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Almost Missouri views localism and agorism as dead ends:
Several states tried this in 1861. It turned out the the President did indeed have that power, that power and more, so much more, never mind it wasn’t in the Constitution.
A couple of generations ago a few school districts tried to go their own way, not even seceding, and wouldntcha know it suddenly they were filled with Federal troops even though the Governors hadn’t asked for them. Again not in Constitution.
Kinda weird how that keeps happening.
Just because you’re a decent guy who will leave others alone to pursue their own happiness, doesn’t mean that they will do the same for you. They won’t. If the cities—and the City of DC in particular—were content to do things their way while the outback did things a different way (i.e., if they were truly “multicultural”), then you would be correct: leave them to their own devices and they’ll leave you to yours. But they aren’t truly multicultural, and they won’t leave you alone.
Contrary to the frame you apparently carelessly accepted from the media, it is not the Red Rustics who incessantly poke the hornets’ nest on the other side of the political fence. It is the Blues who cannot rest until all Redland bakers are gay-sued, all Red towns are Section 8-ed, all Housing is Affirmatively Furthered, all refugees are resettled, all bathrooms are trannied, all schoolchildren are gender neutered, all abortions are on-demanded, all guns are controlled, and all speech is policed and all pronouns are preferred. Red America didn’t send Trump to Washington because we want to move into Georgetown condos. We sent Trump to Washington to make Washington’s provocations stop. He failed. So a bunch of us went there personally to make our displeasure known, or “petition for redress of grievances” as a quaint but apparently long obsolete document puts it.
But hey, if you can get Blue America to sign up for the same thing, you’ve got a deal. (Note that the deal will have to have a nuclear-strength enforcement clause as Blue America has never once stuck to its side of a political deal.)
tl;dr: Localism only works if both sides agree to it. One side never has. That side happens to have infinite currency, the world’s most powerful military, a global media monopoly, and as of Monday a permanent hammerlock on the political process, oh and a bottomless appetite to impose its will on others. Plan from there.
Marijuana legalization came about in the face of federal opposition. It occurred in direct violation of federal law. States started legalizing it, the feds pushed back a little, and then essentially gave up. The feds couldn’t enforce compliance without the cooperation of the states. Well, they could have tried to force the issue militarily, but the public backlash would’ve been very hostile to that kind of federal action. The herculean task at hand is to foster an atmosphere where the same sort of negative public backlash will occur in the case of a part or parts of the country being militarily prevented from partially seceding.
Full political dissolution is unlikely prior to the breaking of the US dollar, but decentralization can begin in a thousand different ways before that. As far as “plan from there” goes, what is the better approach? We’re perilously close to what could be the beginning of an American Thirty Years’ War that will leave everyone worse off for the wear. Maybe it’s too late to diffuse the situation, but it’s worth trying.
dfordoom on fertility and modernity:
In the developed world fertility rates have plummeted pretty evenly across all races and ethnic groups.
It’s not a race problem, it’s a problem with the developed world.
In anticipation of the objection that sub-Saharan Africa refutes this, consider South Africa. The country has a TFR of 2.2, just a smidge above replacement. Niger, in contrast, has a TFR of 7.0. South Africa’s purchasing power parity is over ten times that of Niger’s. Developing Africa–easier said than done, though China is giving it a shot–is probably the best chance the continent, and the rest of the world, has of managing the population explosion Africa is experiencing.
Do lack of resources have an effect on fertility in the present age? That seems a matter of some dispute, but it’s at least a much, much less important factor than it was in the pre-industrial world.
Setting aside Christian morality, a matrilocal free-for-all with early first pregnancies, weak marriages, relatively few patriarchal features, and men and women mostly living separately, was historically the optimal arrangement for maximizing fertility, as existed in those parts of Africa where the population size was primarily kept in check not by a dearth of resources (as in Eurasia) but by an excess of deaths due to violence, animal attacks, and disease.
But right now, while matrilocal free-for-alls are far more viable in Eurasia than they’ve ever been, they’re still not all that common, or producing all that many children, despite some exceptions within the lower classes (especially but not exclusively among the African diaspora). I think a large cause of this is that such arrangements are considered very low status — civilized places have discriminated against single motherhood for untold millennia, and that’s not going to change overnight. While the stigma has softened quite a bit against the sort of single mother who slipped up a time or two and got impregnated by a cad, the “Octomom” example of willfully producing a gaggle of children without a father figure is still widely reviled.
Another factor is that matrilocal arrangements seem to have arisen out of the state of nature, and they’re highly vulnerable to suppression by any sort of birth control, perhaps more so than under patriarchal, monogamous systems where birth control of one form or fashion has always existed and the birth of children was generally more deliberate.
So right now, society doesn’t really have a model for producing children that’s adapted to present cultural and material circumstances. And for such a model to arise spontaneously via natural selection would take a very long time, and it’s made harder by the fact that cultural and material conditions keep changing at a pretty rapid pace.
The result is that fertility is highest right now in cultures that place themselves in opposition to modernity — a force that caused the old patriarchal, monogamous model to both weaken and to produce fewer children even where it’s mostly intact. There hasn’t been enough time to invent a new model, and so what works is the old model, kept in a time capsule. Hence the Anabaptists and Hassidim, who have religious reasons for rejecting modernity and for passing this down from generation to generation.
Though the religious outbreed the irreligious in the developed world, religiosity and fertility both continue to decline. At some point this may reverse but it looks like it will be generations in the future with a long way for total population to decline between here and there.
