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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'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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