Independence for Scotland?

[Space Tycoon]

Too close to call according to all the polls. Primarily because Salmond has Gerrymandered the polls and our idiotic political 'masters' let him.

As well as the fact that there is a lot of support for independence regardless.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Remember that time the U.S. voted for independence from Britain?

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Unfortunately (Fortunately?), Scotland's not over 3,000 miles away from England. That factored in, somewhat.

[Space Tycoon]

In two alternate universes, Canada is either a) separated into independent nations/regional states, or b) absorbed into the USA.

I can see at least one positive result from a US-Canada merger: First Canadian President of the United States of America.

Looser weed laws, baby.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I like that Canada's Canada. I like the idea of Canada.

[Space Tycoon]

Well, thank you from a Canadian. One reason I can't diss the British Empire too much, is that it eventually made Canada happen, as well as other similar countries.

[Adam54]

So "No" is up roughly 55-45 thus far, but Edinburgh is still out, though the experts on BBC are saying the "Yes" vote needed to do better in Glasgow than it did.

So...."no" is perhaps safe here?

[Adam54]

And the BBC just declared "No' the winner!

[Dalty]

Yawn...... stretch......

Oh bollocks. Looks like we are fucking stuck with them.

[Space Tycoon]

[Dalty]

Everything is better with Huey Lewis' News!

[Corporal_Hicks]

Thread title should be: "Independence for Scotland? Not!"

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

[Dalty]

I see a poll today says 24% of Americans want to secede from the Union.

[Space Tycoon]

I understand there's some strong sentiment in Texas and Alaska for secession.

Also, there's strong irredentist movements among the Hispanic population in the Southwest, "La Raza" and so forth.

There used to be talk of Black nationalism and/or separatism, but I'm not sure how that would work, since African Americans are not identified with a particular geographical section of America.

[Dalty]

Is there any legal mechanism for any of that to happen? Or to stop it?

[Space Tycoon]

I don't know. Probably yes and yes. For both.

[neglet]

Nothing in the Constitution addresses or allows for secession, so the answers are no and no. Hence the Civil War, which was litigated on the battlefield and not in the courts.

[Space Tycoon]

Which is unfortunate, because so many lives would have been spared otherwise.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

White lives? Black lives? Both?

A lot of the people who play the woulda-coulda-shoulda game with the U.S. Civil War focus on the loss of (mostly) white soldiers' lives. That's probably because better records were kept for soldier deaths than were ever kept for slave deaths.

It's also just harder to quantify the number of slave deaths over any specific stretch of time. You have to figure in not only the number of people brought over as slaves, but the number of people born into slavery. You have to figure how many died en route to ships, how many died while crossing over (the percent of those who died in transport is staggeringly high), how many were killed by other people during slavery, and how many were killed by diseases and poor conditions during slavery. You also have to ask yourself if a slave's natural death following a long life of slavery should count, since it could be argued that a death while a slave is still a death under slavery.

Wondering all this stuff tends to send a person on a winding conjecture safari. It leads to the raising of questions like these: How many slaves died during the Civil War? (Note: I don't mean black soldiers. I mean the slaves who died as slaves while working for the CSA during the Civil War.) How many slaves would go on to die if the Confederate States had been allowed a peaceful secession? How many slaves would have died if the Confederate States had chosen not to secede? How many slaves would have died if, despite the secession in 1861, the seceded states had chosen to honor the Emancipation Proclamation? How many slaves might have continued to die in South America and the Caribbean if slavery had gone on longer in the U.S.? (Slave trading was technically abolished in most of the Americas south of the U.S. before the 1840s, but emancipation for many of the slaves wouldn't come for decades. Despite the abolition of the slave trade, slavery kept on keeping on in South America and the Caribbean until just after the U.S. Civil War. There's a chance it might have gone even longer if the U.S. Civil war hadn't happened. There's also a chance it wouldn't have. A shit-ton more slaves were sent to South America and the Caribbean, by the way, than were ever sent to the U.S.)

There's no real way of knowing any of this stuff. Whatever the case, I guess it's a shame a bunch of white people died while fighting over whether or not it was right to continue treating non-white people as though they were subhuman.

I'm generalizing, of course. You can't 1:1 these things. A death's a death, and it's a shame anybody had to die over any of this.

I say you can't 1:1 these things, but I feel like I've heard there were roughly half a million soldiers killed during the U.S. Civil War, and I also feel like I've heard that the U.S. netted half a million slaves over the years. (This is excluding the ones who died en route. I think the half a million figure comes from adding the number of successful transports to the number of people born into slavery. I'm not going to look it up, because that would require looking it up, and I have a reputation of not looking things up to uphold.)

[Space Tycoon]

Well, in the context of the Civil War I was talking about the soldiers and civilians killed as a direct result of the war.

The conjecture game can be played with many conflicts: how many people would have continued to die in Iraq if Saddam had been kept in power; would the bloodbath in Southeast Asia have been lesser or worse if there had been no intervention by the US and the USSR; would the Second World War really have been averted if Hitler had been stopped immediately, or would it simply have taken a different course, perhaps with Stalin remembered as The Big Bad of the 20th Century; so on and so forth.

I've heard conjecture that the North could have simply paid for the freedom of southern slaves and bypassed war altogether. Not sure how that would have played out in real life, but it's worth considering.

[Dalty]

The post referendum fallout has started. Major split developing on the left re: the West Lothian question.

[Space Tycoon]

In Canada we call this the Neverendum.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

That's pretty Neverendumb.

[Dalty]

If half the people where I lived thought they were French and wanted to fuck off, I would let them.