Your putting of an “and” on that would imply that I said that all of these things would be concurrent, which is not something that I said.
Not that rapid a change necessary. A fairly large change, and the precedent it would be changing to would be to what we had after the civil war, not before.
The current trends that is desired among the people currently in power is to peel back all of those protections that you claim are inviolate. I think that there is enough resistance to these trends at the moment, but if current political trends continue, and the regressive right continues to gain power, then the ordinary man will find himself with less and less to lose.
It’s not sporadic it’s pretty constant. I would include mass shootings as element of it; they are in essence lone wolf operations inspired by the NRA similar to the lone wolf attacks inspired by ISIS. The fact is we do not have shared values, or a shared culture and we now have a president who is exploiting those divisions while intentionally breaking our political norms and pandering to white nationalism. It’s happening and it’s going to get worse.
I’ve heard people equate the NRA with terrorists before (and I thought it was a stupid argument then), but this is the first time I’ve heard anyone claim they actually “inspired” mass shootings. Which particular shootings do you think were “inspired by the NRA”?
I’m more left than right but that is just a ridiculous generalization. I know plenty of conservatives with engineering degrees. Moreover, there are many conservatives without formal engineering degrees in the military know how to turn ordinary household and commercial products into weapons, which is something your IT guy in Palo Alto, with all of his algorithms, does not have even the slightest idea about. If that doesn’t register, consider that there are probably any number of coal miners in Hatfield-McCoy country who are pretty good with dynamite, and they have ready access to it. Agrarians who lose their stead may still be nevertheless adept at living on a smaller, humbler piece of land and using its resources to sustain themselves. If you want to get a glimpse of what conservative rebellion might look like, just look at the militias - but in an organized civil conflict they’d probably be militias on steroids. And they’d be like a multi-headed hydra.
I doubt we would see an organized agrarian revolution, but one scenario I could envision is growing numbers of militarist leagues of economically distressed ranchers, farmers, and small, independent manufacturers in rural America. This is one reason why the tandem of Trump’s trade war and rising interest rates is problematic. Interest rate surges crushed many farmers in the 1980s, which factored, at least to some degree, into the rise of militias in the decade that followed.
Now people might stand back and say “Well, they would surely know that Trump and the Republicans are to blame for their misery, right?” That might be factually correct, but that might not be how they perceive their reality. Reagan’s economic policies had a lot to do with farming failures in the 1980s, but the movement became not an anti-Republican or anti-Democrat movement; it became an anti federal power movement, an anti-outside world movement. Some extremist groups didn’t even have much use for their local state and municipal governments, either.
And once you throw some religion into the mix, literally anything goes.
first one to pop into my head : the Social War. Admittedly it was more “Rome versus The Entire Rest of Italy” than urban vs. rural ; but there weren’t too many bustling metropolises beyond Rome at that point. Maybe some in Etruria. But most of the *socii *were dirt poor farmers relegated to shit land by Rome’s expansion - that was kind of the impetus behind the war.
I’ll walk this back a bit, as it’s oversimplification. There were other problems facing farmers, such as oversupply, the first visible signs of climate change (i.e. droughts in some areas), and other factors. Moreover, interest rates had already gotten pretty much out of control by the time Reagan took office. The previous post was accidentally too partisan; the point I was trying to make (clumsily) is that the farmers became anti-government more than just anti-democrat, even if they might identify with some of the stated tenets of Republican conservatism.
You did, in fact, clearly imply that they would be happening at the same time, and that it would all be within one election cycle. If they weren’t concurrent, then you don’t have an answer to the question of ‘why don’t people just vote instead of starting a civil war’. Don’t feel too bad about that; no one talking about civil war seems to have a good answer for why people will throw away their lifestyle and put their life at risk before they cast a ballot for something different.
His “inspiration”? No, I would not say that. He may have gained some of his skills from the air-rifle marksmanship program, but I don’t see any evidence that that was his “inspiration”.
Yeah that’s a pretty shaky definition of “inspired”…the NRA may be responsible for a lot of problems, but I fail to see how air-rifle target shooting classes are one of them. Those have existed forever, most people involved in that sport never shoot anyone.
Perhaps his newfound skills inspired him. Maybe the NRA skills he learned helped him develop his talents to the extent that he finally found something he was good at, killing his classmates.
But please, sugarcoat their gun lessons. I’ve heard it all before.
You forget that the so-called red area is most of the map. And what lies under all that dirt? Minerals, oil, water. Which can be extracted and used to produce things. Such as weapons, power, food, etc. How much food can be grown in San Francisco or NYC?
Furthermore, even if urban areas are disproportionately blue they aren’t homogeneous. Factional urban warfare would be nasty. Especially when power, water, and food are cut off from blue enclaves.
Population density also hurts when the war turns nasty and arson and incendiary weaponry are used, sewers are blocked, and Putin supplies the Trumpists with a tiny bit of smallpox.
All that said, Civil War II is something people should really work to avoid and not egg on.
I didn’t forget. Most of those modern factories will cease production after a week of being starved of fuel, materials, and replacement parts from overseas. And nowadays, farms are factories as well. All that stuff depends on bits and pieces that become extremely scarce if international trade is disrupted.
So if rural areas with access to raw materials are vulnerable to supply chain disruption how would cities fare better? They can’t even exist without importing water.
And imagine the cities with no power. Hospitals would shut down. No food in the stores. I don’t think a few Starbucks sipping hippies working at Google would be enough to turn the tide and end the siege.
