Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2hr ago
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?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2hr ago
from brewing to mycoprotein cultivation
AIUI, most of these involve single-celled organisms, with their own abilities to fight off rival microbes that animal muscle cells, adapted to the presence of a broader immune system, lack. And for the rest, look at how much the products cost — and that's usually chemicals produced by the organisms rather than the cultured cells themselves. Or how much a financial hit is taken if a vat or batch "goes bad." You'll be required to maintain a food production plant more sterile than a medical lab, at industrial scale.
Again, I read a lot of stuff without remembering where I read it, so I don't have cites on hand, but a quick google search gave this link: "Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story."
It’s a digital-era narrative we’ve come to accept, even expect: Powerful new tools will allow companies to rethink everything, untethering us from systems we’d previously taken for granted. Countless news articles have suggested that a paradigm shift driven by cultured meat is inevitable, even imminent. But Wood wasn’t convinced. For him, the idea of growing animal protein was old news, no matter how science-fictional it sounded. Drug companies have used a similar process for decades, a fact Wood knew because he’d overseen that work himself.
…
Wood couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In his view, GFI’s TEA report did little to justify increased public investment. He found it to be an outlandish document, one that trafficked more in wishful thinking than in science. He was so incensed that he hired a former Pfizer colleague, Huw Hughes, to analyze GFI’s analysis. Today, Hughes is a private consultant who helps biomanufacturers design and project costs for their production facilities; he’s worked on six sites devoted to cell culture at scale. Hughes concluded that GFI’s report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility.
…
“After a while, you just think: Am I going crazy? Or do these people have some secret sauce that I’ve never heard of?” Wood said. “And the reality is, no—they’re just doing fermentation. But what they’re saying is, ‘Oh, we’ll do it better than anyone else has ever, ever done.”
…
GFI’s imagined facility would be both unthinkably vast and, well, tiny. According to the TEA, it would produce 10,000 metric tons—22 million pounds—of cultured meat per year, which sounds like a lot. For context, that volume would represent more than 10 percent of the entire domestic market for plant-based meat alternatives (currently about 200 million pounds per year in the U.S., according to industry advocates). And yet 22 million pounds of cultured protein, held up against the output of the conventional meat industry, barely registers. It’s only about .0002, or one-fiftieth of one percent, of the 100 billion pounds of meat produced in the U.S. each year. JBS’s Greeley, Colorado beefpacking plant, which can process more than 5,000 head of cattle a day, can produce that amount of market-ready meat in a single week.
And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, GFI’s facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse. With hundreds of production bioreactors installed, the scope of high-grade equipment would be staggering. According to one estimate, the entire biopharmaceutical industry today boasts roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume. (1 cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters.) The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of that, just to make a sliver of the nation’s meat.
…
It’s a complex, precise, energy-intensive process, but the output of this single bioreactor train would be comparatively tiny. The hypothetical factory would need to have 130 production lines like the one I’ve just described, with more than 600 bioreactors all running simultaneously. Nothing on this scale has ever existed—though if we wanted to switch to cultivated meat by 2030, we’d better start now. If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
All of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator. That’s where things get complicated. It’s where critics say—and even GFI’s own numbers suggest—that cell-cultured meat may never be economically viable, even if it’s technically feasible.
…
“A key difference in the CE Delft study is that everything was assumed to be food-grade,” Swartz said. That distinction, of whether facilities will be able to operate at food- or pharma-grade specs, will perhaps more than anything determine the future viability of cultivated meat.
The Open Philanthropy report assumes the opposite: that cultivated meat production will need to take place in aseptic “clean rooms” where virtually no contamination exists. For his cost accounting, Humbird projected the need for a Class 8 clean room—an enclosed space where piped-in, purified oxygen blows away threatening particles as masked, hooded workers come in and out, likely through an airlock or sterile gowning room. To meet international standards for airborne particulate matter, the air inside would be replaced at a rate of 10 to 25 times an hour, compared to 2 to 4 times in a conventional building. The area where the cell lines are maintained and seeded would need a Class 6 clean room, an even more intensive specification that runs with an air replacement rate of 90 to 180 times per hour.
The simple reason: In cell culture, sterility is paramount. Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said. “Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event.”
Viruses also present a unique problem. Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.
“There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said. “Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”
If even a single speck of bacteria can spoil batches and halt production, clean rooms may turn out to be a basic, necessary precondition. It may not matter if governments end up allowing cultured meat facilities to produce at food-grade specs, critics say—cells are so intensely vulnerable that they’ll likely need protection to survive.
…
Of course, companies could try. But that might be a risky strategy, said Neil Renninger, a chemical engineer who has spent a lot of time around the kind of equipment required for cell culture. Today, he is on the board of Ripple Foods, a dairy alternatives company that he co-founded. Before that, for years, he ran Amyris, a biotechnology company that uses fermentation to produce rare molecules like squalene—an ingredient used in a range of products from cosmetics to cancer therapeutics, but is traditionally sourced unsustainably from shark liver oil.
“Contamination was an issue” at Amyris, he said. “You’re getting down to the level of making sure that individual welds are perfect. Poor welds create little pits in the piping, and bacteria can hide out in those pits, and absolutely ruin fermentation runs.”
…
The risks are even more dire when it comes to slow-growing animal cells in large reactors, because bacteria will overwhelm the cells more quickly. At the scale envisioned by proponents of cultured meat, there is little room for error. But if aseptic production turns out to be necessary, it isn’t going to come cheap. Humbird found that a Class 8 clean room big enough to produce roughly 15 million pounds of cultured meat a year would cost about $40 to $50 million dollars. That figure doesn’t reflect the cost of equipment, construction, engineering, or installation. It simply reflects the materials needed to run a sterile work environment, a clean room sitting empty.
According to Humbird’s report, those economics will likely one day limit the practical size of cultured meat facilities: They can only be big enough to house a sweet spot of two dozen 20,000-liter bioreactors, or 96 smaller perfusion reactors. Any larger, and the clean room expenses start to offset any benefits from adding more reactors. The construction costs grow faster than the production costs drop.
Also "Is Lab-Grown Meat Commercially Feasible?":
The first of Humbird's grievances is the need for a cheap and plentiful supply of nutrients for the cells. [15] Currently, such cell food is produced for pharmaceutical purposes, so is expensive and not produced in the vast quantities required have cultured meat supplant animal meat on the global market. [15] In fact, nutrients are the currently the most expensive part of cultured meat production. [15] On top of that, the most popular source for key biochemicals needed for proper cell growth is fetal bovine serum (FBS). [16] FBS is harvested (lethally) from unborn cattle after the mother is slaughtered. [16] A replacement for FBS will have to be found to keep the ethics people on cultured meat's side. Additionally, the cells' food would need to be extremely clean. In the case of animal meat, any trace toxins in the animal feed are (mostly) filtered out by the animal's liver, and do not end up in the muscle. However, for cultured meat, the cellular slurry inside the bioreactor has no liver, meaning any toxin left in the feed is put directly on your plate.
An effective scale-up of cultured meat production would also require an incredibly clean work environment. The warm, nutrient-rich bioreactor, ideal for animal cell growth, is also the perfect environment for pathogens (bacteria and viruses). If a single pathogen managed to get a foothold in the bioreactor, it would quickly overwhelm the animal cells, killing the entire batch. This restriction requires labs to be at least Class 6 cleanrooms. [15] Importantly, since that level of sanitation requires all pipes, windows, etc. to be perfectly sealed, as well as ventilation replacing the air 25 times an hour, they get much more expensive with size. Essentially, you can have a large factory or a clean factory. Cultured meat requires both. In animals, pathogens are mostly dealt with by the immune system. Since the cell slurry has no immune system, great care and expense must be invested to ensure the cells' safety.
The final problem I'll discuss is the limits on the size of the bioreactors. Larger bioreactors are more space-efficient, allowing you to have smaller cleanrooms, reducing those sanitation costs. However, larger bioreactors are also more susceptible to disease, since pathogens can ruin the entire batch. Beyond that cost balance lies another problem with larger bioreactors: waste management. When left to their own devices, cells build up waste products which slow down future cell growth. Cycling out this waste effectively is only possible in small bioreactors, requiring more reactors, therefore larger and much more expensive cleanrooms. [15] Another possible solution is to use slow-growing cell cultures, since they are more waste-efficient, however less frequent batches means again more reactors are required, again ratcheting up the price. [15] In animals, waste is extracted via blood vessels. Since cell cultures have no blood vessels, cell waste becomes a problem.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
The FBI only has 35k employees, not just special agents, and is in a similar situation with a wider breadth of requirements.
This "they can't catch everybody" argument is tiresome, because it's true of every police force ever. According to the 2022 figures on this page, the case clearance rate for murder is only 52.3%, and this doesn't count the portion where the courts fail to convict. Thus, in the majority of murderers in America, the killer gets away with it. Does this mean laws against murder are pointless, and we shouldn't bother enforcing them? For auto theft, the closure rate is only 9.3%. Does that mean that the laws against carjacking have been "nullified"? Their aren't enough traffic cops to catch even a tiny fraction of speeders or red-light-runners; does this mean enforcing traffic laws has no effect at all, and is a waste of money?
This is a fully-general argument against law and government in general. No society in human history has ever been able to catch all criminals… but they don't have to. You just need to catch enough, and punish them harshly enough, to have a significant deterrent effect on the general population.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
If violence is your last resort, you're not prepared to use it at all.
Exactly. Particularly if you are also fundamentally opposed to preparing for its use, and particularly to organizing in any fashion ("We are the people who, when someone orders us to breathe, suffocate to death. It's our superpower."). They mumble about "2nd amendment remedies" coming someday, eventually, when the gubment finally "goes too far"… and when their past idea of "goes too far" finally comes to pass, well, it's not that bad, but next time…
These are family and friends I'm talking about, and they have such terrible understandings of how successful rebellions and insurgencies are fought. Ridiculously wrong understandings of how the American Revolution worked, how the Taliban worked, how "fourth-generation warfare" works; it's all 80s action movie fantasies about how "lone wolf" fighters with naught but their rifle and the clothes on their back will Chuck Norris their way through hordes of faceless mooks to inevitable victory.
Back in my junior year of high school (98-99), we had an exchange student from the former Yugoslavia, briefly escaping the wars. And (until lefty classmates stopped asking because they didn't like the answers) she had interesting things to say about the conflict. My later readings have mostly matched what she said: that people and families who tried to hunker down on their lonesome — particularly those who "headed for the hills" and tried to make a go of it in the woods — got picked off by those who grouped up. It was the organized, the militias and such, who survived.
As I've seen it put, a rebellion is not going from one government to zero to one, but from one government to two to one. A successful rebellion is a parallel state — as is a successful mafia; the difference between the two is mostly down to political ambitions (as in the case when the Ming restorationism of the "Three Harmonies Society" degenerated into the modern "Triads" who draw their name from it).
In reply to Isaac Asimov's dictum that "violence is the last resort of the incompetent," fellow sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle replied, "you're right; the competent use it before it's the last resort."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
In grizzly or polar bear country, what are people doing out in the wilderness without a group and multiple guns? I think when I was in Alaska the men in town shot any brown bear bold enough to show its face. Each family had a half dozen or so guns.
This Alaskan can confirm. It's why you always take a gun — one with serious stopping power — when salmon fishing (at least, salmon fishing anywhere other than Ship Creek, which runs through Anchorage right by Downtown and the Port).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
Only tangentially relevant, but I'm deeply skeptical of the commercial viability of "lab-grown meat" because of the need for, and serious expense of providing, the requisite hyper-clean conditions and total lack of microbial contamination. That is to say, the living animal has an immune system, your bioreactor culture equipment does not.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4hr ago
That does not mean we are heading for utopia; there is no utopia.
Agreed.
It does mean that humans are moving away from centralized control as the default organizational principle of society.
Disagree. Where's your evidence of this? The internet and computers are only making centralization of control more effective than ever.
Attempting to assert control through the naked exercise of force is less practical now than it was previously, and it grows less practical over time.
Also wrong. You cite the invention of guns removing the power of castles. Yes, there was a trend, for centuries after the invention of gunpowder, that made "the naked exercise of force less practical," gave power to "the people" and drove the rise of democracies. Such trends of labor-over-capital in military effectiveness peaked over a century ago, and the trend has been back toward high-capital "knightly" military elites, leading "government versus masses" conflict to look less like the French Revolution, and more like the German Peasants' War.
We're seeing in Ukraine the failure of "war of movement" and "hordes of expendable replaceable meat" of the past century, and to elite battlefield drone operators as the new knights:
Hordes of expendable replaceable meat just are not working very well. One very good drone operator is responsible for a significant proportion of all recent Ukrainian casualties — we are drifting towards early iron age warfare where a single very good warrior with very good and very expensive equipment can make the difference between winning and losing, and tenth century warfare where men fought largely as individual heroes.
We are moving towards aristocratic warfare, with the likely result that we will return to aristocratic governance.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4hr ago
I do not see a route by which the establishment arm of the GOP regain authority over and support from their base, which has been in open rebellion for some years now.
I agree with this. Which is why my scenario is that the Republican party will be suppressed; we'll have at the very least Democratic dominance, as in the early 20th century, maybe more. I wouldn't rule out the GOP getting banned.
..As for the rest, I maintain that the ultima ration is preferable to an uncontested blue tribe win, and that it favors Red Tribe.
I'd like to believe that last point, but I don't see sufficient evidence, particularly given my first-hand experience with other Red Tribers — I don't see my parents or brother winning in any civil war, regardless of the veritable arsenal of guns and ammo they've accumulated. You certainly aren't providing any evidence of that. Comparisons to the Taliban are facile and misunderstand how the latter won. Sheer numbers of people and (merely-civilian) guns are not nearly as relevant to victory as command and coordination. A small, disciplined force almost always overcomes an uncoordinated rabble of individual, independent actors.
And since you're not going to provide such, for no other reason than because you don't have any (and when you claim other reasons for not sharing, you are lying), yes, I suppose I am simply stating that you offer no explanation, are a liar and thus should not be listened to.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14hr ago
The Jews waited 2000 years.
And how many other minority groups ended up assimilating and dying out? There's a survivorship bias here.
But if you have a tight knit group, with money, that practices endogamy, that produces children,
That's a lot of "ifs." Especially the money part, these days; but also endogamy (few manage it, and are often under suspicion, save maybe the Hasidim — who have the advantages of being Jewish — and the Amish — who are seen as "quaint" and harmless) and producing children.
it also allows you to impose your own kind of order on a community,
Only as much as the broader society allows you to.
preserving a space for yourself and people like you
Until the government decides to crush your communities, arrest your leaders, and take and "residential school" indoctrinate/assimilate your children.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14hr ago
People on the right need to be better at winning the culture war by producing more of their own entertainment.
This might help some, but I doubt its enough. Because the marketplace of ideas doesn't select for truth, but for virulence. Many left wing memes are "cognitive heroin"; however bad they are long-term, too many people will prefer them. The Left's positions is simply more persuasive — or should I say "seductive"? — than the right's.
Start a family.
Far easier said than done in today's environment. And is this section aimed at me personally, or just a generic "you"? Because I'd have different answers each way.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14hr ago
To @100ProofTollBooth, @2rafa, and the others:
What, really, nobody can come up with anything other than some form of "join a religious group (for instrumental reasons, even if you don't believe) and hunker down" Benedict Option, where you just try to avoid being crushed utterly until… what, Judgement Day?
Say what you will about @FCfromSSC's usual over-optimistic canned response ("Just defy the Federal government, brah. They can't do anything to you if you don't accept their legitimacy; the bullets in that FBI agent's gun will bounce off you once you stop respecting Federal authority!"), it's at least a proposal for winning, as opposed to merely slowing the losses and trying to avoid total defeat (and poorly, at that).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
15hr ago
The mission of small-c conservatives right now is pretty much lawfare. And, looking at SCOTUS and the legacy of Mitch McConnell, it's actually going damn well.
I disagree. If this keeps up, expect either court-packing, or loss of respect for SCOTUS decisions (there is no actual enforcement mechanism for Supreme Court rulings). Either way, I expect the Left to shut down these avenues fairly soon. Besides, the primary “win” here, Dobbs, is more a symbolic victory than anything else — as you note, it hasn’t actually changed much at the ground level.
On a social level, tradcath communities are real, vibrant, and actually growing especially among the Youths.
For now.
The positive side is that it truly is a durable community.
At current conditions. But as state oppression combined with anarcho-tyranny inevitably ratchet up, I doubt it’ll do nearly so well. You’re not (literally) bulletproof.
It's actually not that big of a deal to be a permanent minority so long as we can self-preserve
And I’d say that’s a mighty big “if,” given how much worse “bake the cake, bigot”-type actions are going to keep getting.
tradcaths babies on one hand
And how long are they going to stay that way when public schools get done with them?
and politicians from rural states that have a structural advantage in the Senate
And that’s not going to last all that much longer, either, given both demographic and political trends.
At best, this is a “losing as slowly as possible” strategy. It simply carves out a tiny bubble of survival, and only at the sufferance of the broader society. It can’t last forever.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
15hr ago
Consider that Hebrew is a reinvented language.
The Hasidim of Kiryas Joel speak Yiddish as their day-to-day language, not Hebrew. You should know that if you'd read up on them.
It’s so difficult yet virtually every small non-denominational Christian church is tax exempt?
Because for all of them, there's a history and structure already in place, going back to whichever group they schismed off of earlier. As others have pointed out, "religions" invented whole-cloth tend to be much harder to get past "tax scam" skepticism.
You just casuallly dismis all objections with "just try harder, bro." Along with the implication that one can have politically-useful divine revelations on cue as needed. It still boils down to "Just found a cult, bro. Not working? Just try harder, bro." And, of course, the usual denouncing anything other than unfettered optimism in your particular solution as "defeatism."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
15hr ago
The reason why cannabis legalization worked
…is because the Left supported it and the Right opposed it. It doesn't work the other way around. Cthulhu always swims left.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16hr ago
well, there's a lot of metaphors where the Little People doing unfavored things would be sitting in jail.
That Little People get arrested for doing unfavored things, while others do not, is what makes them Little People. It's not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy. Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.
So really it's much less brazen than what blue states have been doing, where they've been ignoring specific that have been upheld as valid.
Except, despite this, it'll be treated as an egregious assault on federal authority — unlike the actions of said blue states — and suppressed accordingly. Blue states get to defy Red rules, Red states do not get to defy Blue rules. It's not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy, and Reds are just powerless.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16hr ago
things like marijuana "legalization" seem not all that different.
The difference is that in those cases, it's the Left doing it, with the backing of all the institutions they control. The Right, being mostly powerless, will not be able to get away with it the way the other side can.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
17hr ago
Read about the political influence of Kiryas Joel if you’d like
I have. I've even talked about it to others IRL as a model to emulate, whereby the universal response is that such a thing only works for Hasidic Jews; that there are unique elements there — ranging from their long history and separate language to their ability to suppress criticism by denouncing critics as antisemites — that cannot be emulated.
Every Protestant church has religious protections.
Every currently existing Protestant church. But, AIUI, you're talking about creating a new one. And, also AIUI, the IRS tends to default to treating all new religions as tax evasion schemes until proven otherwise.
Personally, I have had divine revelations in dreams and given an understanding of mystical meaning behind Biblical symbols and allegories.
And these just so happened to give you true belief in the specific doctrines of the denomination you found it most convenient for your political goals to join? If so, then lucky you, I suppose.
Yeah, civic nationalism has really been working hasn’t it?
And where did I endorse that? It's clear that isn't working, either. But I don't see 'just rebrand your secular political goals as a religion and start a cult, bro' as a viable project either.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
18hr ago
Federal authority is a norm, not an immutable law of the universe, and norms can go away over time.
Except it's a norm backed by a lot of guns.
Here, defiance by Red Tribe provides the other half of the back-and-forth wrenching that will tear this norm out of its cultural foundations.
And what is left after the norm of Federal authority is "torn out," if not the raw "obey or die" assertion of power through raw force?
If Abbott and DeSantis continue on their current trajectory, then we'll see more Broad spectrum resistance from Reds as well.
Only until Abbott, DeSantis, and their supporters end up in prison or dead.
Keep that up, and it's entirely possible that Federal authority loses all credibility
They don't need credibility, they just need to send armed FBI agents to do pre-dawn no-knock raids on enough of those who oppose them to deter the rest.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
18hr ago
Why do you think using it to coordinate Red Tribe defiance is a bad idea?
Presumably, because "Red Tribe defiance" is itself a bad idea? Either because one is Blue Tribe, or because one sees "Red Tribe defiance" as leading only to Blue power cracking down even harder?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
18hr ago
the so-called captains of industry, who tend to lean right,
[Citation needed], as they say. Because from what I've read, these days "industry" leans ever-leftward — see DEI, ESG, etc.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
18hr ago
From a Red Tribe perspective, there is no rational reason beyond naked fear to respect or maintain federal authority.
Why isn't that fear enough?
Blues look at this as a fiat accompli, but why respect a system that doesn't respect you?
What matters is not respect, but obedience. Blues don't need or want Reds' respect, only their submission.
Given that reality, why continue to support and maintain those institutions?
Because you will be punished if you don't?
The correct move is to withdraw the consent of the governed, and make them fight for every step.
So, poking the (metaphorical, Federal) bear?
Deny them freedom of action at every possible point.
This implies we have any meaningful ability to do so.
Never concede their legitimacy
Legitimacy is overrated. Don Corleone doesn't need "legitimacy" to get people to pay him for "protection," does he?
never grant them authority
What does this look like, and how does it end in anything other than getting arrested, shot, etc.?
never cooperate.
Try that with the IRS, or the FBI, and see what happens.
When they push back, escalate, and when they push back on that, escalate again.
What makes you think this can possibly end well? How does this not end in the Feds and Blues crushing Red utterly. What does getting you (yes, you) and your entire family gunned down by SWAT accomplish, exactly?
Attack their institutions and organizations.
Attack with what, exactly? As the old meme goes, you and what army?
Engage in economic and legislative warfare.
Same question as above. They have most the big corporations and economic weight on their side, and only their legislation has "teeth," not ours.
All this has been done to us; tit-for-tat is the correct strategy given the state of play.
Except we lack the means to do unto them as they have done unto us. It's like telling a man taking cover from gunfire to "just shoot back; tit-for-tat," when he's unarmed.
It does not appear to have unlimited state capacity to spare.
It doesn't need literally "unlimited" state capacity, merely enough to crush us. And as I see it, it has that in spades. What evidence do you have to the contrary?
It is entirely possible that we can grind them down to the point that the social structures they're leaning on simply collapse,
Wrong, wrong, WRONG! It is not, in fact, "entirely possible" for us to do this. They are too powerful, and we are but ants beneath their boots.
And if we are not so fortunate as to get the happy end, all the efforts put into this strategy pay dividends at the subsequent levels of escalation.
How can you possibly believe that "the subsequent levels of escalation" are anything other than Red Tribe getting crushed harder and harder, until we're eventually eradicated?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
19hr ago
they are not motivated by what wins votes.
Well, why should they be? Per the past post of mine that @magic9mushroom linked, have you considered that maybe the reason they appear to care so little about elections is because they know elections don't matter? That they'll remain in power no matter how the masses vote?
I mean, I don't see how anyone, having seen both the Trump and Biden presidencies, can believe POTUS is anything more than a figurehead position, as much in charge of the Executive branch of DC as King Charles III is in charge of the UK. Nor how they can have lived through government "shutdowns" where nothing that mattered actually shut down and trillions of dollars continued to be (unconstitutionally) spent, and still think that the House of Representative's "power of the purse" still exists.
The reason the administration enforces extremist doctrines "no liberal would have endorsed until a few months ago" is because they know they won't suffer any meaningful consequences, because they have all the power, and there's nothing and nobody that can stop them.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
19hr ago
The only realistic move is to organize into a tight religious in-group, because: religion is the best way to train the young’s’ spiritual/mental immune system against political propaganda, religion is the best way to transmit cultural/philosophical concerns, and (most of all) America offers strong religious protections which would allow you to live sequestered away from normal life in America.
First, how does this accomplish political goals?
Second, you vastly overstate said religious protections. AIUI, getting religious tax exemptions is actually incredibly difficult, particularly for a "new" religion.
Third, isn't this just "instrumentalizing religion"? How is your conservative "new religion" anything but a LARP, with added tax evasion scheme?
Frankly, I'm getting tired of people proposing the (ridiculous) idea that the best way to achieve material political goals is to start a [expletive deleted] cult.
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.
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