Aside from that, I’ve also been known to cheer secession of any sort. My thought is that if we are to have states, we’re better off having as many as possible. It’s difficult to imagine the horrors of the World Wars, for example, if Germany had remained a loose confederation of roughly-sovereign principalities bound together as part of the Holy Roman Empire instead of becoming a roughly modern nation-state at unification. Likewise America under the Articles of Confederation, with reference to the War of Northern Aggression and everything going on today.

There’s no doubt that the USA is weird. It is full of bizarre people, with bizarre ideas, wacky religions, and kooky behaviors. But, Americans rightly blame it all on California. So, if California seceded, we could get back to something akin to normal.

California is admittedly outrageous. Those of us who have lived there and traveled in California extensively know this to be true. It is full of bizarreness, weird ideas, crazy oddballs with heretical religions, and behaviors that would make a nun perish from shock. Californians, with complete justice, blame it all on Los Angeles. So if Los Angeles seceded, the rest of California could get on with encouraging San Francisco and Silicon Valley to secede.

Now, Los Angeles is freaky beyond belief. To suggest that some lunatics are roaming free in LA is to promote the idea that Angelenos are not all entirely nuts. I’ve spent many unpleasant weeks in the LA basin, and I know it is true. What’s more, many Angelenos are quite willing to admit it, but they blame it all on Hollywood. You can hear them doing so from time to time, nearly anywhere you go in LA. So if Hollywood seceded, the rest of LA could get on with getting on. Or pretending that there is something in the San Fernando valley besides vacuous shoppers and barely legal porn starlets.

Hollywood blames it on West Hollywood, and who can argue? It’s “turtles turtles turtles, all the way down.”

The interesting thing about Brad’s proposal is that the secessions could continue down to the quantum unit of political energy, the individual. And if that were done, we might at last find the one weirdo who is making reality his bitch. When he secedes….a splendid time for all.

re: “So we cannot support secession unless the seceding state essentially stops being a state?”

That’s not quite what I suggested. California would only “stop acting like a state” if it recognized an individual right of secession. What I’m suggesting is that if a seceding state explicitly recognized a right of secession for the next smaller size down sub-division, it might be worthy of conditional support (for the secession effort, anyway). The next smaller size down sub-division for the state of California would be its constituent counties and/or large municipalities.

Seems to me that secession is ALWAYS a game of political brinksmanship, with a given group trying to get away with an act that the larger group fundamentally wants to prevent them from performing. It’s a narrow political strategy, not a principled move. Therefore, it seems silly to expect a state to formulate such a magnanimous policy.