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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   24894 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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Could American social progressivism be (in part) an intelligence operation to create “defense-in-depth” against America’s weak points, akin to the cybersecurity or military strategy?

In cybersecurity, valuable assets are hyper-protected with multiple layers of security, so that if any layer fails the others may still hold. The idea being that the assets are so important to defend and attacks could come at any time (and with novel stratagem), so it is reasonable to over-defend it in many different ways. In the military usage, layers of physical defense are established so that one may retreat into another defense upon an assault, ensuring reduced losses and longer periods of defending. Another somewhat ancillary idea is “fencing the Torah” in Judaism. It is so important not to violate a Torah prohibition that “fences” are established to make even the chance violation impossible. Eg, the the rule to not even pick up a tool lest you accidentally use it which would violate the sabbath prohibition.

America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines. In order to hyper-defend from that risk, you implement a social operation involving defense-in-depth where the majority constituents must necessarily deny their own identity and engage in ritual ”sacrifices” upon the altar of plurality (from Trayvon to George Floyd). This explains even the whitification of Asians: once they become significant enough to possibly lead to Balkan problems, you enforce the same depotentiation. Notably, it is not enough of a social defense to merely pledge allegiance to plurality, as that hardly changes someone’s psychology. You must actually make it a social ideal so that it is promoted and normalized especially among the young potential rebels, and that is in fact what we see — those most at risk for any potential rebellion are coerced into a Kaczynskian “system’s neatest trick” procedure where their very rebellion helps to solidify state security. Why allow “Antifa” their own zone in Portland? Because when they are doing that they are doing nothing serious. Along the same lines, see how valuable transgenders have been as a layer of defense: millions of conservatives hours are spent arguing against something that has a surprising level of state support, and millions of progressive hours are spent defending something that is historically and intuitively off-putting. Those are hours that are not spent on something actually valuable; transgender stuff is simply the most outer layer of defense against a possible Balkan threat, and if conservatives win there’s nothing valuable lost from a state security perspective.

As outlandish as it seems, I think this is possible. It would be par for the course for how intel agencies behaved historically — well before they had enormous databases of information and AI to help them decide state hyper-protection. We could imagine the team of hundreds of some thousands employed toward this objective at some intel agency: “how do we protect against the most cataclysmic threat for America?” They look at the cost and benefit with history in mind, with WWII’s staggering death toll and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in mind.

America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines. In order to hyper-defend from that risk, you implement a social operation involving defense-in-depth where the majority constituents must necessarily deny their own identity and engage in ritual ”sacrifices” upon the altar of plurality (from Trayvon to George Floyd). This explains even the whitification of Asians: once they become significant enough to possibly lead to Balkan problems, you enforce the same depotentiation. Notably, it is not enough of a social defense to merely pledge allegiance to plurality, as that hardly changes someone’s psychology. You must actually make it a social ideal so that it is promoted and normalized especially among the young potential rebels, and that is in fact what we see — those most at risk for any potential rebellion are coerced into a Kaczynskian “system’s neatest trick” procedure where their very rebellion helps to solidify state security.

This seems more likely to create problems of civic disunity than to serve as a defence against them, at least as currently implemented.

If US intelligence was most focused on strengthening America's stability, wouldn't they try to shore up American identity? Wouldn't they want colorblind patriotism, the supporting the troops ethos? You want to smooth over divisions, you don't want to create even controlled conflicts. You'd try to subvert and suppress dangerous groups of course but you wouldn't try to suppress the majority's white identity, you try to annex it into American identity.

Look at what Russia does. Rally around the flag, enemies all around us, we're all Russians regardless of race/creed, sacred duty to the motherland... They suppress the liberal/trans/separatist minority rather than the majority.

Here's an interesting article that perhaps deserves a post of its own. There are many things to say about it ("Gorbachev and Yeltsin ruined ice cream, the cowards.") but you get the sense that the state machinery is trying to keep the country together, promoting unity rather than division: https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/

That's not what the US is doing. They're playing the patronage/suppression game, not the national unity game. 'We need more blacks in the Air Force, quotas everywhere, need to fight white supremacy and racism'. Those Stand Down days in the US military to counter extremism, internal conflict over things like migration and national identity.

Wokeness really isn’t very far from what Russia and China do for their minorities; both practice affirmative action openly or less openly. These countries’ governments are both officially anti-racist. Chinese rightists complain online about privileges granted to non-Han minorities; Russian ones complain online about advantages of Central Asians or Muslims replacing whites in Moscow and so on. Russia has emphasized national unity since the start of the Ukraine War, but it doesn’t seem to me more radical than the unity the US had in support of ‘the troops’ after 9/11. The US military’s internal rationale for affirmative action is domestic social unity, that’s why the Supreme Court gave them an explicit carve-out in the affirmative action ban last year.

Non-Han minorities get certain privileges but if they step out of line they'll be in a world of pain. Imagine if a minority group in China pulled an LA riot or a Floyd in response to police brutality, let alone a CHAZ. They'd be whisked away, never to be seen again. The police would launch an orgy of repression and re-education. China is super into historical grievance narratives, patriotism and Chinese nationalism (as opposed to Han nationalism or multiculturalism). The only times they're allowed to riot is when there's some incident with the US, the Belgrade embassy bombing for instance. Then they have the police put the kid gloves on and subtly stoke the fires, while trying to keep things under control.

Imagine if the top earning film at the US box office was 'Saving Private Ryan' turned up to 11 with an ending caption saying 'the eternal glory of the US Army shall be remembered forever and ever, the brave martyrs live forever in our hearts'. That's the Battle at Lake Changjin, that's real, intense nationalism. The top grossing film in America is Star Wars VII, a woke remaster of the original Star Wars.

If Central Asians desecrate Russian symbols, they and their families are expelled. Russia takes national pride very seriously, to a quasi-religious level. There's a lot of intense patriotism and nationalism, people (Strelkov and co) who'll go volunteer to start a tough war in support of their national beliefs.

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-uzbek-boys-expelled-eternal-flame/32726911.html

Russia and China - civic nationalism. USA and West - multiculturalism and wokeness.

The only times they're allowed to riot is when there's some incident with the US, the Belgrade embassy bombing for instance. Then they have the police put the kid gloves on and subtly stoke the fires, while trying to keep things under control.

To be fair, I think that Floyd was much more similar to this than you'd first think. It was completely supported by the mainstream media and institutions.

The power balance in the West is different from that of China; there isn't a single Politburo, the media and institutions are power centers in their own right. But there's still a group of people you can more or less draw a circle around and say, these people are the people who actually decide what happens. And those people supported Floyd, even not-so-subtly stoked it, and if they hadn't it would've never happened.

Non-Han minorities get certain privileges but if they step out of line they'll be in a world of pain.

Non-Han minorities have received privileges that American leftists could never dream of. Imagine if the left restricted white parents to one child while allowing black and brown people to have unlimited children. The CHAZ and Star Wars are nothing compared to that.

Imagine if the top earning film at the US box office was 'Saving Private Ryan' turned up to 11 with an ending caption saying 'the eternal glory of the US Army shall be remembered forever and ever, the brave martyrs live forever in our hearts'. That's the Battle at Lake Changjin, that's real, intense nationalism. The top grossing film in America is Star Wars VII, a woke remaster of the original Star Wars.

Have you watched ‘Masters of the Air’ (2024)? It’s the successor show to Band of Brothers, it’s very patriotic and features a majority white male cast. I don’t think the occasional line about ‘But Black People Were Still Oppressed’ changes that. A rare negative review in Ars Technica said:

The only thing allowed here is wall-to-wall jingoistic patriotism—the kind where there's no room for anything except God, the United States of America, and bombing the crap out of the enemy.

Now, you can argue that no Chinese outlet would publish that about Battle at Lake Changjin, but it’s not clear that that’s really something negative about the US in comparison.

China is indeed doing things to minorities that American leftists could never dream of. Even allowing for US propaganda, they are not very tolerant.

In addition to the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in state-sponsored camps, government policies have included forced labor,[5][6] suppression of Uyghur religious practices,[7] political indoctrination,[8] forced sterilization,[9] forced contraception,[10][11] and forced abortion.[12][13] Experts estimate that, since 2017, some sixteen thousand mosques have been razed or damaged,[2] and hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools.[14][15] Chinese government statistics reported that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than 60%.[9] In the same period, the birth rate of the whole country decreased by 9.69%.

Or consider what they've done in Tibet. That is not woke behaviour! They offer the carrot and the stick - if your ethnic group doesn't do what they want, they'll ensure you regret it. You had better be Chinese first, second and third, Tibetan fourth. It's very different to wokeness which is all carrot and no stick, for minorities at least. Wokeness undermines and reinterprets what it means to be American, Christopher Columbus Day or Thanksgiving are 'controversial'. It's thoroughly different to Chinese nationalism.

I'm not saying it's great to be super-nationalist like China but a certain level of nationalism is preferable for stability in a time of uncertainty.

It's very far. Both Russian and Chinese interpretation of multiculturalism is "better restaurants plus folk song and dance ensembles". Unless you're in one of the few ethnic republics that can get away with that, you won't be discriminated against for being too Russian, and as far as I know, China doesn't allow that at all.

Do their military contractors have bizarre struggle sessions over Han / Russian privilege? Do their major corporations tell workers to be less Han / Russian?

If not then this is just cope.

Imagine if black people and Muslims in America were allowed to have 4 kids each but white people were only allowed to have 1 child each. That was literally state policy in China until recently. I don’t know how you can say that’s better than the US.

I could imagine it of there was a billion Americans, and it came with none of the self-flagellation. Sorry but there just is no comparison between the two approaches.

I don’t think you really mean that. Would you accept a permanent end to affirmative action, bans on any DEI, guaranteed meritocracy in public and private employment and harsh crackdowns on any racial identitarianism (white or black) in exchange for limits on the number of kids white people could have?

It is simply indisputable that China is more leftist about this kind of thing than the US. The specific flavor of anti-racism in America is largely unique to the Anglosphere, progressivism isn’t.

If the policy was time-limited like in China, sure.

It is simply indisputable that China is more leftist about this kind of thing than the US

We were talking about wokism, not leftism.

Also note how you completely dropped Russia from your argument.

I discuss it below, but it’s hard to quantify the extent to which Putin tolerates the extreme overrepresentation of various minority groups in organized crime in Russia proper. By contrast the modern FBI went after organized black gangs to the extent that the whole culture fractured and the drugs business is no longer even the main cause of internecine conflict in eg. the South Side.

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Exactly. The Chinese and Russian regimes rather markedly do not normalize ethnomasochism.

Ethnic self flagellation happens because progressives do not view normal whites as part of their tribe, hence denigrating white people and white supremacy does not diminish the interests of white progs. Gutting the promotions of white Royal Air Force and forcing new hires to be uninterested and unqualified blacks stationed in some isolated northern airbase has zero impact on a Ministry of Defense desk jockey in London whose tribe is oxbridge peers in the city. The institutional capture by progressives to advance value negative minorities is to crush the vile bad whites, and at no level do these progressives view themselves as vulnerable because the championed classes can only survive under their stewardship.

This is the big difference between western style progressive championing of minorities and Russian/Chinese style 'wokeness'. The Russians and Chinese have no internal enemy they need to weaponize a minority against, so they can make a pretense of largesse towards compliant minorities. Moreover these are neither market dominant minorities whose presence upends the socioeconomic dynamic nor violent separatists who need to be clamped down on. Let the minorities have their food and costumes so long as they do not cause violence or upend the dominant order; the Hui have always had minimal trouble compared to the Uighur or the Yunnans for the Chinese, as the Buryats have been ignored compared to the Tajiks for Russia.

pretense of largesse towards compliant minorities.

Pretense? Tuvans and Chechens both seem very favoured, moreso than ethnic russians.

The current 'favored minority' position seems a function of the deft political power employed by Shiogu and the necessity of Kadyrov as a strongman to keep Chechnya in line. Bribes siphoned by Shoigu and paid to Kadyrov are not necessarily indicative of any Muscovite high opinion of those peoples and cultures detached from their political leaders. There has been little wealth flowing downwards to the tuvans or chechens from Moscow, and doubtless the utility of Shoigu and Kadyrov in keeping those populations docile is part of their value proposition to the state.

How about the extreme amounts of organized crime by various non-ethnic-Russians that the Kremlin largely tolerates and which de facto amounts to huge wealth transfers to these minorities? Sure, there aren’t many state handouts (although there are some), but that isn’t the only thing that serves that effect.

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akin to the cybersecurity or military strategy

"Defense in Depth" means something very different in the cyber versus the traditional military context.

It's a real shame that the term was re-used but then also redefined. So, unfortunately, I think your analysis is confused and self-contradictory not because of a failure of your personal construction, but because the terms and the concepts underlying them can't be swapped out as easily as you may have assumed.

Directly answering your intro question - hard no. Conspiracy theories about the all-powerfulness of the amorphous "intel" cabal of the USA I always dismiss out of hand because the axiomatic assumption underpinning it is that they're all powerful. "Could an all powerful entity do ... stuff!?" Yes, yes it could.

The sad fact of the matter is that the really cooky progressive stuff is the result of a Long March through the institutions paired with the kind of narcissism that can only result from the most prosperous generation of all time (boomers) failing to introduce their children (millennials) to reality. If you grow up richer than all other humans and never leave the suburban never-never land (even into college), tinker belle starts talking about polyamory, and then everyone starts calling your green tights gay, then, yeah, maybe cheering for the Islamic Death Cult helps you work through those emotions.

Phrased differently; social progressivism is make believe that has survived as a political ideology only briefly. Remember, 10 years ago we were in lame duck Obama years and looking at an at the time probable Bush-Clinton 2: Electric Boogaloo contest in 2016. Then the Orange rolled down the escalator and changed the game. 10 years in politics / social ideologies isn't nothing, but it isn't that long. The hard left is dying quickly before our eyes (big caveat here: the overton window has been shifted so much that the non-hard left is still pretty nuts.)

MAGA types are going to take multiple victory laps as the hard left continues to decline, but they've problems of their own. If the hard left is political make believe, the hard right is nihilistic fatalism. We had Walt Bismarck around these parts not too long along. Reading his substack is both worth it and difficult. Worth it in that a lot of his highlighted problems are very real and very well analyzed. Difficult because a lot of the solutions are heavily caveated "...but, even still, I don't think society is recoverable."

Looking in the mirror, earlier this week or last week, I got called out for unintentionally recommending a Benedict Option. That one made me think. Nihilism and fatalism aren't self-sustaining ideologies for obvious reasons. Worse, they don't actually cultivate pro-social and pro-growth behavior in a constituency. I saw a funny thing during the heart of the pandemic; my progressive friends were barricaded in doors wearing their CBRN costumes during zoom meetings - they mostly got a little fat, posted on Twitter more, and got good at home brewing anxiety. My MAGA friends stayed outside, went to spring break --- and got constantly shitfaced without a second thought. They definitely "owned the libs" at their end of the world party. And now, even those who think Trump: Deuces Wild is inevitably going to premier in November walk around very much like a doomsday cult that had their D-Day come and go without the rapture and are now feeling empty, fearful, and unprepared.

And none of this is the real threat to America.

Because that's China.

I’m gonna sort of disagree on the causes, and I think it’s a misunderstanding of how powerful things like culture and education are. I don’t think it’s a cabal deliberately trying to create divisions, but I do think the cathedral is.

Just to take your Islam example. The cathedral wants them accepted because they need worker drones and Muslim immigrants are it. Having other people rag on them for being different is bad for business and national Stability. There’s a lot of ways to go about making Islam less dangerous-seeeming. Put Muslims on TV as good people, or victims. Don’t educate people on what the religion is really like, don’t teach people about the Hadiths especially the violent ones. And add in the culture memes of diversity and inclusion and religion not being a serious thing, and you’ve got kids who think they can simply try out Islam.

I don’t necessarily agree that the right is nihilistic. I think the left has some of those tendencies, but not really on the right. The Benedict Option isn’t nihilistic in the least, in fact the main conceit of the BO is exactly that the white Christian community is worth sacrificing to save. A nihilist would look at a culture like ours not aligned with the good life and not care about it. They wouldn’t care if John decides to become Jill because it doesn’t matter, it’s another life choice in a sea of other unimportant life choices. Nihilism means nothing matter so do what you want to do.

No, I think if someone was acting according to your intent it would be more akin to beating a kid to the point of hospitalisation to 'toughen him up'. American cultural resilience is not anti-fragile.

I think this is too much 5D chess even for the American intelligence community.

Far more plausible is that they popularized this to contain internal threats (people typically point to Occupy and the uptick of media led racial discourse at a time of economic turmoil) and that it escaped from their grasp, either through some healthy encouragement from external threats or on its own.

This doesn't pass any kind of parsimony, does it?

Do you need to posit a benevolent(?) conspiracy to explain hyper-polarisation in American life? Surely not.

And surely where we would expect to see evidence of any such covert action, we don't. A deliberate act of social engineering on the scale of the entire US would require large numbers of people and large, coordinated programmes that we don't see. Meanwhile, if we do look for causes of progressive attitudes to race, it seems to me like we see large efforts put forth by non-state actors, for reasons that are plausible on their own independent of any 'defense-in-depth' plan.

I think it's plausible that American polarisation over unimportant or superficial issues might function to obstruct deeper polarisation, and that through this process real or successful revolt becomes less likely. But if so, it seems more likely that this is a happy accident, rather than something planned for an implemented by an agency.

I don't see it.

America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines.

You can claim that Social Justice Progressivism aims to kit racial and ethnic cultural fault lines in society, perhaps.

However, the main fault lines I see today in the US are not Black vs White or New Immigrant Culture vs Traditional US Culture, but rural vs urban and SJP vs MAGA. If any religions are involved in fault lines, it is Christianity! (Notably, rich vs poor is not a big rift.)

While I can not disprove that Hari Seldon looked at the civil rights movement in the 1970s and saw that despite the racial barriers slowly falling, the end result would paradoxically be an increase in racial tensions, and set up SJP as a way to avoid a race war, I find this highly unlikely.

I think the roots of SJP in the civil rights movement started with relatable, noble goals and had the bad luck to mostly achieve their goals. So they did what any movement would do and picked further goals. Some, like gay rights, were again noble enough. Some, like insisting on equality of outcomes instead of color-blindness were IMHO harmful, some were mostly silly empty symbolism (like Confederate statues -- if you have the majority to blow them up, whatever, but this is not a decisive battle for the future of the US in any case.).

I think the roots of SJP in the civil rights movement started with relatable, noble goals and had the bad luck to mostly achieve their goals. So they did what any movement would do and picked further goals. Some, like gay rights, were again noble enough. Some, like insisting on equality of outcomes instead of color-blindness were IMHO harmful, some were mostly silly empty symbolism (like Confederate statues -- if you have the majority to blow them up, whatever, but this is not a decisive battle for the future of the US in any case.).

The civil rights movement was after equality of outcome from the start. Most of the things one finds bad about modern black identity politics existed there. If anything, the original movement was more violent against white people.

You could argue that parts of the broader society that helped the movement on some areas might have had more limited goals, or that they had then more so legitimate grievances too, but the reality is the core movement and a figure like MLK would be all in favor of the modern woke types, and he would be insinuating that opposition as he did as the time with contemporary republicans are nazis, racists, etc. It simply wasn't a movement with just limited goals.

No.

The most important parts of our army have dropped out of the army. Masculine males often southern no longer feel they fit in with the military.

Racial resentment is higher now.

A significant portion of the right (and disproportionately our best fighting men) now have a great deal of fondness for Putin or Xi. A masculine Chinese or Russian ruler doesn’t sound that bad to them versus being an adrogenous they/them with no real purpose in society.

On Balkanization - moreso in Europe but you did not have to worry about balkanization when a Swede was a Swede and you didn’t invite in sub Saharan blacks or Syrian immigrants. In the U.S. I think we have fewer big cultural issues with our immigrants coming from the South but they aren’t going to be our sophisticated fighting class.

Blacks in America have never posed a political problem. They are lower class. They have never been a key part of our fighting class. If they rose up against white well violent repression would not be hard.

On the left wokeism and oppressor-oppressed has literally caused a not that small group of Americans to identify with Hamas and take the side of our enemies.

In short if wokeism came from the intelligence community it’s the worst idea they have ever had.

The lefts concern that Putin in 2016 infiltrated our social media to radicalize America against itself plus China weapononizing wokeism on Tic-Tock is far more logical. America is far more Balkanized today than it was in 2008.

identify with Hamas and take the side of our enemies

There are lots of groups that have a dim view of Hamas' enemy. In the US I've only seen those on the left taking the side of Hamas. Are there groups on the right also aligning with Hamas? On the right I see more "let your enemies fight".

I'll offer a kind-of alternative hypothesis: wokeness exists to weaponize racial resentment against any group which defects in the approaching American economic crisis. The obvious drawback is the development of a high-ingroup-preference group identity in the targeted group, which explains why it was deployed against whites for field testing- you can rely on liberal and conservative whites to attack each other even if they're sharing a foxhole, rather than circle the wagons. Only time will tell if red tribe whites will develop a sufficient group identity to escape that trap and advocate for the ingroup.

I agree that trans qua trans is not the reason that the government promotes it so hard; I think in widespread civil conflict the pro-federal side will not care very much about some subset of its allies shooting transgenders out of hand, or otherwise learning from other cultures- such as Islamic ones- on the issue. But I don't think the conservative reaction is the point, unless it's some kind of 5d chess move to prevent ingroup orienting among conservative whites by getting them to argue about something else instead. I think trans is a distraction from deeper systemic issues.

It's true that a prolonged economic crisis leading to balkanization or pervasive civil strife is the main threat to the current world order; the USA is still #1, and Russia and China have demographic and economic issues preventing them from being true world hegemons, to say nothing of the problems faced by, like, India. But I think wokeness is intended as a weapon to be used against groups that are perceived as rebelling, not as a means of keeping them in line.

There is no approaching economic crisis. The USA is doing better than every single country in the world economically. Why do you say this like is is a default belief we should all accept. What proof do you have?

But I don't think the conservative reaction is the point

The government decided to redefine the social contract in a way that allows it to attack more and more people and institutions as "transphobic" in a way that is basically unavoidable. Because of the moralizing, it was able to do this shockingly fast and with relatively little pushback, even according to activists themselves.

I mean, that sounds enough like a conspiracy theory to me! Not sure why we need to posit some additional indirect play or benefit.

Why allow “Antifa” their own zone in Portland? Because when they are doing that they are doing nothing serious.

These sort of reverse arguments are easy to generate (e.g. "welfare is actually bad for the recipients because they become dependent on it", "affirmative action is bad for Black people because people assume they're diversity hires", etc), so barring any actual evidence, it's hard to take any specific example seriously.

America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines.

Similarly, it seems extremely weird to argue that elevating racial groups in discourse is supposed to prevent civic disunity along racial lines. When there is a clear direct relationship in one direction and an alleged indirect relationship in the other, I take the direct relationship far more seriously.

Every example you posed can actually be considered thoughtfully (“does affirmative action harm black people? In what capacity? Can it both harm and help different cohorts of black people?”). I think it’s a poor cognitive choice to opt out of thinking about questions which lack easy empirical data. This would mean that you can’t think about the most powerful agencies in America (or Russia), as they are necessarily clandestine. “Reverse arguments” is a fictitious category which cannot be uniformly swept aside. For this question, the evidence consists in thinking: do you want your leftist political agitators engaging in something that is actually problematic to state security (see anything from Italian anarchists, the IRA, the weather underground, to that one highly effective anti-meat org in the UK), or do you want them to instead embarrass themselves in a couple city blocks where agencies can collect identifiable data and where you always have the option to arrest them? “CHAZ” never had any chance of getting out of hand because what they were doing was clearly illegal. Rather than immediately arresting them, you can lure potential rebels into doing nothing serious while collecting data on everyone who showed up. (Remember how the FBI for some reason had drone footage of Rittenhouse?)

it seems extremely weird to argue that elevating racial groups in discourse is supposed to prevent civic disunity along racial lines

The propaganda which has been fully imbibed by the PMC class is not that they were elevated, right? What the PMC exemplar believes is that some racial wrong was rectified and that white solidarity is wrong. This created a fear about group solidarity among whites (right now the only group that can actually threaten a risk of balkanization). Various black advocacy groups are appeased, though it’s not like black people can be an organized threat to the state (especially with gang culture and consumerism completely depotentiating them). What the BLM et al stuff effected is a class of high achieving young people who fear having an identity apart from harmless anti-cultural things (LGBeTc) and consumerism.

For this question, the evidence consists in thinking: do you want your leftist political agitators engaging in something that is actually problematic to state security (see anything from Italian anarchists, the IRA, the weather underground, to that one highly effective anti-meat org in the UK), or do you want them to instead embarrass themselves in a couple city blocks where agencies can collect identifiable data and where you always have the option to arrest them? “CHAZ” never had any chance of getting out of hand because what they were doing was clearly illegal. Rather than immediately arresting them, you can lure potential rebels into doing nothing serious while collecting data on everyone who showed up.

Isn't this premised on the idea that the people who were involved in CHAZ would have, had they not been involved in CHAZ, become real security threats?

Is that plausible?

At least two alternative possibilities spring to mind. Firstly, the kind of people who engage in street circus nonsense like CHAZ are not in fact the same sort of people who are likely to become real threats, like the early Bolsheviks. They're both radicals, in a sense, but they have very different strategies and interests. If these groups are different, then CHAZ might actually decrease overall security by making governments and security agencies devote time to CHAZ, rather than serious threats. Secondly, it's also perfectly possible that the kind of people who engage in CHAZ would go on to become serious threats - CHAZ itself is a clown show, but the experience of engaging in radical action, even the ineffective sort, might prepare people for more effective action later.

In fact both those possibilities might be the case. If I were a genuine radical - if I were part of a modern Weather Underground or something - I might look closely at CHAZ, identify the most competent or most radical people involved in it, and then aim to recruit them. Even if only the top 5% of CHAZ participants have real revolutionary potential, that's not nothing. A real radical might benefit from the existence of a large number of shallow, ineffective protests in order to skim off the top level of participants. For any organisation whose primary business is illegal, recruiting is a real challenge. Test beds like these protests seem useful.

Is that theory true? Is that what's actually happening?

No idea!

My point is that being able to imagine a situation in which X event benefits Y people does not constitute evidence that Y did X. It's not that easy to transmute theory into fact.

Interestingly the anti-semitism push last year was aimed at the black supremacists who were organizing the strongest 'everyone get organized and stop fucking up' push in the black community.

Like who?

Black Hebrew Israelites and 5% nation, most notably.

That's what I thought.

My thinking is they got caught up so easily because they're antisemitic (and can't/won't hide it) and b) no one is really worried about them: "we need to finally get organized" is just a cliche in these circles. It's actually even used by grifters now: Dr Umar Johnson has - allegedly - been building a woke black school forever and keeps complaining about how black people want to talk and not step up and donate.

There are prominent black people organizing or lobbying. Presumably you'd go after them first. But most aren't going to start on a rant about being the real Jews when pushing the NFL.

So the idea is that the powers behind the throne use woke discourse to provide circuses to prevent an actual threat to their dominance of American life?

All reports are that the intel agencies aren't insulated from woke discourse and the culture war, so it doesn't particularly work that they float it to protect themselves from attack.

Not to prevent a threat to the agency but to prevent a threat to American security and territorial integrity.

If so, it's their biggest failure ever; there's a serious possibility of civil war, and even if unrealised that threat is contributing to other threats such as a potential WWIII over Taiwan.

a serious possibility of civil war

America has shockingly little threat of civil unrest for a 333 million strong country that is globally hegemonic. It’s our endless catastrophizing against potential unrest (an example of hyper-defense) which leads to our civic equanimity. When some people made vague gestures toward the possibility of legitimate civil unrest on January 6th, which was never actually a threat, their punishments and social shame were maximal simply as a way to deter even future gesturing.

It would take a fairly-major spark, yes. Here are some possible sparks big enough:

  • hard hit on debt ceiling, police and military defunded for long enough that they desert from lack of pay
  • a true repeat of Bush v. Gore without a concession and with a hated candidate winning (Jan 6 was as mild as it was because Trump was clearly bananas to the point that the Republican machine didn't back him, and because Joe Biden was a milquetoast candidate who didn't (yet) have the hatedom that Trump himself and almost every other Democrat did)
  • open defiance of SCOTUS by the executive, or possibly court-packing.

None of these is remotely a sure thing, but it's hard to rule any of them out either. Hence, serious possibility.

(And there's at least one other I know of.)

Frankly the USA lacks a clean racial/cultural split across demarcated geographies to let a proper civil war play out. Gretchen Whitmer isn't rallying Dutch-German Americans in the Midwest to take up arms against the New Englanders of Hochul. There are too few concentrated natural resources or geographies worth fighting over in the USA because it is so large. The most likely failure point will be race based riots collapsing a major metropolitan area totally combined with a refusal by a governor to send in the national guard or said national guard rebelling. Think full riots of BLM and Rodney King with 0 law enforcement for a few weeks. A spontaneous violent mob horizontally coordinated along racial lines for ease of identification just to wreck shit. Less armed factions battling street by street Stalingrad style, more Harlem Riots with more destruction.

Civil wars really require geographically consolidated factions free of any local element capable of resistance. This is especially easy when the state institutions are token rebrandings of existing tribal or ethnic power structures. When the state falls, the militias simply swap out their patches and return to their old ways.

A spontaneous violent mob horizontally coordinated along racial lines for ease of identification just to wreck shit. Less armed factions battling street by street Stalingrad style, more Harlem Riots with more destruction.

I think that describes the Rwandan genocide pretty well, too- if perhaps a very extreme example.

Civil wars really require geographically consolidated factions free of any local element capable of resistance.

Of course, the problem here (for the belligerents) is that defense against even a consolidated faction is really one-sided. 3 foot soldiers dead on national TV was enough to end BLM; how much worse for turbo-BLM in a free-fire zone? Unless the National Guard is defending them, but "government organization decked out in military gear shooting civilians" is the definition of civil war anyway.

3 foot soldiers dead on national TV was enough to end BLM; how much worse for turbo-BLM in a free-fire zone?

BLM ended because the godzilla threshold for sending in the troops to quash rioters was breached. The riots could definitely have descended into haiti-level extortion rackets if the police never came in.

I don't doubt that cowardly looters would scatter at the first few dead, and reprisal raids conducted by amateurs are easily defended as you state. However defense of territory is never easy with multiple entry vectors, and territory can never be held in anarchic situations. A regression to defensible strongpoints with the rest being grey zones is the likely path for any conflict state with insufficient bodies and weapons to wage permanent war.

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