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Is there a way to express that some issues may not have satisfactory political solutions without being modded for fedposting?
Lean heavily into is rather than ought. Describe the specific mechanisms that you see driving people away from political solutions, how this driving works, how you see this process evolving over time. Analyze how it might be prevented, and why you think those efforts to prevent it are likely to fail, if that's your conclusion. Make rational predictions on the expectation you'll be held to them.
And if you really want to do it well, do what I do and before you start, take a couple minutes and contemplate your closest loved ones burned to charcoal, flesh shredded by bullets and shrapnel, their skulls shattered and evacuated brain matter fly-blown in the afternoon sun. Meditate on it, try to capture the sensory details, the texture and smell. Imagine yourself poor, hungry, maybe homeless, in a world that cares nothing for you, scrounging for food while your children sit starving and hollow-eyed at whatever itinerant shelter you're squatting at presently. Imagine fear, bone deep and omnipresent, defining every moment of the remainder of your life. That's what "no satisfactory political solutions" very likely looks like in reality: the rule of hatred, terror, malice and immiseration on a scale unprecedented in the experience of you or anyone you know, and the permanent end of every good thing you have ever known.
This still seems to me to be the most likely outcome, given our present trajectory, but I for one am in no hurry to reach the end of this particular rainbow.
This seems exaggerated. You had a literal civil war and it wasn’t this bad AFAIK. Obviously quite a lot of people died but ‘the end of all good things and a life of permanent misery and terror’ doesn’t seem like a good way of describing post-civil-war America.
We had a civil war back when "States" actually meant "independently governed polities", not "administrative prefectures of the single government", and people were pretty loyal to their states, and so despite some exceptions like West Virginia, the "War Between the States" was actually a war between (collections of) states. The front line was a mostly well-defined, somewhat-stable thing.
The most exceptional change to the geometry of the combat was probably Sherman's march to the sea, and it's not a coincidence that that's the main US Civil War example on Wikipedia's Scorched Earth page. If you're in a position where you have a locally small value of territory occupied relative to the length of frontage needed to defend it, then you don't want to sit on it and defend it. The best thing you can do defensively is to keep maneuvering until you're somewhere less dangerous, and the best thing you can do offensively is reduce the value of territory you maneuver through before the enemy takes it back. Scorch the earth.
What would the front line look like in a US Civil War II? Something roughly like the old maps of the "Hillary Archipelago" and "Trump's Ocean", to begin with. And that looks like an astonishingly high ratio of boundary to territory, doesn't it? That's not going to be what a somewhat-stable front line looks like. That's what the battle lines of a guerrilla war look like. If the war goes on a long time, those fractal boundaries are going to change into something more connected, and a lot of people in both the red areas being seized for connections and the blue areas that are too isolated to connect are going to be unhappy about the process.
For that matter, a lot of people in the "red" (actually reddish-purple) and "blue" (actually bluish-purple) areas aren't going to be happy no matter what happens. Being so ideologically divided in a way that's so geographically diffuse makes it less likely for another civil war to happen, but also makes the consequences if one does happen much more dire.
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War (sigh) has changed.
Motorization. Improvised explosives. Handheld automatic weapons. Radio. A small number of motivated individuals can deal a lot more damage today than they could during the March to the Sea.
Personally, I think a hypothetical U.S. balkanization would look more like the Troubles than the American Civil War. It’d be high-variance: some regions would see a bombing every week, and others would be left untouched up until the point a militia rolled into town. Even the best-off, though, would suffer compared to the globalist, interconnected society we have today.
Not everyone would see the outcomes FC described. But enough of them would, and then they’d take up arms and gouge back. And your children would never expect to have it as good as we did.
Right, this I think is mostly a reasonable prediction. Perhaps I’m wrong but I think that @FCfromSSC pushed a valid point a little too hard and made it look silly.
On a lighter note, your post reminds me of a scene from Black Books:
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I observe a lot of civil wars do and have had these results. I note that more mild civil wars, like the English one and our own, happened a long time ago and under very different conditions.
If you think serious violence cannot happen here, I think you are badly mistaken. If you think that such violence can't get bad enough to kill the American economy or seriously compromise our national security, and possibly both, and possibly for the foreseeable future, well, you're much more optimistic than I am. It seems to me that there is a tipping point, past which gravity takes over and we are all along for the ride. Violence causes political instability, political instability crashes markets, market crashes create mass dysfunction, mass dysfunction begets more violence. Maybe I'm overestimating the feedback effect, but I observe that a lot of people are vocally enthusiastic about violence, and that this enthusiasm appears to directly result in actual violence being inflicted. I think it is the sort of thing people are really going to regret having not taken seriously when they had the chance.
I do appreciate the reality check, truly. But I just don’t see Europeans and Americans acting like Congolese warlords, or permanently destroying their country’s economics. There would be a significant amount of short term suffering, yes, but not as much as you are proposing and I don’t think the long-term effects would be so bad. Look at Spain, which had a reasonably modern Civil War and was basically okay.
Then it seems to me that you lack the necessary imagination and perspective.
The best estimate I've seen is that BLM killed ~8.5k black people, in addition to thousands more non-black people, in roughly four years. No one involved intended for that to happen, but it happened all the same. Most of the people involved will not be aiming to become Congolese warlords. I'm skeptical that their intentions will prevent the formation of lasting conditions where Congolese warlordism is an adaptive behavior.
From observation, violence > chaos > poverty > more violence is a self-perpetuating cycle, especially when the good people die or leave until those who remain are some form of bad person.
I am not arguing that American civil war means inevitable and eternal hell on earth. I am arguing that if you are contemplating a potential war, you are probably underweighting the likelihood and severity of the bad consequences, and you are probably not thinking about what it means if those bad consequences arrive for you, personally.
Perhaps I misread you but it seemed like you were arguing exactly that:
Thus some level of shock and bemusement. In The Black Swan Taleb describes his experience in the Lebanese Civil War and it wasn’t like that. Most people adapt to most things.
Only if you use a very non-standard definition of ‘kill’. BLM killed perhaps 30 people: the CHAZ murders, that poor old man who got his head cracked open. Maybe the 2 people who Rittenhouse shot.
But ‘assisted in the death of, via second order effects on murder rates’ is a rather different phenomenon.
Message received, and I will think about it carefully.
I don't know if I agree with that. If law and order collapses as a result of civil war, it's not going to be much comfort to me that technically the mob burning down my house is a second order effect.
That’s not what @FCfromSSC was talking about though. He was (in my perhaps incorrect reading) folding in murders that resulted from a reduced police presence over the next few years as ‘BLM deaths’. In some cases this is appropriate - if you are arguing about whether Black Lives Matter cares about saving Black Lives, the fact that it indirectly resulted in many black deaths is relevant. But I don’t think the use here was appropriate - it seems more like Pascal’s mugging where I say that lowering the minimum wage will cause 10,000 bankruptcies and 300 related suicides and therefore that anyone proposing tax cuts is a Stalinesque mass murderer.
(If there really were thousands of BLM mob murders then of course I apologise).
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Rdrama mocks us for words, words, words, but it do be like that though, and it's a good thing.
Explain why a political solution won't work, explain what might work instead, try to keep a relatively morally neutral tone. It's not that hard, you can literally boogaloopost if you put enough effort.
You belive that had @Capital_Room explained his literal bullet solution or @WhiningCoil his outside the law and politics solution in a morally neutral tone they'd be grand?
Maybe one of them will edit their posts with your suggestions.
Yes, I've seen it done, and I've seen prominent posters (who used to be mods) clutching their pearls over it, and leaving in a huff about it, and no disciplinary action being taken.
You were a part of the discussion that happened two months ago that pointed out that the post cited in TW's Schism reasoning post which did not call for violence. And even the spicier FC post cited by others doesn't seem to be calling for violence either unless you interpret people saying that they hate and want others to die as being actual calls to violence which is not how I understand the term/phrase. I'm guessing you disagree or maybe didn't see the posts Nybbler made.
For me, saying you think that the only solution is killing people and saying that you hate these people and if they tried to destroy your home/city that you'd kill them is a far cry from the same thing. But no amount of words, words, words is going to make it acceptable for FC to have said that the right should just start shooting leftists because they are evil and not because they should defend their lives and property with violence and that they're indifferent to their own destruction because they believe they are evil.
I just want to make it clear that I really don't think calls of violence are allowed or tolerated,even if worded eloquently or verbosely. In fact, for the most part tiny posts like capital's or whining's are let slide far more often and mostly because it's assumed that we give charity to other posts. Capital's is pretty impossible to afford charity to but Whining's post is pretty easy to do so.
AvocadoPanic was asking "is there a way to express that some issues may not have satisfactory political solutions?", not "is there a way to directly call for violence?". The answer to the latter is obviously "no".
Well, then I'm not sure what your response is supposed to mean. FC didn't call for violence, neither did WhiningCoil. How do you get around this unwritten rule that means if you post something short you will be interpreted as uncharitably as possible? I guess words, words, words works in the way it always does for every rule here but WhiningCoil didn't break the rule, at least not the one they're blaming him for. And your suggestion seems more like a "how do you get away with writing bullshit on your homework? just write nonsense for a few pages they never actually read it." than a real suggestion of how someone should conduct themselves.
And I should note that FC was warned for that post, just not banned. So, even your acceptable version of how to express oneself in that situation is not a pure example of the right way to post.
Correctly caveat your writing. Be aware of how it may be read and misread, and write appropriately.
This will not save you from sufficiently aggressive I-don’t-care-what-you-say-I-know-what-you-mean persecution, of course, which is why many rationalists split off from woke in the first place. But I don’t remember ever seeing a carefully worded piece get modded here.
I'd say what whiningcoil said was carefully worded if his intent was something similar to capital room's. I think you meant to say you've never seen a carefully worded long piece get modded around here. And it's true, just write two paragraphs and your week ban will end up just being a day or write seven paragraphs and you'll just get a warning, despite the content being exactly distilled down to the single sentence it could have been. Words, words, words, should literally be written in to the rules.
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