Not sure what the point is here exactly. Every single country that has ever had a revolution had to deal with these things.
The point is that if you convince yourself there’s no chance of succeeding, then maybe you won’t feel so guilty about not even trying.
Yes let’s downplay the US military like it’s just any other. No biggie
the military is what the ghandi trap is for. one doesn’t defeat them in combat, we be brutalized by them publicly in a way that radicalizes enough of the remaining population that they have to kill everyone in order to prevent the revolution.
so in order for it to work you have to lay the groundwork beforehand teaching people how to have empathy for the victims of systematic violence. in which your enemy isn’t the military but propogandists.
I remember some guy from history saying something along the lines of “turn the other cheek”, if only I could remember who that was and what happened to them and if they achieved any sort of meaningful impact on society.
Don’t think that was Ghandi but it was definitely a winning strategy in gaining India’s independence.
however, as a counter point to that comic:
Yeah my point was rather that “we can conquer with peace” is a few thousand years old, at least. Jesus, Gandhi, all of them.
And exactly because it was working, they got killed. Little men in power got scared.
Edit Also I don’t really understand what I’m looking at. Fallout 3 pipe gun prop? Prolly a diy gun. But in the US lots of those rely on parts that are free to buy. Making a pipe shotgun isn’t too challenging… but something like a repeating pistol? That’s a bit more work.
that’s valid. I would like to propose that the ghandi trap and conquering with peace are a useful technique among many that we must use. like, it’s specifically for militant violence like those individuals were facing but it’s countered with proganda like the past three decades of fox News has produced.
so sometimes ducktape Shinzo Abe guns are necessary too, so is deradicalizing the old-heads, and building coalitions like the NAACP
edit: shit, yeah I should explain. that’s the gun that was used to kill Shinzo Abe, former nationalist PM of Japan
You forgot to mention Abe’s enabling of the Moonies cult, who exploited the assassin’s mother. After that made headlines, opinions on Abe shifted and started actions to address the issue (dissolution, looking into corruption etc).
shit, yeah I should explain. that’s the gun that was used to kill Shinzo Ab
Aah. That makes sense.
Yeah pacifism should be a priority but it isn’t always the answer. Like it would not have been the right choice for Jews in WWII, it wouldn’t have been the right choice in Rwanda or Cambodia, and it doesn’t really work in Gaza either.
Sometimes violent resistance is necessary, yes, but for developed counties which still use the pretense of civility, at least that can be broken if nothing else. If peaceful protests are mowed down with military force, it strips all pretense of acting like a democracy.
That’s probably why it’s so hard for Chinese people to see any mentions of a certain place with a name that has a geometrical shape in it. I went to check the Wikipedia page for it and holy shit any mention of anything bad having happened there is pushed down to a subheading of a subheading, and afforded a whole three sentences. There’s obviously a specific article on Wikipedia addressing that, but that being pushed so far down on the main article is clearly China’s doing.
But seeing as the US doesn’t (yet) have such extensive censorship, now would be the time to loudly and non-violently protest before they manage to set up systems which can censor any government violence used to put down peaceful protestors. Afterwards it won’t matter and it’s going to require something more like firebombs and guerilla warfare.
yes, that’s why most revolutions result in dictators.
Yes and they had cooperation and a plan and the US population does not have either.
Given how messy many revolutions were, i don’t think that to have been the case most of the time.
The plan doesn’t have to be complex and e.g. the cuban revolution wouldn’t have been possible without widespread support from people. Also, relatively un-bloody, comparatively, btw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Revolution single digit thousands on both sides? Bloody enough that everyone probably knows someone affected by two or three degrees separation, but besides that?
deleted by creator
And before all, who is willing to intentionally miss (perhaps forever) the remaining episodes of their favorite show to make that all happen?
I don’t think they’re making any more episodes of Firefly
Turns out they could take the sky from us. 😞
Hey you’re here at least - they couldn’t stop the signal.
Until they kill me with a sword. How weird would that be?
Must you upset me so?
Yeah. We can’t even get people to agree to stop using social media networks that spread misinformation and fund the worst elements in society. You can’t even SUGGEST it to them without being met with angry, ignorant, defensive nonsense. If we can’t even manage that, how are we going to convince them to risk everything on revolution? I think we’ve Brave New World’d too hard - the old rules do not apply.
I don’t know what the answer is. But the problem is clear.
i’m kinda hoping that social media gets less interesting over time to many people. the reason why everybody spent 15 hours a day in front of their smartphone for the last 2 decades was mostly because of the novelty of it all. once we’ve seen it all, it’s less interesting and people will stop using it so much.
I’d like to think so too, but there’s a whole generation growing up without anything else in their reference frame to switch to - this IS their lives. It’s easy for old farts like me to change to something else - we had a couple decades BEFORE the internet.
oh at some point smartphones were new and unfamiliar, and still they captured people’s attention. this means that something else can capture people’s attention as well, in the future.
I’m not currently on any shows or series, so…
Kurzeghast(sp) has a great little video that ends with essentially “there is literally nothing stopping us from having a better healthy post scarcity society but ourselves. There is no reason for it except for the mindset that perpetuates that we can’t”
There are also lots and lots of guns wielded by lots of misguided poor people being paid by very rich people who have nearly infinite resources at their disposal.
I’m not saying the conclusion is wrong - but it’s not easy either.
Strap up
*****🔫
“Kurzgesagt” is German for “briefly put.”
Yeah I knew I would butcher it
I think the English channel used to be called “in a nutshell”
No, the English Channel used to be called “Oceanus Britannicus”
How about “curtly said”?
Curtness is not implied here.
It certainly is. “Curt” and “brief” are synonymous, at least in some definitions. Curt has an implication of rudeness but that is not strictly so.
It would be simpler to avoid the implication by using a more apt term.
“In short” would be another less-incorrect translation, but I think “briefly put” is more elegant in conveying the tone of the message.
Well, I think they subtitle it “in a nutshell” which is also more elegant but less literal.
Translation does not require literalness. That’s arguably the most elegant given the apt idiom.
There is no reason for it except for the mindset that perpetuates that we can’t
Theoretically every human could just cooperate too, but that’s not how humans work. Humans are animals and a lot of society exists to suppress and channel animal behaviours.
We should try, bit by bit, to get to a post-scarcity society, but we should also acknowledge it’s going to be hard and take a long time.
I fail to see what that has to do with a violent uprising.
Not to mention, “how is someone supposed to organize any of this without getting disappeared by the FBI or CIA.”
Easy. Get disappeared by ICE instead.
Most of the people here live paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford a $500 emergency.
So the risk of even just getting arrested, and held in custody for a week, would be enough to ruin one’s life.
That puts a damper on protesting, until you or your family are directly impacted. It also inhibits willingness to strike.
And it also explains why so many protesters are of retirement age – they don’t have a job to lose if they miss work unexpectedly for a few days.
In a lot of ways, we were already conquered.
Wow, I’m three days late, sorry.
But of course no one can fight back alone. This is why you have to start grassroots and build up to national movements. Start with mutual aid: helping members of the community with the expectation of being helped in return. Food drives, worker’s co-ops, free daycare services, etc. Once we have community we can push the issue when the time is ripe (e.g., a BLM-level protest). Labor strikes, rental strikes, expropriating food and clothes etc.
Ultimately the same for all other authoritarian states with a “docile” population. Fragile living conditions threaten their livelyhoods, preventing many from joining the fight.
Until those fragile living conditions are threatened. Then people will think “I’m fucked if I do nothing and might not be fucked if I do something. So I will do something.”
Forces of capital have been trying to find the level just above the tipping point for many decades.
What do you think they want all your data for? Yes, it’s to find out what you like to buy, but more importantly the concept is to figure out what levels of discomfort, disappointment or despair you can take before you stop buying the product.
From new phones to life-saving medication for your spouse to how many monthly fees your bank can get away with charging you. They aren’t coming up with prices from nowhere, the money doesn’t represent labor and parts, it represents an adjusted level where enough people will reach before they become a problem.
We were conquered by comfort. We had enough money to throw at those willing to produce things for vast sums of wealth, that we threw vast sums of wealth at them to make us comfortable.
Not secure. Not safe. Not healthy.
Just comfortable. Nice, predictable, reliable routines that give just enough satisfaction to make you feel like you’re not in immediate danger, and for our survivalist brains, that’s enough.
Even our discomfort is comfort. Working 13 hours a day moving other people’s furniture sucks, but you can still scroll your phone, you can still get sugary snacks and a bottle of alcohol at the end of the day. You will still undoubtedly read some story that will make you feel special for working hard, a message that you’re a “real” person and a “true citizen” and that makes you comfortable with your hard days and self-medication to get through the week.
To say nothing of the vast, vast number of people who are completely tuned out from conscious thought and just shuffle from one easy reward to another. Scroll your forums, check your likes, eat your burger and soda, yell at someone on a forum because they don’t like a thing you like. Watch the advertisement for the new thing that successful people own… you can afford one of those things, right? Maybe save up a little longer, and you can get one!
We live in margins of debt and safety, we let culture shape us, we have long since given up shaping it. There’s an app to do that for you.
I disagree that ‘comfort’ was a cause. That line of thinking comes from the same puritanical austerity narrative that has been used to tell the working class that our circumstances are due to poor character rather than because we were talked out of demanding more.
It’s victim-blamey, but like all victim-blaming narratives it has the virtue of restoring a sense of control, a sense of “this is the thing that I can decide to do that would have prevented this.”
…which isn’t to say that I don’t think we can’t identify things that could have stopped this. But I don’t think a vague assertion that people here are more distracted or ‘comfortable’ than elsewhere helps. Also - a lot of people are not comfortable. But they may deal with that by at least enjoying the distractions or not staring into the sun of things they don’t think they can change.
Ultimately, we ended up here through corrupt systems. The Trumpers were right to want to ‘drain the swamp’, they are just so blinded by antimosity that they fell for a grifter because he promised to hurt people.
All the pillars of democracy have been under attack since Reagan - high quality journalism and education to maintain an informed voter base, a voter base with enough time to research issues, and political campaign laws to keep government working in the public’s interest.
Occupy Wall Street tried to sound the alarm, but journalism was already too corrupt and the movement was successfully sold to the public as ‘annoying college kids demanding free things’.
So now we have a significant chunk of the voter base that doesn’t know what habeas corpus is, or anything about how our checks and balances are supposed to look, and thinks what makes this country “a free country” is that we blow shit up with fireworks on July 4th - and doesn’t see why authoritarianism would be so bad.
And the rest of us who are looking on aghast are honestly afraid of our police, of Trumpers openly talking about lynching us (and yes - they have more guns than us. Most liberals still refuse to consider becoming armed), and of losing everything and dying in a prison cell run by a for-profit corp.
This is a stage-4 cancer diagnosis on a social scale, and people are still figuring out if we want chemo or to try to ride this out as long as we can.
On top of that, while conservative social media spaces are full of people threatening violence, all of the platforms are coming down hard on any space that discusses anything more provocative than holding a sign in a nonn-threatening manner in a way that abides any police order given.
There is no place to organize, and no one is proposing or organizing any serious strategy. Seriously – I’ve gone to local meetings, and all any activist org or politician will say is “organize with your neighbors (organize what?) and try to do mutual aid”.
That is not a meaningful response to an organization like the Heritage Foundation.
I think I’ve seen this play out longer than most users here and I have sunk to the realization that we’re not getting better.
My assertation sounds victim-blamey and defeatist because I blame the victims and I feel defeated. Stupidity is easier for most people and so that’s the water-level we all sink to.
I see no way we’re going to get enough people to care about their community and each other more than they care about getting to wal-mart on Friday to stock up on weekend comforts. That’s fucking paradise to the median voter and the bulk of the population we would need to mobilize. There are vast, vast sums of other people’s productive capability being shoveled into the machine to keep people consuming distractions, sugar and sedatives and there’s no way to tell people to stop consuming this self-destruction without an equal measure of vast sums of people’s productive power… but you don’t get that kind of capital to begin with without stealing and exploiting billions so here we are.
No seriously, you have no idea how dark it really is. You haven’t talked to enough people and learned enough neurology to understand how bad this situation is if you’re not victim-blaming also. I spent most of my adult life active and involved and trying to mobilize others and have had to know and understand people’s lives and did my best to be as empathetic and charitable as possible, but when I see all the people actively turning off their higher-cognitive functions on purpose so they can scroll incel-propaganda and racist memes in peace, people who don’t care about politics at all past WWE theater and spectacle sometimes, or an excuse to hate some group of people, I know when we’re at our limit. It’s many factors together, sure, but at the end of the day it’s the people and what they want. They let this happen so on some level they want this and fuck the small minority who don’t I guess. (That small minority is often too busy yelling at each other over problematic tweets and other performative virtue signals to possibly organize and create new movements that average Joe and Jane can get behind.)
I’m just done and ready to bail on the whole continent. The cancer is incurable in its current form, we have no treatment, it may be better for the patient to die and we find a way to start over.
but when I see all the people actively turning off their higher-cognitive functions on purpose
Counterpoint, it’s not all the people. You and I are depressed as fuck, our brains like to tell us that everybody is against us, it’s all worthless, and the only good part is the end, but that’s not very accurate.
I burnt out as a caregiver for developmentally disabled adults, due to lack of support in the community. I was working nights, working with clients that had violent behavior (unfun fact, 100% of people with Down’s Syndrome will develop early-onset dementia), and my friend group imploded with the stupidest drama. It’s too easy for me to think “most people have never had a client have a seizure in the shower and spray shit and vomit all over them, blah blah addicted to comfort”, but it turns out that’s a really terrible way of getting people on your side.
I’m going to a local meetup this weekend to discuss plans and mutual aid in my rural town. There’s not a lot of us, but nobody can argue it’d be better to stay home.
Agreed, it’s so many wrongs built upon a foundation of awful; I think the internet magnifies and accelerates this enshitification. Thank you for your work
I know and understand it’s not literally everyone but I am so used to dealing with statistics in my roles in life that I despair at the ratio. And it’s getting worse. We simply don’t have enough people who actively care about others and their community to turn it around, and the more you try to shake empathy and decency into people, the harder they push back and resist the notion out of emotional insecurity, spite, and their own biases and struggles.
I have massive respect for caregivers, I could barely do it in my own family. The levels of empathy and sympathy you need feel utterly at odds with the general attitudes of most people. I don’t have much in the way of community anymore, but I did try, I even was a political organizer for a spell, but I’ve watched our nation collectively embrace their insecurities and hate. I used to coach young men and provide alternatives to the incel-rhetoric that was spreading like wildfire across the internet, and with hard work and dedication and compassion I saved more than a handful of young men from falling into that darkness… but there are so, so many, and for every young dude you reach and instill the value of love and emotional intelligence, a thousand will fly right past you frothing with hate and malice, and the ones you DO reach, will almost immediately fall right back into the pit as soon as they have a bad day and start scrolling the forums again.
I am depressed, yes, but I worked hard on it and have mostly overcome the worst rumination and mental effects. Still though, it’s really challenging to keep any optimism after seeing so many people making the same mistakes over and over for so many years. I don’t know where we’re heading but it’s nowhere good.
Yes, it’s hard and it is getting worse. But the revolution will not be televised. There is an overwhelming interest in keeping people from knowing about each other, they’re not going to make it easy for us to organize. The internet is complicit, as it’s controlled by only a handful of companies, who don’t want to lose their monopoly either.
One of the ways in which to drive a wedge is to highlight the failings of the other side. It’s more personal for you and I, and therefore more effective. We cannot focus more on the failings than on the successes, even if there is more fail than success, because success is birthed from failure. Yes, it feels weird, it feels like you’re ignoring how badly we’re all doing, but we have to keep our eyes forward and not get bogged down with despair.
I saved more than a handful of young men from falling into that darkness
It is just a small thing, but you are only one droplet in a cascade. People who have stood on the precipice and stepped back are in a more valuable position to reach others on the edge of darkness, and you have enabled that to spread. If darkness can spread like a mind-virus, so can the sun.
They always talk how they need guns to prevent tyranny and they are in a tyranny for over 6 months now and nothing…
That was never the reason.
Like anything else, conservatives only want things because smarter people suggest to them that they don’t need them.
Guns, unhealthy food, horse paste, religion, fossil fuel power, gendered bathrooms…
Everything is pigheaded contradiction like a 2 year old.
I’m very ready to defend myself against the Nazis. And I’m regularly on the outside of protests in my area just waiting for one of these fuckers to hurt anyone. And there are plenty of us there.
You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
Okay, I overgeneralized… I don’t mean EVERYONE who owns guns falls into that category.
But you can’t deny it’s the vast majority, and at the very least the LOUDEST group.
Edit: Oh, it’s you again! Hey, buddy! How’s life?
Maybe loudest. But 15-30% of Dems, depending on what your reading, already own guns compared to 30-40% GOP’er. Hardly a peer reviewed paper but it’s easy to immediately dismiss vast majority.
We’re far off topic but stop acting like progressives aren’t ready to defend themselves. You’re making excuses for your own unpreparedness.
Okay, before we get too far into ANOTHER argument here based on taking a generalization as a universal assertion…
I’m not saying progressives aren’t ready to defend themselves, I’m not saying progressives don’t own guns, I’m not saying every gun owner is this.
I was responding to this:
They always talk how they need guns to prevent tyranny and they are in a tyranny for over 6 months now and nothing…
Which is very clearly talking about a VERY SPECIFIC kind of VERY VOCAL gun owner. I’d like it very much if you could just take my acknowledgement that I asserted something about a group that DOES NOT apply to everyone as the grumbling, empathizing complaint about conservatives it was intended to be, and we can both just get on with our days without degenerating into another unnecessary, pointless slap fest.
Honestly a whole bunch of somewhat respectable progressive comedians and whatnot who I know have gotten guns in the US and I don’t really fault them that much with how shit is going.
They’re plenty available and if you don’t have kids in the house you need to worry about, why not? It’s not like the gun companies are gonna shut down via boycott of some leftists.
Harmontown - Shooting Range Suicides And Why Dan Bought A Gun
Horse paste
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3043740/
Discovered in the late-1970s, the pioneering drug ivermectin, a dihydro derivative of avermectin—originating solely from a single microorganism isolated at the Kitasato Intitute, Tokyo, Japan from Japanese soil—has had an immeasurably beneficial impact in improving the lives and welfare of billions of people throughout the world. Originally introduced as a veterinary drug, it kills a wide range of internal and external parasites in commercial livestock and companion animals. It was quickly discovered to be ideal in combating two of the world’s most devastating and disfiguring diseases which have plagued the world’s poor throughout the tropics for centuries. It is now being used free-of-charge as the sole tool in campaigns to eliminate both diseases globally. It has also been used to successfully overcome several other human diseases and new uses for it are continually being found.
Research takes like, no effort. Still perpetuating this “it only for horses” bullshit does nobody any good. “Viruses aren’t parasites,” is better.
It still doesn’t do shit for covid, but it is widely used to great effect in humans for, y’know, what it actually does do. Hell maybe RFK needs a dose lol.
The point you’re missing is that MAGA morons aren’t getting human prescriptions for ivermectin, they’re buying the emulsified horse paste from farming supply stores because they don’t need to go through a medical professional for that.
Appropriately dosed ivermectin is quite safe, but these people are eyeballing horse doses and ending up with fulminant liver failure.
Tbf they could actually math out the dose, and it is the same stuff. Same with fish antibiotics actually, and people without insurance have been doing that for years because our medical system is fucked. If they OD that’s on them, tbh, same as if they took a whole packet of the human pills.
That said, again, in no dose will it ever do what they claimed. It’s still for parasites.
(Side note, not all of them were using the paste. Friend of mine gave me a pack as a joke [still have it, it’s expired now but still funny], he got it illegally from a pharmacy like drugs used to be before xanax became fake bars pressed with fent! Don’t need a prescription when you know a drug dealer either lmao. But those were floating around too for sure.)
I guarantee you that the people gullible enough to fall for the ivermectin lies cannot math out the dose correctly. And yes, the primary problem is that most of these people don’t have parasites (yet, give the raw milk some time) that would actually see any benefit from the drug.
The fish stuff was hydroxychloroquine which is typically used as an immunomodulator for diseases like Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (not an antibiotic), and that’s a medication that has to be dosed very carefully with regular screening labs to ensure that patients don’t end up with organ damage. The stuff for aquariums is in a vastly different concentration (and commonly mixed with all kinds of other stuff), and again, would be profoundly difficult to dose appropriately.
Interestingly, there is some physiologic basis on which hydroxychloroquine may have helped with the original COVID-19 strains. The original strains of the virus early in the pandemic had the ability to hijack immune cells that would then attack and destroy lung tissue, so an autoimmune treatment might have had some benefit had the virus not mutated so quickly.
I guarantee you that the people gullible enough to fall for the ivermectin lies cannot math out the dose correctly.
Ha-ha, but jokes are not reality. I mean, maybe you’d be surprised how many blue collar workers that have to use math daily are maga, but it really shouldn’t be that surprising.
Though yes, it is indeed for parasites, not viruses.
The fish stuff was hydroxychloroquine
Nope, Amoxicillin. Antibiotics given to people with a penicillin allergy (among other reasons.) Though yes, it is a different dose than normal for humans, it is still possible to do math. Of course it’s always better to go to the actual doctor, but welcome to America.
Now that last bit is kind of interesting actually. Didn’t know that, neat!
I remembered there being a spate of people poisoning themselves with Hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic, so that’s what I thought you were referring to.
As far as people being able to do math? There are plenty of people with STEM degrees that struggle with unit conversion and the orders of magnitude of the metric system. The reason pharmacists are so important is because it isn’t uncommon for NPs/PAs, and physicians to write a prescription in milligrams that should have been micrograms. If people with advanced medical education fuck it up, I don’t have high expectations for other folks. Also, there isn’t a lot of readily available information that is accessible to the layperson that explains what dose would be useful/safe.
Edit: ALSO!! AMOXICILLIN IS A PENICILLIN. DO NOT TAKE AMOXICILLIN IF YOU HAVE A PENICILLIN ALLERGY!!!
Be thankful that enough of us are armed that the fascists aren’t yet kicking down doors. Can you imagine where we would be if they could enter any home without fear?
In many successful revolutions, an army was a part of uprising. Serving in the army does not make you any less of a voter.
My biggest fear is what emerges after.
No, no, don’t you know, this time it’ll be different. Every time a government was violently overthrown by the local population what came after was either dictatorship or warlordism. But this time it’ll be different! Trust me, bro!
I’d be willing to accept help from France again
what i’ve learned from history is that the killing doesn’t stop after the revolution, it just continues. if there’s no more nobles to decapitate, then suspected “supporters” of nobles get executed, then just people suspected of being counter-revolutionary (whatever that means).
the killing doesn’t stop after the revolution, that is why it’s best if the revolution itself stays as bloodless as possible.
That’s why it tends to happen only when the “right now” is terrible for enough people. If the options are either living in a dictatorship, and fighting against and possibly not living in a dictatorship, a lot of people might favor trying the latter
To get that kind of momentum going against a literal police state would be difficult to say the least. Such a movement would also likely be smothered in it’s crib by the surveillance state we built ostensibly to keep us safe from the terrorist boogeyman that America created.
Even if the revolutionaries win, there’s no guarantee that the government that comes as a result would be better in any way. Great warriors rarely make great rulers.
This is it. Anyone who might be interested in “fighting back” who has half a braincell knows it’s just not possible. It needs to come from a state, or even a city. It needs to have some political figurehead, some borders, some organization. Taking on the government is not a DIY operation, and said government is not going to let some organization pop up when that organization’s goal is to fight back.
We’ve been “legally” spied on here for my entire adult life, and then some. Brainwashing red hats was the last step.
Violent revolutions almost always result in bad governments for exactly this reason, i.e. it’s only fringe idealists that get it together enough to lead one, and such people are usually terrible at doing actual grown-up governing.
It’s why it’s so infuriating to see right-wingers claim that basic social safety nets and tackling inequality are Communism, because it’s like, if you want Communism then pushing half the population towards that level of desperation is exactly how you end up with it.
We are in the middle of a revolution, just not one of, for, or by the people.
Now that corporations are people, they are “fighting for their rights” to make obscene profits; it’s a “Cash is King” plutocratic revolution.
And the majority of people are libs and conservatives that think ”capitalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the best we got.”
“How would they deal with the army?” Probaby even better then other folks in shitty technicals like Afghanistan and Vietnam did to be honest. They aren’t going to nuke American rebels because then they’d win a big radioactive pile of shit. Think they’d shoot missiles in NYC? Fat fucking chance. Even tanks rolling down Main street is gonna set off alarms.
The soldiers, firing into the crowds, brought death to tiananmen square. Survivors were simply run down. The tanks never fired a shell, because they didn’t need to. In the decades since then, nothing has emerged to shift that power dynamic in the favor of the people.
We’re not worried about missiles, stealth aircraft, armor penetrating rounds, their stupid microwave cannons, drone strikes or whatever other sci-fi bullshit looks good on television. We’re worried about armored vehicles rolling down mainstreet while there are thousands of people there, and the crowd crush that results. We’re worried about one zealous national guardsman with an M2 firing blindly into a march as it crosses a bridge. We’re worried about any leaders that emerge being quietly disappeared overnight, about our families being singled out by a teen at a fusion center that’s watching Joe Rogan on their phone, or about the simple fact that the military could just turn off critical infrastructure and our cities would grind to a halt. We have no way to stop that.
The Oligarchy can only roll over one protest. After that it is guerilla time.
The US is prime real estate for that. Large thinly populated areas, large remote mountain areas, densely populated urban areas. Population with access to guns at large, access to chemicals for explosives…
Tiananmen worked, because it crushed the resistance. Once the resistance decides not to be crushed, it is usually game over for the Oligarchy. It won’t be pretty though and it can take a while.
The key is that in asymmetric warfare, the regular army needs to defeat every single resistance fighter. The resistance just needs to survive as it pecks away at the regular army.
The US only fights insurgencies it creates - and on terms it dictates. A civil war is invariably the bloodiest kind, and should one break out in the US there would not be a coalition to help reign in the ROI this time. It would not be vietnam, or afghanistan - both wars that were lost in congress, not on the battlefield - it would be palestine.
The wars were lost on the battlefield. It was impossible to achieve any of the goals set out by military means. The military failed in its objectives and there was no reason to believe, that tossing another trillion dollar and another half a million soldiers onto it, would have changed the equation.
The US pulled out because it lost. As we have seen time and time again it is not that the politicians were reluctant to engage in another attempt in another country later. They did it time and time again. So it is not for a lack of political will, but for the ability of the US to achieve any of their stated or real objectives by a prolonged military occupation on the other side of the globe.
I don’t want to trade rhetorical quips with an ally - we both gain nothing from me waxing didactic about doctrinal warfare. I just want to caution that the political landscape shapes all wars, and the metaphorical terrain on which a US civil war would be fought would be abjectly alien to what you’re envisioning.
I’m not sure the answer to this question but I’ll be ready with my de-ICE-ing agent.
If the US collapses before I die. I can die happy.
This is an evil country. It makes war on the world. It threatens the world via control of the reserve currency. To say nothing of the abuses it visits on its own citizens.
Total collapse. Balkanization. Don’t care how. No expectation of surviving the fall. But as long as it falls I can die happy knowing that life on this planet has a brighter future than it did with the US at the till.
They should just disunite and become 51 independent states. Then they don’t have to project their internal differences onto other countries any more.
I agree, Balkanization would be for the best at this point; there’s no longer any legal solution
Every state has its own government and the feds have become more trouble than they are worth.
I should add that even if the states get a right to secede, but don’t use it, that improves people’s lives.
Because the states can constantly pressure the federal government to be nice to the states or the states will secede. This way, the federal government is forced to treat states somewhat better, if it wants to retain power.
Laws don’t mean anything any more, so states should just go ahead and dew it regardless of legality.
if mamdani wins he has the opportunity to do something incredibly funny
as long as at leadt one state fully commits to doing the dew. Baja Blast style.
Putting aside reality, the day New Jersey decides to bounce, I will fight for New Jersey. When people ask the general “What are you waiting for,” I’m waiting for NJ to declare war on the world.
