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posted by mrpg on Friday October 06 2017, @02:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the nation-state-is-over dept.

Some of the great moments of history sneak up on businesspeople. Two years ago, Britain looked to be Europe's most economically rational country; now its companies seem to be rolling from one economic earthquake to another, with Brexit looking increasingly likely to be followed by the election of a near-Marxist prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn.

Looking back, two things stand out. First, there were some deep underlying "irrational" causes that business ignored, such as the pent-up anger against immigration and globalization. Second, there was a string of short-term political decisions that proved to be miscalculations. For decades, for example, attacking the European Union was a "free hit" for British politicians. If David Cameron had it to do over again, would he really have made the referendum on whether to stay in it a simple majority vote (or indeed called a vote at all)? Does Angela Merkel now regret giving Cameron so few concessions before the Brexit vote? Would the moderate Labour members of Parliament who helped Corbyn get on their party's leadership ballot in the name of political diversity really do that again?

Now, another rupture may be sneaking up on Europe, driven by a similar mixture of pent-up anger and short-term political maneuvering. This one is between the old West European democratic core of the EU, led by Merkel and increasingly by Emmanuel Macron, who are keen to integrate the euro zone, and the populist authoritarians of Eastern Europe, who dislike Brussels. This time the arguments are ones about political freedom and national sovereignty.

Eastern Europe's gripes are nothing a little anschluss couldn't cure.


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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 06 2017, @09:06AM (7 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday October 06 2017, @09:06AM (#577898) Journal

    Maybe they need a compromise where each new state has to come in with another on the other side of the political divide, as in, one red and one blue. Dividing California in half would do that, with the red half balancing the blue Puerto Rico.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @01:06PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @01:06PM (#577983)

    Sacrificing one of the largest states and probably the one with the biggest economy to allow in a tiny speck of a ruined island as a state makes NO SENSE AT ALL.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 06 2017, @04:31PM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday October 06 2017, @04:31PM (#578097) Journal

      If you let Puerto Rico get too ruined, the 3.4 million AMERICAN CITIZENS within will flood into the mainland, maybe change a couple states to Democrat. No amount of chucked paper towels can stop it.

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      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @06:55PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @06:55PM (#578228)

        Most Puerto Ricans already live in the mainland U.S.
        Leaving Puerto Rico is nothing new.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DECbot on Friday October 06 2017, @04:33PM

      by DECbot (832) on Friday October 06 2017, @04:33PM (#578101) Journal

      If we're granting statehood to incompetently managed, corrupt islands, Puerto Rico should be inducted with Guam as the 51st and 52nd states.

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      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday October 06 2017, @05:38PM (2 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday October 06 2017, @05:38PM (#578161)

    What are you talking about? North/south, there's no "red half" of California, they're both blue, with LA/SanDiego in the south and SanFran/BayArea in the north. You'd have to do some kind of east-west divide, but that would look ridiculous; the two states would be impossibly long and narrow, and the eastern side wouldn't have much population, mainly just Sacramento, and possibly Fresno depending on where the line is.

    I say we break Texas in half, along with California. That should solve this problem.

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 06 2017, @06:12PM (1 child)

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday October 06 2017, @06:12PM (#578196) Journal

      The Bay Area is the middle. The northern half would start north of there. People have proposed it as the "State of Jefferson [wikipedia.org]." Culturally, though, it would work better to separate the coast from San Diego to the Bay Area from the rest of the state. The Central Valley, north, and east of the Sierras are all quite red.

      Dividing Texas doesn't make much sense, though. Once you pop Austin out of the middle you've broken the blue out from the red.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday October 06 2017, @09:25PM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday October 06 2017, @09:25PM (#578346)

        The far north area I don't think has enough population to be a viable state. It's too rural. There's not even any real cities up there. If they're unhappy, what they should be lobbying for is seceding from California and joining Oregon. That's sorta what the "Jefferson" proposed state in your link does, by taking some parts of Oregon. That's not a terrible idea; the rest of OR could merge with WA.

        Dividing Texas makes sense from the standpoint of making the US states more equal in population. I don't know where you'd divide it, perhaps north-south, with the Amarillo part merged with OK, and maybe splitting off the far-west part with El Paso and merging that with NM. It'd probably also make sense to break off the far-east part and merge that with LA.