We can beat them! The US Army, Navy, Air Force, and that other one that no one cares about, they don’t stand a chance!
Like, we can all joke about civil war and splitting up the red and blue, but, like, when it comes down to deciding who gets the nukes in the divorce, it becomes pretty obvious that it’s just super dumb to think about realistically.
From what I’ve heard, the supreme court decision was mostly about the feds having access to the border, and the ability to cut down the razor wire, rather than any specific opposition to the razor wire existing in and of itself. I would wager this whole deal is mostly just a kind of political play, to try and egg biden into doing something stupid, while simultaneously keeping up the appearance that everyone at the head of these states is doing something dangerous, anti-institutional, and counter-cultural, even though they’re all kind of inherently unable to do anything along those lines just as a matter of their positions.
Everybody’s correct when they say that the political divides in this country are less clear-cut, but I also don’t think that the radicalization that we’ve seen, as a matter of perspective from being in online space, necessarily reflects reality. I think if you look at most people, most people want social security of some kind, and want healthcare of some kind, and want drug legalization of some kind, and want us to stop fighting wars in some form. Those are all kind of generalities, because the specific mechanism by which people want those things achieved differs from person to person. It’s very fractured as a matter of course, as a matter of how our political system and society is set up, and the ruling class has taken advantage of this to enact a divide and conquer strategy, where they can selectively promote whatever ideological positions benefit them the most, and cordon everyone off into a relatively small set of solutions over which they have a high amount of control. Rather than, you know, what a good democracy might do, which is come to a compromise solution, that everyone but the most extreme propagandized radicals might be kind of okay with. There is a reason why lots of conservatives like communism, as long as you use the right words. Both parties attempt to be mostly “populist” parties. This is all kind of obvious, right, but people understate the degree to which it’s a deliberate thing, and the overstate the degree to which it’s been successful, you know, which isn’t surprising, because, again, serves the interests of the powerful. People aren’t, broadly, morons, people have realized that this is all the case. That’s mostly what the “radicalization” that you’ve seen online has been, people just realizing that they hate these shitass solutions that aren’t really compromise solutions. See how everyone is cripplingly disappointed with the democratic party, and also how, likewise, conservatives are consistently disappointed with their own party, as well, and for many of the same reasons, barring the extreme radicals.
Most people are focused on how the internet divides people into radicalized swaths and conspiracy theorists, which is true, but even the mainstream monopolized internet is kind of a good tool for mass mobilization. See the occupy movement and the arab spring for older examples, for more recent examples, maybe the george floyd protests, or the french retirement protests. The only risk of these is kind of that they more easily get co-opted as a result of their visibility, i.e. “defund the police” gets turned into an argument for “fund the police”. If you were an asshole, you could cite charlottesville, or jan 6th, for examples of internet mobilization, but those are relatively smaller scales of things, compared to the others, which were more popular, they just got disproportionate media attention relative to their size, and had disproportionate political effects.
I think if we’re looking at the true, extreme political radicals, we’re seeing them come about as a result of a kind of well-oiled engine. I’m not gonna say that this is an institutional kind of thing, and it’s maybe more of a third level effect of active decisions, but it’s still something that, nonetheless, has been deliberately constructed. 4chan is funded by a japanese toy company and a hands off japanese internet techbro, and is administrated by some former american military freak who’s deliberately organized the site. The more radical offshoots, that use the same source code, tend to be funded by oil money, and political action committees, but through second-level effects, where they fund some small level conservative actor, and then they prop up the space. Which churns out some radical terrorists that are capable of your more fucked up bombings, and shootings, and controlled and coordinated protests. And then you kind of get military people at almost every level of this, in lower numbers, who act to control the space.
I dunno what I mean to extrapolate from all of this, but yeah. There’s probably not going to be a civil war.
Apologies, but too verbose and meandering to gain insight/understanding from (and I tried). Also, its murder trying to read that on a phone (vs PC monitor) to boot.
Appreciate the attempt though, thank you for that.
I don’t even come to a conclusion in the thing itself, but the tl;dr is basically just that this is all political farce, political theater, and the nature of the opposition’s control is too like. granular, too atomized, to be able to co-ordinate a large scale war. What we see instead are discrete “events”, discrete attacks, civil unrest which is corralled and channeled towards political ends by political powers. That’s what we see, we don’t see like, large scale organized institutional conflict, because the institutions are (mostly) all on the same side.
If you read the popular opinions around 1860, we have the same “we are right and we’ll show them” attitude building up in the new poor-people-and-women slave states.
The US Regular Army (RA) was founded in 1775. State militias supported the RA through the various wars fought on what is now US soil (including the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812). In the Civil War, the RA was supported by volunteers and fought on the side that ultimately won. The Confederate Army was similar to the RA at the time. Currently, the RA has been absorbed into the US Army (including Army Reserve and National Guard).
So… yes there was a federal military, but it was a different thing than the US Army is now. How that would play out if things went bonkers in 2025… who knows. There are a LOT of people around the world watching VERY closely though… and really hoping (not that confidently though) that sanity will prevail.
One thinking skill Ive picked up from programming is to really take all the time necessary to articulate a thought using the best words.
Clear communication is worth the time and effort. Using the right word for each concept, learning new words as necessary, makes a positive impact on all the uses of that communication.
A templatable OCR app that maps areas or shapes to excel fields.
If you have a product tag with different serial numbers or product details and a standard layout it would be really useful to be able to scan for a tag shape, apply an overlay with each block of relevant data and then map that block to a cell address.
Take photo of product tag x100 OCR and edge find on product tag Select/draw areas Assign areas to spreadsheet cell or column. Apply and check with second photo. Confirm function and process next 97 images automatically.
Thought of it for work but would be great for food labels and nutrition information collation as well. All sorts of paper->digital stuff.
There have been attempts at this with store receipts, so you quickly scan your groceries into your budget or inventory app. That has been a difficult problem, in part because stores change receipts so much.
I’ve seen and used the on the fly versions for expensing receipts and such but I’ve run into standardized tags at work a few times where it would be nice.
I think the people that spend their time focusing on this are really creepy. They freak out about something that genuinely isn’t an issue and demonize people who are just trying to live their lives. There are better things to focus on
Sounds good on paper, but you’ve essentially just banned them from all sports. Most schools won’t have enough trans students to form a whole team, and that’s even if they all enjoy the same sport! If by some chance you do get them all to team up, can you do that with all of the neighboring schools? They will need teams to play against.
You are talking about what is visible on the surface right now.
When the idea of girls’ sports teams was first considered, men didn’t think of girls as wanting to play sports either; sports were for men/boys. There were people making the same argument as you “there aren’t enough girls interested in sports to form a team” etc.
Just because you only know a very small number of trans people doesn’t mean there aren’t more, and doesn’t mean there won’t be even more in the future.
Mmmkay. My high school class was around 100 people, say 50 were assigned male at birth. It would take 20% of them being trans to put together a bare minimum size softball team of trans women, and that every single one of those 9-10 trans women would want to play softball. It would take 25% for a full roster volleyball team. 10% for a bowling team. It would require the level of these students’ interest in sports to be a statistical anomaly.
In the most generous of estimates, has anyone anywhere thought that a full quarter of people are trans? And that they would have a higher-than-average interest in sports? It’s ludicrous. But tell you what, if we ever hit 25% of the population being trans and every one of them is an athlete, I’ll eat my words.
You’re arguing rates of trans women playing sports will reach levels comparable to AFAB women playing sports. Which effectively means everyone or nearly everyone identifying as a man today would have to come out as a trans woman. It’s ludicrous. Who’s being disingenuous?
There are a bunch of studies that show that there is minor map advantage on most (not all) measures for trans athletes a few years after transitioning with hormone therapy. Some trans people never go through puberty of their assigned sex at birth.
I used to be of the view that it wasn’t fair for someone who was amab to have an innate advantage over someone else who wasn’t. However, we should also consider where they would compete. Is it fair to have trans women compete against cis males who now have a similar, but more profound, advantage over them? Or are they now just excluded?
I’ve come to believe that all sports at the elite level are dominated by those with genetic and physical advantage, usually by luck. Trans people also for in that category, but it’s easier to pinpoint the why for them. All the rules of sport are arbitrary, anyway.
So, after consideration, I think we should have sports open to all that are (identify) as a particular gender. For sports that already categorise by physicality (boxing, weightlifting etc), I don’t think it would be problematic to consider their physicality too. For many sports there is no advantage anyway, after transition. And even if there was, isn’t the point of sports to have fun, to enjoy oneself and have pleasure. Only a rare few people compete at elite levels. Excluding trans people hurts far more.people than it helps.
The reason we have women’s sports is because women are extremely rarely able to compete against men in most sports.
When MTF trans person reaches adulthood they have already generally attained a physical advantage over cis women that no amount of hormones and surgery will diminish. Their current levels of testosterone will have no impact on bone structure and muscle development gained through puberty. This can be shown by the lack of female to male trans athletes.
I am all for Trans rights, but becoming a professional or elite athlete is not a right, as much as I would love to become a racing driver.
Perhaps a mixed gender/sex competition could work, but allowing people that have transitioned after puberty took hold is blatantly unfair. Obviously there are some sports, such as shooting, darts, snooker etc where this advantage isn’t really applicable.
Unfortunately in life compromises sometimes have to be made, and I believe that for males transitioning to female, not allowing them to compete as elite female athletes is a compromise that needs to be made for the greater good.
The best thing that I’ve seen from the anti-trans movement in womens sports, is the number of cis women who end up falling more afoul of the rules due to their genetic predisposition to have a higher than average level of testosterone for women with regards to anti-trans rules that almost always revolve around bodily testosterone levels.
Anti-trans rules will hurt women in womens sports far more than it will hurt trans women (as far as numbers go, to be clear), and no one wants to think or talk about that.
Trans women in sports are not dominating any field. All the outrage you see from it is like that Marathon from a year or 2 ago where a woman got pissed off for losing to a trans woman who finished infront of her, both of them in the high thousands of placement, not like 1st and 2nd place… Both were beaten by thousands of other women, but that woman had a hissy fit because one of the women was trans.
What is curious to me is these are state departments disagreeing, though the previous civil war was fought between federal and state governments with raised armies.
This time I was expecting the police vs. militants. Uncontrolled civil unrest. Portland and Minneapolis but spread across the nation, cranked to eleven.
In Minneapolis at least one police station was burned down, as well as some commercial buildings. But what is interesting to me is the degree of lethality law enforcement tends to resort to during even peaceful protests.
What I thought was interesting in Portland were the DHS Stormtroopers / LGMs abducting protestors without identifying themselves or their purpose, which figured into to escalation of the protests around the ICE building.
So yes, I’m expecting either white power militant groups or law enforcement, masked up and without identifying marks to conduct raids on minority neighborhoods and community buildings associated with left-aligned organizations like BLM.
That or law enforcement accelerates its usual overpolicing of non-white neighborhoods and covers larger regions until the people can’t stand it anymore and start organizing resistance efforts. In Nazi-occupied Paris, it was the brutality of the German occupation that compelled Parisians to fight back. La Résistance evolved from independent mischief-makers to a formidable fighting force across three years.
But you’re right, if it’s just protests and OWS style campouts, and the police don’t misbehave too much, it’s not going to be much of a civil war. But so far, we can count on the police getting their murder on when they feel the civil unrest doesn’t respect their authority enough. And unlike Ferguson (or the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s) smartphones with cameras are ubiquitous, so they can’t deny when they pull a hit like Tamir Rice.
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