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Capital_Room

rather dementor-like

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joined 2023 September 18 03:13:26 UTC

Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer


				

User ID: 2666

Capital_Room

rather dementor-like

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2023 September 18 03:13:26 UTC

					

Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer


					

User ID: 2666

I'll say that you were right that non-violent defiance wouldn't work, and that we should escalate.

And what will need to come to pass, to convince you that escalation will fail? That it will only provoke greater and greater reprisals, until we're destroyed?

If the defiance accelerates and grows, are you and @TheNybbler going to admit you were wrong?

I'll admit I was wrong about the character of our people. I will still stand by the position that growing defiance will provoke yet worse backlash down upon us, until I see solid evidence that the escalatory spiral doesn't favor Blue government.

You want me to believe you can defeat the Federal government? I'll believe it the day you've actually done it. You want to convince me we can win a civil war? I'll buy it when you've actually fought and won it.

Until you actually go to war, I'll keep on saying you're all talk, and it's all empty saber-rattling.

and both Texas and Florida have functioning conservative talent pipelines.

Certainly not ones big enough to replace as much of the Permanent Bureaucracy as would need to be replaced. Assuming, of course, that Trump is even able to actually remove the people currently in place. And assuming he even gets elected.

Abbott and DeSantis are coordinating open defiance to the bureaucracy. Maybe they'll lose, but they haven't yet.

When they do, will you change your tune?

The Bureaucracy is losing the fight on gun control, and they are losing it permanently.

That's not what the demographic trends say. And what good is the right to own guns, anyway? You talk about it as a "coordination mechanism" — i.e. something like "when they come for your guns, that's when you fight"; but they're never going to actually "come for your guns" openly, are they? They'll salami-slice here and there some. But if they push leftward on everything else but guns while never actually hitting that line in the sand?

And they are destroying those corporations, in a way that's pretty impossible to hide.

Are they? "Companies That Get ‘Woke’ Aren’t Going Broke — They’re More Profitable Than Ever."

They have a scam that works when we endlessly cooperate with it, and that falls apart if we simply and consistently defect.

But we're cooperators. Defecting is what Leftists do, and using Leftist tactics would make us no better, no different from them (as Hlynka insisted more than once). "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world," et cetera. What defines the Right — the only thing that distinguishes us from our enemy — is our willingness to put absolute adherence to principle over worldly victory, unto martyrdom and death, knowing their can be no real victory in this world anyway, and the only reward to be sought is in the next life, which is why all atheists are Leftists by definition, right? (Again, this is from Hlynka.)

If that defiance doesn't keep escalating like you predict, but instead does "all fizzle out," and Red Tribe mostly backs down like Nybbler and I predict, what will you say then?

Exactly. Anyone expecting the Pentagon brass to intervene on behalf of Trump (or Red America, for that matter) is bound to be sorely disappointed.

And this is all contingent on Trump even winning. Odds are, we get a second Biden term, followed by a younger and lefty-er Dem after that (and after that, and after that…)

We have not yet begun to fight, metaphorically or literally.

We haven't begun to fight because we're never going to. Because we're not capable of it. Every time, this wasn't the hill to die on. Every time, it wasn't yet time. Every time, we've backed down and said "next time" or "someday." Because we're never dying on any hills, because it will never be time, because "someday" will never come. We've always backed down, and we're always going to back down.

But I will note that every time you initiate this argument, you claim that "2nd Amendment solutions" means hicks with AR15s in twos and threes attempting to fight the US government.

Because anything more than those random hicks requires levels of organization of which we are not capable. (It's how one can tell all the sizable "militia groups" are Fed honeypot operations — they're simply too coordinated to be authentic. It's got to be undercover FBI doing all the organizing.)

Organization requires hierarchy, requires following directions from others; and we're talking about people who declare that "they don't take orders from anyone but Jesus." They boast about how if someone told us to breathe, we'd suffocate ourselves to death just to spite them. Who swear that no matter how dire things get, should anyone dare talk to them about organizing or coordinating or fighting together — even if they've been a friend for decades — that automatically makes that person "the Enemy" and they will shoot them dead on the spot.

How are you going to get that guy to join up? How are you going to get him to follow directions, to coordinate his actions with yours, to not immediately go off and do his own "Lone wolf" thing?

As for your "other vectors," I suspect you're talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities. Those are a bit easier to do with a smaller group, but from what I've seen from investigating the issue, it's still more coordination than anyone I know is capable of.

You appear to argue that the correct option is unilateral surrender, let the Blues do whatever they want, in the hope that they'll abuse us less. Is that correct?

Yes. At the very least, I want people to accept the war was lost long ago, and there's nothing we can do about it now (if not going further, to "accept we're utterly doomed and LDAR," or even "spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come by taking The Exit early," but I get that most are too religious to consider that).

deputizing red state national guards to restore federal authority?

That "red state national guards" aren't the sort to fire on fellow Americans?

This would require a Republican governor with the guts to actually send troops against "fellow Americans" — civilians at that — rather than just threaten. It would also require National Guard troops willing to gun down "fellow American" civilians, even if they're feds.

This Calvin and Hobbes comic illustrates the position the bureaucracy would find itself in

And just who's supposed to be revolting, and how? I keep bringing up the German Peasants' War for a reason. As the late Kontextmaschine over at Tumblr said, about JFK's quote that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable," that making violent revolution inevitable then crushing it by force can be a viable strategy. It will confirm, in the minds of Blue Tribers, the truth of every comment they've made about "neo-Confederates," or about domestic terrorism being the biggest threat to Our Democracy, and that there really is no living with the Deplorables, they'll truly have to be crushed utterly, and the surviving children forcibly reeducated residential-school-style.

The US military seems kind of big on following a chain of command which ultimately ends with the president.

The same military who lied to "misled" Trump when he was president? The same military where these people are in command:

The top US military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, was so shaken that then-President Donald Trump and his allies might attempt a coup or take other dangerous or illegal measures after the November election that Milley and other top officials informally planned for different ways to stop Trump, according to excerpts of an upcoming book obtained by CNN.

The book, from Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, describes how Milley and the other Joint Chiefs discussed a plan to resign, one-by-one, rather than carry out orders from Trump that they considered to be illegal, dangerous or ill-advised.

The book recounts how for the first time in modern US history the nation’s top military officer, whose role is to advise the president, was preparing for a showdown with the commander in chief because he feared a coup attempt after Trump lost the November election.

Or see here:

In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said.

Milley was careful to refrain from commenting publicly on Trump’s cognitive unfitness and moral derangement. In interviews, he would say that it is not the place of the nation’s flag officers to discuss the performance of the nation’s civilian leaders.

These views of Trump align with those of many officials who served in his administration. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, considered Trump to be a “fucking moron.” John Kelly, the retired Marine general who served as Trump’s chief of staff in 2017 and 2018, has said that Trump is the “most flawed person” he’s ever met. James Mattis, who is also a retired Marine general and served as Trump’s first secretary of defense, has told friends and colleagues that the 45th president was “more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine.” It is widely known that Trump’s second secretary of defense, Mark Esper, believed that the president didn’t understand his own duties, much less the oath that officers swear to the Constitution, or military ethics, or the history of America.

For Milley, Lafayette Square was an agonizing episode; he described it later as a “road-to-Damascus moment.” The week afterward, in a commencement address to the National Defense University, he apologized to the armed forces and the country. “I should not have been there,” he said. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” His apology earned him the permanent enmity of Trump, who told him that apologies are a sign of weakness.

In the weeks before the election, Milley was a dervish of activity. He spent much of his time talking with American allies and adversaries, all worried about the stability of the United States. In what would become his most discussed move, first reported by Woodward and Costa, he called Chinese General Li Zuocheng, his People’s Liberation Army counterpart, on October 30, after receiving intelligence that China believed Trump was going to order an attack. “General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley said, according to Peril. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you. General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise … If there was a war or some kind of kinetic action between the United States and China, there’s going to be a buildup, just like there has been always in history.”

The October call was endorsed by Secretary of Defense Esper, who was just days away from being fired by Trump. Esper’s successor, Christopher Miller, had been informed of the January call. Listening in on the calls were at least 10 U.S. officials, including representatives of the State Department and the CIA. This did not prevent Trump partisans, and Trump himself, from calling Milley “treasonous” for making the calls. (When news of the calls emerged, Miller condemned Milley for them—even though he later conceded that he’d been aware of the second one.)

More on that latter:

Twice in the final months of the Trump administration, the country’s top military officer was so fearful that the president’s actions might spark a war with China that he moved urgently to avert armed conflict.

In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa.

In the book’s account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

(Emphasis added.)

And on the Floyd riots:

This week, Milley made headlines with remarks before a congressional committee about critical race theory, an academic discipline that explores racism in American law and institutions that has been targeted by Republicans, in relation to the US army and its academy at West Point.

“I want to understand white rage,” the general said, “and I’m white, and I want to understand it.”

When Trump was in power, Milley had to deal repeatedly with presidential rage.

Milley is also reported to have told Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser, to “shut the fuck up”, after Miller said “cities are burning” amid protests prompted by the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis last May.

Throughout a tense summer, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, a historic piece of legislation regarding domestic unrest, but ultimately did not do so.

Bender reports that at one stage Milley pointed at a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president who led the Union to victory in the civil war, and told Trump: “That guy had an insurrection. What we have, Mr President, is a protest.”

The US Military is famously apolitical, and, like you note, they obviously will be reluctant to interfere within the US, particularly on behalf of Trump. The guys at the top, especially, spend a lot of time in DC, and interacting quite a bit with other DC "insiders." They're not going to want to send in troops to shoot fellow Americans — civilians, at that, even if Trump says they're in "insurrection." So all they need to do is declare that any conflict over authority, and what is or isn't in the president's power to do, is a civilian political matter, because the US Military does not get involved in civilian political matters, full stop.

So, let me ask you, if Trump declares the bureaucracy in insurrection, and the top brass say "no they're not," and tell Trump to go f*** himself — or even if they just say "civilian matter, we're staying out of it" — what then?

because at the end of the day he can always send law enforcement in to escort him out of the building if he gets ignored

What law enforcement? Why wouldn't they side with Smith?

Suppose Trump orders Smith fired, and the Justice Department says "no he's not" and ignores Trump. Trump tells the FBI to escort him out of the building… at which point the FBI says back, 'No, we're not doing that. You can't fire Smith; Smith is still employed no matter what you say, so we're not escorting him out. And if you try to send someone else to remove Smith, well, as far as we're concerned such a person will be trying to obstruct Smith in the course of his duties as a federal official, which is a serious federal crime, and we will arrest them on that very charge.' What then?

Who's going to sign the paychecks? ; Who's going to sign off on maintaining the security clearances? ; Who's going to assign work?

The same people who do so right now. (I mean, it's not like Biden is doing so.)

These are all people who would have to report to the President, or report to somebody who does.

Again, on paper. What if they just don't? The President's orders aren't magic — they contain no inherent power to compel obedience in and of themselves.

Why would the FBI step in and arrest people?

Because they're as anti-Trump as the rest of the > 90% Leftist fed bureaucracy, and thus they'll agree with them that Trump can't fire John Q. Bureaucrat, and that John Q. Bureaucrat is still a federal employee. And attempting to obstruct a federal employee in the course of his duties — which is, in this view, what anyone attempting to remove John Q. Bureaucrat would be doing — is a federal crime. Why wouldn't the FBI arrest someone they believe to be committing a federal offense?

What's the argument that fighting and losing leads to worse outcomes than not fighting and losing?

Should Hirohito have surrendered before Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Do you think Japan should have continued to fight on further?) The war was already lost well before that point; all continuing to fight did was get even more Japanese killed.

which is useful for coordinating further escalation

This would require a Red Tribe capable of coordinating, rather than being downright allergic to it. (This is a point David Z. Hines has been making for years now.) These are my friends, my family, my neighbors I'm talking about. They're never going to do anything. They'll grumble, and mutter about "2nd amendment solutions," but they'll bow down and comply. Let somebody else take the risk of resisting Federal tyranny. And don't come around expecting them to join up with you — they don't take no orders from nobody, y'hear?

About a year ago, I did some reading about historical counterinsurgency methods, particularly Rome. And, contra to Princess Leia's comment to Tarkin, crackdowns usually didn't generate greater resistance, they generated submission. When they did lead to "further escalation," it was generally only a single cycle — Rome's second crackdown usually got the job done. The only exception, with multiple cycles of escalation, was the Jews — and look how that turned out:

The Bar Kokhba Revolt had catastrophic consequences for the Jewish population in Judaea, with profound loss of life, extensive forced displacements, and widespread enslavement. The scale of suffering surpassed even the aftermath of the First Jewish–Roman War, leaving central Judea in a state of desolation.

According to a study by Applebaum, the rebellion led to the destruction of two-thirds of the Jewish population in Judaea. In his account of the revolt, Roman historian Cassius Dio (c. 155–235) wrote that:

"50 of their most important outposts and 985 of their most famous villages were razed to the ground. 580,000 men were slain in the various raids and battles, and the number of those that perished by famine, disease and fire was past finding out, Thus nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate."

From my limited understanding, the president is the head of the executive, and any democratic legitimacy of the federal bureaucracy ultimately comes from the fact that the bureaucrats are enacting the will of a democratically (or however you call the electoral college system) elected president.

Again, this is how it's supposed to be, on paper. But that matters as much as when Bart Simpson was sent back to kindergarten:

Bart: Lady, I'm supposed to be in the fourth grade.

Kindergarten teacher: Sounds to me like someone's got a case of the s'pose'das

The law isn't what's written on paper, the law is whatever is enforced. There's how the "employee handbook" says a workplace is supposed to work, and then there's how the workplace actually operates. (The very existence of "bothering by the book" and malicious compliance illustrates that there's a difference between the two, sometimes rather vast.) The written constitution is like an ignored, out-of-date employee handbook.

For one thing, do you really suppose the Supreme Court would play along with that?

Maybe, maybe not. But it won't matter.

If they do not, should the rest of DC also pretend that the Supreme Court does not exist?

Absolutely yes. Because there's no actual enforcement mechanism for SCOTUS decisions, except the willingness of the executive to heed them. From the federal court system's own webpage:

The judicial branch decides the constitutionality of federal laws and resolves other disputes about federal laws. However, judges depend on our government’s executive branch to enforce court decisions.

And from Cliff Notes:

The Supreme Court has no power to enforce its decisions. It cannot call out the troops or compel Congress or the president to obey. The Court relies on the executive and legislative branches to carry out its rulings. In some cases, the Supreme Court has been unable to enforce its rulings. For example, many public schools held classroom prayers long after the Court had banned government-sponsored religious activities.

(DC still hasn't given Mr. Heller his permit.)

the long term effects of establishing that the federal bureaucracy is independent of the president would likely be violent.

Not really. I mean, sure, maybe a few people might resort to violence, but only a few hundred at most, and they'll all be lone actors independently pursuing disorganized, poorly-targeted acts of domestic terror. Nothing that the FBI and ATF won't be able to handle (particularly given that at least half of our would-be rebels would be receiving "assistance" from someone in the pay of the FBI). Maybe you get a few more "Oklahoma City"s, but, as in that case, the perpetrators will accomplish nothing but creating martyrs for the other side, tainting their own side by association, and getting themselves executed (assuming the state takes them alive at all). And once a sufficiently-strong example is made of these people, most everyone else will be disincentivized to follow in their footsteps.

What consoles did everyone have growing up?

NES — the package deal with the light gun and the floor pad, to go with the cartridge with SMB, Duck Hunt, and Track & Field. Then SNES. Then, when I was in high school, the N64 — which let all three of us boys plus Dad play (mostly 4 player versus mode on Star Fox 64).

he can fire everyone involved he can get his hands on

Again, I dispute this. If he says John Q. Bureaucrat is fired, but the rest of DC says Mr. Bureaucrat isn't fired; they still work with Mr. Bureaucrat when he comes into the office; payroll still issues Mr. Bureaucrat his paycheck; and they have the guy Trump appointed to replace John hauled out of the building and arrested for trespassing, because he doesn't work there, since the job he claims to hold is actually still held by Mr. Bureaucrat; and anyone who tries to remove Mr. Bureaucrat on orders from Trump gets arrested themselves by the FBI for attempting to obstruct a federal employee in the exercise of his duties, because Mr. Bureaucrat is still a federal employee… then has John Q. Bureaucrat really been fired?

he can declassify any and all documents involved

And if everyone ignores him, and keeps treating them as classified anyway?

he could order the entire classification system revoked

And if everyone ignores him, and keeps acting as if the system is still in place?

If Congress is on his side, they can open investigations into the investigators

With what people? Who are they going to order to carry out these investigations? What if those people ignore that order? Or side with those they're "investigating" against Trump and Congress?

they can defund the offices involved.

Government "shutdowns," where nothing shuts down and the executive branch continued to spend and disburse funds without the constitutionally-mandated Congressional authorization, say otherwise. What happens when Congress "defunds" the offices, and Treasury just ignores them and keeps issuing the offices their funds as before?

but I find it very unlikely that Trump's enemies will really push (escalate) a Constitutional crisis

Why not? I don't understand why everyone seems to think a "Constitutional crisis" would be any kind of big deal. What would change, really?

One way in which I see a second Trump term being significantly different from the first one is that he's not going to be shy around things like this.

This assumes there's actually things he can do "around things like this." I've made my case before as to why a second Trump term won't be significantly different from the first, because whatever his powers on musty old parchments nobody cares about, the President is a figurehead who only has as much authority as the Permanent Bureaucracy allows him.

It goes almost without saying that, if Trump were elected in 2024, he could have the authority to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida.

Does it, though? Because I, for one, am not sure about that at all. Because, first, does a president have the authority to fire an A.U.S.A like Smith on paper? Second, even if a president does have that power in theory, well, how DC is supposed to work on paper and how it actually works are two distinct things, so is this a power the president has in reality, or merely on some musty old piece of paper nobody who matters cares about? (I here link this marginally relevant Substack piece from our dear @KulakRevolt.)

Third, and perhaps most important, even if a president has such a firing power in general, one could easily argue that in this situation Trump would not, because allowing him to use said otherwise-legitimate authority "to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida" against him would so fatally-undermine basic justice and the rule of law that the very survival of Our Democracy demands the suspension of said authority until the cases are resolved, and that it be incumbent upon all to #Resist any attempt by Trump to remove Smith.

My personal expectation is that none of these things are going to matter — the system is going to find some way to push past all these roadblocks and keep these cases going.

That was, in fact, the context of one of the two cases, within the broader case that my lack of a job makes my failure to reproduce less excusable, not more, because being a welfare parasite puts me in one of the few income brackets with above replacement TFR.

It's weird to have more than one person give you "advice" suggesting you try to become a drug dealer, right?

Still working my way through Life Worth Living. I keep finding myself pausing to note down various choice quotes. And I definitely appreciate the authors' clear disdain for Bentham.

Your argument becomes close to saying that ranking any human attribute is in bad taste, because someone ends up at the bottom, which is bullying.

It's been awhile since I was in elementary school, back in the previous century, but even that far back, the whole "self esteem" program we were subjected to pretty much endorsed something like this — you're great just the way you are, nobody is better or worse than anyone else, everybody's equally special in their own way ("which is another way of saying nobody is," to quote Dash Parr), everybody gets a participation trophy.

It's the "equity" mindset, the moral axiom that fairness demands equal outcomes for everyone; the same thinking that, when applied to identity groups, creates our "disparate impact" regime. And to many of its defenders, whether it's true, or even if it's a "noble lie," it's the only thing holding back horrific oppression. After all, you know who else once thought some people were better than others, back in mid-century Germany?

It's A pretending to share a value that is important to B to convince B to help toward's A's policy goals, whereas A actually holds both the B and the value in contempt.

So, the generalized version of the style of argumentation this meme is aimed at?

But then unless both partners have really bought into the homeschooling lifestyle, most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day.

I read this, and think of my parents, who don't really match the picture you've drawn here. Mom was pretty much fresh out of high school when she married Dad — who was about as far from "well-off" as you'd expect a functionally-illiterate high-school-dropout handyman to be. Mom didn't homeschool me and my younger brothers, and yet she still found ways to fill her day — and, in fact, be frustrated by time pressures getting things done — that weren't "spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day" (being as she had little in the way of money or friends), and only went out into workforce once my youngest brother was off to college. Part of this, I suppose, comes down to a standard element of living on the poorer end of the socio-economic scale (to which I can also attest personally) — that is, doing yourself what others pay to have done, those with more money substituting said money for time. I remember Mom, particularly when we were younger, doing a fair bit of sewing. Lots of cooking. Smoking or canning salmon. Thursdays and Fridays spent packing for weekend trips out of town — hunting, fishing, or just spending weekends at the cabin (and Mondays spent putting everything back). Gardening, once we were no longer in apartments. Shopping trips to Costco. Laundry (lots and lots of laundry). And, of course, plenty of cleaning up after three messy boys and a man with ADD and no ability to organize his collection of work tools and spare parts.

Much of this sort of thing — the "idle 50's housewife" and such — seems to be dependent on class, and not so much a thing down at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Not mine; from a screenshot (of a Mastodon post, I think?) that was passed around Tumblr:

there once was a lamp that could turn anyone into a woman by merely standing in its light. people came from far and wide to see it, but to their dismay the lamp was rarely lit. for this lamp ran on a special fuel, and that fuel was heavily guarded. it had all been gathered up and stored in a fortress, and that fortress had only one way in or out, through a big iron gate. the only way to get the fuel was to get permission from the person in charge of the gate, the girl light gas keep gate boss.

The purpose of debate is not to convince the other side, it's to convince the audience. It is to their benefit that I address the claims you make, rather than allowing those claims to sit un-rebutted.

You're wrong, and I'm not going to stop pointing out when you're wrong.

Coordination is an actual problem, a very serious one.

And yet, you don't seem to think that the Red tribe's deep hostility to coordination of any kind is an issue with respect to their odds of success. How do you solve the coordination problem with the regular in Sarah Hoyt's comment section who declared that, even in a SHTF situation, everyone will do their own thing, fort up their own homestead themselves, and if you come around to his place talking about "organizing" or "joining up" or "coming together," it won't matter how long he's known you or how close a friend you are, you are The Enemy and he will shoot you dead on the spot?