Thread by @Tinkzorg

I might as well do a thread on this issue of "is a civil war/troubles scenario a realistic scenario for the US?", seeing as this is the other area where there are a lot of misconceptions and faulty reasoning, mostly from the right, who love to loathe their own countrymen.

https://twitter.com/Nazboleon/status/1447485556649246721

First off: a repeat of the first civil war is just something you can cross off the list. The US army - or whatever elements of it end up on different sides of some political divide - can't actually fight a war under those conditions. Why? Because US infrastructure.

US infrastructure is currently held together by duct tape and the consent of the governed. It is in fact incredibly easy to simply knock out most of the country's power grid. The stations you would need to hit aren't classified, you can probably just FOIA that stuff.

Are the power stations guarded? No, and it is impossible to guard them, because the power grid is a system of nodes where the system fails if a fairly small number of nodes fail simultaneously. And there are many, many nodes.

The logistical requirements of the sort of warfare that the US army would like to do - blowing up tanks in the Fulda gap, as it were - are just massive. A civil war with tanks and helicopters flying about would last for a week before people without power started starving.

You can't have a war on US soil without simply ruining the lines of supply and the physical infrastructure necessary to keep the current US war machine going. So an alliance of southern states just sending armored divisions to fight in Virginia is not going to happen.

What is much more likely, however, is continuing political polarization to the point where the system mostly breaks down in practice. Depending on how the 2024 election plays out, you could have a situation where certain states and their governors simply ignore federal writ.

At that point, if the recalcitrant politicians have popular mandates to do what they do (and they almost certainly will, given current levels of polarization), any attempt at removing them by force is likely to trigger, over time, something similar to the Troubles.

A Troubles scenario is a *nightmare* for the US elite. Again, US infrastructure is held together by duct tape and the *consent of the governed*. You could, unironically, crash the US power grid as a fucking high school project. Nobody does, because nobody wants to. For now.

Cities often have multiple points of weakness where one failure reinforces other failures. Taking New York City's water supply is a matter of sabotaging a few pipes that run for hundreds of miles through rural country. Can you guard the entire length of those pipes? Lol, no.

And as I pointed out in the prior thread, in terms of warfare, an AR-15 and a good source of explosives is all you really need to pull off ambush tactics at the level of the IRA. Tanks, drones, gunships, nukes, none of these things give an advantage here.

To underline just how much the US requires *consent* from the governed just to keep from falling apart, you only have to look at these various vaccine mandate strikes. Whoops, suddenly pilots refuse to work, and now nobody in the southwest gets to fly!

Anyone who works in physical infrastructure has an incredibly outsized veto power given how brittle our systems are and how little slack they have.

Note what the dems have done: they've said "we can just fire you chuds". Once their bluff was called, and they were asked to fire all the chuds, there weren't enough non-chuds left to staff a bunch of critical functions. Whoops! Do they have a plan B? No! There *is* no plan B!

To sum the argument up, the current US situation is defined by 1) increasing polarization and political/geographical division (the two go hand in hand) that shows no sign of slowing down. It is also 2) defined by strategic weakness of the armed forces and the infrastructure.

In the near term, you can expect to see many more things similar to this vaccine mandate backlash. Don't focus on the vaccine itself here, keep your eye on the important thing: the US elite's power of *enforcing a writ* is actually fairly weak! That's the real story here.

In the mid term, if polarization keeps getting worse, libs will become both more desperate and reckless, making their writs even more onerous, rather than less onerous. This invites - but does not guarantee in any particular one instance - more dangerous blowback.

Finally, we have to address the elephant in the room: online rightwing radicals' belief in the total worthlessness, uselessness, and laziness of the american people. A "real" people would fight, these radicals claim, but the american is just too fat and too stupid to ever act.

I don't want to do spend more time on this issue than necessary because I find these people to be completely revolting, but what one needs to understand is that online right radicals are recruited from the exact same social base as online leftwing radicals.

To wit, these people are generally frustrated middle class strivers, and like their cousins on the left, they have a pathological need to externalize their own grievances by projecting them on other people. In this case, on their own lower class countrymen.

Every fucking online "philosopher king" who complains about the lack of chiseled abs on the american proles are doing so because they feel cheated out of their right to rule over these plebeians. But that pathetic sense of frustration should not be confused with *analysis*.

In reality, people are people are people. Like leopards, they generally don't change their spots, nor could they do so even if they for some reason wanted to. Humans will revolt or cause mayhem in the 2040s for the same reasons they did so in the 1840s. You can't remove that.

In point of fact, the complete and utter *isolation* of the commentariat - whether left or right - from the people they supposedly aim to speak for is the absolutely most glaringly obvious facet of american political life today. Just take these vaccine mandate strikes.

While a bunch of anons were jerking themselves off over the patent stupidity and docility of the american proles, they simply acted. To borrow from a neocon of the Bush years - the twitterati analyze while the fat proles change the world faster than the analysts can keep up.

If someone is telling you that nothing will ever happen because Americans are too fat and stupid, that person is - and this is not a facetious point - more often than not interested in selling you a product, be it a podcast or some protein powder.

In reality, ordinary people don't know that any of you exist, nor do they really care about your ideas. They will not act because you want them to, nor will they not act because you think they are unworthy. You might as well not exist to them.

That's how it's always been, and how it will always be. The coffee house radical set - which is what you'll find on here - are spectators, not actors, in the grand events of history. If you forget that point, you're just going to end up with far more protein powder than you need!

What actually drives ordinary people out into the streets is not reading some particularly rousing passage by BAP or whoever the fuck, it's shortages of necessary supplies to keep living. Ideas are not important here.

If the US elite fails to keep the grain shipments coming, and the bread part of the bread and circuses going, ideology will simply not matter. Paid ideologues don't like to speak on this point, because it risks revealing that they don't really matter that much.

Given the current slow-rolling collapse of the global supply chain, I leave it up to the reader to judge just how (un)likely these sorts of shortages are in the years and decades ahead.