It's nothing to do with violence and everything to do with the charade they put on. They didn't forget the plant exists. They allocate for it in appropriations every year, and they accept federal funds every year because the aforementioned contamination has made it an EPA superfund site. They know it would be a political impasse, and they could push Pantex out of the state to avoid the problem - but they don't. The idea of secession was and is, to the majority of the legislature, a tool for agitation. That is why it is hilarious, it's an elaborate exercise in "hear what I say, see not what I do". To think my comment was about "using violence to force other people to be chained to a political union" is to play right into their trick.
I find an interesting philosophical subject in that the last time states seceded from the union for misrepresentation the remaining states declared them in rebellion to the agreement and spent a million lives(on both sides) forcing them back into union. Why not just let them go?
Today given the outcomes of said conflict, it is generally agreed that this was the correct thing to do. Are there guidelines for when a secession is a genuine need to preserve local representation and when it is a gross attempt to preserve local culture that right thinking people have deemed illegal and are trying to stamp out?
> Are there guidelines for when a secession is a genuine need to preserve local representation and when it is a gross attempt to preserve local culture that right thinking people have deemed illegal and are trying to stamp out?
I think the Civil War is a rare, almost singular, example of the latter.
Because a poltical union is not just something where you get things, but also a commitment (some would say: duty) as e.g. demonstrated by such infrastructure the union put there.
If you want to get out without causing decades of conflict you have to at least get even with them, return things you have gotten through the union and esentially make your secession meaningless.
Seceeding when you hate your neighbours is a dumb and dangerous move, that has historically caused more than one war.
We live in a world where few nations would voluntarily give up their landmass. If we want this changed we need to make it so that borders don't matter anymore (e.g. an overarching governing entity — at least in Europe this has eased tensions between language barriers an places that yearned to receed — but that is a Union).
But the fact remains, just because you live in your own room in that shared rental doesn't mean your flat mates have to tolerate everything you are doing in there if it starts affecting them. We are all connected and pretending that we are not creates situations of tension. The metaphor stops working at some point, because "moving" out doesn't work for countries, at least not on human timescales.
This means there will always be the tradeoff between having binding deals (less freedom to do as you like), but good terms with your neighbours and having no binding deals (more freedom), but being in bad terms with them (on the upper end of that scale we have North Korea).
So freedom for geographic landmasses is always paradox in a sense. Cutting all ties to your neighbours will make you more free to decide laws and regulations they or your deals with them wouldn't allow, but it comes with consequence that you are on your own and interacting with them now becomes very much non-free, extremely bureaucratic and burdensome. Just look at Brexit, and there the seceeding part was at least a nation, so that was easy mode.
In the case of Brexit mostly the English laboured under the illusion that you can get the freedom to decide yourself while keeping all the good stuff they gained by being within the union.
Maybe now you might ask why the union wouldn't let them keep the good stuff?
1. It makes the union meaningless. If you allow one part to ignore the rules of the union, but still keep the good stuff, all nations can ignore the rules of the unions and keep the good stuff
2. Part of the good stuff you gain through unions you gain because your law and regulations are aligned with them. E.g. if your food safety standards are compatible you can get food that has been checked at your place and sell it all over the union without having to check again. This kind of compatibility has to exist in many places. If you are out of the union you got the freedom to have your standards diverge, but if you let it come to that guess what, you got the freedom to fuck up your ability to export things and reap the benefits of compatibility. So either you eat it up and live with much more bureaucracy, regulation and checks at your (now: hard) border or you closely mirror union law, without having a seat at the table — call me stuborn, but both do not sound like freedom to me.
Don't get me wrong, real secession can be a legitimate decision, but I think sometimes people wanting it have the wrong idea of what this would mean, which freedoms are gained and which things they would be able to keep.
IMO the best thing is to accept you are part of the world and try to gain favourable terms with those around you, without pretending they have nothing to do with you, just like in real life.
> Seceeding when you hate your neighbours is a dumb and dangerous move, that has historically caused more than one war
Secession is sometimes necessary for freedom and self determination. People should do it more often, instead of trying to live in unworkable Byzantine unions. My home country exists because we seceded from Pakistan. Yes it meant war. Folks like my uncle has to kill a bunch of Pakistanis to do it. But it was totally worth it. We now navigate our own destiny instead of being tied to an overbearing neighbor.
If the US split into 2 then China would offer to help one of the 2 pieces defend itself against the other piece, which greatly strengthens China's position in the world with potentially drastic effects on billions of people, so I hope that anyone talking about secession from the US is at least taking that effect into account.
And: most of the US population is so used to the US dominance of geopolitica, they don't know how much it gains them.
E.g. one of the consequences might be that world business might decide to do business in EUR instead of USD, ending a lot of the ways in which the US currently exploits the situation.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't live in the US, and my place might geostrategically profit from such a split in the long term. But it will be a rude awakening for all the "rugged individualism"-people out there to see just how rugged things get once the US isn't in a position of privilege anymore.
>>>We are all connected and pretending that we are not creates situations of tension.
...among other damage. Believing you're not connected to Rest of World is a symptom of narcissism - an irrational moral blindness where you're trapped screaming with rage inside your own skull because you lack any genuine connection to the world outside, and only ever experience it through a narrow filter of opportunism and antagonism.
Just because you acknowledge some sort of “connection” to others doesn’t mean you want to enter into a political arrangement in which those people can vote on the laws that are binding on you.
True, a necessity to form political unions does not arise. But my point was about the notion of freedom. If we look for example at freedom of speech, the naive assumption would be that people would most free in their speech if everybody ignored others and just spoke their minds. In reality however this leads to people yelling at each other. Turns out the best room for speaking freely (e.g. without having to censor yourself or without pretending you are of your ingroups opinion) is in places where you can trust the participants to both understand you and them wanting to understand you. The point here being that the goal of communication is to have others understand you, not to win against them by yelling them into submission.
A similar paradox applies to the freedom to decide your own laws without having to regard others. You can of course decide to do that, but then you have to be aware that this symbolic act of freedom might in fact have a detrimental effect on your actual freedom (as in: the number of choices you can make).
Most people who operate on a "I won't let them tell me what to do"-mindset don't care about actual freedom, they care about something symbolic. Brexit being a big example of the whole thing. There are whole phone-in radio shows filled with guests unable to answer the question which EU-law violates their freedom.
We need to be aware that a big fraction of The Bad Stuff™ that has ever occured in the political history of the world was due to regular people being whipped into a violent frenzy over purely symbolic problems, which on closer analysis don't have any impact on people's life at all.
The symbolic plane of politics is how they get you — get you to do things you thought you never would — for things that wouldn't even impact your life if you just ignored them. Stay aware of that.
