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Notes -
You are perhaps more correct than you realize.
[...]
No, I do realise all of that. But the forms and niceties are important, even if they are just pretending. If you pretend to tolerate the other for long enough, you start believing you do. And when enough people believe it, something magical happens (or rather, something terrible doesn't happen); your society becomes more stable and its constituents don't jump to civil war anytime they lose an election.
Let us suppose I rigorously observe the forms and niceties. The other side flouts them. This is regrettable, but mistakes and friction are inevitable.
I continue to observe the forms and niceties. The other side continues to flout them. This happens repeatably, to the point that I can predict in advance with excellent accuracy where and when the flouting will occur, the specific mechanisms used to organize, implement, and protect it. This flouting constantly costs me value, and the value it costs me is increasing rapidly over time.
Your claim seems to be that the correct response is to grin and bear it, to accept that justice will never be done and that this is okay because mumble mumble.
There are contexts in which this is an answer I, personally, am willing to accept: "Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother when he sins against me?"
This is not an answer that you should rely on to maintain our current, observably-shaky condition of peace and plenty in the long term. Such reliance is extremely foolish and extremely dangerous. I invite you to contemplate the political history of the phrase "no justice, no peace", and to examine its prominence in the political landscape. Examine the position of John Brown within our society and political mythos.
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 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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