wj - That’s what allows the far right to make such effective use of it: it’s got enough plausibility to resonate with the substantial portion of the population which does not have the luxury of taking a chance on change being an improvement.
The thing is, when a problem like Climate Change comes along, nobody gets to choose "no change." Change is going to come for us all because "no change" is exactly what is threatening our existence. The only truly conservative position is to choose the path of change that has the greatest margin of safety going forward for the greatest number of people, prioritizing those most at-risk over those who are least at-risk.
I have yet to see a single "conservative" political group do anything of the sort.
CharlesWT's Poe-driven conglomeration of US voters does illustrate why it is that it's so hard to have a meaningful political discussion about voters political beliefs - stick everyone on a right/left continuum, label either end (conservative/liberal), have the voters sort themselves to one side or the other. As I've said before, this makes no effort to define or anchor a political center, and it flattens out the philosophical differences between voters on either half, such that both Harris and Sanders can be called "very liberal" and GWB can be called liberal by those on the right half, while Klobuchar can be called a centrist by those on the left half.
And since these polls get recycled, the pollsters can talk about the percentage changes between groups, but don't account for how or why people identify where they do on the conservative/liberal spectrum.
None of it gives us meaningful language for talking about how we should govern ourselves, or for locating the potential agreements and deep-rooted disagreements between factions.
All stuff that I have said before.
One place where I do agree with Graham Platner is where he draws a distinction between classes in the US by saying that the real divide is between those who live off of their wages/salaries, and those who live off of their wealth/investments, with the former being "working class" regardless of any other trappings of social status.
I'm pretty sure that Klein would call me part of the elite. I have a Ph.D.. I teach at an R1 University. I live in a very wealthy city. Most of my friends and associates are academics and professionals.
But I grew up poor in a rural area. I am adjunct faculty. I am a union member. I show up to march with the cooks and groundskeepers when their union is on strike because I know that my own ability to pay my rent is tied to their ability to negotiate better conditions for themselves, and because I know that the university would gladly exploit us both if they thought they could get away with it. Neither of us are getting ahead. We are both struggling not to be left behind.
I am a fortunate worker. I have (for now) a pension that I could draw on were I to retire. My wife and I have a larger savings than most Americans, and we could leave our very prosperous city and go somewhere else less prosperous and cosmopolitan and buy a house outright, and live comfortably. That's a lot of privilege compared both to the unions I've marched with and to the majority of other adjunct faculty who have no benefits, no retirement, and not much pay to show for all their contributions to the common good. I have a fair amount of job autonomy. I'm an elite - by plebeian standards.
But none of those things are going to take away the contingency of my living circumstances. One medical emergency could still wipe away all of that privilege and put me on the street without a home.
I don't know if I am a liberal or a progressive. It depends entirely on who you ask, and on the subject or distinction in question. But in practice that difference is irrelevant because whatever you call me, I'm going to be advocating for the same things - we need to take care of our world if we hope to take care of ourselves, and we need to help those in need first before we start to add to our own comfort and luxury.
I was confused by Klein insisting that Rawls was "fundamentally unreadable by the public." Rawls never struck me as being particularly inaccessible or opaque.
I'm also struck by how he insists that Liberalism is elitist. I'm guessing that's because he was a professor's kid, and grew up surrounded by people with graduate degrees and an interest in public policy, but he had limited success in school and found his voice as an upstart blogger, and then parlayed that into being a beltway insider. I wonder if he'd have that same view of how elitist liberalism was if he had grown up in a less cosmopolitan place, and less cosmopolitan and educated circles.
I don't know how much time he's ever spent actually living in modest, non-cosmopolitan places, and I don't know if he's ever truly lived where all of his friends and associates were people of modest means, where the mark of a distinguished education was the completion of a bachelors degree at a state university.
He seems to spend a lot of time in the podcast slipping around in his use of "liberalism" and "liberality," following along as Rosenblatt explains her research, doing a good job of tracking her arguments and echoing her language, but then taking her more formal and restrictive use of "liberalism" and using things she says to springboard into a much fuzzier, popular conception of the terms without noting (and perhaps not noticing) the shift in register.
I think that's why his questions feel like gotcha questions. He's taken a conversation out of its initial context and dropped it into another in an attempt to make it "more accessible."
I don't think that liberalism has to be elitist at all, or that a liberal education has to be viewed as individualistic or personal in the atomistic sense. We all have cross-cutting associations, relations, and affections, and we can understand how to share and to compromise and to collaborate.
His discussion of "tolerating intolerance" is another one of those places where I feel like he's stuck on the idea of there being some flaw in liberalism, or in how liberals practice liberalism, when all that is really being argued is that (wherever possible) we set aside the sort of fundamentalist notions of right and wrong and practice some epistemic humility in matters of belief - mostly as a way to avoid violent conflict and war in our societies.
The real spirit of Enlightenment toleration lies in being willing to die for one's beliefs while also being not to kill in order to triumph over those who do not hold or practice those same beliefs. It doesn't work if that second clause is ignored.
I don't think that's being idealistic or utopian, more (as Kim Stanley Robinson puts it) anti-anti-utopian.
Snarki - Fair. I was thinking more in terms of scale, intensity, and duration than in methodology or geography when I mentioned The Troubles. I have yet to find a reliable historical analog for the current US.
Think of Russia as the federal government. Putin sees Ukraine as a separatist state of what is historically (to his mind) Russian territory. He tries to invade, but gets bogged down. The battle lines harden and it becomes a war of attrition. Advantage Russia.
That's the old war.
Ukraine, meanwhile, desperately needs to find a way to preserve their limited population and not spend it foolishly taking on Russia's material advantage. They put up obstacles to territorial progress and settle into a strategy of dispersal, using drones and SigInt to locate, map, and bleed the Russians. They spend $5000 a drone taking out Russian weapon platforms that cost millions to produce, and use anti-personnel drones to kill the crews that serve the Russian weapons. $15000 to cost Russia $10m or more and kill more troops than Russia can replace, all with no further territory gained and controlled.
That's rapidly becoming the new face of war across Europe.
Troops on the ground is a fools errand when the people don't want you there. Especially when what you really want is to bring those people back under your control.
I see a lot of different imagined scenarios here of what a "shooting war" might look like in our hypothetical futures. I'll clarify what I was imagining when I used the phrase...
Imagine it is twenty years on and the federal government continues its deep dysfunction in the legislative branch, its anti-regulatory, anti-labor, pro-oligarchic, christian national stance in the judicial branch, and its competing authoritarian trend in the executive. Most of the federal management has been crippled and those responsibilities have devolved to the states.
The tensions between the coastal PNW cities and the eastern side of WA/OR have escalated. ID has continued its evolution towards being a haven for White Christian Nationalists, and there is a growing network of Active Clubs along the west coast that are working with the Idaho nationalists, going to paramilitary training and whatnot, supported by a network of WCN donors across the US.
The Active Clubs show up to protest in liberal cities whenever there is a Democrat in the White House, and to counter-protest whenever there is a Republican there and the residents of Portland/Seattle come out to protest the feds.
This is no different from today, really.
But with the FBI and the Justice Department crippled by two decades of competitive authoritarianism, these Active Clubs can start to attack the power grids of the liberal cities (using drones and small guerilla units to sabotage substations, etc.) and in places like Spokane these groups stage Malheur-style takeovers and standoffs. The use of drones means that the Active Clubs can attack any state enforcement efforts.
All of this is making the more eastern side of the states unsafe for anyone that does not fit the demographic ideals of the American Redoubt.
It's a shooting war, but on the level of The Troubles, not of The American Civil War. No one is putting units on the ground and fighting openly for territory. That's an obsolete vision of war.
russell - Maybe we need some kind of regional entity, smaller than the whole country, but larger than a single state, and then devolve a lot of what are currently federal responsibilities to those. It would be a hell of a lot easier to get a workable consensus about a lot of stuff in, for example, New England or the upper Midwest or the mountain west, than it is when the whole country is involved.
That sounds to me something like The Hansa. Germany had its Holy Roman Empire and its lords, but the emperor was weak and the lords were more independent. That's something like what we would have if federalism weakened under the dysfunction of competing authoritarianism, leaving states to pick up the slack. It's kinda where King Leer is pushing things right now with his withholding of federal monies to states he hates.
Germany also had powerful cities with guilds, whose economic power bought them a measure of independence from their lords - again, think blue cities in red states. The cities form leagues and arrange favorable exchanges, and use those associations to allow for mutual aid and for more liberal social policies. Such an arrangement could work as a counter to weak federalism.
I imagine that places like L.A. and Silicon Valley might use their economic power to go the Italian city-state route rather than the league route. They already do where the California governor is concerned. Nevertheless, the other big cities could well affiliate to compete with the megacities for influence over the state.
The United States could remain, and could hold elections, but lacking enough federal power to enforce central control over its territory it would lose sovereignty, and the centers of power could well become regional and associational, rather than territorial.
"United" States with power more devolved to the states and formal associations between states and cities to create regional compacts that regulate shared resources and mutual aid.
It's one of the ways the world could have gone in the Renaissance - a less universalist vision than the nation-state. Pockets of prosperous liberalism within illiberal territories, all working within a much reduced form of national sovereignty.
cleek - I understand where you are coming from with your thoughts about military force, and I think those beliefs are widespread and common. My own perspective on this comes out of the readings that I did during preparation for my dissertation work during the Gulf War, reading texts about insurgencies. In particular I'm thinking about what John Nagl was arguing in his book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (a reference to a TE Lawrence quote about military leaders trying to understand insurgency).
Nagl is comparing British strategies for dealing with the Malay Insurgency and American strategies for dealing with Vietnam. Your discussion of how the US military would deal with rebels is similar to US military doctrine from Vietnam - what Nagl would call "sending a bullet, not a man." He argues that this strategy is what led the US to win every military engagement, but lose the war.
It's a well regarded text among military strategists - especially those who served in the Gulf. It's well worth a read if this subject interests anyone here.
Israel has been pursuing this strategy with Hamas for a while now, with great cost to civilian populations and infrastructure. I don't see them being able to pursue that same strategy in Israel proper against liberal Israelis with a military force made up in part of Israelis from the areas under attack.
Likewise, the US federal government could take over the capitals of the Confederate States and install their own regimes in those capitals, but they could not bring military force to bear against the KKK during their first reign of terror. Military force is a tool ill suited to solving a political problem if the other side is not under arms in the field.
For that, you have to send a man, not a bullet.
This is probably already more than the subject is worth in the current conversation here, but it's where I'm coming from in my thoughts about where I think things are headed.
I'm telling you all right now...RW evangelicals will support LDS before they support any Democrat, and the RW paramilitary groups can stay as klannish as they want, but they will all show up under separate leadership to take on a target that codes Democrat in their worldview.
The doctrinal purity and infighting will happen if they gain power, but until then we are the forces of satan, and they will contort however they need to in order to take us down.
Michael Cain - I’ll leave it at this: describe a plot you could sell to a publisher where the Southern Baptists from Kentucky and Alabama drive 1500 miles to support the Church of Latter Day Saints in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. Who are they going to attack? California and Phoenix and Front Range Colorado?
The evangelical religious right has no strong central authorities. It doesn't matte what the official doctrinal statement of the denomination is, there will be people in their pews who are subscribed to social media accounts that are putting out Seven Mountains content and agitating for Christian Nationalism.
I don't think anyone showing up to a Patriot Prayer rally is going to be chased away for being LDS or ELS or whatever.
And what they will attack is any sort of gathering in Seattle, or Portland, or Eugene, or Denver that they perceive as being the work of Woke Ativists. They will attack civic infrastructure (as they have already done) to strike a blow against tyranny.
Just wait until they get drones.
These cells are not vanguard organizations, but that won't stop them from forming flash mobs when they see an opportunity for it.
cleek - 1861 had something to say about states trying to leave the union. and that was decided with foot soldiers.
no state is going to stand a chance against a few B52s.
The question is, though, how much enforcement and control can a federal government project onto dissident states? The North won the American Civil War, but white supremacy remained the order of the day in the South for 100 years, and is now back with a vengeance.
There are only so many sorts of policy that can be moved forward with state violence. Gold Statue is finding that out right now where Iran is concerned, as W found out with Afghanistan... as Putin is learning with Ukraine.
Given the difficulty of forcing compliance, I don't know that there remains enough common cause to try to hold on if states decided not to comply with federal mandates.
I'm more worried about Palantir than I am about B52s. The future of war in the US will be dispersed violence, not mass violence, and a surveillance apparatus would be more dangerous to dissidents than a state military.
As per the last time we discussed Michael's partition, I'm wondering how Western America (sans TX/OK) divides up the political baby between the purple Front Range and NM, the mostly red patch from the Western Slope to the western side of the Cascades/Sierra Nevada. I have a hard time imagining the compromise that would let ID/WY/UT come to terms with the population advantage held by the big CA cities, Portland, and Seatle/Tacoma. Those divides seem like shooting war divides to me.
I know...we can build all of those data centers in Galt's Gulch, bypass all of the small minded bureaucrats, and skip all of the governmental red tape!
CharlesWT - Musk and others plan to put AI data centers in space.
Or, to put it more accurately, Musk and others plan to float these ideas to supporters, investors, and banks and and use that idea to leverage access to more capital. The actual practicality of such a thing has yet to be established, and the opportunity costs of doing such a thing is likely outside of the scope of these guys' concerns.
How often does the hardware at such a center have to be updated? How does one access it to service it? How much does that service cost? Can any of the old hardware be recycled, or is it single use? What about the solar panels? Same questions there.
Guess I'm just not on enough ketamine to be captivated by this bold vision of the future.
The nature of warfare is becoming increasingly dystopian, and fast, Yaro said. “I see the picture that in five years we mostly won’t need people. It scares me.
Still thinking about what wonkie was saying. I just came across this bit that I posted on social media eight years ago:
Young people come to me and they asked me 'What is your hope for the world?' And I always answer that the hope for the world is you. You are the next generation, I am the old generation. Just like this little tree here. This is a sapling, right beside it is one of these enormous red pines. This sapling epitomizes you and the hope of the world. So when you wonder how things are going, just remember that.
You have your task to do. You’ve got to carry on the battle to preserve such beautiful places as this, the battle goes on endlessly. It’s your task. You’ve got to see that you keep the flame alive – no matter what obstacles. The whole world depends on you!
This whole world depends on this little pine in a sense. Just like at one time, it depended on those enormous trees here.
If you could transport the sub by rail, the route wouldn't get steeper than about a 3% grade. None of the subs, though, is going to fit through the Moffat Tunnel, so coming from CA is out. Not sure if any of the other 30 tunnels on the California Zephyr route are between Chicago and Denver, but I imagine that track clearance would be an issue even without the limits of train tunnels.
(Just finished a deep dive into bicycle rail trails for a research class this winter.)
That's good to know, Michael. I'll have to check into it further.
I'll remain worried, though, because it seems likely to me that the fast-and-cheap-and-damn-the-consequences crowd are still in the driver's seat where policy is concerned, and where judicial obstruction is concerned as well.
wonkie - The breaking point for me is the destruction of our public lands.
I'm still trying to come to terms with how my brother, who was a big Edward Abbey fan and conservationist, could trade that birthright for a bowl of anti-vax, anti-abortion pottage. I'm really struggling with it.
I do continue to support One Tree Planted on a monthly basis. It doesn't change my bafflement or sense of betrayal, but it is a counterbalance against despair.
I was just reading that the USGS has determined that there are likely large pegmatite deposits in ME/NH that could supply US lithium demands for a long time, but lithium extraction is environmentally destructive, highly polluting, and uses vast amounts of water. I'm wondering how those externalities might affect the local politics. The Woodchucks have always struck me as lilely being a bit more stubborn and less grasping than their ND counterparts were when the fracking gravy train pulled up.
Pro Bono's response to that YouGov poll seems right to me, and it fits with my sense of David Brooks's ideological leanings as I describe them earlier here. I think his mention of the French Revolution as his ur-scene of rising political violence shows that. He's giving us an essentially Burkean response in a moment where he sees the left as the chief threat to the established order.
The US was built with electoral safety valves. The GOP is systematically monkey wrenching all of those, empowered by a corrupt judicial cabal.
Nope. Our biggest worry isn't that, it's that the college kids are losing faith in the political process.
Never mind why that might be happening.
Never mind the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Boogie Boys, Patriot Prayer, Atomwaffen Division, Patriot Front, and all of the Active Clubs on the right.
Those guys are all a bit over-the-top, but not a threat to anything important and essential.
We need to be careful that we don't get another Baader Meinhof. Those guys were marxists!
Brooks's list tells me that when he thinks about rising climates of violence, he thinks in terms of violence against the state, and "against the order of things." Political repression doesn't enter into his calculus because he doesn't conceive of "law and order" as violence, even when the state is using violence against protesters while invoking the state of exception and allowing themselves to violate the laws they have sworn to uphold.
I wish Capeheart would have asked Brooks to expand on what he meant by naming Reconstruction. Was he referring to the KKK and their terrorist campaign against freed blacks, or was he referring to the disenfranchisement of southern whites? It would be really nice to know where Brooks drew that line.
"This isn't a story about one bad agent or one bad API [Application Programming Interfaces]," Crane wrote in an X post. "It's about an entire industry building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it's building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe."
In February the Trump Administration moved to give deportation agents and other DHS officials plenaryauthority to ban, seize, and take down drones they don’t like, and punish their remote pilots. As we
pointed out at the time, this move is part of an ongoing trend of law enforcement seeking broad powers to ban drones. But it’s also part of this even larger and more dismaying trend: the construction of a regulatory regime for drones that renders drones primarily usable by law enforcement, government, and big companies, while boxing out ordinary people and potentially even prominent news outlets engaged in the recording of law enforcement operations like abusive immigration arrests.
Coming soon - debates over drones as personal weapons. Can an ordinary person own an ag drone capable of spraying liquids if that drone could be used against crowds at sporting and civic events? Does this technology extend the reach of the mass gunman and diversify the means at their disposal for mass killing?
The feds seem to be treating this as if it is a dangerous threat to Orangymandias's enforcement regime, and will likely continue to do so until they lose their grip on power.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
wj - That’s what allows the far right to make such effective use of it: it’s got enough plausibility to resonate with the substantial portion of the population which does not have the luxury of taking a chance on change being an improvement.
The thing is, when a problem like Climate Change comes along, nobody gets to choose "no change." Change is going to come for us all because "no change" is exactly what is threatening our existence. The only truly conservative position is to choose the path of change that has the greatest margin of safety going forward for the greatest number of people, prioritizing those most at-risk over those who are least at-risk.
I have yet to see a single "conservative" political group do anything of the sort.
"
CharlesWT's Poe-driven conglomeration of US voters does illustrate why it is that it's so hard to have a meaningful political discussion about voters political beliefs - stick everyone on a right/left continuum, label either end (conservative/liberal), have the voters sort themselves to one side or the other. As I've said before, this makes no effort to define or anchor a political center, and it flattens out the philosophical differences between voters on either half, such that both Harris and Sanders can be called "very liberal" and GWB can be called liberal by those on the right half, while Klobuchar can be called a centrist by those on the left half.
And since these polls get recycled, the pollsters can talk about the percentage changes between groups, but don't account for how or why people identify where they do on the conservative/liberal spectrum.
None of it gives us meaningful language for talking about how we should govern ourselves, or for locating the potential agreements and deep-rooted disagreements between factions.
All stuff that I have said before.
One place where I do agree with Graham Platner is where he draws a distinction between classes in the US by saying that the real divide is between those who live off of their wages/salaries, and those who live off of their wealth/investments, with the former being "working class" regardless of any other trappings of social status.
I'm pretty sure that Klein would call me part of the elite. I have a Ph.D.. I teach at an R1 University. I live in a very wealthy city. Most of my friends and associates are academics and professionals.
But I grew up poor in a rural area. I am adjunct faculty. I am a union member. I show up to march with the cooks and groundskeepers when their union is on strike because I know that my own ability to pay my rent is tied to their ability to negotiate better conditions for themselves, and because I know that the university would gladly exploit us both if they thought they could get away with it. Neither of us are getting ahead. We are both struggling not to be left behind.
I am a fortunate worker. I have (for now) a pension that I could draw on were I to retire. My wife and I have a larger savings than most Americans, and we could leave our very prosperous city and go somewhere else less prosperous and cosmopolitan and buy a house outright, and live comfortably. That's a lot of privilege compared both to the unions I've marched with and to the majority of other adjunct faculty who have no benefits, no retirement, and not much pay to show for all their contributions to the common good. I have a fair amount of job autonomy. I'm an elite - by plebeian standards.
But none of those things are going to take away the contingency of my living circumstances. One medical emergency could still wipe away all of that privilege and put me on the street without a home.
I don't know if I am a liberal or a progressive. It depends entirely on who you ask, and on the subject or distinction in question. But in practice that difference is irrelevant because whatever you call me, I'm going to be advocating for the same things - we need to take care of our world if we hope to take care of ourselves, and we need to help those in need first before we start to add to our own comfort and luxury.
"
I was confused by Klein insisting that Rawls was "fundamentally unreadable by the public." Rawls never struck me as being particularly inaccessible or opaque.
I'm also struck by how he insists that Liberalism is elitist. I'm guessing that's because he was a professor's kid, and grew up surrounded by people with graduate degrees and an interest in public policy, but he had limited success in school and found his voice as an upstart blogger, and then parlayed that into being a beltway insider. I wonder if he'd have that same view of how elitist liberalism was if he had grown up in a less cosmopolitan place, and less cosmopolitan and educated circles.
I don't know how much time he's ever spent actually living in modest, non-cosmopolitan places, and I don't know if he's ever truly lived where all of his friends and associates were people of modest means, where the mark of a distinguished education was the completion of a bachelors degree at a state university.
He seems to spend a lot of time in the podcast slipping around in his use of "liberalism" and "liberality," following along as Rosenblatt explains her research, doing a good job of tracking her arguments and echoing her language, but then taking her more formal and restrictive use of "liberalism" and using things she says to springboard into a much fuzzier, popular conception of the terms without noting (and perhaps not noticing) the shift in register.
I think that's why his questions feel like gotcha questions. He's taken a conversation out of its initial context and dropped it into another in an attempt to make it "more accessible."
I don't think that liberalism has to be elitist at all, or that a liberal education has to be viewed as individualistic or personal in the atomistic sense. We all have cross-cutting associations, relations, and affections, and we can understand how to share and to compromise and to collaborate.
His discussion of "tolerating intolerance" is another one of those places where I feel like he's stuck on the idea of there being some flaw in liberalism, or in how liberals practice liberalism, when all that is really being argued is that (wherever possible) we set aside the sort of fundamentalist notions of right and wrong and practice some epistemic humility in matters of belief - mostly as a way to avoid violent conflict and war in our societies.
The real spirit of Enlightenment toleration lies in being willing to die for one's beliefs while also being not to kill in order to triumph over those who do not hold or practice those same beliefs. It doesn't work if that second clause is ignored.
I don't think that's being idealistic or utopian, more (as Kim Stanley Robinson puts it) anti-anti-utopian.
On “Open Thread time”
cleek - We're starting from such different assumptions about starting conditions that it's no wonder we are envisioning different conflicts.
So it goes.
"
Snarki - Fair. I was thinking more in terms of scale, intensity, and duration than in methodology or geography when I mentioned The Troubles. I have yet to find a reliable historical analog for the current US.
"
cleek - /looks at Ukraine.
Exactly...
Think of Russia as the federal government. Putin sees Ukraine as a separatist state of what is historically (to his mind) Russian territory. He tries to invade, but gets bogged down. The battle lines harden and it becomes a war of attrition. Advantage Russia.
That's the old war.
Ukraine, meanwhile, desperately needs to find a way to preserve their limited population and not spend it foolishly taking on Russia's material advantage. They put up obstacles to territorial progress and settle into a strategy of dispersal, using drones and SigInt to locate, map, and bleed the Russians. They spend $5000 a drone taking out Russian weapon platforms that cost millions to produce, and use anti-personnel drones to kill the crews that serve the Russian weapons. $15000 to cost Russia $10m or more and kill more troops than Russia can replace, all with no further territory gained and controlled.
That's rapidly becoming the new face of war across Europe.
Troops on the ground is a fools errand when the people don't want you there. Especially when what you really want is to bring those people back under your control.
"
I see a lot of different imagined scenarios here of what a "shooting war" might look like in our hypothetical futures. I'll clarify what I was imagining when I used the phrase...
Imagine it is twenty years on and the federal government continues its deep dysfunction in the legislative branch, its anti-regulatory, anti-labor, pro-oligarchic, christian national stance in the judicial branch, and its competing authoritarian trend in the executive. Most of the federal management has been crippled and those responsibilities have devolved to the states.
The tensions between the coastal PNW cities and the eastern side of WA/OR have escalated. ID has continued its evolution towards being a haven for White Christian Nationalists, and there is a growing network of Active Clubs along the west coast that are working with the Idaho nationalists, going to paramilitary training and whatnot, supported by a network of WCN donors across the US.
The Active Clubs show up to protest in liberal cities whenever there is a Democrat in the White House, and to counter-protest whenever there is a Republican there and the residents of Portland/Seattle come out to protest the feds.
This is no different from today, really.
But with the FBI and the Justice Department crippled by two decades of competitive authoritarianism, these Active Clubs can start to attack the power grids of the liberal cities (using drones and small guerilla units to sabotage substations, etc.) and in places like Spokane these groups stage Malheur-style takeovers and standoffs. The use of drones means that the Active Clubs can attack any state enforcement efforts.
All of this is making the more eastern side of the states unsafe for anyone that does not fit the demographic ideals of the American Redoubt.
It's a shooting war, but on the level of The Troubles, not of The American Civil War. No one is putting units on the ground and fighting openly for territory. That's an obsolete vision of war.
"
russell - Maybe we need some kind of regional entity, smaller than the whole country, but larger than a single state, and then devolve a lot of what are currently federal responsibilities to those. It would be a hell of a lot easier to get a workable consensus about a lot of stuff in, for example, New England or the upper Midwest or the mountain west, than it is when the whole country is involved.
That sounds to me something like The Hansa. Germany had its Holy Roman Empire and its lords, but the emperor was weak and the lords were more independent. That's something like what we would have if federalism weakened under the dysfunction of competing authoritarianism, leaving states to pick up the slack. It's kinda where King Leer is pushing things right now with his withholding of federal monies to states he hates.
Germany also had powerful cities with guilds, whose economic power bought them a measure of independence from their lords - again, think blue cities in red states. The cities form leagues and arrange favorable exchanges, and use those associations to allow for mutual aid and for more liberal social policies. Such an arrangement could work as a counter to weak federalism.
I imagine that places like L.A. and Silicon Valley might use their economic power to go the Italian city-state route rather than the league route. They already do where the California governor is concerned. Nevertheless, the other big cities could well affiliate to compete with the megacities for influence over the state.
The United States could remain, and could hold elections, but lacking enough federal power to enforce central control over its territory it would lose sovereignty, and the centers of power could well become regional and associational, rather than territorial.
"United" States with power more devolved to the states and formal associations between states and cities to create regional compacts that regulate shared resources and mutual aid.
It's one of the ways the world could have gone in the Renaissance - a less universalist vision than the nation-state. Pockets of prosperous liberalism within illiberal territories, all working within a much reduced form of national sovereignty.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
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cleek - I understand where you are coming from with your thoughts about military force, and I think those beliefs are widespread and common. My own perspective on this comes out of the readings that I did during preparation for my dissertation work during the Gulf War, reading texts about insurgencies. In particular I'm thinking about what John Nagl was arguing in his book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (a reference to a TE Lawrence quote about military leaders trying to understand insurgency).
Nagl is comparing British strategies for dealing with the Malay Insurgency and American strategies for dealing with Vietnam. Your discussion of how the US military would deal with rebels is similar to US military doctrine from Vietnam - what Nagl would call "sending a bullet, not a man." He argues that this strategy is what led the US to win every military engagement, but lose the war.
It's a well regarded text among military strategists - especially those who served in the Gulf. It's well worth a read if this subject interests anyone here.
Israel has been pursuing this strategy with Hamas for a while now, with great cost to civilian populations and infrastructure. I don't see them being able to pursue that same strategy in Israel proper against liberal Israelis with a military force made up in part of Israelis from the areas under attack.
Likewise, the US federal government could take over the capitals of the Confederate States and install their own regimes in those capitals, but they could not bring military force to bear against the KKK during their first reign of terror. Military force is a tool ill suited to solving a political problem if the other side is not under arms in the field.
For that, you have to send a man, not a bullet.
This is probably already more than the subject is worth in the current conversation here, but it's where I'm coming from in my thoughts about where I think things are headed.
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I'm telling you all right now...RW evangelicals will support LDS before they support any Democrat, and the RW paramilitary groups can stay as klannish as they want, but they will all show up under separate leadership to take on a target that codes Democrat in their worldview.
The doctrinal purity and infighting will happen if they gain power, but until then we are the forces of satan, and they will contort however they need to in order to take us down.
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Michael Cain - I’ll leave it at this: describe a plot you could sell to a publisher where the Southern Baptists from Kentucky and Alabama drive 1500 miles to support the Church of Latter Day Saints in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. Who are they going to attack? California and Phoenix and Front Range Colorado?
The evangelical religious right has no strong central authorities. It doesn't matte what the official doctrinal statement of the denomination is, there will be people in their pews who are subscribed to social media accounts that are putting out Seven Mountains content and agitating for Christian Nationalism.
I don't think anyone showing up to a Patriot Prayer rally is going to be chased away for being LDS or ELS or whatever.
And what they will attack is any sort of gathering in Seattle, or Portland, or Eugene, or Denver that they perceive as being the work of Woke Ativists. They will attack civic infrastructure (as they have already done) to strike a blow against tyranny.
Just wait until they get drones.
These cells are not vanguard organizations, but that won't stop them from forming flash mobs when they see an opportunity for it.
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cleek - 1861 had something to say about states trying to leave the union. and that was decided with foot soldiers.
no state is going to stand a chance against a few B52s.
The question is, though, how much enforcement and control can a federal government project onto dissident states? The North won the American Civil War, but white supremacy remained the order of the day in the South for 100 years, and is now back with a vengeance.
There are only so many sorts of policy that can be moved forward with state violence. Gold Statue is finding that out right now where Iran is concerned, as W found out with Afghanistan... as Putin is learning with Ukraine.
Given the difficulty of forcing compliance, I don't know that there remains enough common cause to try to hold on if states decided not to comply with federal mandates.
I'm more worried about Palantir than I am about B52s. The future of war in the US will be dispersed violence, not mass violence, and a surveillance apparatus would be more dangerous to dissidents than a state military.
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As per the last time we discussed Michael's partition, I'm wondering how Western America (sans TX/OK) divides up the political baby between the purple Front Range and NM, the mostly red patch from the Western Slope to the western side of the Cascades/Sierra Nevada. I have a hard time imagining the compromise that would let ID/WY/UT come to terms with the population advantage held by the big CA cities, Portland, and Seatle/Tacoma. Those divides seem like shooting war divides to me.
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I know...we can build all of those data centers in Galt's Gulch, bypass all of the small minded bureaucrats, and skip all of the governmental red tape!
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CharlesWT - Musk and others plan to put AI data centers in space.
Or, to put it more accurately, Musk and others plan to float these ideas to supporters, investors, and banks and and use that idea to leverage access to more capital. The actual practicality of such a thing has yet to be established, and the opportunity costs of doing such a thing is likely outside of the scope of these guys' concerns.
How often does the hardware at such a center have to be updated? How does one access it to service it? How much does that service cost? Can any of the old hardware be recycled, or is it single use? What about the solar panels? Same questions there.
Guess I'm just not on enough ketamine to be captivated by this bold vision of the future.
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The nature of warfare is becoming increasingly dystopian, and fast, Yaro said. “I see the picture that in five years we mostly won’t need people. It scares me.
And then Starlink renamed itself Skynet.
On “It’s funny what gets left out”
Still thinking about what wonkie was saying. I just came across this bit that I posted on social media eight years ago:
-- Sigurd F. Olson
On “Open Thread time”
...and thus ends our reductio ad absurdum.
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If you could transport the sub by rail, the route wouldn't get steeper than about a 3% grade. None of the subs, though, is going to fit through the Moffat Tunnel, so coming from CA is out. Not sure if any of the other 30 tunnels on the California Zephyr route are between Chicago and Denver, but I imagine that track clearance would be an issue even without the limits of train tunnels.
(Just finished a deep dive into bicycle rail trails for a research class this winter.)
On “It’s funny what gets left out”
That's good to know, Michael. I'll have to check into it further.
I'll remain worried, though, because it seems likely to me that the fast-and-cheap-and-damn-the-consequences crowd are still in the driver's seat where policy is concerned, and where judicial obstruction is concerned as well.
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wonkie - The breaking point for me is the destruction of our public lands.
I'm still trying to come to terms with how my brother, who was a big Edward Abbey fan and conservationist, could trade that birthright for a bowl of anti-vax, anti-abortion pottage. I'm really struggling with it.
I do continue to support One Tree Planted on a monthly basis. It doesn't change my bafflement or sense of betrayal, but it is a counterbalance against despair.
I was just reading that the USGS has determined that there are likely large pegmatite deposits in ME/NH that could supply US lithium demands for a long time, but lithium extraction is environmentally destructive, highly polluting, and uses vast amounts of water. I'm wondering how those externalities might affect the local politics. The Woodchucks have always struck me as lilely being a bit more stubborn and less grasping than their ND counterparts were when the fracking gravy train pulled up.
Here's hoping.
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Pro Bono's response to that YouGov poll seems right to me, and it fits with my sense of David Brooks's ideological leanings as I describe them earlier here. I think his mention of the French Revolution as his ur-scene of rising political violence shows that. He's giving us an essentially Burkean response in a moment where he sees the left as the chief threat to the established order.
The US was built with electoral safety valves. The GOP is systematically monkey wrenching all of those, empowered by a corrupt judicial cabal.
Nope. Our biggest worry isn't that, it's that the college kids are losing faith in the political process.
Never mind why that might be happening.
Never mind the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Boogie Boys, Patriot Prayer, Atomwaffen Division, Patriot Front, and all of the Active Clubs on the right.
Those guys are all a bit over-the-top, but not a threat to anything important and essential.
We need to be careful that we don't get another Baader Meinhof. Those guys were marxists!
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Brooks's list tells me that when he thinks about rising climates of violence, he thinks in terms of violence against the state, and "against the order of things." Political repression doesn't enter into his calculus because he doesn't conceive of "law and order" as violence, even when the state is using violence against protesters while invoking the state of exception and allowing themselves to violate the laws they have sworn to uphold.
I wish Capeheart would have asked Brooks to expand on what he meant by naming Reconstruction. Was he referring to the KKK and their terrorist campaign against freed blacks, or was he referring to the disenfranchisement of southern whites? It would be really nice to know where Brooks drew that line.
On “Just call me Laocoön”
Slashdot got it from Live Science which says it got the story from the X accont of PocketOS's founder:
https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/i-violated-every-principle-i-was-given-ai-agent-deletes-companys-entire-database-in-9-seconds-then-confesses
"This isn't a story about one bad agent or one bad API [Application Programming Interfaces]," Crane wrote in an X post. "It's about an entire industry building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it's building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe."
Godspeed, UAE. Godspeed, Pentagon.
"Would you like to play a game?"
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...and in the realm of the First and Second Amendments:
https://www.aclu.org/documents/drones-for-them-but-not-for-us
Coming soon - debates over drones as personal weapons. Can an ordinary person own an ag drone capable of spraying liquids if that drone could be used against crowds at sporting and civic events? Does this technology extend the reach of the mass gunman and diversify the means at their disposal for mass killing?
The feds seem to be treating this as if it is a dangerous threat to Orangymandias's enforcement regime, and will likely continue to do so until they lose their grip on power.
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