the states that border the Colorado River go to war over water rights
Have you read "The Water Knife"? This is basically the background to the story (though they're in a cold war, and the US nominally still exists, but is allowing states to close their borders to each other).
I remember reading about that book but have no memory of the details and I bet it stuck in my subconscious
Please dont read it. The author is a huge misogynist and sadist and a total raging lib. The premise is basically the whole book, there are a few points of intrigue that are passingly interesting and the rest is just really fetishistic and male gazey portrayals of extreme torture and sexual violence/exploitation including of minors. I am mad at myself for reading three quarters of that book expecting it to get better and it never does and it is my mission in life to make sure no one ever reads it.
Is he? I always got a bad vibe from his stories. But they are horror stories you aren't supposed to like them. My radar isn't the strongest, but I never read it like that. I got the vibe he was blackpilled and taking it out on the reader. Did I miss some discourse? Or did his later works get worse?
just extrapolating from how he presents himself in 'The Water Knife'. The most charitable interpretation I can give is that he has something like Quentin Tarantino on some level having anti-racist feelings but still desperately wanting to say the n-word: he's torn between sexualizing women and being horrified at exploitation which he synthesizes in a really unfortunate way. Personally, I don't think that charitable interpretation is warranted given the scene that made me finally realize how depraved that book is. (CW: extreme violence)
spoiler
The third main character who is 12 (who has virtually no plot impact and really just exists for scenes like this!) has her hand fed to a hyena after watching her protector be tortured to death. Why? Because she did not pay for the privilege of being talked into sex work by her friend who is also brutally murdered in front of her.
No matter what high-minded purpose he's trying to reach with scenes like these, the obvious glee with which their written make me believe he's just an imaginative creep. Hardboiled Marquis de Sade.
Maybe. In an earlier book windup girl the protagonist character is a women who was doing survival sex work and she was written in a compeletly sympathetic light and to my understanding there was no actual sex scenes. It was about her inner life as it related to her making the best of a bad situation, and then doing a hero's journey. Although, my radar might just be miscalibrated.
Hmm... I wonder if writing dystopian novels about the impendong climate collapse, and then living in the impending climate collapse has been bad for his mental health. I know I have seen sensationalist accounts of catels doing stuff like that.
I think your take makes sense though. I was honestly not going to read it anyway just because I don't need that level of horror in my life. Even though I prior had a positive look on him as a writer. So I am never going to have any more context to examine it.
if you're looking for a similar, more hopeful, if somewhat less here's the science I can't recommend 'Parable of the Sower' enough. Also good contrast in terms of presenting sex work and extreme exploitation as a plot and character element in away that is actually insightful and critical—not just fetishistic.
It's really good! Classic noir in a realistic near future apocalyptic Phoenix.
I'm getting mixed messages, what would you say to bubbalu's criticisms?
I don't know anything about the author.
As for the book - it's a noir set in a dystopia. It's not pretty in the slightest, and you should absolutely take those criticisms as valid content warnings. That said - it's a noir. It's about the depths to which human beings can sink. I don't think it's exploitative in that sense; all the violence and sexual abuse is portrayed as repulsive and sordid. It's a hyperrealistic painting of Hell.
I don't think any of the factions in the US are going to be regionalized enough to make a war with borders and territory. Instead there'll be a lot of parallel, unrelated conflicts, happening more often and occasionally overlapping. So the police vs BLM clashes of last year, the battle of Blair Mountain, white supremacist terrorist attacks against governing buildings (last year again lol), all that stuff happening at once. There's a bit of city vs countryside in that, but it's not 100% consistent, and neither of those groups has the ability to take and hold territory, so it can't really become a territory dispute.
That'll all continue onwards while the federal government does less, city governments do more, and state governments get used as proxies by their most powerful cities. The federal government won't officially collapse, it'll just do less and less until some group gathers enough power to do something on a national scale again. Then some leader from that group gets elected president, and the official structures have continuity so we can pretend the collapse didn't actually happen.
what if it happens like in czechoslovakia where we just elected a communist to be intelligence chief and he was like 'ok cia? more like communist intelligence agency amirite'
America has the least politically engaged population on the planet and conflict generally isn't regional. They wont balkanize. usually when countries fall apart they don't split into a bunch of different countries. the reason why they call it balkanization is because it applies strongest to former yugoslavia. There would be civil war but whoever wins would control the whole country. maybe a state or two will split but it's not going to be each state against each other.
This is a good take. I'd also imagine that the military, feds and intelligence agencies would become more powerful, more corrupt and more openly organized crime operations.
maybe a state or two will split
Not even, once >80% of the US technological/industrial might is brought under control clubbing any state into compliance becomes relatively simple. You wouldn't even need to fight just surround and blockade.
From San Diego to Boston, it's the same corn syrup brain. The US will never balkanize.
Unaccounted in this calculation is New England. They're more the maple syrup sort, so they get annexed by Canada.
A state is a monopoly on violence. Our states do not have monoploies on violence.
Our cities do. You know how the police have over the years been turned into occupying armies? This has been accounted for.
So it would become rome. A collection of losely affiliated city states. With petty squabbles and trade deals.
Where it gets intresting is in the bandit country. Out in rural places where there is no monopoly of violence it will fall down to clan structure. Which isn't far off from what we have in tbe Philippines from what I understand. So in rural places you will see a stepp like churn of groups trying to come to power and then being displaced.
I think mexico is way more self sufficent than us and will probably take a good chunk of their land back.
Most places would need to lose a lot of population. The west and the south where we grow food could do okay. But new york is completely unsustsinable. So I can't even being to happen how the east will pan out.
I don't see the army being a big factor as its heavy industry has been distrubted across the states for pork reasons. So good luck keeping cohesion when half the soldiers family are dying and there are no more specially made fancy tires for the trucks.
I wonder about hawaii and what they will do.
this is close to my thinking, except the city police paramilitaries are all right-wing extremists. the liberals have no one guarding the gate. they think guns and violence are too icky, but not even 1/6 or the kidnapping plot against Gretchen Whitmer has caused them to consider cleaning out their police forces of fash and, i dunno maybe arming and deputizing a bunch of communists or anfita. clearly, it's not ideal for them to keep servicing capital, but at least commies aren't in a frenzy fantasizing about putting them against the wall the way the fascists are.
Maybe. I think when the time comes the cops won't bother with the pretense of ideology and just go full warlord. Might just be the cops I know in my area though.
Like, I knew the guy that sold my city's swat tream their steroids. When the time comes those guys will be no different than they are now.
I also wonder what the Hawaiians will do to Zuckerberg's compound on Kauai.
:freedom-hater:
I visisted the island once. Saw some meth country. They gonna do alright
Utah when the Second Coming happens and it turns out the Mormons were right.
Mormons being right would honestly be so much better than our actual current timeline. Which really says something.
I'm basically at a point where I'm rooting for any doomsday scenario that isn't climate change, tbh. Gotta love the underdogs.
If we all instantly die from a solar flare or something, I'd be fine with that. We'd all go together simultaneously, and not much we could've done about that.
I unironically considered trying to get close with some Mormons just because I consider them highly organized enough to sustain themselves post apocalypse. They're often underestimated.
They’d only allow you to join them in the post-fallout times as a full member so pick your poison I guess
Yeah, living a lie myself to survive would be one thing but it'd kill me to raise my kid in a cult like that.
Cascadia vs. US Army remnant vs. Idaho Free Dominion over control of the upper Columbia watershed
I don’t really expect the US to Balkanize, I expect it to collapse. I’m expecting Syria but bigger and with more guns
The Dakotas will fuse together and immediately descend into civil war
If it happens, it won't be along state lines. It will be a rural vs urban divide, with the suburbs splitting either way, but probably towards whichever side seems likely to win.
i can't imagine having a strong feeling one way or the other on ohio, it's the most average state
A balkanized America would see Texas have an immediate failure of its power grid and general breakdown of emergency services. Border territory and probably large swaths of the infrastructure would get seized by Sinaloas and Golfos. The only territory I imagine staying part of Texas proper would be the strip of land going from Houston to Port Arthur, only because of international oil trading.
The separately maintained grid is the exact reason for why it's terrible. There was a winter storm that knocked out power for 4 million people in February 2011, and then again earlier this year in February and around 500 people died. People were boiling snow for water. They didn't fix the problem for 10 years and it happened again. A 2019 study showed that Texas is the only region of the US with insufficient power reserves to meet peak demands during summer months. With climate change accelerating I can only imagine the problem getting worse.
remember how the Texas grid nearly collapsed last winter? that was at least partially because it isn't sufficiently interconnected with the rest of the North American power grids (primarily so they can avoid muh big government regulation). it didn't, and still doesn't, have enough power generation capacity to compensate for surges in load (i.e. a bunch of people suddenly need electric heating in an area where they usually don't), and they couldn't rely on the rest of the country's grid to supplement.
tl;dr the bigger the grid the better
Some states are net energy exporters to the grid, and others are net importers.
Assuming that state lines don't break down along with state apparatus (whih is a big "if"), then that should give you an idea of who will be okay and who will be in trouble when the lines are cut.
You're assuming that everything will be cut along state lines. It won't, look up "American Nations" to find out why- and also why Texas would be extra fucked.
If a state produces more power than it uses, it will mostly be okay if the lines are cut, assuming the people there continue to operate on a state level. But the lines will probably cut at a very short distance, likely wherever the culture changes, wherever the radius of "people like us" ends (3 Californias, upstate vs downstate NY, east and west PA, north/south FL, north/south IL, lots of different regions in Texas).
It's possible that states (or groups of states) that are culturally homogeneous enough, and also net energy exporters, might reconfigure a grid on the fly that would be better than Texas'.
But take this "cutting the power lines by local boundary" concept, and apply it to all resources. It'd be a shit show. That's why I think it's more likely that people would start to get used to doing a lot more things locally, and then re-constitute regional polities.
