Interesting Links for 03-10-2017

[andrewducker]

Not all disagreements are opportunities to change your own mind

(tags: argument belief )

FactCheck Q&A: the Tories’ plans for student loans

(tags: Conservatives students loans )

Electric car owners 'can drive for free by letting energy firms use battery'

(tags: electricity cars batteries uk )

New 24/7 bus between Glasgow and Edinburgh

(tags: Glasgow edinburgh transport )

You can safely ignore any electricity commentator who uses the word "baseload"

(tags: electricity renewables viaDanielDWilliam )

Gun company stocks soar after Vegas massacre

(tags: guns money death usa business )

London voters happy with Uber decision

(tags: london regulation taxi )

5 Ways To Honor The Victims Of The Las Vegas Shooting Without Being Disrespectful To The NRA

(tags: satire guns usa )

A Tom Petty tribute. With kittens

(tags: cats music death )

Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

(tags: google news fraud OhForFucksSake )

At $50 a barrel, billions in tax breaks keep many oil projects profitable ($2Billion per year)

(tags: oil tax OhForFucksSake )

How is it that so many of us seem to live in different worlds?

(tags: personality society groups psychology )

Sex Differences in Nonhuman Primates

(tags: gender behaviour monkey )

Every Member of Congress Who Took Money From the NRA and Tweeted 'Thoughts and Prayers' to Las Vegas

(tags: usa politics guns )

A map of what it would like if all of the European Independence movements succeeded

Presumably not _all_ as there are some absolutely tiny ones out there.
(tags: independence maps europe )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

If Ireland were unified could we assume that the DUP would constitute an indepedence from Dublin movement?

[calimac]

Of course. That's how the polity of Northern Ireland came into being in the first place; when Home Rule was proposed for the island, the ancestors of the DUP objected.

[danieldwilliam]

In which case the map has a peculiar circular reference error as Northern Ireland constantly shifts from being part of the UK to being part of the Republic and back and ends up existing in some sort of super-position being both fully British and fully Irish and neither British nor Irish.

I wonder if anyone will notice?

[calimac]

Oh, well, the map. I see the map's premise as being the enactment of all changes currently being pressed for. There's a movement to put N.I. into the Republic. (In the States one sees occasional cryptic bumper stickers reading "26 + 6 = 1" - do you ever get those?) But there isn't currently one to take it out, because it's currently not in. What would happen if the map's changes were enacted is not the map's concern, because the map is a hypothetical construct, not an actual proposal.

[danieldwilliam]

I think the various Ulster unionists have some reservations about Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution.

[andrewducker]

Even after the changes following the Good Friday Agreement?

[danieldwilliam]

Yeah, I think so.

The 1999 Good Friday Agreement related change to the Irish constitution shifted the language to a desire for a unified Ireland, if everyone wanted it, through democratic and peaceful means but there is still a desire for a unified Ireland and an extension of Irish citizenship to anyone born in the island of Ireland.

I think there a number of Ulster unionists (not necessarily the DUP or the Ulster Unionists) who are would prefer that the Irish Constitution said "Ireland is the 26 counties in Ireland and Ireland has no interest or claim on the 6 counties of Northern Ireland which are British."

I'm not suggesting that vey many people are very excited about the current Article 2 and 3 language but there will be some.

[calimac]

Yes, but that's not a desire to change the lines currently on the ground, which is what the map is about.

[naath]

Nice map; and we could all be under the umbrella of the EU...

Does the US have part-ofstates that want to be their own states?

[calimac]

"Does the US have part-ofstates that want to be their own states?"

A good question. Not currently, as far as I recall. There have been in the past suggestions that New York City should secede from New York State, most of which it has nothing in common with, but I haven't heard anything about that in a long time. Nor have other regional grumbles within states taken separatist form as far as I know.

However, a few existing states were formed by cutting up previous states, most notably West Virginia which was the loyalist part of Virginia during the US Civil War; and there's even more if you go back to territorial or colonial days. (Where European boundaries are mostly the relics of tribal settlement or conquest, most US boundaries were drawn by government bureaucrats, first in London then Washington, long before any white settlers were on the ground in those spots, and often using inadequate maps, which is why the boundaries are so peculiar.)

What there has been a lot of in the US in recent decades is county secession movements within states, some of which have come to votes. A few of them have succeeded.

[nojay]

I recall seeing stuff in the US blogosphere about the State of Jefferson, an independence movement to take the right-wiing bits out of California and form their own rural poor federally-subsidised third-world dirt-road state and give the Republican Party two extra senators in Washington.

[calimac]

Yes. That slipped my mind, but it was current a long time ago, late 1930s. It was pretty much knocked out of people's heads by the Pearl Harbor attack.

It wasn't a right-wing rebellion - California was far from a left-wing mecca in those days, so there wasn't much for right-wingers to protest against state government for - but a rural protest movement intended more for publicity than as a serious secession attempt. It was the far northern tier of California, plus parts of southern Oregon. It's still remembered, perhaps mostly by right-wing types, but the National Public Radio local network in the area still calls itself Jefferson Public Radio, and they're not right-wingers at all.

It's less known, but the California legislature did actually pass an act in the late 1850s to split the state in two (the line would have gone between Fresno and Bakersfield). It was never acted on by Congress, which would have been the next step in the process, and was probably set aside because of some ugly slavery-related overtones to the business, but that's a story of its own.

[skington]

Buried at the bottom of the "this is how much we're spending on oil subsidies" article is the revelation that cutting the subsidies would only affect 1% of all the CO2 we can or cannot afford to chuck into the atmosphere - i.e. basically nothing at all.