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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   35142 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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Idk what you mean by misreading. It's certainly not JK Rowling's position. I would say the number of Brits who believe that people should be armed so they can fight bad guys and their oppressive government is approximately 0.

We have guns, we use guns, but for sport and hunting and as objects of beauty. I don't think the narrative you mention would even occur to most people - it's not that the anti-gun side has beaten down the pro-gun side, it's that for all intents and purposes the battle doesn't even exist in people's heads. Nobody would describe themselves as anti-gun either.

I would say the number of Brits who believe that people should be armed so they can fight bad guys and their oppressive government is approximately 0.

I'd say that a clear supermajority of the Finnish people hold this belief, at least - with the caveat that the definition would have the armed people being the Finnish nation as represented by the conscription-based Finnish Armed Forces and the bad guys and their oppressive government being Russia and Putin.

No, these are not the same and in context are close to opposites. Trusting the Finnish Armed Forces would be like trusting the Ministry of Magic.

I think this is a case where there is a lot of mutual incomprehension between Americans and Europeans due to different historical mythologies reflecting different histories.

In the historical mythology that stems from a rose-tinted view of the American Revolution*, liberty is secured by the ability of the nation-in-arms to check the power of the armed forces of the democratic state. In the historical mythology that stems from a rose-tinted view of the French Revolution, liberty is secured by the fact that the nation-in-arms is the armed forces of the democratic state**. Finland (alongside Switzerland) is one of the few European countries where that is still a realistic statement of how the armed forces work. Contra Nybbler downthread, if you accept that worldview then the Finnish government didn't corruptly turn on its own people in order to appease the Soviets - the Finnish government and people surrendered to the Soviets after losing the Continuation War.

* The British cope for losing the American War of Independence is that we took a tactical drop on what we (wrongly) saw as the least important front of a three-continent mostly-naval war against France. This isn't quite true, but it is a lot closer to the truth than "Colonial militias were able to take down the British Empire by virtue of local knowledge and superior woodcraft."

** It wasn't

So, the difference is pretty much down to how much a state is considered to be contiguous/coterminous with its people, rather than being in a separate and implicitly-adversarial relationship?

Somewhat, though not entirely. Even when the French people consider themselves to be in an adversarial relationship with their government (which is most of the time), they expect that the army would ultimately take the side of the people over the government. (Or at least did during the period where France had a large conscript army.)

It is worth noting that at some level the US Red Tribe know that the French model is closer to factually accurate than the Paul Revere one. As soon as you start talking about the practicalities of "what happens if a Blue-controlled Federal government decides it is no longer willing to tolerate armed Reds?" everyone agrees that what would stop them wouldn't be the armed Reds shooting back, it would be the lack of sufficient Blue-aligned goons able and willing to enforce the order against trivial opposition.

As soon as you start talking about the practicalities of "what happens if a Blue-controlled Federal government decides it is no longer willing to tolerate armed Reds?" everyone agrees that what would stop them wouldn't be the armed Reds shooting back, it would be the lack of sufficient Blue-aligned goons able and willing to enforce the order against trivial opposition.

"Everyone" does not agree with this; I certainly don't. We've just finished two wars featuring the US military operating against insurgents. One was a pyrrhic victory at best, the other was a flat loss. Both were in countries significantly smaller, significantly poorer, and significantly less well-armed than the US. The assessments that generate the consensus you're referring to are based on the idea of pitched battle between AR15s on one side and Abrams tanks and f35s on the other, but it is ignorance to the point of madness to imagine that this is how the situation would work in practice. This failure to understand the nature of asymmetrical conflict was risible ten years ago, when we only had two decades of examples from our two most recent wars to draw from. Given the developments since, it approaches a very black form of comedy. We're literally watching the formation of deep-seated assassination culture in our society right now. The government can't consistently enforce straw purchase laws when the criminals submit a signed confession to federal law enforcement. And these aren't even the worst problems with such a scenario, or even in the top ten!

Blues and the Blue-adjacent have the insane belief that they could plausibly impose their will on Reds and get it to stick. Reds and the red-adjacent have the insane belief that violent conflict with the blues would be short and sharp, and then life would go back to normal. Both of these beliefs are insanely destructive if acted on. Neither side has anything near a proper understanding of just how fragile our Belle Epoch really is: It will pop like a fucking soap bubble, and it will never, ever come back. Please, I am begging you, update your priors!

We're literally watching the formation of deep-seated assassination culture in our society right now.

Could you give some examples of what you're referring to? As an Aussie I tend to get only the US news that's talked about a lot on here. I know about the attempts on Trump (at least, the ones before his re-election), but you sound like you're talking about more than that.

There was the thing where a democratic campaign volunteer attempted to murder as many of the republican congressmen as he could, the FBI covered up the clear political motive, and it was common for years afterward to hear Progressives mock the victims and wish the would-be assassin had done a better job.

There was the time the Antifa guy murdered a trump supporter in cold blood, on video, his antifa buddies publicly celebrated the murder on video, prestige media responded by glazing him, and local progressives shrugged and said it was the trump supporter's fault for engaging in political speech in a blue enclave.

There was Butler, where the evident Progressive reaction anywhere outside formal contexts was sorrow that the assassin had missed, and complete obliviousness that the assassin had in fact killed one man and wounded two more.

There's the multiple other assassination attempts on Trump too, of course.

Then there was Luigi:

Woman inspired by Luigi Mangione planned to kill Trump cabinet members, feds say

Luigi Mangione Musical Is Real, And It's Sold Out

Trolls bash tipster who helped catch Luigi Mangione, alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson

Jimmy Kimmel Makes Stunning Confession About ‘Hot Killer’ Luigi Mangione

What Luigi Mangione supporters want you to know

This is not what the media coverage looks like when they want their audience to leave with a negative view of the subject.

Then there's the open calls for the murder of Elon Musk, together with the coordinated mass violence against properties associated with him, which Tim Walz among others gave winks and nods to on stage, advising Tesla owners to remove the logos from their vehicles.

Then there's the family members, friends, and acquaintances who've opined to me that it'd probably be for the best if Trump or Elon or Vance were just murdered.

More comments

There is also an additional element, not generally mentioned because it really is too horrible for the average American, based or not, to want to speak out loud.

That total loss and pyrrhic victory were achieved in an environment where the soldiers involved could be confident that their homes and families were safely defended an ocean away.

Everyone will wake up into a whole different world the night that some American guerrillas hike into the mountains above a base and start dropping mortar rounds into base housing.

No American, government or otherwise, is prepared for that kind of war.

Edit: To avoid potential accusations of fedposting, Almighty God forbid this kind of war come to my beloved country.

I know it's not the same thing, I was just playing around with the literal meaning of the words.

It has always struck me that the American belief that the most likely chance to have to face down an oppressive government from the inside is a belief enabled by the fact of belonging to the most powerful country in the world without any conceivable external enemy that could defeat it in warfare; in a small nation with a powerful authoritarian neighbor, the threat matrix and the perceived ways to combat that threat are obviously different.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...

We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Also, the same weapons and the same spirit that effectively precludes totalitarian domination also precludes domination by foreigners. Or in the vernacular, "welcome to the rice fields, motherfucker."

Quote attribution, please

apologies, I thought it was well-known enough to not need the attribution. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago

Appreciate it. Looks like I'm bumping it up my reading list.

As Abraham Lincoln once said:

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer: If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.

The American belief goes back to the Revolutionary period, long before the US was the most powerful country in the world.

The Finnish Armed Forces and the state they are embedded in, of course, cannot be trusted. They'd be happy to appease their big Eastern neighbor by oppressing their own people rather than fighting; they did it before, after all.

I know, I'm mostly expanding on the aspect 2rafa mentioned with:

mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.

Which is likely the case with JK Rowling. I just think it's a very worthwhile aspect to analyze in media, and likely the result of an author not examining their own beliefs honestly, and not just an empty thought experiment. Not every children's book ends up making an accidental case for teens carrying guns to school.

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