistreatment of Native Americans. If that got you riled and the rest of this page didn't, something's wrong. Anyway, I mean none of this sincerely. I do but talk in jest, murder in jest.)

-- 23:49, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Yeah, I know about Chicago, Iain. As you see from my comment above, the Boston urban area has exactly the same problem. The supply-chain logistics would doom this entire exercise to the realm of silliness where it belongs.

By the by, you think water rights issues are bad there, you should get a look at what's going on down in the lower reaches of the Colorado River and in the central areas of California. Although, you have a tendency to follow news of that part of the world more than I do, so this is surely not news to you.

Boston is less of a Catholic stronghold than you might think. The Catholic establishment has pissed off even its stalwarts here (over parish closings, not the gay-rights issues - older parishoners feel, with justification, that they are being made to pay the penalty for whistle-blowing when it wasn't their fault the church couldn't get its priests to keep their hands off the altar boys) - and its stock is at historical lows. Remains to be seen where that will lead.

-- 23:55, 25 January 2010 (GMT)

Spc476:

Maybe if the Federal government gave some of its power up to the States we could have the Whiteland (Michigan most likely), the State of Moslims (Mississippi perhaps?) and The Peoples' Socialist Utopia (Mass? California?) and leave the Federal government to what it should be doing, national defense and trade regulation.

-- 00:45, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Bunny42:

"When's the last time you had dinner with someone who differed from your basic social/political stances in more than minor ways? When's the last time you had a discussion with someone who was seriously outside your comfort zone in these stances?"

To be honest, this is about the only forum in which I feel comfortable espousing an opposing viewpoint, secure in the knowledge that I won't be flamed by illiterate name-callers who can't defend their point of view. I had dinner last weekend with a life-long liberal Democrat, who is gradually inching toward the center. I enjoy a healthy discussion of our divergent points of view, and we always part friends. But I steer clear of commenting on Live Journal for the most part, because I have always believed that one should not engage in a war of wits with an unarmed man. Said man eventually resorts to name-calling ("mean-spirited" being only the beginning) and I wander away. Robert, you are one glaring and much-appreciated exception. I look forward to our discussions, both here and on LJ.

-- 03:13, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Bunny42:

Uh, wait. I think I worded that last sentence so that it could be misconstrued. Robert is the exception on Live Journal, not here. In this forum EVERYONE is civil and thoughtful, for which a lonely moderate Republican is very grateful.

-- 03:16, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

ProfRobert:

The Balkan States of America. What a great idea. Seeing, you know, how well it has worked out for the original Balkans.

I'll go one farther -- even if you could get an internal, peaceful, separation and allocation agreement, the continent would be overrun by the Chinese within a decade. Or the Russians. Or both, fighting WWIII here. Do you recall why the Articles of Confederation got scrapped? From 1776 to 1789, we were the Balkans -- 13 sovereign states in a weak federation. It wasn't working.

To change topics entirely, what do you mean by "let GM fail"? GM *did* fail. It filed for bankruptcy. Equity was wiped out. Do you understand what that means? Stockholders own the company and select directors, who in turn select management. The people ultimately responsible for the poor management -- the stockholders -- saw a total loss of their investment. What the government loans did was to allow the creditors to receive more than they would have in a liquidation -- that's what the bankruptcy court and every appellate court that reviewed the plan of reorganization said.

So what, exactly, was wrong about the GM reorganization? Treasury announced today that GM plans to repay the government loans in June, ahead of schedule.

If by "fail," you mean "go into liquidation," that would have hurt creditors -- mostly suppliers and employee pension funds. They aren't the ones who made the horrible decisions that led GM to go bankrupt. Or do you contend that they should have known better and refused to enter or continue a business that supplied GM with parts, or refuse to work for GM because they should have foreseen that GM's management practices were unsound?

I think you may have a much better argument about some of the bank bailouts. The government assistance to the auto industry has been a huge success so far.

Finally (why do you pack a week's worth of entries into one?), at the risk of sounding like someone saying, "Well, I have a good friend who is black," I will say that one of my best friends from law school (whom sadly I see way too infrequently because we both have busy lives and families) is a conservative Catholic Republican. I'm also friends with a free-market vegan. I'm also friends with a few people who claim (at least) to be socialists. And then there are a couple of relatives whom I love dearly, but who, in my view (and I tell 'em as much) are religious nuts.

Oh, yeah, and I have a good friend who is black, too.

-- 06:53, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

By "fail" I do indeed mean "go into liquidation," if by "go into liquidation" you mean the kind of bankruptcy you don't come out of alive at the end. By "fail" I mean that General Motors should have ceased to exist as a corporate entity - and possibly as a brand, unless some other car company were stupid enough to want to buy it.

Or do you contend that they should have known better and refused to enter or continue a business that supplied GM with parts, or refuse to work for GM because they should have foreseen that GM's management practices were unsound?

Yes.

[Digression: Have I mentioned before that I'm not a very forgiving person? I believe heavily in penance, in repentance, and in punitive measures for what I consider to be mistakes. If I have mentally never allowed myself to forget so much as an iota of every serious mistake I've ever made in my life - if I hold myself personally responsible for every single bad decision I've ever made and every time I should have known better - why should I allow any less stringent a standard for the rest of the universe?]

Anyway - if *I*, outside the industry entirely, could read the writing on the wall about GM going astray years ago, the people who did business with GM and were presumably much closer to that information have utterly no excuse.

The government assistance to the auto industry has been a "huge success" only in that it enables GM to stay in business and continue to make the sort of cars which got them into this in the first place. And, it enables some misguided members of the American public to keep buying those cars. I don't consider either of those a very good victory for the price we paid for them.

P.S. As long as we're pushing this ridiculous theoretical construct to its extremes anyway: Why do you assume either China or Russia would give a damn about invading us? China is already close to owning our economy, why would they want to mess with that? Sure, their land/population pressure could very well get nasty (although their population is about to plateau - that's what happens when the government is able to impose population controls unilaterally), but they'd invade Russia first - lots of barely-used real estate there and no need for an overseas invasion, which is much harder than a land-border one. And Russia, despite its bluster, would have a hard time these days invading anything.

-- 15:42, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

I should note, in fairness to GM, that not all of their decline was due to stupid management decisions. Some of it was the crushing weight of many decades of accumulated pension and benefits burdens. Basically they were spending a huge portion of their budget paying entitlements to their retired workers. I will concede this matter was beyond their control, but I also think there was a point where they should have said, "Well, in order to sustain our payouts for the next X years, we will have to sell Y number of cars, and it's unlikely we'll do that, so we really need to retrench in a hurry, or simply go into bankruptcy now and explain there is no way in hell we can get out from under our commitments." That did not happen.

-- 15:47, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

ProfRobert:

The one question you didn't answer is: Who was hurt by the GM reorganization? It's a Pareto Optimal result; everyone did better than in a liquidation, and no one, including the taxpayer, was hurt. If you're seeking the economic destruction of everyone who was doing business with GM, then basically you're the economics equivalent of Keyser Soze, and we will have to agree to disagree.

As for why China would invade the BSA, how about "food"? North America is pretty much everything you'd want in a colony, or at least the Spanish, French and British thought so.

-- 19:51, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

"The economics equivalent of Keyser Soze." I like that.

There's a part of my brain that wants to be the economics equivalent of Keyser Soze, and there's a part of my brain that knows that's a bad idea and why. This entry was me indulging the former part, the part that would like to bring the temple down on everyone's heads.

-- 21:27, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

In Which The Economist Calls Me Out

Incidentally, according to this week's Economist, I'm wrong about GM not learning a damned thing.

Now if we can just convince Americans that it's bad to treat gas as cheap - and, apparently, that it's bad to treat cars as cheap:

I don't understand why cars can possibly be that expensive, and my first new car cost $8000 (in 1992), so I'm not especially sympathetic there. I believe it should be possible to make cars small, efficient, and cheap, and I'm not going to believe otherwise until someone from a major car company sits down and shows me numbers.

-- 21:38, 26 January 2010 (GMT)

Iain:

I don't understand why cars can possibly be that expensive, and my first new car cost $8000 (in 1992)

Hmm ... well, I was going to suggest that you run that through an inflation calculator to see what happens, but it turns out there's one here http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ and it's only about 50% inflation since then. I think that's off, somehow, but then, I'm not running the numbers.

-- 06:13, 27 January 2010 (GMT)

Danima:

Thanks for the link-back to this post -- I've been thinking a lot about your hypothetical ring-city of metahumans, and I keep trying to organize my thoughts into something coherent.

In the meantime, what was the make and model of your $8000 1992 car? My 1997 Honda Civic, being the folkloric optimum between affordability and durability, cost twice that.

Of course, if you've bought another car since then, I've come out ahead.

-- 17:12, 9 February 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

It was a Tercel. They literally don't make 'em like that anymore. I drove it steadly and heavily, including many, many road trips, for ten years, and the main reason we got a new car in 2002 was because we bought a house and needed considerably more cargo space. The Tercel sat in the driveway, unattended and unstarted, for many more years - and when it was given to charity a couple of years ago, despite years of neglect, all it needed was a jump start; they DROVE it away.

-- 23:10, 9 February 2010 (GMT)

Danima:

Okay, I realized yesterday that I deliver that "organizing my thoughts" line all-too-often. The question is this: what are the political philosophies and their (inevitable shortcomings in) implementation of your ring-city metahumans?

The broader picture: I'm fascinated by how metahumans can function as all things to all people. Self-reliant, yet cooperative. The ultimate expression of reclaiming the means of production, yet rarely imagined as having to work for their livelihood. Elite purity *and* subversive outcast. And so on. So when you posit your hypothetical, I don't feel comfortable making any assumptions about what they mean, in this instance, to you.

-- 21:33, 14 February 2010 (GMT)