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If we try and you're wrong, then we win. If we try and you're right, then this creates common knowledge of the problem, which is useful for coordinating further escalation, which creates opportunities for an eventual win.
What's the alternative? If we don't fight, we definately lose. What's the argument that fighting and losing leads to worse outcomes than not fighting and losing? What's the outcome you're actually attempting to avoid, and how do your prescriptions actually lead to avoiding it?
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.
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:
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We are not the imperial Japanese, and the Blues are not 1940s America. Should the Russian Whites have surrendered meekly to the Reds? My read is no, but again, our situation isn't Whites vs Reds either. We are actually in a much better situation, against a much less ruthless enemy. We have not yet begun to fight, metaphorically or literally. There is no rational basis for despair in the current situation.
The Reds I see around me are evidently capable of considerable coordination. You should at least consider the possibility that your personal experiences do not generalize.
Your opinion is that I am a liar, because I have repeatedly stated that I believe that "2nd Amendment solutions" are both a possible and practical solution to the current situation, without providing details of how that would work. I've stated that I prefer being called a liar to providing those details, annoying as it is, because I'm still hoping the current push for peaceful defiance will work. 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. I think you badly underestimate both the chances both of the hicks actually trying this and the possible effectiveness of the strategy if they do, but I believe I've stated a number of times that my understanding of "2nd Amendment solutions" does not consist of Red Tribers, singly or in numbers, fighting the government with their personal collections of small-arms. If that was the scenario I was expecting, I would be significantly less confident in success, though still not as pessimistic as you. But that is not, in fact, the scenario I think is likely, and my assessment of that scenario is not the source of my confidence. If the Blues find a genie that magically un-exists all guns in America, it would not materially change my estimate of our chances for overthrowing Blue Tribe. The Second Amendment and the firearms it is intended to protect are much, much more valuable as a coordination mechanism than for pure tactical advantage. The tactical advantages come from other vectors, vectors which neither you nor most others appear to have grasped. I think this is a good thing, because we might still be able to unwind this mess before people like you stumble across them, a whole lot of people die, and the lights probably go out for the forseeable future.
And the part I can't figure out is, what your actual position is. Let's say you're right about everything. I'm lying, and we have no chance. 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?
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.
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.
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).
Speak for yourself. Maybe that is the way you are. Maybe that is the way the people around you are. It is not the way I am, and it is not the way the people around me are. There's a decent argument that Rittenhouse single-handedly ended the Floyd riots, and he survived the Blues' attempts to crush him for it, and the attempts to crush him appear to me to have been costly for the Blues. They attempted to crush Kavanaugh, and failed. Gun owners refuse to comply with state and federal laws, and they get away with it. This is exactly the sort of coordination you and @The_Nybbler consistently claim doesn't exist, because you are both so black-pilled that you refuse to accept contrary evidence.
Abbott defying Biden on the border requires significant organization. Gun owners refusing to comply with registration requires coordination. But in fact, you are fundamentally wrong about the level of coordination required to destroy our present society. The amount of organization required is effectively zero. It can be done with individuals alone.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Red Tribers coordinate on all sorts of things, from defying law to purging the Republican party.
Infrastructure vulnerabilities are a significant part of why I think small bands of hicks with rifles have a better chance than you allow. To my knowledge, they never did find the guys who shot up that substation, and that is an example of an attack that can be effectively carried out by one person alone.
In any case, no, I am not talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities.
This is what I don't get. If we've already lost and the best thing we can do is to kill ourselves and spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come, why are the horrors to come horrors? You don't appear to believe in God, so once you're dead that's it, and none of this actually matters in the end. Even fighting, it really is not that hard to make sure you aren't taken alive, and then the horror is over. If you're right, we fight and they crush us, and this is worse... why? We're already doomed, no? What benefit is derived from quiet surrender? You already hate your life and want to die; how does surrendering to the blues improve any part of your situation? Why do you care about this question at all?
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And you never will.
Your enemy holds the bureaucracy. They hold the media. They hold the vast majority of the corporations. They hold an even more complete majority of educational institutions. They hold Federal law enforcement and state law enforcement in many states. And of course all big city law enforcement. Your tribe has paths for exit but no paths for entrance -- you may birth more young people but they end up rejecting you under the influence of the institutions. Immigrants may not join the other tribe but they vote for their party, and so do their children.
And most of your tribe respects all of those institutions despite their obvious capture. They can cynically ignore all the rules, all the laws, everything, to go after one of yours, and when the verdict comes in, your tribe will accept it. Ask Alex Jones or Rudy Giuliani. When Trump is duly convicted in New York Kangaroo Court, a large number of your people will say "Well, the jury had more information than I do, so he must be guilty" or similar rationalizations to trust the institutions. Because the very idea that the institutions are utterly corrupt and should be defied is anti-conservative.
That is the rational basis for despair.
Abbott and DeSantis are coordinating open defiance to the bureaucracy. Maybe they'll lose, but they haven't yet. The Bureaucracy tried to put Rittenhouse in a cell for the rest of his life, and he's a free man. The Bureaucracy is losing the fight on gun control, and they are losing it permanently.
The media are losing their influence, and in many cases their ability to even keep their doors open due to their entire business model going extinct.
And they are destroying those corporations, in a way that's pretty impossible to hide.
And yet, those agencies can and have been successfully defied, and they can and have fought and lost.
And those cities continue to decay.
They don't actually have a plan. They have a scam that works when we endlessly cooperate with it, and that falls apart if we simply and consistently defect. We are currently organizing that defection, and it is delivering tangible results. Your predictions have been consistent for some time, and increasingly they are being falsified by the actual outcomes. Your prediction was that Abbott would not be able to defy Biden on the border, but he did. Your prediction, I think, would be that Republicans would "compromise" and vote for the border bill, but we didn't. Resistance is not costless, but the costs can and are being borne.
Time will tell.
Too much of my tribe does, it's true, but less and less each day, and the more we push resistance, the more obvious the problems with the system become and the less my tribe respects it.
This is a prediction. Let's see how it goes.
To the extent that this is true, it seems to me that Conservatism is on the way out. Again, Abbott and DeSantis seem to be going for open defiance. The gun culture is definately going for open defiance. Trump's supporters are going for open defiance. Maybe you're right and it will all fizzle out, but that does not appear to me to be the trajectory we're on.
When they do, will you change your tune?
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?
Are they? "Companies That Get ‘Woke’ Aren’t Going Broke — They’re More Profitable Than Ever."
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?
I'll say that you were right that non-violent defiance wouldn't work, and that we should escalate. "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul" remains true. It also remains true that keeping one's soul does not appear to require pacifism. Belief in God cuts both ways: it means we see no reason to pursue victory at any cost, but it also means some of those "costs" are in fact acceptable. Faith in God does not preclude prosecuting war, nor inflicting the harms of war. There are no "horrors to come"; pain and death are the inevitable lot of all men, always have been and always will be.
You've mangled the argument rather badly, but sure, close enough for purposes of this discussion. If Blue Tribe hegemony is destroyed, that will not in fact solve anything in any permanent or meaningful sense. Destroying the Third Reich didn't solve anything in any permanent or meaningful sense. Neither did grinding down the Soviet Union. Both were still the right thing to do, and worth the costs required to do them. In the latter case, Von Nuemann was wrong; beating the Soviet Union was not worth a nuclear exchange. We probably should have paid more than we did, but a full-blown nuclear war was not worth it to stop a tyranny that was, in fact, already doomed.
If the defiance accelerates and grows, are you and @TheNybbler going to admit you were wrong?
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?
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 until then, you'll insist that we shouldn't try, no? Every time we face a fight, you'll argue we should surrender rather than commit to it. Every time we win a fight, you'll argue we should surrender rather than capitalize on it. How is your position distinguishable from an argument that Reds can't coordinate, and that is a good thing? You are fully committed to the position that Reds can't coordinate, and that we shouldn't coordinate, and you've precommitted to that position regardless of any evidence short of absolute victory.
Nothing. I believe that escalation against tyranny is self-justifying, regardless of outcome. If our fate is destruction, that is acceptable; we should fight for what is right regardless. If that fight provokes greater reprisals on the part of the tyrants, that is all the more reason to fight harder. Their tyranny is fundamentally illegitimate, and it is axiomatically good to fight them. Nor is it obvious why your preferred plan of suicide would be preferable; we're dead either way, aren't we? In that eventuality, if we're dead listening to you and dead listening to me, at least my way we go down fighting, which seems deeply preferable. If you think otherwise, you are free to follow your own counsel, but it's worth pointing out that there is no rational reason to prefer your policy, even if you are correct in how things will go.
"there is no point where you'll actually go to war" is a reasonable prediction, and it's true that the only way to disprove it is to actually go to war. I do not think proving you wrong in an internet debate is a victory worth killing and dying over, so I'll refrain for now, and your prediction will continue to be plausible.
What is not plausible is your prediction that Red Tribe can't coordinate defiance short of violence, when it is in fact, observably, coordinating defiance short of violence, and at considerable scale. You and @The_Nybbler have been proven wrong on that score. You can retreat to the prediction that defiance won't work, to which I reply that time will tell.
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Certainly they are not. There have been some Supreme Court decisions, but the blue states just ignore or even defy ("Spirit of Aloha", "No Second Amendment in New York State") them. And with Rahimi the Court is poised to neuter Bruen. ATF is getting shirty (and shooty) with gun dealers again, not to mention classifying every L-shaped piece of metal a firearm. In New Jersey I still can't buy a gun or carry one if I had one. And even in Virginia, didn't they pass a bunch of new gun control?
Abbott did beat them on the border, I was wrong there. But that's a tiny light in a sea of darkness.
Certainly they are. The guns are never, ever going to go away. Registration is not going to happen. Confiscation is not going to happen. They're still trying to go after the manufacturers and dealers, but DIY manufacturing gets easier and more accessible every year, and we're well past the point where this process can be stopped or even meaningfully slowed. Enforcement on any of this, whether against the gun culture or against criminals, is a complete joke.
Meanwhile, the Gun Culture has learned to actively erode existing laws through malicious compliance and technological innovation, and are doing an excellent job of radicalizing the community as a whole to reject the legitimacy of gun control laws. The Fudds are all but extinct, and the people who replaced them are moving from "I lost them in a boating accident" to "I didn't lose shit." I am pretty sure I'm going to see the NFA die in my lifetime, one way or the other. Concealed Carry continues to steadily expand. And as fantastic as all that is, we've barely started on the low-hanging fruit. There's beautiful avenues of practical lawfare/tech development just lying around, waiting for someone to pick them up and thus further beclown state and federal laws.
Yes, it's easier for the blues to violate the letter and the spirit of the laws they don't like, thanks to their stranglehold on institutional support. But it is not only possible to do as they have done, it is inevitable.
A gun buried in your backyard might as well have gone away. They may eventually do sweeps to gather up the majority of them, but even if they don't, in time you or your children will have forgotten about them.
Making guns isn't that hard, for competent machinists (of which fewer and fewer are being produced). Making ammo, on the other hand; as far as I know there's no way to even make firearm brass from non-firearm materials, never mind the chemicals. Smokeless powder requires restricted materials (nitric acid). Primers require restricted materials AND are super-dangerous to manufacture on the sly.
The gun culture has gotten more radical, but with ATF declaring firearm parts to be firearms, they'll start rolling up people soon enough, probably starting with those who post videos on the internet. This will "encourage the others" to keep their mouths shut (lest they get picked up by the feds), and the knowledge will no longer be passed along, and the culture will die.
Well, see, there's the problem. They don't. The community isn't radicalizable. At their base, they think the laws preventing me from getting a gun in New Jersey -- a requirement to be vouched for by 2 unrelated adult residents, and a requirement to produce the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health professional I've ever seen -- are reasonable restrictions if administered by decent people. They may be upset by the time it takes to get things approved or the requirement to get a new set of vouchers for every handgun or shit like that, but basically they don't believe in personal freedom or individual rights because they're not liberals (in the Lockean sense). The "second amendment" people are, but they're a small subset. Most red tribers would be fine if they could be assured they could keep their personal guns.
I am teaching my children the importance of firearms in defending liberty. When they're old enough, I'll show them where we've "buried in your backyard" the family firearms that are illegal today (regardless of whether that cache grows, shrinks, or has become unnecessary due to changing laws). I think it's a bad assumption that most people hiding firearms aren't doing the same with their children.
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They are literally tracking all the online purchases of people buying 3d printers, checking them against social media and reports by leftist informants, and raiding people at 3am.
Thinking about "revolution" is insane with the kind of tyranny you're facing.
Surely the number of people buying 3D printers is far too high to perform meaningful background checks on all of them.
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Could you provide a source for this? I like to keep abreast of current developments on this front.
In any case, what do they do if you have a 3d printer and no social media?
I suppose that depends rather heavily on how you expect a revolution to work. Some are easier to execute than others.
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