Civil War?

[Ibrahim]

[Demon of Undoing]

Backwater is a self-selecting situation , where the operators know going in that they may not be on the right side of the law. As well, Blackwater isn't the government. They couldn't hire enough mercenaries to do the job. But your point is admittedly attached to the fact that yes, elite units may have entirely different lines of can and can't. However , there are likely to be more that would help the people. An SF guy actually ran a very short lived newsletter about that very thing , and yes , it had the authorities pooping fine China.

Thanks for the bit on the Taliban. They are their own kind of professional , living in the situation where the fight is like a job. That sort of nine to five ethos is kind of inevitable when the war goes long. The same thing was seen in the VC line people that lived in the South. When pro cadre came down the Trail, though , effectiveness shot up. In the US' benefit in Afghanistan , a lot of the old pros there are now getting too old to lead operations. Still plenty of people that are plenty effective , though. The guys in that clip remind me of some very hard customers I have known in Colorado and NC. Even look the same.

[Demon of Undoing]

HN: Excuse No5 in full effect.



Ibrahim

It is not my intention to maintain that the US has a fully formed , veteran insurgency. It is my intention to communicate that we have wellore than just a foundation and raw materials for one , and that enough of a descent into chaos will pit us right there. Many of the differences between anything in the US and something in Kunar are simply a matter of time spent under the gun. In most particulars , there is indeed a wide difference. But the right actors , by virtue of their training and experiences , have the capability to easily cause asuch he'll as Z ever thought of. Just the quality of people his American analog could draw from would see to that.

In the end , though, it really does come down to environment. While I do think that America has a core of people functionally nihilistic enough to create Chechnya all over again (" Ve believe in nothing!") , it would indeed take a whole new level of national dysfunction to catalyze that. The judgement comes in knowing how much is already present. I have been curious enough to have entertained the idea of getting neck deep in the stew of that just for shits and goggles , but have become rather burdened by the harness and plow. At 25, I'd do a 90 day training cycle and then go find out where we are now as opposed to, say, 1998.

Oh , and they did go underground , so far that no Time writer could be bothered to look. However , these guys don't exist on goodwill and PR at this point in our history. When they "disappear" , they do not go away. The suburbanites just lose the recent scare the news put in them, and will go back to their wet bikes and big screens. And for the record , as much as I know America will and has to be taken down a peg due to global emergence , I want the masses to stay as docile and as far away from the bad white men as possible. America was a really great idea. It would be sad indeed to see it retreat from primacy into petty fights and shitty little agendas. Infortunately , I think that's exactly what we are doing. America has to either become a true Empire or not, but either way, I think we are looking a generation of very weird quasi- isolation , with some very strange possibilities engendered. I hope the scene I paint isn't one of them.

[Demon of Undoing]

Really , you know what my fear is ?

Karma.

I'm afraid that one day , God is going to take off the mask and let the world know that He is not , in fact , an American. That the graves and the chains and the oppressions and the wars on our own people and on others for very shaky reasoning at best have made within us some sort of a monster. I'm afraid that all the advantages that we have had , which we have has the audacity to ascribe to providence , has turned us into this two faced monster. On the one side , fat, oblivious , spoiled and cheerily goofy. On the other, inordinately demanding to the point of entitlement , unconcerned about consequences as long as we get ours , heedless of simple cautions even children know to follow and above all, comfortable as a matter of course with violence unknown in the civilized world.

When the balloon pops , and the systems we have put in place to hold us in place fail like the infrastructure in the rest of America is failing , I am afraid that we will become fully realized versions not of the PR image we make ourselves out to be , but the real monsters that many in the third world have been forced to conclude we are. If we ever act a fraction as hideous here as we have there, well. Canada better out up one hell of a fence.

[noddy]

a variation of that has been floating in the back of my head for too long now.

heres hoping it is just the static caused by being raised for one society and living in a completely different one... and heres hoping the worst of what i see is just the initial childish denial, and their is more depth to be found when it is properly tested.

[Caskhades]

The extinction rate of empires so far has been 100%. Of them all, only the Brits had an easy time downsizing, a few V2s in old London town notwithstanding, but then again they lived on a cloudy little island with bad food. America is a pretty nice place.

Sidenote: A foreign friend of mine that I drove across the States with once when I was younger, while passing by yet another trailer park, commented that if the Germans, rather than the Brits, had dominated North American colonization, the USA's worries about southern neighbors would be restricted to penguins landing in Sandig Punkt, Patagonien.

[~]

[~]

[Mr. Perfect]

[~]

[Mr. Perfect]

[Apollonius]

[Demon of Undoing]

Part of the problem is that we have conditioned the American public with War on Drugs rhetoric to the point that a full blown insurgency/ de facto anarchist movement can just be swept under a " law enforcement " rug , and call it a day. We are used to gangs killing the hell out of each other here. The situation in Mexico , to American eyes , is just 1985 Los Angeles writ large ( it isn't , theres more there , but dangit , the Black Eyed Peas are on !) . We have inured our population to the idea of the government making war on it's populace; it shouldn't be surprising that the people are similarly hardened to the idea of the populace making war on the government.

Right now , it's our chickens coming to roost in Mexican homes. They will be coming to sit with us for a spell , too.

[Caskhades]

Bah,

If the magical tooth fairy would wave her wand and vanish away the 1,000,000 top public officials, including law enforcement, after about a month or two of vague chaos, the US would look exactly the same. No civil war. Well, because of staffing shortages, perhaps with a simplified tax code. And simpler welfare distribution. And private schools, highways and DMVs.

Hmm.

Where's that tooth fairy again?

[Torchwood]

[Ibrahim]

America "jumping the shark" is the key issue here, but we don't have any examples of this tearing apart any developed states. The future looks more like Sweden than Mad Max. Will Americans take to the streets and tear the system apart because they can't afford a 4-bedroom house and two cars on a Wal Mart employee's salary? No. Though they may talk about it, on break next to the Coke machine.

[Hans Bulvai]

[Mr. Perfect]

What a hilarious echo chamber thread. One year ago the right is condemned for fomenting civil war (that never materialized), today the left is in the streets openly discussing it according to our resident occupy apologists (Tinker, GC) and are uncondemned. Politics can be hilarious.

I also appreciate the Milo statement about the GOP getting drubbed last election. I'll take those drubbings all day long.

[Nonc Hilaire]

Ricin. An extraction made from the castor bean, a popular southern U.S. decorative plant made by God so toxic that every part of it's biology is deadly. We also have the beautiful but fatal oleander plant. It is often deliberately planted in landscapes with the also deadly diffenbachia (dumb cane) and the Datura Straminoium, one of the deadliest poisons and an essential component in creating the true voudoin zombie.

Obviously the focus of these sick people's interests went far beyond death. Killing people via plant poisons in the southern U.S. does not require technology.

[Demon of Undoing]

Okay, for those new to this, let me clear up any confusion. If you see a news story where anybody turned informant, anybody had a meeting to decide what to do, or ( and this is the kicker) talked to anybody about getting gear, then these are not the droids you are looking for. These guys were third- tier at best, one notch from jailhouse bullshit sessions.

[Hans Bulvai]

I agree.

These dudes' ages should also be a hint; not that I am knocking on older people.

I am not sure if the US could descend into a civil war as we might think we know it.
Maybe these guys take out a politician or two, but I just don't see people in the streets going after someone who just killed their favorite candidate.
Now food riots, different story.

[Demon of Undoing]

The are currenly no political issues that will start a civil war. I am not concerned for civil war. I have concern that breakdown/ chaos can occur because conditions increasingly favor it, there are people actively seeking it, and the people are soft. That's all. Civil war requires a whole lot of directed intent. Breakdown of complex systems can happen seemingly spontaneously without evil input at all.

Complexity kills.

[Ibrahim]

Perhaps its just an anachronistic turn-of-mind, but the use of "civil war" in this thread invokes Antietam and Bull Run for me, or at least the uniformed chaos of the Russian Civil War. I would think a violent breakdown of American society in teh near future would look more like this incident, which is to say various domestic terrorist groups with differing agendas, combined with 90's-favela-level gang violence in the cities.

This Georgia crew are clearly a bunch of retards, but so is the average homegrown Islamist killer and Americans fell over one another throwing away their civil rights to counter that threat. Its all cut from the same cloth; tenth-rate morons can still kill people. In fact killing tends to be a profession/hobby reserved for lesser minds. Usually.

[Mr. Perfect]

I don't know. Tinker and GC seem pretty convinced that the left is up for it. I don't think that should be dismissed.

[Demon of Undoing]

I've always said that one of the prime factors that would complicate things was when people make a nihilistic surrender to chaos and throw the baby out with the bathwater. People that have never had less throw away too much, too readily. There is a large antisocial streak in America focused on that.