McConnell is a coward going through “Face Eating Leopard Party” issues. The runaway fascism/disregard for rule of law he fuelled is coming to bite him on the ass. Boo hoo. He should grow a pair and just declare 1/6 was a failed coup and throw his coworkers under the bus.
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Hey Asshole, about those impeachment hearings…
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Key insightful quote from Kingzinger:
“If the election was legitimately stolen, I’d be pretty ticked off too… and so when you convince that number of people, it is not a far thought to think that some militia shows up to do something and then a counter militia shows up and that’s how you end up in a civil war.”
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What is happening in the military, if the 4 years of Biden’s presidency see it taken over by stealth then you are lost.
The same thing that’s happening to the rest of the country. A significant subset of active duty personnel have bought into the Trumpists’ insane narrative. It’s hardly far-fetched to assume that in the event of a violent uprising some of those people would side with the insurrectionists.
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eta: assuming you did mean the south, they weren’t anti federalists. they did have their own articles of confederation after all. a better appellation would be pro-enslavement
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I’m not that worried about this since we’re not seeing the state losing control over the police and military on this among many other factors needed to cause something like a civil war. More likely, we’re in for something probably worse by many standards: Troubles 2, American-style. So if you’re familiar with the Troubles in Northern Ireland then you know where I think this will lead: regional politicians being assassinated or kidnapped, neighborhood militias, and so forth. No strict armies, no secessionists, just slow burning civil unrest that no one can really control and probably worse since at least with the original Troubles there were clear goals and attempts to negotiate the current status quo in Northern Ireland whereas I don’t see there being such a potential return to status quo for the United States.
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I find it odd that in this scenario, if a militia shows up to enact violence the only way to stop it is a…countermilitia? I seem to recall us going trillions of dollars into debt to build the largest military in history and a police force that is the 3rd largest military in the world. They are shrug while the rest of us pick up an AR-15 from BassPro outlet to defend a Planned Parenthood?
He’s probably right though.
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One doesn’t need to lose control of the military or the police to have a full-fledged civil war—for example, the British Empire never lost control of their military during the American Revolution which was effectively a civil war that the rebels won.
But even if that was a prerequisite there are lots of signs there would be trouble from inside the ranks. Just look at how many of the Capitol insurrectionists turned out to be police or members of the military. Look how many cops proudly wear “Punisher” insignia. Look how many high-ranking military officers like General Michael Flynn have hitched their wagons to Trump. Look what happened to Colonel Alex Vindman’s military career when he complied with a congressional subpoena during an investigation of Trump. There’s plenty of reason to believe that a lot of people in uniform would take the side of the fascists.
If there’s a second American civil war it won’t look like the first American civil war, but it also won’t look quite like the Troubles or any other specific conflict from the past. It will have a lot of familiar notes but it will ultimately be its own new horrible thing.
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Those are some aspects. Unlike Northern Ireland, you’re also going to see a lot of sabotage of critical infrastructure serving big liberal cities (aqueducts, power lines) and a lot of blockades meant to paralyse them.
The military might stay out of it, but a good portion of the police sympathise with the sado-populist movement if they’re not already active members. If it goes on long enough you’ll start seeing cities requiring that police officers live in them (which will be interesting considering guard labour usually isn’t paid enough to buy a house in these cities).
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The difficulty is that at least the police are on the same side as the insurgents.
Look at how many officers were among the attackers on 1/6, and how the head of the FOP said he was ok with the attacks.
Or how, where I live in California, on duty cops openly recruit for the Oath Keepers at public safety events.
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Good thing he’s retiring from Congress, right? 
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Maybe try Google? There definitely exist.
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4 posts were split to a new topic: How to “Just ask questions”
Well, if a nuclear armed state is headed into civil war, perhaps it it time for us to put our toys somewhere that they cannot be used by either side. I know my red-til-they’re-dead neighbors are all-for the destruction of any “blue” city, and would not even stop to think before hitting any available launch buttons. In the USA, nuclear war can be started by the president, any nuclear-armed submarine captain, a too-large number of Air Force generals who command nuclear missile and bomber facilities, and so on down the line. The president could be vaporized in a first strike, so just about anyone who has physical control over such weapons has a way of launching, that’s the heart of the whole MAD strategy that is still the guiding principle of nuclear war theory. Time to stop pretending we are not rapidly becoming an existential threat to the whole world, and at the very least decommission the weapons that will inevitably end up in the hands of insurrectionists and other extremists who will not hesitate to use them.
I think you need to watch less Dr Strangelove and learn to love the bomb.
No single person can launch or use a nuclear weapon. There are multiple redundancies and requires the input of several people for it to happen. You can’t have, say, a submarine captain just launch a missile at NYC. I suppose if the whole submarine was on board with it, it could happen, but I find that idea very unlikely. (I assume there would need to be a launch code from the outside as well. This isn’t 1984 where we were worried that submarines on their own may be the only ones who could retaliate against a per-emptive strike.)
The fall of the USSR and several other Eastern Bloc countries never resulted in any of these fantastic scenarios, even though Hollywood loved to use it as a trope that terrorist would get their hands on an abandoned nuke from somewhere.
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I can see cities like ATL, Nashville, or Birmingham suffering through a Sarajevo type scenario…
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I admit I’m being paranoid, sure, but sadly no, it would only take three officers in collusion to launch – all the authentication stuff happens to tell them to launch and where to aim them, but they are effectively in full control of their weapons, and the rest of the crew would have no way of knowing if this was a drill or the real thing until it was too late to prevent a launch. I’ve confirmed with with an ex nuclear sub commander who I worked with, and just now checked online to confirm it hasn’t changed significantly, at least as far as a civillian can.
The reason I find a nuclear strike unlikely in a civil war scenario is that we wouldn’t be fighting a war where the factions were clearly divided by geography. “Blue” California has more Republicans than “Red” Texas and Texas has more Democrats than New York. Even a crazed partisan couldn’t nuke an American target without taking down a helluva lot of people on their own side.
Recent conflicts have proven that you don’t need WMDs to get a body count in the millions though. The Rwandan genocide was largely committed by people who didn’t even have guns.
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