Faine Greenwood: India got partitioned at the cost of just a few million lives after all

If you think that we actually just need a civil war to settle this once and for all: 1. No, you don’t. 2. No, you don’t. 3. You are an idiot.

Trump’s re-election will mean four hideous years of the GOP playing constant Civil War Chicken at best - as this Heritage Foundation ghoul made clear - and actual civil war at worst. Avoiding that bloody nightmare is a pretty damn good reason to suck it up and vote for Biden.

I'd love a civil war. But no casualties, and no disruption to my lifestyle. Other than that, all good!

Civil War 2.0 is a bunch of states seceding and the rest of us not making much of an effort to bring them back. I’d feel bad for a lot of decent people stuck there but I feel bad for them as it is

These people are not going to be content with just having their own fascist red states. They want to crush us too in our blue states.

The rural/urban split makes secession a moot point; it doesn't solve the problem, it just multiplies it

Oh, it COULD be done. It would be utterly horrific on a scale that boggles the mind, but yeah, it could be done.

India got partitioned at the cost of just a few million lives after all

Yeah, I was going to say, that wouldn't be secession, that'd be full-on partition. How ugly it would be!

While that looks bad, take into account population density.

the more I see people's plans for "civil war" here, the more I want to be an early casualty when it first breaks out

Waterways would be an absolute disaster here. Every river polluted by the “conservative” areas. To say nothing of land management, roads, airports, and freight

I specifically chose the worst thing I could find!

how are we even defining 'progressive' vs 'conservative' here

RIP to like every smaller blue city in a red state, it was nice while we were allowed to live here

badly!

I am guessing (county) level voting data. Areas that vote Dem in modern era = Progressive. Areas that vote GOP in modern era = Conservative Towns/cities tend to be more Democrat leading and these areas are (usually) along major highway routes

As with Gerrymandering, to create a partition you need to have areas next to each other, so a blue area that is unconnected to others cannot be part of the "progressive' partition just as a red area surrounded by blue ones (guessing some in the NE) can't be part of conservative.

kind of wild how this has stuck with me over the years www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/89734/...

An Empire Wilderness by Robert D. Kaplan: 9780679776871 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Bookswww.penguinrandomhouse.com "Full of surprises and unusual revelations . . . an informed and disturbing portrait of the new American badlands."--Chicago Tribune "[Kaplan is] tireless, curious, and smart....

I notice that by that map, they ain't got a shitload of good ports....

Charleston & Mobile, pretty much. Wilmington. What's old is new again

..... which Charleston are you thinking of? Because Charleston, South Carolina (admittedly, I'm biased in thinking it's that one, I live in South Carolina) is in the progressive region.

Oh, so it is. That's what I get for not looking very closely

No worries.

On the plus side, progressives have access to a lot of coastlines while conservative areas are mostly landlocked.

for now

This is a fun map to overlay with US nuclear missile silos. We are spending more money than God developing a next gen ICBM (to the point it risks cancellation), and it's designed to fit in existing concrete structures!

Paradox Plaza gore

Yeah, put the conservative capitol in Dallas. There's no history of anything bad ever happening to a President there. *puts finger to imaginary earpiece* I'm being told I'm wrong.

Well something good happened to LBJ there, it’s a push

Love the tiny strip of blue crossing Idaho along the I-90 corridor. I am already dreading making that drive later this summer. At least we'd get (most of) Yellowstone National Park?

The blue bits are still drivable.

that's several diff countries... that arrogance has been going on for a couple hundred years... it def pop under that kind of nonsense.

good font choice

The book itself fell of the rails, but in "Fall or Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson, he came up with a pretty convincing, and terrifying way this could happen. The outcome looked a lot like this.

The dystopia he presents in Snow Crash seems like a likely possibility too… devolving into privately controlled city states

I think that one thing he gets better than a lot of scifi writers is the near future dystopia (SevenEves and the social media wars are another example of this) he just... really needs an editor to help him because you can tell almost to the page when he gets bored and is like "new thing now"

Yeah, reading some of his stuff takes COMMITMENT. The 200ish pages of world building before the plot really kicks off in Anathem could have been condensed…

This is actually one reason I think Rise and Fall of DODO worked so well, because he had a co-author. It felt very different, but still fun, and FAR more cohesive

Texas is funny bc while they pick up Houston, San Antonio and El Paso, they leave out not only the capital Dallas but also Austin

I know this isn't meant to be serious, but the blue areas would get much wealthier and the red areas would get *much much* poorer.

Dallas would again be insufferable with the revival of "world class" being prefixed to *everything*

What a wild map, just no sense of geography

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