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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26752 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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a particularly nasty modernized variant on the early Athenian strategy against Sparta

Was he talking about what Pericles did or some other conflict?

  • Turn Athens and local vital infrastructure into connected fortresses
  • Evacuate the allied rural population from vulnerable areas to the fortified cities so enemy raids cannot harm them.
  • Use superior Athenian wealth, industry and trade relations to make up for reductions in available harvest by trading for food imports.
  • Deny the enemy a conventional battle or easy areas to pillage, leaving as the only available targets heavily defended urban areas that would take horrific casualties to besiege.
  • Focus on destroying the enemy navy to deny them mobility and give Athenian forces command of the seas.
  • Use the navy to launch unpredictable raids into enemy territory, making them dash back and forth chasing after fleets that have already left and struck somewhere else.
  • Target the Spartan agriculture to destroy their harvests and recruit or arm uprisings of the Spartan's brutalized helots, forcing the Spartans to abandon gains to protect their supply lines and fight uprisings behind their lines.
  • Count on the Athenian wealth and logistical superiority winning out through putting the Spartans into an attrition war where their wealth and logistics will run out first.

Probably would have succeeded if Pericles hadn't died of plague and been replaced by impatient morons keen on decisive battles.

Probably would have succeeded if Pericles hadn't died of plague and been replaced by impatient morons keen on decisive battles.

I agree with this.

But as to the overall point, it was mainly

Use superior Athenian wealth, industry and trade relations to make up for reductions in available harvest by trading for food imports.

and

Target the Spartan agriculture to destroy their harvests

Specifically, they began by pointing out that the US has done a lot of biological and chemical weapons research, not all of it aimed at humans — there are ones targeting crops and livestock, too. And there's a reason it's called "flyover country." This, accompanied with a photo of a crop-duster plane in action.

So, they argued, if red states decide to stop selling the food they grow to blue states, to try to use hunger as a weapon, then the other side will use hunger as a weapon back, go "if we can't have it, no one can," and send out aircraft to drop as many herbicides, blights, livestock diseases, et cetera upon red state farms as necessary. At which point, food will then have to be shipped in from elsewhere… and look at which side controls the coasts, and especially all the big coastal port cities. Oh, yes, and as for the funds with which pay foreign countries for that food, isn't a large majority of America's economy and wealth concentrated in those very same big coastal cities?

I feel like this begs the question, what do you think you're going to do after you've gone scorched earth on Middle America? What exactly are you going to trade with those superior trade relations if not your own lives? Live action remakes of old Disney cartoons? The United States does not export Grain and Produce, the Midwest does. The United States does not manufacture trade goods, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee do. The United States does not have a space program. Alabama, California, Florida, and Texas do. Etc... Etc...

Survive. The hypothetical is one in which red states start the cycle by intiating use of starvation as a weapon against blue states and the blue states defend themselves through MAD-style retaliation. Same logic as making it clear that if a country starts dropping nukes, they will be nuked in return.

It's like the Bomber Harris line about how Germany operated under the rather naive notion that they could bomb everyone else's cities and somehow the Allies were just going to sit on their hands and not return the favor. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Look at the breakdown of states by population, manufacturing, and so on. Bill Sherman's warning to pro-secessionist southerners about their eagerness for war is much more likely outcome. I'm from a hard red state, still live in it and have traveled and worked extensively elsewhere; rural conservatives calling for another civil war and dismissing the northeast, west coast, blue midwest, etc as pushovers and thinking they just make disney movies and the like would be repeating the same error of judgement to their peril. Most places that actually make things are like 60-40% partisan divide among the populace at most, not monolithic.

What exactly are you going to trade with those superior trade relations if not your own lives?

Exactly. There's a difference between the "on-paper" wealth that underlies the "America's economy is mostly Blue coastal cities" and actual material goods and production. But people like the guy who made this argument don't get that.

I bring this up as an example of the Blue Tribe's utter hostility to Red, that they'll openly show how much thought they put into scenarios of smugly enacting "flyover genocide."

It's not that I think something like this would work… but I wouldn't put it past them to try anyway.

I bring this up as an example of the Blue Tribe's utter hostility to Red, that they'll openly show how much thought they put into scenarios of smugly enacting "flyover genocide."

It's not that I think something like this would work… but I wouldn't put it past them to try anyway.

Frankly I don't see how this is any worse than Reds smugly proclaiming "guess who has all the guns".

Yeah if I had a nickel for every time people in my hard red state talked with immense pleasure about the idea of slaughtering, starving or cutting off water to cities I'd be rich.

It’s a ridiculous subject matter for any number of reasons, not least the fact that in any new American civil war the entire rest of the world would pick sides, and those sides aren’t easy to determine from current political dynamics (eg the simple fact that the left is more xenophilic isn’t sufficient to predict whose side various other factions would be on). The dollar and US financial institutions would collapse, and the US is a huge net food exporter, so it’s unclear where the coastal cities would be buying food from anyway.

There won’t be a civil war, though, a slow Orbanization is more feasible and the modern American ruling class is much more disunited than they were 30 years ago (the Israel question discussed above is one example).

The whole nukes thing would probably hinder the potential for direct intervention, and there’s like 5-10 wars waiting to pop off the moment American attention to global interventions would stop in the manner required by a bonafide civil war.

That depends on who has the nukes and who has the army. If the Republic of California invites soldiers of a foreign nation into their territory, that’s not an invasion.

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