JTarrou
19hr ago
Just some random thoughts on aspects of this:
At a grunt's-eye view, it's pretty undeniable that it's a big advantage for your actual front-line troops to be habituated to physical hardship, and this is difficult to teach people as adults.
But, of course, exactly how hard they have to be depends on how hard their actual combat environment is. If the country can afford to provide them with Pizza Hut in the field, the necessity of non-picky eaters may have been overcome with brute finance and logistics, to take a wacky modern example. A country willing and able to keep their troops mostly in armored, air conditioned vehicles and willing to accept the resulting loss of presence and intel at a tactical level can adjust many of the physical requirements.
As a second-order effect, this pushes more and more of the remaining light tactical work to more and more specialized units, which means massive cost in training and equipment, but a really lopsided frontline capability. What it lacks is the ability to scale beyond special-forces sized engagements. And those guys in the high-speed units now have to be even tougher.
So you still need a feeder population of "hard men", a farm team winnowed by competition and training into a warrior elite. And you might not want to let those guys be drawn from populations that vastly differ in culture and political loyalty to the civilian leadership. Which in turn means any long-term social organization needs an internal military culture that habituates some portion of its young men to the physical necessities of their brand of combat. What that is depends greatly on technology, organization and finance.
Broadly speaking, I think Devereaux has a good point. Civilizations do generally trump barbarians, and we remember the exceptions much more than the many failures of various tribal groups to dent their better organized empires. Rome defeated, co-opted, romanized and absorbed probably thousands of patriarchal, feudally organized semi-nomadic tribes over their run as a society. Similarly, Persia, India and China absorbed successive groups of tribal peoples, with the exceptions becoming the ruling dynasties of those societies. To peer myopically at the warriors who were able to exploit times of political, social or public health upheavals to seize power after the failures of a settled society is to miss the other 90% of the time.
Of course, history may be a limited guide here. For pre-modern history civilization was a very limited thing in cities and their immediate hinterlands. The days of nomadic pastoralists are gone. The seas, deserts and grasslands are no longer untracked wilderness. The modern barbarians live in a society, on a social fringe rather than a geographical one. And like the barbarians of old, they have to adapt to the higher technology of civilized peoples in order to be effective. Which means paralleling their social and political organization as well, adapting to the culture they predate and parasitize.
The implications for modern politics are straightforward: Civilization falls to barbarians when the existing power structure cannot enforce the laws, finance the military, make political decisions and foster a functioning economy. The danger is not in the hinterland, geographical or social. It is in our own government, our social divisions and our political animosities. We've mostly solved the plagues and famines that used to destabilize organized societies. We're never going to solve the political problem.
JTarrou
21hr ago
They're running organized squad-sized ambush operations, though not very well so far. They have commo, legal, media and political coordination. They've been running violent street operations for a decade against Republicans. They've tried to secede parts of the country a number of times, and succeeded briefly in a couple places. Their security forces have murdered multiple people and successfully kept those members from facing US justice. They've assassinated a number of prominent right-wingers, tried the president twice.
Yes, they are a low-level insurgency with more strength in the media and the DNC/NGO establishment than in a directly military sense, but they are developing that capability quickly. Right now they're relying on "independent" cells and individuals with just enough deniability, like John Brown back in the day. But this is all funded, semi-coordinated and defended by the gov/NGO complex of public sector unions, the security services and old-money "charitable" funds. You know, "the people".
To be blunt: you know because no one has yet car-bombed an ICE or CBP squad or opened fire from an elevated window on an DHS patrol.
That's pretty specific.
https://apnews.com/article/ice-facility-shooting-dallas-immigration-d49f76ffc95572970ede58ef15769fe4
"Nuh uh, they hid in treelines and on a roof, not an elevated window, checkmate chuds!"
All that writing and it's just based on observably false premises.
JTarrou
1d ago
Your thought experiment is "what if it weren't rape"? Yes, I expect those numbers would differ, if consent was explicit and the woman were attractive.
But this is just misandrist equivocation. "Some significant fraction of men would engage in behavior that would be rape if not for all the explicit consent and instruction from the woman" isn't great evidence for "some significant fraction of men are hardened rapists who are victimizing anything unconscious in their general vicinity".
JTarrou
2d ago
I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman if there were no consequences.
50/2,000,000/20 years = large fraction?
Yeah, you really have your finger on something big here. Huge effects. With such a strong signal that certainly holds true for every man, and women being unconscious like a third of their lives, the true rape rate must approach 100%.
JTarrou
3d ago
Apparently the lesson they took from civil disobedience was that intentionally breaking the law to force consequences shouldn't have the consequences. The whole point of this sort of protesting is to get arrested in such a manner that people think it's unjust, not fight the cops and try to flee.
JTarrou
5d ago
And yet, evolution.
You have only one purpose here on this earth, and it isn't to avoid diapers. It isn't vidya games. It isn't your job. It isn't your hobbies or your religion or your political ideology. It isn't any fake achievements you might get while here. You have only one purpose. You will only ever make two choices that will matter beyond your lifetime, but luckily, you seem to be making the right one. Stay at it, no matter what those pro-natalists say.
JTarrou
5d ago
And yet every time a Democratic official appears in front of congress, they are reliably stumped by the "what's a woman" question. The "trans thing" is still strong enough to demand the slavish allegiance of every single elected and appointed dem in the country, apart from Fetterman. It still runs every university, major corporation and media organization. They're being a bit quieter about it, they aren't pushing the maximalist stuff as hard, but that's a temporary thing. This is a religious invocation of faith, and it won't be dropped for some time, if ever.
The godforsaken parts of Africa and the Middle East, mostly. Some control our southern border regions, though we have an understanding that keeps a lid on things. With open borders and refugee flows and international air travel, those distant barbarians can be in your town in hours. They don't ride horses into your hinterland, they move into major cities. They're not all raiders, some are sub-legal workforce. Some are scam artists, petty criminals etc. Some smaller number are violent, form gangs to raid, rape and pillage. This is probably what low-level raiding usually looked like, just with more horsy-running-off inbetween.
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