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Irrespective of whether it's "rational", is it really a conversation we need or want here? I'm with @FiveHourMarathon below regarding how these discussions always wind up going. I don't even think that there aren't interesting discussions to be had about how a popular uprising in the US would proceed, but the burden at this point should really be with those who want to talk about it to lead with something novel rather than another instance of "my chad tribesmen will beat the shit out of your effeminate wimps, if only the sheeple finally wake up and develop
classtribal counsciousness".Maybe I’m unusual, but I’m pretty doomer-pilled about the right’s prospects in a civil war.
Enh, 50/50.
I think they hold clear dominance in fieldcraft, and modern infrastructure is in fact so perilously fragile that a small group of dedicated individuals can have truly outsized effects. On the other hand, team red sucks at organizing in groups.
The biggest deterrent against civil war is that a vast majority of people on both political aisles are Comfortable(tm), or at least, comfortable enough that a civil war would have deleterious effects to their present quality of life and material well-being. They may not be happy or even content, but there's a gulf between that and everything else.
Also, there's nothing sadder than the yes-chad who got shot first getting less than half-hour's engagement on social media before everyone else shrugs and moves on. Nobody wants to be the one who starts a revolution if it doesn't start a revolution.
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There is no winning for anyone if it comes to that. Just violence until both sides are exhausted, or one is annihilated. I can't even speak with confidence which side it would be. But funnily enough, I always remember a line out of a trashy fantasy novel I read once.
"We don't fight to win. We fight so that we don't lose."
The prevailing wisdom here cannot be "Listen, it's just 'rude' not to walk into the ovens. It would get us into trouble with the feds if we talked too openly about non-compliance with their pogroms". Are we really so committed to ensuring everyone cannot even imagine a world where they aren't forfeiting their lives for nothing?
Why does there need to be "prevailing wisdom" here on this topic at all? You treat it as a given that we can't just ignore the topic, as something that can't be discussed while maintaining the spirit and purpose of the forum, and perhaps even mean to suggest that enforcing non-discussion is tantamount to complicity with your enemies. The exact same approach has been tried on the other side, with popular glosses like "the personal is political", "silence is violence" and what-not; and look where the discussion norms built around those memes got them.
I'm not saying what the prevailing wisdom should be, I'm saying what it should not be.
This is wrong and bad faith and borders on intellectual malpractice. "Silence is violence" as deployed by the left is about compelled speech. I'm asking for free speech, non censorship. Nobody has to have an opinion about their own genocide. But I'm asking for the freedom to discuss it, as well as extra-Democratic ways to survive.
And this is exactly what people mean when they say this place, and it's rules, are too "feminized". The only possibility that can be imagined is consensus. If you disagree, you are trying to change the consensus to a different consensus. Because a consensus must exist. There must be a norm that everyone conforms to. There cannot simply be endless discussion.
So, full disclosure, I found @remzem's post obnoxious and performative, but I would not have modded him for it, even though it did get several reports. @self_made_human decided otherwise, and while I would have decided differently, I don't think he's necessarily wrong. (Yes, this does in fact mean how you do or do not get modded sometimes depends on which mod decides to take action.)
I will attempt to answer your questions directly.
Are you allowed to discuss resisting the state? Yes, you can discuss it. People discuss that all the time here! (And that's why I personally thought @remzem's post was borderline but within bounds.)
Talking specifically about people you think should be killed is not within bounds. Talking about plans to do violence is not within bounds (and would be pretty fucking stupid if you're serious).
No, we are not saying it would be "rude" to talk about not walking into ovens (really, though? Come on.) Or that you can't talk openly about "non-compliance."
But what is it, exactly, that you want to say that you think you are not allowed to say? That you hate Jay Jones and hope someone shoots him? Well, you can say you hate him, but no, you can't openly wish death on him. (Yes, his texts would have gotten him banned on the Motte.) If you want to be more indirect about it ("I really think some of our state leadership should water the tree of liberty"), we are not stupid and we're still going to tell you to knock off the fedposting. Both because, yes, it's easy for you to whine about what you're not allowed to say when you're not the one who would get visited by the FBI, and because as several others have pointed out, most people here are not really interested in reading dick-fondling threads about what people will do to their enemies when the Boogooloo happens. If that's what you're into, there are guys on Twitter whose entire niche is jerking themselves off over such fantasies, including our own Motte alum Kulak. If you want Kulak-posting, go give him a follow.
To nitpick, I have stated the sentiment that I would celebrate if a public figure died of natural causes and not gotten a warning for it.
While neither is a nice sentiment, I think there is a clear distinction between the wishing for someone to die and wishing for them to get murdered. One is poor taste and possibly makes me a terrible human being, but the other is calling for or condoning violence, which has a corrosive effect on civilization.
To further complicate matters, there are certainly cases where homicides are widely celebrated. The death of Bin Laden has been widely celebrated, for example. (Yes, you can argue that Obama's SEALs were doing their utmost to bring him in alive to stand trial in NY, and he somehow thwarted them by presenting a clear and present danger, so they had to abandon their objective and kill him (so the public would not be celebrating a murder but a killing in self defense), but given the general US policy of drone strikes against individuals suspected of terrorism, I think it much more likely that they fulfilled their objective. -- Personally, I would have liked to see him stand trial, but of all the deaths from W's war on terror, his is certainly in the lowest percentile of upsettingness.)
So empirically, it seems to depend on the victim if a homicide can be praised or not, at which point we are mostly haggling over price.
I am not saying that people should be able to call for the murder of anyone (and I do not think there is a CW topic whose outcome could be improved by murder, actually), I am just stating my opinion that it is hard to make hard and fast rules about these things.
Generally speaking we won't mod people for celebrating someone's death ( though it is in poor taste), but wishing for someone's death is more likely to get modded.
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The difference here between homicide and murder is significant.
Potato, potato. As Bierce observes,
I will grant you that killing in self-defense is meaningfully different from murder.
I might even grant you that there is sometimes a difference between killing out of murderism and accepting killing someone as an acceptable side effect in pursuit of another goal.
But I have read enough Tucholsky to reject the premise that murder dressed in uniform ceases to be murder.
If the US navy is shooting boats of suspected drug smugglers in international waters near Venezuela, arguing about the difference of that and what is generally understood to be murder is splitting hairs.
Directionally, what Obama did to Bin Laden seems to be mostly the same thing, at least based on my priors. Could be that he forced the hands of the US troops when they were trying to take him into custody, and could be that he was on the verge of giving the order for 9/11 2.0, which is why they had to storm his compound right away, but likely the US just decided that it would not bother with a trial.
Again, least upsetting murder committed by the US ever, though.
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The term is "boogaloo". It's a reference to the movie Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, which became a meme title for sequels (the idea being that this conflict would be a sequel to the American Civil War).
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Oh how far we've fallen. From rhetoric you'd see heroic sung in a Disney movie that was required viewing in Elementary School to intolerable hate speech that will get you and everyone around you visited by the feds in a single generation.
But sure, I'm the problem here.
So look, if you want to argue that we are in need of a revolution, you can make the argument. But Thomas Paine you are not. "I hate my enemies and want them dead" is not an argument.
If you think that's what I'm saying, you are wrong, and if you think that wasn't an argument in revolutionary times, you are wrong twice.
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I should probably be glad we have higher standards than the Virginia electorate, but mostly it makes me disappointed in humanity.
A nice consolation prize.
Cheering after the fact should tragedy occur to such an innocent and praiseworthy individual, a la Kirk and approximately every internet forum to the left of The Motte?
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"Silence is violence" is absolutely deployed in defense of "free speech" too - it's a mainstay in protests where students disrupt unrelated university functions to inject progressive talking points of the day, and in those cases is taken to mean that being forced to stay silent (on the talking points, at university) is tantamount to being forced to be complicit in violence. Essentially, you and they are conflating the "I have the right to be heard" notion of free speech and the "I have the right to speak wherever and whenever I want" notion; while neither can be implemented perfectly, we can get a lot closer to something like a stable equilibrium with the former.
Also, from where do you get the idea that there is a consensus here, and anyone is trying to force some other consensus? I am under the impression that, weighted by posting frequency or upvotes, this place leans mildly towards the at least boogaloo-sympathetic. I do not think that a right-wing uprising in the US would win, and I am generally pro-chaos so I would want to see it happen! Yet, I do not want it to be discussed here, just like I don't want my approximation algorithms lecture to be disrupted by people yelling about Palestine (even though I am inclined to agree with them).
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