> It’s reminiscent of the plan suggested by a school teacher, to dam the San Francisco Bay, which was taken seriously enough to be modeled to scale by the military.

For those unaware, I learned of this plan via this short Tom Scott video. Fascinating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i70wkxmumAw (4:33)

This was just to get the conversation started. It was very accurate that the Treaty of Versailles was inadequate, but us evaluating this concept is the same as people 100 years from now evaluating some random map on a Medium article that got 2 claps. Its relevance is not worth entertaining, while it can be used to see the sentiment of the day.

Outside of the box indeed.

I mean, there are dopey ideas galore, starting with the wedged sectors, and then married women over 20 cannot vote, Sweden took a sizeable chunk of Finland, and Norway got the Kola Peninsula, Finland took East Karelia and then some, Estonia and Latvia are part of Greater Russia, the Hebrew Nation encompasses the area all the way north of Beirut, that massive neutral zone in Sinai, Greece takes south Italy and Sicily, Sardinia belongs to Spain, Serbia and Albania are joined, and so on.

The colonial map (#2104.02) is also something.

It's too bad one cannot simulate this to know if the ideas would actually had had an effect in the upcoming WW II and so on.

When this was written a married woman was required to obey her husband in all matters. This meant that she would vote for whomever he told her to vote for, effectively giving each man two votes. So it made sense to disallow this.

Yes, it's a good point.

However, it sounds like an unenforceable thing. As secret votes have been around since ancient Greece, one could have said "I voted for X" when the real vote went for Y, and no-one would've been any wiser.

Villages and towns are split now. There are hundreds of locations around the EU where different sides of a street are in different countries - or (worse now) straddling the UK/Ireland border.

Which is not to suggest that pie-shaped political geography is a good idea. But splitting towns is much less of a show-stopper than old-fashioned tribal and religious affiliations.

It's not just Ireland. There are towns crossing the English-Welsh border and English-Scottish border which has been an issue with the increasing fragmentation of the UK in the last year. Particularly in lockdowns people officially can't go to their local shops as it's "over the border". Pretty ridiculous but it reinforces the idea that UK is looking more and more like separate areas -- an idea that the present government appears to want to support?

I don't think it's just the lack of respect for the Good Friday Agreement (I wonder if Raab has read it yet) the unity of the UK as a whole is looking quite strained to me.

[Just my private opinion.]

This caught my eye last week, since the football stadium is built over the England/Wales border, and the two places have different rules on using indoor toilets at public events during lockdown:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/24/cross-border-t...

Wow, thanks for posting that; even more ridiculous than I thought!

I think the impracticality of the borders is purposeful, a suggestion that you might want to leave room for some cultural differentiation here and there, but not really have border checks or any other limiting elements that give them any kind of practical importance.

> but it’s impressive that people could seriously entertain such out of the box ideas as recently as 100 years ago.

I don't know if there was any other period in history than 1920 when this sort of thing could have popped up. It was exactly the period of time when people seemed to have been swept up by all sorts of incredibly idealistic/weird/outrageous/revolutionary/utopian ideas. This is the period when things like Communism, Anarchism, and places like Fordlandia seemed like a good ideas. Also notably League of Nations itself came from that period.

Also I'm not sure how seriously this idea was really entertained even at the time, and how much it was just regular crackpottery that happens to have survived.