If at first you don’t secede: world-building

Hi, peeps–

A friend of mine sent me a link recently from a…ah…shall we say, more “conservative” website in which there was talk about certain southern states seceding from the U.S. I won’t mention the site or the states. Suffice it to say that if you play on TEH GOOGLE for any amount of time with the word “secession,” you’ll no doubt run across many sites whose visitors spend lots of time grumbling about such.

I don’t want to talk about the historical or political origins of such an argument, n...