Paul Krugman in NY Times: "government by the people may soon perish from the earth"

I already replied to you earlier making very clear what I was talking about, quite specifically.
It was pretty obvious I was not talking about anything like lies, disinformation, etc.

Plus what @anon50609448 said.

Yes. You’re looking at various factions fighting it out in Ameristan between themselves and the central government, with insurgent attacks on the areas controlled by or allied with what remains of the federal government. This podcast presents the most likely scenario for a new civil war in America, which unfortunately is not far-fetched at all.

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While that is true, democratic governments are under assault all over the world. It’s not just USA where it is in danger of vanishing.

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Yeah, Canada is doing relatively well (which is not great) right now, but if the US officially abandons democracy for President-for-Life Kid Rock then Canada’s democracy is not going to be very stable.

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I’d argue this has been underway for years now to some degree. Think about the rise in violence by hard right groups on localized, small scale since the 80s - ask almost any punk who went to shows during that time, and I bet you everyone has a story about neo-nazi skins causing trouble, not to mention Black and Jewish communities having to deal with random attacks by groups like the hammerskins…then there was Oklahoma city and Atlanta. How many of the various mass shootings can be directly connected to right wing ideology. Not all, but a not-insignificant number of them can be. And how much did that ratchet up during the Obama and then Trump years?

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I’m in total agreement. Leading up the Trump’s election I think I thought of the US being in a civil cold war. But one day I woke up to the fact that it’s not a cold war if people are fighting it with guns.

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Looking in from the outside…

True or accurate facts have no currency now. Opinion becomes a legacy political rhetoric with no inherent value… but perhaps a devalued and watered down influence is the best ‘we’ can expect and hope for.

In many places they still do. We don’t have to accept how some people distort reality. We push for what we know is true. Or we just give up and let the fascists win. It’s up to you.

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Like I said, the kind of civil war that doesn’t have a definitive beginning date or end date.

If the United States collapses into full-scale armed conflict between warring factions then it will be interesting to see what dates or events future historians cite for “how it started.” January 6? The election of Trump? Earlier? Some event that has yet to pass?

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True. Any number of dates that have already passed are possible, and as always, it will depend on the historian and their viewpoint…

But even then, we’ll still have people who believe it’s not a “real” civil war because there aren’t people wearing blue and grey uniforms facing each other down on well-defined battle lines (which of course is itself a pretty gross misrepresentation of how much of the war was conducted… it only seems that way if you focus on the large battles). The fact that there are still people maintaining the idea that we’re not in deep shit right now flummoxes me.

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Absolutely. Which is why I read through the text with an eye towards whether he mentions that in his text about “the earth”

He doesn’t.

The reference is to Lincoln’s phrasing in the Gettysburg Address, so I’ll give him a pass on that.

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Even the previous one didn’t really. There was a formal war that started with the south attacking Fort Sumter, but people were already killing each other in Kansas over the same thing before then, and the KKK went on killing people over the same thing until…well, they’re still around.

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As good a date as any for the “next” one too.

“It’s far more likely that the next American Civil War would look like the recent conflicts Syria, Ukraine, and Iraq:”

We don’t have Iran or Russia sending troops here and there is no real military power in this country except the US military. No. I don’t agree. If we are going to follow history, we are at the end of the Roman Republic, not the end of the Roman Empire. See Mike Duncan’s video.

A Civil War does not require two centrally organized military powers, or even two sides that possess roughly proportionate firepower. If (say) 10 percent of the country decided to throw in their lot with a loosely organized alliance of anti-government groups who were willing and able to wage small-scale armed resistance against the Federal government then friend, you’ve got yourself a bona-fide civil war. And you likely won’t even recognize it as such until it’s been underway for some time.

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That’s not how history works. It’s not just a set of endless repeating memes. It the study of the events in the past, the context in which they arise, what leads to those events, what the outcomes of those events are, and what all that actually means and what drives them.

You can’t just point to an event in the past and say what is happening now is just like that, because the context isn’t the same, the causes and outcomes are not the same, the actors are not the same, etc, etc. You can certainly draw parallels, but you can’t say it’s the same as the fall of the Roman republic, because centuries have passed and the context is very different. The American republic is very different from the Roman one, even if the American founding fathers took influence from Rome.

The reality is that the context of how we wage war is completely different now than it was in 1860 and most certainly what it was in 44BCE. The expectations of how war is waged, the strategies, the technologies, WHO does the fighting, how the population thinks about the concept of war… if you want a one to one comparison, you’re much better off looking at how war has been waged since Vietnam.

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I think there are a lot of important parallels to that time period…but as far as what war looks like? I regret to inform you that we already had our ill-conceived invasion of Mesopotamia, and the leader responsible came out fine, because they stopped marching at the head of the legions a long time ago.

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And a lot of that looks to me like it was much closer to fanboi cosplay than to critical (re-)evaluation and application.

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Greco-Roman architecture|nullxnull

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