For every fascist in office, there are 100,000 fascists walking the streets in America. MTG and her ilk aren’t aberrations, they represent the views and thought processes of 30% of the country. And that 30% of the country has 90% of the firearms and ammunition. The United States is not magically immune to Civil conflict, it’s coming. The Republican party has chosen chaos and violence.
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I’m not really worried about an actual civil war involving bullets.
These people refuse to do the most simple thing like wearing a mask to protect their neighbors or loved ones. They’re certainly not going to risk their life for anything as much as their memes say otherwise.
Sure, there are enough nuts do do great harm but organized civil war? Doubtful.
I’m more worried about what we’re living through now, by the time they realize they were wrong our health system will have collapsed.
They’ll come to that realization when they accidently shot themselves and there is no hospital to save them. Or when they get cancer and can’t get treatment.
This stuff needs to hit home in a big way before they realize they’re wrong.
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Please don’t throw trash into the oceans. Even the Marianas Trench has an ecosystem.
Though now that I mention it… I guess I will add, “Don’t be like my dad.” He once told me he chucked a broken radio overboard when they were over the trench in the late 60s. (He was on a mapping vessel in the Navy) Part of me hopes in some deep sea rover exploration they find it laying there…
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That worked so well with India and Pakistan…
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While I’ll allow that a Syrian-style civil conflict in Ameristan is a probable scenario post-2024, it’s by no means a guaranteed one. There are ways to help head it off, but pursuing an illusory “peaceful partition” with a group known to deal in bad faith is not one of them.
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And where would these partitions even go? The divide isn’t at the state level, it’s at the city vs rural level. Even Alabama and Mississippi have cities that solidly vote Democratic.
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The square states. They are easier to fence off. And cheaper, saves the tax payers money.
George Carlin had the idea, just with different groups of people.
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Our experience with Brexit suggests that they will never realise or admit they were wrong. There is always some other reason why it all turned to shit and always someone else to blame. It is an item of faith with these fuckwits, not reason.
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I feel like there needs to be a Republican-specific exception to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, because the answer to “does this person really mean what they appear to be saying in coded language?” is always
YES.
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Yeah, that’ll be fun watching the two countries fight over who doesn’t get Missouri. (Apologies to the fine BBers from Missouri.)
But seriously, every time one of these braintrusts talks about seceding, I always ask: and then what? Where will your military come from? Who will maintain your planes and tanks, pay for your ammo and fuel, pay your troops? Who will build and maintain your roads? Who’s going to negotiate your entry into the WTO? Who is going to recognize you as a country, assuming the US doesn’t block your recognition, a la China and Taiwan? Who will build and pay for your embassies? Negotiate treaties? Negotiate your open skies treaty with the rest of the world? Will you print your own currency, or tie yourself to the US Dollar? How about passports? How soon can you get those designed and printed? What about disaster aid? Those tornadoes, hurricanes, and droughts won’t end just because you’re not part of the union anymore. How about public health? What will your equivalent of the CDC be, and how will you handle nasty infectious disease outbreaks? (Forget Coronavirus, how about hantavirus, valley fever, and the actual, effing plague?).
I’m so sick of their tantrums. “Waaaah! My worldview can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas! I want to secede, but still want the benefits of living in an industrialized country!”
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Can you show me examples where a peaceful partition actually remained so?
Genuinely asking. Thanks.
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The subtext of the entire Republican platform suggests Civil War.
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You cannot wait for that, as it will never come.
There is no solution where a group needs to accept that for years they were wrong. There is no “come to their senses” moment. Not in any meaningful way for enough of the group.
Any solution involves remedies that allow them to have been “not wrong” in the past and move forward anyway.
In the vaccination example, that’s job mandates. We’ll end with enough people vaccinated because they want to keep their jobs. There’s no need to change their minds that getting vaccinated is right and hence no need to for them to come to the realization they were wrong for a year about not getting vaccinated. They can be “not wrong” to themselves and we can get to an end goal where enough are vaccinated at the same time.
We need a political solution like that. Where it doesn’t depend on a group realizing they made a mistake. They have to be able to internally feel they were “not wrong” and yet we still need to end up at the place we want to get to anyway.
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Sun Tzu called this building a golden bridge to retreat across. It is one of the best negotiating philosophies I’ve ever learned.
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So that means you get to decide where I get to live how?
Open your eyes. It’s already fucking here.
But you don’t get to decide which side millions of Americans end up on. We either keep the whole thing together, or we all down together. Sorry that you don’t get to dictate whether or not I live under fascism in your eagerness to give these assholes exactly what they want to make it easier on you.
While, you know, going after those of us who are not lily white and down with white supremacy. But hey, apparently that’s a small price to pay for some people to be done with the problem rather than actual work to fix it.
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In case of divorce, who gets custody of the nukes?
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As a Minneapolis resident, you don’t have to tell me that the conflict is already here. I got to spend chunks of time last summer debating whether to try and evacuate my family. There were black pickup trucks driving through my neighborhood stripped of ID bearing far right stickers.
If you’re worried about someone “deciding” where you get to live, I don’t see things working out better for you with armed gangs of facists trying to manifest their White Christian American Theocracy.
We are in the realm of No Good Options. If you have a better solution that’s based in social science, I’d love to hear it.
And your idea is that if we put the fascists in charge of their own territory, abandoning countless people to their cruelty and hatred, they’ll just…peacefully stay there? How much did you study what happens after fascists take power?
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