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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29372 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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The main reason why I have had a pro-2nd Amendment position in the past was because I believed that the 2nd Amendment is a bulwark against government overreach. However, while the US is to me unquestionably more free when it comes to civil rights than, for example, Europe, I am not sure how much this has to do with private gun ownership.

I think that the face of warfare has changed a lot since the framing of the US constitution. In the days of the war of independence, men using small arms, i.e. guns similar to the ones privately owned for hunting or self-defense, made up the bulk of land military capability.

While today military small arms still play an important role in combat, especially in in urban areas, they no longer rule supreme. Artillery, armored vehicles, air and drone strikes are force multipliers for ground operations.

A war where one side has such assets (such as a tyrannic federal government) and the other side (such as freedom-loving Americans) does not have them will likely be very asymmetrical. The US military has proven capable of mostly suppressing insurgents in the Middle East even if they are armed with RPGs, which are crucial to counter armored vehicles.

Compared to patriotic Americans the insurgents in the Middle East had a few key advantages:

  • Birth rates above replenishment, where life is cheap
  • A religious ideology which emphasizes the importance of violent self-sacrifice
  • A causal disregard for the war crimes they are committing when blowing up their civilian countrymen
  • Access to RPGs and explosives

Any federal tyrant would first pass a law that punishes the ownership of firearms by summary execution. This would be enough to get most US citizens to hand in their pistols. A few would hide their rifles and eventually rise as an insurgency, but they would be utterly crushed.

Tanks? RPGs? Explosives?

lets do it.

We don't have to give these weapons to every individual.

But make damn sure that every state militia is primarily controlled by that state, then expand the militia system, give every city their own city militia. By the time we have those in place, there will be enough of a pro-defense cultural shift that we can re-assess the 'private citizens with Uzis' issue.

And while we're at it- Don't defund the police, instead train every citizen into a reserve officer.

train every citizen into a reserve officer.

Robert Peel approves.

I think that the face of warfare has changed a lot since the framing of the US constitution. In the days of the war of independence, men using small arms, i.e. guns similar to the ones privately owned for hunting or self-defense, made up the bulk of land military capability.

Yes, but those men had to be organized and equipped, and the expensive stuff - heavy cavalry and artillery - were what won most wars.

While today military small arms still play an important role in combat, especially in in urban areas, they no longer rule supreme. Artillery, armored vehicles, air and drone strikes are force multipliers for ground operations.

Each side had well over 200 cannon at the 1759 battle of Kunersdorf, or approximately one cannon for each 250 combatants.

As best as I can tell, as of January 2023 Ukraine had approximately 1,600 artillery pieces and roughly 700,000 men under arms, or approximately one cannon for each ~440 combatants. Even if that 700,000 number sweeps in a lot of non-combat personnel, the ratio of guns to combatants in major open warfare hasn't changed all that much.

And although there really is no civilian counter to organized air power, per press accounts (fwiw) imaginative civilians are dunking on established defence establishments these days in drone tech, development, and deployment.

A war where one side has such assets (such as a tyrannic federal government) and the other side (such as freedom-loving Americans) does not have them will likely be very asymmetrical. The US military has proven capable of mostly suppressing insurgents in the Middle East even if they are armed with RPGs, which are crucial to counter armored vehicles.

The U.S. war of independence was also a massively-asymmetrical conflict against a highly-capable enemy with experience in such conflicts - the rebels never developed a military establishment that was as disciplined, organized, equipped, and motivated as the Brits, who had significant experience putting down colonial risings in North America, Ireland, and India. Things don't change as much as you think.

Compared to patriotic Americans the insurgents in the Middle East had a few key advantages:

  • Birth rates above replenishment, where life is cheap

Both Russia and Ukraine have had absolutely atrocious birth rates for ages, and they're going at each other hammer and tongs just fine.

  • A religious ideology which emphasizes the importance of violent self-sacrifice

Not present in Ukraine either, or indeed in colonial America. People motivated themselves with secular causes just fine.

Both Russia and Ukraine have had absolutely atrocious birth rates for ages, and they're going at each other hammer and tongs just fine.

Perhaps closer to home, the Mexican drug war has heated up as the fertility transition took effect there- and the economy got better.

Access to RPGs and explosives

The core red tribe has no trouble getting ahold of explosives.

The US military has proven capable of mostly suppressing insurgents in the Middle East

What? The US managed to beat ISIS (in conjunction with Russia, Iran, Syria and so on). They pulled out of Iraq with a little dignity, having turned Iran's nemesis into an Iranian subordinate. They left Afghanistan with their tails between their legs, having completely failed their campaign objectives.

That's not exactly a great track record! Once serious fighting gets going, the US will fall into a deadly spiral of capital flight, brain drain, financial crisis and increased radicalism. Consider that the economic damage power outages cause is totally disproportionate to the cost of sabotaging substations. There's already vast deficit spending in peacetime. The tax base to pay for social spending and war won't exist, so there will be serious inflation.

Russia and China would send really nasty things to any serious insurgency via the US's gaping open southern border. MANPADs, ATGMs, kamikaze drones, plastic explosives... They'd probably send spooks and advisers too. The insurgents would be far better-resourced than any asymmetrical opponent the US has fought since Vietnam. Al-Qaeda was working with whatever explosives were lying around, they didn't have the latest and greatest from Norinco. Furthermore, many of the insurgents would be ex-US military and could plausibly take things from military bases. Maybe some people within the military are sympathetic to the enemy and are passing intelligence off to the insurgents.

The real advantage of the US is that their media and political power is very strong and they can focus on squashing anything before it becomes a conflict. But if it does come to a conflict then the US government is totally screwed. Very few good outcomes for them. That's why they deployed all those National Guard to Washington after Jan 6th. If they can't squelch it at the beginning, it's all over.

They left Afghanistan with their tails between their legs, having completely failed their campaign objectives.

Obviously, the nation-building objective failed completely. But during the occupation, at least cities like Kabul were pretty much under US control. Sure, there were IED attacks, but it was not like any insurgents would claim a neighborhood, keep the US out of it and enforce their ideas of Sharia law in it.

Of course, the countryside looked much different, but I would argue that Kabul is a better model of US conditions than overall Afghanistan with regards to accessibility.

Furthermore, many of the insurgents would be ex-US military and could plausibly take things from military bases. Maybe some people within the military are sympathetic to the enemy and are passing intelligence off to the insurgents.

My point is that the US is stable because the US military really buys into the US constitution. A general imprisoning a democratically elected president and declaring himself supreme leader would be considered awfully un-American.

The real advantage of the US is that their media and political power is very strong and they can focus on squashing anything before it becomes a conflict. But if it does come to a conflict then the US government is totally screwed. Very few good outcomes for them. That's why they deployed all those National Guard to Washington after Jan 6th. If they can't squelch it at the beginning, it's all over.

I think this vastly overstates the dangers of J6.

If the SCOTUS had ruled that Trump was the election winner and the rest of Washington had decided to ignore that ruling and certify Biden as the president, that would have been a constitutional crisis, and the question with whom the federal bureaucracy and the military would sided would have been debatable.

With just a lone Trump crying election fraud, the outcome was never in doubt. Even if his followers had managed to take over the Capitol, do you think that that would have changed anything? There is no kill-switch for the US internet controlled from the White House, no easy way to take control of the media narrative.

Even if the powers that be had decided to let the insurgents fester for a month in DC, the outcome would not have been a collapse of the US government. It would have lead to more dead insurgents, and a few DC buildings being worse for wear, but in the end the US military would have prevailed.

A general imprisoning a democratically elected president and declaring himself supreme leader would be considered awfully un-American.

It would never be that. It would be the lawfully elected president heroically preventing an illegal, fraudulent coup/stolen election in defence of freedom, democracy and American values. You'd just have two such figures battling it out, possibly followed by more as the economy implodes and militancy skyrockets.

Obviously, the nation-building objective failed completely. But during the occupation, at least cities like Kabul were pretty much under US control. Sure, there were IED attacks, but it was not like any insurgents would claim a neighborhood, keep the US out of it and enforce their ideas of Sharia law in it.

The point of gorilla warfare isn't to defeat the enemy on the conventional battlefield, but to win through attrition and demoralization. The Afghans won the war in the end.

gorilla warfare

Now I'm imagining armies of trained tactical ape commandos.

I would argue otherwise at least in red tribe areas. Most red states are pretty rural often with few roads, and substantial wilderness in between small towns. The ideal strategy in that area would look a lot like what happened in Iraq or Afghanistan. You strike with a small group and slink off into the wilds. Or you plant bombs along the roadside. Or you take out the power grid. And so on. Tanks and drones don’t work well without defined targets. Air strikes can’t be called on people who aren’t there.

And big cities have a huge problem with supply chains— almost everything that a city needs comes from or through rural areas. If the trucks don’t come to DC for long enough, there’s not much that can be done from the government end.

Urban areas have supply routes running through rural areas, but those supply routes need to route through urban areas to function properly(eg highway interchanges). The overall picture still benefits the reds but it’s much more complicated than you make it seem.

Of course nothing in a conflict of this type is simple, but what I’m pointing out is that there are a lot of thing that go in favor of the rural areas and make the kind of fighting that the military would do a bit more complicated. Yes you could field a very large army in rural areas, but if you don’t know who’s fighting and who’s not, or where the IED is or drone strike or attack on infrastructure will come from. And trying to be everywhere isn’t easy, even the biggest military in the world is still finite and can’t control everything.

In a war that’s more a guerrilla conflict with unexpected attacks by small groups who blend in with the locals and have lots of wilderness areas to hide in, it’s going to be really hard for a conventional military to gain and maintain control over the territory and to protect the supply lines to several large cities at the same time. The Blues would have the major disadvantage of having to protect itself and its political leadership in the theater of war. We haven’t had to do so since 1865. And even then, the South was too genteel to try things like starving a city (Maryland surrounds DC and thus cutting off DC would have been possible even back then had they tried to invade). The problem for the military will be fighting an insurgent conflict with most of its tools prevented by the fact that the people doing it are Americans and thus you can’t do things like bomb the strongholds of the insurgents or go house to house collecting weapons.

Not to mention that it turns out that the PREMIER weapon in modern warfare (for cost-effectiveness, anyway) is not tanks, fighter aircraft, or cruise missiles, but a $25 Chinese Amazon drone with a $2 explosive warhead.

I actually think that bulwark-against-tyranny types often underestimate the difficulty of a successful low-intensity conflict. But imagine a Northern Ireland-type conflict today, except the IRA has the DJ Mavik.

the PREMIER weapon in modern warfare (for cost-effectiveness, anyway) is not tanks, fighter aircraft, or cruise missiles, but a $25 Chinese Amazon drone with a $2 explosive warhead.

Or a $300 thermal camera.

I think we have a working model for what people with working knowledge of firearms, access to long guns, and willingness to go into hot war with D.C. will be; it might not be an insurgency, but instead, dozens of D.C. snipers operating in tandem, and specifically targeting the tyrant and their supporters.

Obviously, only the barest fraction of people who talk the boogaloo game would do anything but hand over their guns and seethe when push comes to shove. But as the D.C. sniper shows us, it doesn't take a lot of people to utterly fuck things up. Add in things like targeted sabotage of the power grid in key areas and a few more Oklahoma City bombings, and I think that the government could run out of state capacity very quickly.

I am not convinced that the ability of the tiniest sliver of the population to fuck things up is a net positive.

The way a militia envisioned by the framers would work is that it would unite the bulk of men in a country with similar ideas on how their country should be run. If 99% think that life under British rule is great, and 1% wants to fight for independence, then the 99% would simply arrest the 1% and extradite them to the Brits. Political power grows from the barrel of a gun, so if the guns are equally distributed throughout the population, the majority will be in charge.

If anyone who owns an AR15 gets de-facto veto powers over the federal government, this will not make a country more democratic, but less democratic.

For what it is worth, I agree with @Capital_Room that assassinations are unlikely to change the fundamental character of a political system. If you killed Hitler in 1924, this would not turn the NSDAP or their voters into democrats. But also, if someone had shot Biden in 2020, the US would not have said "well, our democratically elected president is dead, so democracy has failed and we should build a Fuehrerstaat."

Ok, I think we have to keep in mind just how red the people willing to use guns are. The FBI is a small minority of federal law enforcement, after all. The ‘police caste’, for lack of a better term, is ultra ultra red.

the tyrant

This points to a problem recently discussed by Auron MacIntyre: that the word "tyranny" generally conjures up in our minds rule by a singular tyrant; and thereby the impression that all that needs be done to guard against oppression is to prevent power from falling into any one person's hand's. But such individual concentration of power is not necessary (nor sufficient) for a government to become oppressive. As Hannah Arendt wrote in On Violence, bureaucracy can lead to "tyranny without a tyrant."

Snipers can shoot a singular "tyrant and their supporters," but when you're instead oppressed by tens of thousands of mostly-interchangeable near-anonymous bureaucrats with no clear, single leader, what then?

Snipers can shoot a singular "tyrant and their supporters," but when you're instead oppressed by tens of thousands of mostly-interchangeable near-anonymous bureaucrats with no clear, single leader, what then?

Well, about that sniper...

I've read that piece before, and I think our @KulakRevolt both overestimates the ease of assassination government officials — and the willingness of sane, non-suicidal people to attempt it, given the negligible odds of getting away with it — and underestimates the willingness of our officials to bear the risk (which, again, is lower than he thinks).

Was McVeigh really that much of an outlier? You make a good point that this would require sufficient motivation, but I think living conditions could easily get bad enough that people no longer have much to lose.

Really all that needs to happen is that people get their friends and family killed, raped or immiserated with no recourse.

As mentionned elsewhere in this thread, the Feds have been smart enough to avoid escalating in such conditions since Waco, but if they did we could easily get back to levels of violence that are not really that far in the past. People forget there are still living members of the Weather Underground.

Was McVeigh really that much of an outlier?

Yes, and his sort even more so in the decades since.

I think living conditions could easily get bad enough that people no longer have much to lose.

Perhaps, but not particularly soon, and as times get more desperate, people tend to get less cooperative as they compete with one another to maintain their slice of the shrinking metaphorical pie.

Really all that needs to happen is that people get their friends and family killed, raped or immiserated with no recourse.

I think Nybbler answered this one pretty well.

As mentionned elsewhere in this thread, the Feds have been smart enough to avoid escalating in such conditions since Waco

McVeigh had very little to do with the lack of further Wacos. Nor is it due to any unwillingness or incapacity on the part of the government. It is my understanding that the local cops had several opportunities to arrest Koresh and other leading Branch Davidians, and indeed wanted to do so, but were specifically told not to by the feds, who wanted to sweep up the entire group in a single big operation that Janet Reno could show off in the media, and the FBI and ATF could use to justify their big budgets and fancy toys.

But then it went wrong. So, now, they don't bother doing it that way. Instead, they let the local cops pick off leadership as soon as possible.

The reason you don't see any more Waco-type incidents isn't because the government can't deal with groups like the Branch Davidians, it's because they've gotten so good at nipping such groups in the bud long before they ever reach the "armed compound" stage, in ways that don't grab mass media attention.

It's not a sign of their weakness, but a sign of their strength.

Really all that needs to happen is that people get their friends and family killed, raped or immiserated with no recourse.

They'd cling to authority and blame their friends and family for their disobedience and defiance. Law-and-order conservatives do this as naturally as progressives denounce their "racist uncle".

Because they believe in a recourse. This cannot be maintained forever.

Because they believe in a recourse. This cannot be maintained forever.

It can be maintained until they are dead.

Snipers can shoot a singular "tyrant and their supporters," but when you're instead oppressed by tens of thousands of mostly-interchangeable near-anonymous bureaucrats with no clear, single leader, what then?

"He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers, to harass our people, and eat out their substance."

I guess you're going to need a lot more bullets.

No, you're going to need a lot more people. Because our sniper might be able to successfully pick off one of the faceless bureaucrats… but his odds of getting away alive and free to try again with another are very, very small. So you're going to need someone else to pick up where he left off… and then another to follow after him… and then another…

And like @RobertLiguori noted above, only "the barest fraction" are even going to do anything other than meekly submit. And after the first dozen snipers all end up arrested or dead, while the bureaucrats they picked off are replaced, with no real change in the mechanisms of tyranny (beyond further crackdowns and tightening security), how many are really going to want to follow suit?

Because our sniper might be able to successfully pick off one of the faceless bureaucrats… but his odds of getting away alive and free to try again with another are very, very small.

Recent events seem to indicate that for the set of bureaucrats not protected by countersnipers the odds might be better than you think?

AIUI the countersnipers were slower to respond to the Trump shooter because they were busy doing overwatch at the ranges that a sane sniper who was concerned with getting away with it might have set up -- 4-500 yards.

Take away the overwatch, substitute a competent assassin, and it would absolutely be possible for a bad dude to crank off a few shots COM and hop in a van to escape. (on second thought let's make it a dirtbike considering that this is a Kulak fantasy were in)

substitute a competent assassin

Random citizens are not "competent assassins." And for that matter, I'm not sure how much "competent assassin" is even a thing. I don't remember where I read it (as usual), but I recall reading about how on the one hand, it's not easy for a protection detail to stop a determined assassin with no concern for his own survival, but, on the other hand, any assassin who makes plans to try to get away alive is pretty much guaranteed to fail at hitting their target.

Now, the fact that the bureaucrats (at least initially) won't have a protection detail will change this a bit. But still, the odds of getaway remain very slim.

Random citizens are not "competent assassins."

Well picking citizens from a hat your odds would suck, sure -- but go over to Rokslide.com (hunting forum with a focus on long range elk & such) and there are 10,000 dudes who could hit a man at 500 yards every single time. 500 yards is a long ways -- much easier getaway than robbing a bank, and people do that all the time.

That's before you even get into people with military experience -- I'm not saying it's likely, but it's not impossible. And even if it fails most of the time, assassination attempts would put quite a damper on the activities of the bureaucrats, and might make many reconsider their path in life?

A sane terrorist would use bombs, damn the collateral damage. That’s what terrorists elsewhere in the world mostly do.

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