“Hey, no-one will ever conquer my land, I’m white and have guns, why would they go after their own?”
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“Pacific Patriots Network leader Brandon Curtiss said they’re only there to “de-escalate” the situation, and opted to do so by showing up heavily armed.”
Cause nothing says de-escalate like two heavily armed groups butting heads…
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Mutually assured destruction worked for US and USSR, and you can hardly find more bellicose hot heads.
Star Trek is only a socialist society because technology had reached a point that providing most needs and wants of the average person was able to be done at the press of a button (er voice command). Equality is easy when you live in a fantasy world where everything from food to clothing to goods can be replicated.
Conversely, the reason Mad Max’s world is so fucked up is from scarcity of basic resources.
The feudal lord thing wouldn’t work with Star Trek technology. It only works when you have exclusive resources to lord over.
Though yes, there are probably some libertarians like that. Many people I think have an EOTWAWKI fantasy in mind. Few people REALLY want that.
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In the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma that is capitalism (with the bonus mechanic of often getting to be the one to betray and send someone else to prison), I’ve noticed two kinds of libertarians:
The first, naive kind always goes with “remain silent/honest” because “that’s what I would do, if we just got government regulations with their perverse incentives out of the way and let the free market regulate itself”. I’ve bumped into this kind pretty much exclusively online in transhumanist spaces.
The second, cynical kind is “always betray/cheat” because “that’s what I want to/will do, if not for the government regulations keeping me from doing so.” Bitcoin is filled with these types, as are the Bundy types, with psychological projection run rampant.
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The Neo-Reactionaries, I’ve noticed, are the natural result of a libertarian coming to realize the natural contradictions of two of the basic aspects of their ideology–the idea that the unrestrained free market can and will create a Heinleinesque egalitarian utopia.
The ones that are in libertarianism for the egalitarianism tend to shift to some variety of communist, while the ones that are in it for the greed go to the Dark Enlightenment.
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The second kind reminds me of the sociopath that you end up playing in lots of FPS video game like Skyrim and Fallout. You kill everyone who opposes you. You steal anything you can get your hands on. And it’s all justified because, at least in your mind, you’re the main hero who has to survive, you might be saving the world, and everyone else isn’t real - they’re just NPCs who exist to be your quest-givers or enemies or prey.
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They want the best of both worlds. They want to be the post-apocalyptic survivalist hero, but they want the comforts and technology of modern civilization.
I just see them as Don Quixotes pretending to be the bad guy in The Postman.
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How about nuns?
Sister Carol was sentenced to 30 months and Sister Ardeth to 41 months in federal prison for the action.
and they weren’t even armed.
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On the day the news broke that these guys were occupying the refuge I saw the long diatribe (apparently attributed to the Bundys that has been copied and pasted all over the internet) appear in comments on a Yahoo News article. My first thought was “OK, maybe these guys have a legitimate grievance here”, but the more I read the clearer it was they were probably playing fast-and-loose with history and facts, just from the language they used. The screed always presents the Hammond’s side of things while never presenting the government’s side (except to mock or dismiss it), and conveniently leaving out things detrimental to the Hammond’s side (like how the elder Hammond made repeated death threats against BLM employees.) The way it portrays the Hammond’s trial is particularly suspect, describing what sounds like a typical jury selection process as “jury tampering.”
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You mean the way it’s biting conservatives in the ass now, when some of their own are being called “terrorists”? Scott Walker famously called the Wisconsin teachers unions terrorists, Fox News has called Black Lives Matter terrorists, and the FBI investigated Occupy Wall Street as a “possible terrorist threat.” None of these groups were brandishing weapons.
I agree that the word gets thrown around too much, but these guys are only “peaceful” because nobody has tried to arrest them yet.
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Terrorist is such an incendiary word…I think that “gunmen” or “militants” are probably more appropriate. Because walking around armed to the teeth and saying that they’ll never take me alive to put me in prison mean that the term “protester” is no longer appropriate.
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I think all three, as well as Federal Prisoner Number and total fucking lunatic also apply pretty well to this lot.
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Unfortunately, it sort of fucked up the rest of the world, with consequences we’re still trying to sort through today. But yeah, it’s not a nuclear wasteland out there, at least.
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Sometimes one has to be thankful for the lesser evil…
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This character from orange is the new black is based on a real nun who went to jail for throwing blood on a nuclear reactor, I think, possibly in Oak ridge…[ETA] (that’s the character, I think, not the person she’s based on)? In fact I think it might be these women? How many blood-throwing peace activists nuns can their actually be?
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I don’t think that’s the case, though. I think both sides wanted to have their cake (a generally peaceful world) and eat it to (fomenting conflict in the third world to bring other countries to their side). While I’m certainly glad we’re not living in mad max right now, I’m not too happy about how the political choices they made created the world we’re living in now. We have serious problems that came out of the Cold War. Nuclear arms proliferation in general is just one of them.
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I think that the conflict part was often not as much about getting someone on “our” side as much as preventing them from sliding to “their” side.
The question is, what problems we would have otherwise.
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I think that was sometimes true. But both sides funded opposition groups to, often to their detriment. And there were plenty of states that played the US and Soviets off one another for their own advantage, too.
I dunno. We can’t know a counterfactually and you’re right, it might be much worse if the Cold War had never happened. That being said, it could have been better, less violent, more peaceful now if the US and Soviets had not decided to spend 50 years at each others throats, operating through proxies.
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And also:
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