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What if the other side bends the niceties, but is still constrained by them to a point? You're better off with a devil who's compelled to keep up a facade of lawfulness than a devil who's acting completely unconstrained. Sure, it sucks to be stuck in this kind of asymmetrical equilibrium where you have to completely refrain from rule-breaking just because it compels your opponent to do less rule-breaking than he otherwise would. But you might still want to keep that equilibrium in place, if you have reason to believe the opponent has a sufficient advantage that a completely unconstrained version of them could squash you.
To put it another way, taking the blows is usually a better strategy than declaring all-out war. The fact that the other guy is feeling free to pummel you is a pretty good sign that they're confident in their ability to win (or at least ensure MAD) if you did, foolishly, fight back with lethal force.
Of course. Then the discussion advances to where we draw the line between "we can live with this" and "we cannot live with this", and it becomes very important to have a clear understanding of exactly what you're being asked to tolerate. Hence why @gattsuru and I have spent considerable effort over a long period of time tracking the facts on the ground, and why, more and more over time, the conversations here are predictable in advance. At some point in the relatively near future, the Supreme Court is going to hand another win to Blue Tribe, and then our elites will turn to Red Tribe and expect them to accept this win as decisive, and then will be shocked and horrified when Red Tribe fails to comply. How dare they! Don't they understand that we have norms? Well, no, "We" don't, because those norms died here, even if realization of their death doesn't actually dawn until Blue Tribe attempts to draw on them and so renders their absence legible via New York Times headlines.
The other guy is deluded, and their delusion has been sustained by ironclad control of the knowledge-production apparatus that, it turns out, has just about rusted through. If we play by the rules Blue Tribe plays by, Blue Tribe has essentially no chance of surviving the ensuing conflict, while our chances of surviving are excellent; thrive vs survive, no?
Blue Tribe's inability to understand this fact and thus leaning heavily on their supposed strength is one of the great risk factors dominating the present crisis.
This is what I dispute. If we're talking about gun control - sure, the 2nd Am has been bent pretty badly to allow Blue states to effectively ban at least some arms that should clearly be protected. But no Blue government actually passed a federal ban on firearms. I guarantee you that in a world where everybody ignored the Constitution without a second thought, they would have tried at some point. The way I see it, your choice is between selective application of the second amendment, and it simply being torn down.
I don't actually believe that. The Blue Tribe has better liars, better loophole-finders, and above all else a much better social shaming apparatus. It has a nonzero ability to affect Red-aligned normies' worldview, while Red think-tanks are pretty useless at shifting Blue-aligned normies' Overton window. If everyone fights maximally dirty, then, all my personal opinions aside, I'm betting Blue.
(Of course, perhaps we're operating at different levels of metaphor, and you meant the Blues would lose a literal bullets-flying civil war? That's a very different conversation, and frankly one I'm not sure has very much to do with the issue at hand.)
Not to speak for FC, but that you think that this is the only possible battlefield on which the tribal conflict can play out is part of the delusion ("sustained by ironclad control of the knowledge-production apparatus" as it is). Setting aside the literal bullets possibility to avoid fedposting (though, in my view, it remains a likely outcome), there's also a number of domains between the two. One example: infrastructure.
Who grows the food? Who keeps the lights on? What would happen if someone were to shut down the water pipe to southern California, or collapse the aqueducts feeding NYC?
I have a civil engineer friend who has gone on at length — repeatedly — about the vulnerability of our cities, and how easy it would be to get urban Americans to "start eating each other." He argues that in many cases, it wouldn't even require active sabotage — just for a particular relatively-small group of almost-entirely Red Tribe men to stop showing up to work.
FC mentioned "thrive vs survive." Which tribe is better positioned to survive, and come out on top, in the wake of the sort of infrastructure collapse I've outlined above?
Or we can get non-selective application of the second amendment after we crush the Blue Tribe, by (per Sun Tzu) ignoring all that social shaming/Overton window/think-tank space in favor of a battleground that favors us.
I'd argue that there's also the possibility that it becomes common knowledge that courts don't provide any level of fair trial or value even in victory, and the Red Tribe and Blue Tribe both simply ignore their outputs. Yes, then the Red Tribe gets to ignore due process for immigrants and the Blue Tribe gets to keep Heller from registering his gun, but if that's the BATNA it looks very much to the Red Tribe like an active improvement to negotiating.
That'd actually suck for me personally -- I moved to a Red Tribe space to avoid a lot of the worst of Blue Tribe excesses, but I've got a number of traits that the Red Tribe doesn't like, too, and those are at least getting some protection today -- but the
niceterrible thing about national politics is that it doesnt care what is convenient for persons.FCfromSSC has been promoting a national divorce, which would look somewhat like a slightly more official version of that. I'm not as optimistic it will be allowed; if we can't get an informal version that works, there's no way formal admission of the problem will leave anywhere near enough systems interface to not collapse in contradictions.
It's not a stable equilibrium. At some point, someone will find A Just Cause that demands rolling out the military door-to-door again; I wouldn't be surprised if it happens in my lifetime, and I wouldn't be that surprised if it happens in the next twenty years.
But nothing ever really ends. You don't have to think that hard, for that long, for it to still be one of the least bad options.
Tell that to the Tanguts, the Jangil, the Dorset, Homo floresiensis, or the dodos.
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I was thinking of the kind of infrastructure sabotage/collapse you describe as part of the "literal bullets-flying civil war" umbrella. Trying to starve the other side out is basically just siege warfare - it's not a different category of action from just opening fire to begin with, it's simply a different strategy. And one would pretty inevitably escalate into the other.
I certainly don't believe this is the only battlefield on which the tribal conflict can play out. But I was jumping off of "If we play by the rules Blue Tribe plays by, Blue Tribe has essentially no chance of surviving the ensuing conflict (…)", where "playing by the rules Blue Tribe plays by" clearly means nothing more than "blatantly, openly ignoring the spirit or even letter of the Constitution whenever convenient" and similar chicanery. The Blue Tribe has certainly not made the first move on trying to starve the other side into total surrender, or whatever equivalently hostile strategy they have the infrastructure to pull off. The Reds doing that wouldn't, by any stretch of language, constitute "playing by the Blue Tribe's rules".
Civil war in America's not impossible (though I think it's extremely unlikely to come to that before something else that turns the axis of the world happens, whether that's AGI or something else). But it's not what we were talking about.
...and, most crucially, equivalent analogues to these things, where one-to-one replication is not possible. Those are the rules Blue Tribe has very evidently operated by for many, many years.
And it's worth noting that my claim is not that Red Tribe doing these things would destroy Blue Tribe. It is that Red Tribe doing these things would be a significant escalation, that Blue Tribe would absolutely engage in significant escalation in response, and the outcome of that escalation spiral would not be survivable for anything we would recognize as Blue Tribe now.
...But leaving that aside, you claim:
Over the last decade, it seems to me that I have seen all these advantages degrade significantly. Trust in the media is cratering. Major media organizations are conducting mass-layoffs. Culture-production centers are visibly withering. The knowledge-production apparatus is now under siege, and Red Tribe is orienting itself to make that siege lasting and merciless.
To me, it seems obvious that our recent political history has a pretty simple story: post-civil-war through the 1960s, we had a more or less unified country, with elite institutions operating as the thought and memory of the common man. In the role of thought and memory, it was easy to steer the large mass of people wherever the elites wished them to go, and because the elites and the commons were more or less in tune, they didn't want to steer them anywhere the common man didn't particularly want to go. In the 60s, the elites diverged in values sufficiently that they attempted steering that the common man did not readily accept, and the elites and commons began to diverge. The more that divergence grew, the less the common man trusted the elites to serve as thought and memory, and the more they did their thinking and remembering for themselves, the more evidence of divergence they retained. This process ignited a chain reaction that accelerated slowly and then all at once.
In the 90s, the phrase "mainstream media" marked you as a kook. By the 2000s, it marked you as an upstart. By the 2010s, it was a necessary descriptor to accurately describe the realities of the situation. By the 2020s, the term "legacy media" is legitimately appropriate. Trust in the ability of Elite institutions to provide thought and memory continues to degrade as common knowledge of their malformation continues to accumulate. The entire ecosystem is dying.
Which is a long way of saying, I like our odds.
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The Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 is within living memory. The last Blue Presidential nominee laughed at the idea that the Second Amendment would protect against outright confiscation of firearms from their current owners. There are several federal bans on firearms, and not a single one has been successfully challenged at SCOTUS. The only federal gun control law that has ever been successfully challenged was the Gun Free School Zones Act, under the Commerce Clause, and which immediately was reenacted with the court pretending it was all okay. Nor is that because the statute-writers carefully wrote around the borders of the Second Amendment, or even believed it could cover anything.
If you mean to say that the Blue government have not passed a federal ban on all firearms, granted. But this does not reflect the Constitution coming out of its glass case.
They did, in fact, try. They have, in fact, tried repeatedly, both at local and federal levels. The 1938 Gun Control Act started out specifically as a complete registry of every semiautomatic, under a theory that this could make a future nation-wide Sullivan Act possible! Lujan Grisham was not stopped by a preliminary injunction (it got stayed), or a citizen grand jury (New Mexico has them in theory but defanged them against politicians) or civil suit (New Mexico's overturned qualified immunity with a but, and that butt is Grisham's face) or impeachment (nope) or federal or state censure (double nope, didn't even get a single Dem vote); she was stopped by actors holding politically-responsive offices knowing that knew they would face a serious cost at the next poll.
The only thing that has stopped several very broad gun control laws has been serious, prolonged, and coordinated political and structural force from the Red Tribe against its own politicians, well away from the courthouse.
Some of those came at massive political cost! The NRA tanked several Red Tribe politicians to protect Harry Reid, in exchange for Reid blocking gun control efforts, right before Reid infamously burned the next Red Tribe presidential nominee with malicious slander from the House floor. Even smaller stuff, like increasing efforts to curate Blue Dog Democrats and trim anti-gun Republicans, cost no small amount of political capital and literal money, and was one of many factors that lead to the ACA passing.
There is no application of the 2nd Amendment, today. There are only fancy papers talking about it.
Heller can not register (lol) his gun from Heller I, he's brought a handful of other cases that SCOTUS punted on every single one, in Heller II a goofball wrote a dissent from the appeals court case specifically calling for SCOTUS to decide on the question of 'assault' weapons bans, and yesterday the guy who wrote that dissent in Heller II put out a statement in Snope deciding nope not gonna. From the last available numbers, the NYPD have issued fewer CCW permits per-annum post-Bruen than before it, those lucky few can carry fewer places at greater legal threat, and they may not be able to carry at all anyway. Other courts have simply read Bruen's rule against banning carry across an entire island and deciding that five sounded better, and SCOTUS punted. Lower courts have simply defied SCOTUS opinions that covered other rights too, and SCOTUS punted; others outright deny that the 2nd Amendment exists in their courtroom.
I can keep doing this.
Yes, that is what I meant. The fact that they've only tried the thousand-papercuts tactic, instead of just going ahead and saying "no guns, ever", is exactly what the Constitution is buying you, and what you would lose if you tried to make it common knowledge that you can just ignore the Constitution.
You're going to need to need to circumscribe that "try" a bit more.
Gabby Giffords has never been President.
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[emphasis added]
The only person to use the President in this conversation, so far, has been me: to highlight that Kamala Harris laughed at the idea of the Second Amendment meaning anything, and to point to Harry Reid burning Romney.
EDIT: To be clear, the Harris cackle.
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