The military is full of right wingers who think cities are full of Satanic liberals, uppity women, insert homophobic slur, insert racial slur. Once everyone not like that is purged from command I’m sure they’d delight in the chance to kill all of “those people”. They want their “Day of the Rope” where everyone not a white Christian is exterminated.
No, you’re misunderstanding @Horatius’ question: Would the US military actually destroy all that valuable infrastructure and corporate property just to root out the rebel scum?
Well, yeah, six of one, half a dozen of the other
Imagine the pictures on the news of Chicago looking like Gaza does right now. Would they really be willing to go there?
Also remember that we are not a country where everyone has the right to carry a gun. White people have that right, but the courts have consistently found that if a black person is armed, it’s justifiable to shoot them on sight.
The Israeli military and Hamas were willing to go there, weren’t they?
The billionaires and their disciples in charge shouldn’t let that happen because it would be bad for business. All they are concerned with is extracting as much wealth out of the country as they possibly can. They can’t afford to let things get so bad that it comes down to that.
Hopefully, the CEO shooting has caused them some concern. The autocrats have now seen that tens of millions of Americans on both sides are pretty much ok with assassinating the ones they blame for their pain. I don’t think anyone saw that coming. Obviously, there’s not a lot they can do to stop such random acts. And you can’t protect everyone who is seen as making the harmful decisions.
If Trump’s ilk were smart, they would see that they can only push people so far before they resort to this type of terrorist act. There are 400 million guns and plenty of people like the guy in NY who will snap. Just the threat that there could be random assassinations of high-level executives/officials at any time should put some constraints on how far into a dictatorship they are willing to go. It will be bad for business if they make life miserable for most people and this gets to be the new normal.
It remains to be seen if they will be smart about it and indications aren’t that great that they will be. They may just let the country burn. But you can’t make much money from ashes.
Was your intent sarcasm, saying that de facto double standards hold sway, or are you claiming it’s literally true?
Sure, power and the race/religion war is more important to the Right than money. That’s why they scream about “woke capitalism” and such, they are perfectly willing to take a loss if it hurts “those people”. They’re actually bad capitalists.
And once the fascists take over the opinions of the capitalists will cease to matter, they’ll either fall in line or “fall out a window”.
Both, in that’s how it’s treated and it that the courts consistently rule that shooting black people is justified (but not other people).
Of course it’s literally true, and of course that truth reflects a double standard. The courts have, in actual fact, consistently found that shootings of armed black people were justified. Take the Tamir Rice case, for instance: Everyone kept on harping on the fact that he looked like an adult, and that his toy looked like a real gun. And everyone just takes for granted that if a black adult has a real gun, that’s justification to kill him.
They also have literally decades of history of blowing up each other.
It’s one thing to blow up someone else’s city, but this will be the US military blowing up their own cities. That’s a very different thing.
I think that Ukraine is showing us what regular joes can do against a powerful army.
Sure, they have a military, but many of these guys just waded in to the fight.
Regular Joes backed by a pro army can certainly do a lot.
Our Militia was handy in 1812,- being the US primary fighting force- and the Civil war. Mind you the regular army did the heavy lifting but the militia helped.
A lot of that is probably due to logistics and supplies that a regular army preforms quite well.
My neighbor and I would be well and truly screwed by a regular army. If the Magas start taking up arms, well, we may be able to keep them at bay.
Your hyperbole is not helpful in promoting justice. This isn’t Alabama circa 1905. (and really, do think carefully before responding “yes it is”.)
It’s not hyperbole, it’s America.
So, are you saying that the killers of Tamir Rice, Philando Castille, Trayvon Martin, and Joseph Rosembaum, along with many others, didn’t literally get away with it?
Seriously, the more I muse on this the more I’m convinced that a chance for the USA to have a real armed, militarily trained populace along Swiss lines was squandered by the Federalists. The Anti-Federalists had warned that under the new constitution the Federal government would use its authority over the militia either to regiment the adult male populace or else to deliberately neglect the militia so it became irrelevant; and more or less that’s exactly what happened. When the Federalists saw that they couldn’t use the militia to enforce grossly unpopular federal laws like the one that sparked the Whiskey Rebellion (they couldn’t even enforce the militia draft itself!), the federal Militia Acts were not updated or followed up on and actual military preparedness among the populace at large was allowed to become moribund. As for the state governments they were content to rely on a select militia of those who stepped forward as volunteers and were vetted for obedience to the government. As @Whack-a-Mole said, the Founders (or rather the hardcore Federalists among them like Hamilton) wanted a populace of obedient lockstep soldiers, and when they couldn’t get one they said to hell with it.
It’s a bit of a conundrum: in principle there’s nothing more libertarian than an armed populace and in principle nothing less libertarian than a government that universally regiments its populace; yet to be both militarily effective and free, some balance between the two has to be struck. I can’t help but wonder if a less authoritarian federal government, one which didn’t seemingly go out of its way to prove the Anti-Federalists right, one more Jeffersonian in character, might have maintained an armed and trained* militia of the citizenry.
*as in “well-regulated”?
Are you saying that no person of color should ever be shot dead by a white person for any reason whatsoever, no excuses, because every single such instance is without exception the murder of a black person by a white racist? If that’s what you really, truly believe say so, so that people of reason can dismiss you.
Except real life doesn’t work like that. An “armed populace” just means that the bigots have an easier time massacring the people they don’t like and tyrannies have an easier time inciting massacres.
Why are the bigots’ victims helpless in this scenario? Aren’t they armed too?
They are outnumbered, probably not killers, and the bigots typically have the backing of the authorities. A random civilian or two with guns against a mob of a hundred with guns and the police will just die.