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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.
Not when you can casually cross-reference all credit card transactions to automatically detect "home grown violent extremists" who shop at sporting goods stores and search for political topics. That narrows it down well enough to make a target list for manual investigation.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEEkKBDWgAA6g4R?format=jpg&name=large
You do not seem to realize what the Democratic party are capable and willing to do to maintain power, and what a powerful tool the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is when used as a political weapon.
This is just cons complaining about the lib version of 'noticing'. Pattern recognition applies to everyone. If they've detected specific transaction patterns highly predictive of possible mass shootings, why is it wrong to acknowledge that? Would you have the same sympathy with some Muslim garden supply business owner regularly profiled and investigated for his high-volume fertilizer purchases? I know for a fact that this kind of transaction analytics is responsible for preventing a lot of successful terrorist attacks, and I also know that conservatives don't care when it's used on their outgroup.
This is facile. There is no specific transaction pattern highly predictive of mass shootings, in that it is both selective and specific; there can't be, because there are way too few mass shootings. The way they get "highly predictive" is by reversing the order and noting things like "gee, looks like nearly all mass shooters purchased guns recently", maybe we should check out anyone who buys a gun?
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Just going to let this post speak for itself.
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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.
Were you, uh, going to acknowledge that article?
I thank you for it. Like I said, I try to keep abreast of this sort of thing. I don't think it changes the fundamental math, but I do want to see this guy defended to the hilt, and I do maintain that the surveillance and enforcement against him is fundamentally illegitimate. What more are you looking for in terms of a response? Do you think that them getting this guy demonstrates that DIY firearms are a genie that can be put back in the bottle?
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"ghost gun raid on Staten Island nets arsenal of firearms"
The last two paragraphs were edited out of the article, but you can still see them on archive.is. DHS and fincen are still trying to keep it under wraps that literally every bank and store sends them complete customer data to comb through, but every so often some junior dumb fuck assigned to a state task force brags about it on record.
For convenience’s sake, here’s a direct archive.is link: https://archive.is/wIt8h.
Thanks, my phone absolutely dies trying to do that
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