Ihado planning to invade Oregon

[Ted King]

DeusxMac wrote:
[quote=kj]
Eastern Oregon is a lot more like Idaho (ranching, agriculture, etc.) than the coast, so it's not really nonsense. The same is true of northern Idaho, which has a lot more in common with Washington state than southern Idaho, so I get that too, but as said, stuff like this has been going on all my life, and it doesn't happen. But it makes some sense.

That rational could be applied to every State in the Union to some degree: coastal California counties and the inland counties; southern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, southern Florida and the Panhandle, northern Illinois and southern Illinois, etc.
The other day I posted about homogeneity and pluralism within nations with respect to how much we should respect the "sanctity" of national borders. Should Scotland not be able to become a separate nation if a super-majority of the people vote to do so? The Scots have made significant threats to do so. And French speaking Canada?

I used the term "granularity" (in the "finely detailed" sense). In this context I mean that outside of some small areas there is usually some notable diversity of populations within a country. Sometimes those differences lead to a sentiment to split - at least on one side. We could look at it in more and more detail - more granularity - until we split families apart based on differences on what movie to watch on movie night in the ridiculous extreme.

So if the Eastern part of Oregon split off to join Idaho because most Idahoan's "conservative" values line up more with most Eastern Oregonians, what happens to the liberals in those areas that felt their representation in the Oregon state government was fine? Too bad, right. Well, why not just too bad for the Eastern Oregonians "stuck" in Oregon? What level of granularity of "too bad" should we go by?

As you say, there is no practical likelihood of a border change between Oregon and Idaho so it's kind of a moot point in this instance, but when a "splitting" is considered, I think that often the granularity problem is underappreciated.