I don’t think we need to be worried about full-blown civil war, but preparing for an increase in stochastic terrorism probably isn’t the worst idea.
Climate change will create food and water scarcity. Their life or yours.
Idk man. I’ve been having some huge existential crisis lately and climate change and destruction is just flooding my brain.
Anyone else or just me?
Not me. There’s nothing I can do to stop it and I refuse to bring kids into it. So my plan if things get really bad is to die and there’s no sense worrying about that.
there is nothing I can do to stop it
Wtf. Drive/fly less and bike/walk more. Take the train/collective transport. And if that’s too troublesome for you at least vote for politicians who care about climate change and are willing to actually do stuff.
So my plan if things get really bad is to die and there’s no sense of worrying about that.
And please that’s just so fucking selfish. Even if you don’t get any kids there are still people who will have to live with the climate change that you created. For example I and all of my friends, cousins, classmates, etc will have to live with the consequences of climate change.
That’s a mountain of assumptions and frankly insufficient attempts to feel like you can make an impact. The literal best way for a person to reduce ecological impact is to not exist.
Secondly, having someone exist for you even if their existence is pure misery is the most selfish thing. It’s my body and it’s my choice. Anyone who says different is someone who feels entitled to keeping me around regardless of what I want.
I’m gonna take a wild guess here and say you’re depressed and suicidal. If so, I am sorry for what you’re going through and hope you find some way to improve your life and get better.
Not really? Like there are moments but I’m talking about if or when things fall apart I don’t care to keep trying. It’s not because of depression that I’d be ok with death but because I’m not scared to die but I am scared to suffer every day.
I don’t think depression has the monopoly on desiring death over suffering.
“Living is just a promise that I made”
While I’m all in favour of individual action, I think it’s very reductive to say that that will stop climate change. And even the politicians we explicitly vote for to actually do things don’t, or not enough. And it’s not like we chose to live in a world that is being destroyed by climate change, so how is it selfish if we leave behind other people who also do? They created it as much as me - barely, because none of us have any real recourse to deal with it.
Haven’t stopped planning for retirement and all that jazz but at this point it’s just theater.
If you’re not white, straight, and a guy, I’d also recommend updating your passports and maybe arming yourselves. It’s gonna be a bumpy year.
I can’t really imagine danger being particularly extreme for anyone other than trans people, for trans folk updating passports is likely a good idea. But keep in mind that blue states would still be relatively safe.
If shit truly gets to the point where it’s death squads and fascist street gangs, realistically there would not be anywhere in the world that would be safe.
“Blue states” are states with notable swaths of intolerant people spread out over the majority of the state, with a lot of tolerant people and allies condensed into cities.
Really? Other groups besides trans people certainly have a lot to fear in my state: I can predict immigrants, Black people, Native Americans, gay people, non-Christians, and anyone who positions themselves as allies, off the top of my head.
Not sure where you live, but the fascism is feeling pretty full-blown around my parts lately.
What can a straight, white guy do to prepare?
Rat out your neighbors to the police.
Well, since the police would be on it like maybe the national guard?
I don’t know, just be prepared to cap somebody in the name of equality.
Be straighter and whiter, I guess
Same thing. Be vigilant. Prepare for what’s going to go down.
For there to be a civil war, both sides need an army. The US president will have the US army, and the other side might as well have nerf guns. The civil war would last an afternoon.
If there’s going to be anything, it’s an increase in domestic terrorism.
That’s what a modern civil war will look like.
Have you read CIA reports?
Flash pogroms and terrorism. Sometimes by law enforcement. In other words, not a stand up fight, but a bug hunt.
That’s what’s going to suck. The war might only last a couple months but I can’t imagine months of bombings and violent demonstrations in every city across the U.S.
The us gov is not going to bomb cities and kill innocent citizens and I’m frankly sick of seeing idiots repeating this insane concept.
I think you may have added the “us gov” part from inference, vigilante citizens and vigilante cops have bombed American cities and citizens in the past, and will again.
Sorry buddy, it’s not going to be the U.S. government bombing cities and killing innocent civilians.
You’ve never heard about the Tulsa massacre, have you?
White mobs are not the us government. There was no bombs dropped.
The US has bombed its own citizens twice. First in 1950 it bombed the Puerto Rican towns of Jayuya and Utuado, then in 1985, the Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a residential neighborhood while targeting MOVE.
If we were to go down the road of military and police violence against US citizens it would be a much longer list.
So in other words, you haven’t.
Furthermore, the American Civil War was precluded by several decades of escalating tension between the states, not between parties in the federal government. The legal and organizational attributes of a state also served to enable separatist states to even attempt to raise an army (this was by design). Bubba and his buddies will, as you said, be armed with nerf guns comparatively
There’s also no real fiscal incentive. Morality and freedom are important and all, but we fight wars for financial gain.
That and the three letter agencies have so much incompressible amount of power that any real revolution/civil war is damn near impossible.
Plus, who really wants to abandon modern living to die in some urban street combat?
Fascists think they do
Once they hear the cracking of gunshots fires in their direction, they’ll start rethinking their decisions.
It would be a guerilla collective against a conventional force that’s consistently failed against guerilla tactics.
There’s no way to know how long it’d last or how it’d impact politics, but targeted acts of terrorism in cities would likely become a more common tragedy. It would pretty much gaurantee US states increasing their police forces and personal rights eroding, and I’m not looking forward to that.
Everyone keeps saying this, but I think good ole’ Amercian laziness will win out and nothing happens.
Ever been around people when an emergency happens? People can’t be bothered half the time; or they gawk…
Most Americans are lazy until they aren’t. Doesn’t require much energy to show up somewhere with a gun in hand now does it?
Most Americans won’t do shit.
I still remember in the sequel to The first Mage: The Ascension ttrgp book that the Ascension war was fought and ultimately came to a stalemate because when the average person was given the opportunity to Ascend and be giving God like powers to rewrite the world to their own whims they chose to watch TV instead.
No, these guys are way less organized than last time and Donald Trump is getting fucked in court still. I think its less likely now than it was 4 years ago. The GOP is fracturing and losing steam. Senators and governors are still a threat but not in the civil war type of way I don’t think.
What exactly is required to be a threat in the civil war type? Besides Guns and a feeling of not being represented?
Unification.
That’s the main lacking puzzle piece on both sides.
If the left were unified there wouldn’t be a republican in politics.
If the right were unified, you wouldn’t have jackasses running their mouth at every opportunity just to get a news blurb generated about themselves.
The old adage about United we stand, divided we fall? Technically, our divisions are the only thing keeping us up right now.
If we ever come together it will end in nuclear hellfire
Organizing a war against the us army would take a lot of planning. Unless trump wins, controls the army, and enough generals agree.
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I always like to say everyone should have a zombie survival plan. Is there any possibility of zombies? No. But there’s a lot of overlap between prepping for the exciting, fictional disaster and boring, real-world natural disasters.
- Having a fireaxe in your trunk might not let you chop off zombie heads, but it’ll sure be useful for clearing road debris after a hurricane.
- Having a bug-out-bag with important documents and bottled water is also great for wildfire preparedness, even if that bag also has a spiky leather jacket in it.
I encourage people to have a civil war plan. Do I expect we’ll have one? Not really, it wouldn’t be a two-sided conflict. But we can expect to see domestic terrorism (see also: insurrection) and potentially police riots (the police enacting organized violence as they did in 2020). If you’re ready for a civil war, you’re ready for the more mundane breakdowns we’re more likely to see.
- Knowing first aid and how to treat a gunshot wound might not find use on a battlefield, but it could easily save someone’s life in a mass shooting or isolated hate crime.
- Having ad-hoc or peer-to-peer communications is useful during riots and power outages.
- If you can move ordinance discreetly across state lines, you’ll probably find the skillset applies to moving red state refugees as well.
- Building a network of people you trust to band together when SHTF? Brother, you just invented a mutual aid network.
So yeah, if you feel anxious about the possibility of a civil war (or zombies), channel that energy into prepping for it, and you’ll find that even if your predictions were wrong, your effort will not go to waste.
Thank you for giving me justification for buying myself a fire axe!
Can a mod pin this comment?
Funny enough, I don’t know how to pin a comment. I’ll look up how!
I’ve been learning how to use Meshtastic recently and getting friends interested in setting up fixed nodes around the city I live in. I live in Australia and successive governments on both sides of politics have repeatedly restricted the right to secure, private communication.
So long as we have mass precarity this is going to continue to be a risk. And we’re going to have to deal with renegade MAGAs and Project 2025.
After 2016, I don’t trust the people of the US not to vote in fashy autocrats.
What is P25?
Only the plan to turn the United States government into a broad amalgamation of totalitarianism and fascism.
Americans need to stop electing fascists
The problem is, the politically daft don’t comprehend the risk that comes when fascists get elected, and when their life is in precarity (say, one paycheck or one bad illness away from homelessness) then some strong, confident Mussolini-wanabe starts looking attractive, especially when what he promises is too good to be true.
During the Great Depression, different factions were seriously considering going full fash or trying out communism. (The growing pains of the Soviet Union didn’t seem worse than living in cardboard boxes here in the States.) FDR’s New Deal was a stopgap measure so that the industrialists could get their act together. Well, they resented having to consider the public then, and they still do now.
And as Iran has shown us recently, violence is unthinkable for the most of us, until the hour it’s inevitable.
You guys are giving Republicans way too much credibility.
Better to take their threat as creditable now than to be surprised later
Democrats too. half the country lost a pretty significant right to their own bodily autonomy that they’d taken foregranted for basically their entire life. and they just… rolled over and took it? that’s about the most concrete domestic loss they’ve taken this century, and more concrete than anything else on the table right now, so i honestly don’t know what would have to happen in order for the left to do anything meaningfully violent.
I’m sorry, but what were your expectations towards the Democrats here?
These anti abortion laws were enacted at state level. By Republican state governments whose representatives were elected by the people. What did you want the Democrats to do here? Even if they complained, in the end if they don’t have the majority in the state government, they have no power to do anything.
Even at the federal level, the Senate is 48 Democrat members, 49 Republican members and 3 independents. They don’t have the majority there either.
And in the house of representatives, the Republicans are the majority with 220 members vs 213 as Democrats. They still don’t have the majority there.
And if you look at the supreme court, Trump packed it with Republican judges.
So what are your expectations towards the Democrats??? If people don’t elect them, they can’t do anything.
The president can’t step in and cancel any of these anti abortion laws because it’s the will of the people. (In a way)
That’s what happens when people are apathetic and don’t go out to vote.
what you say is entirely consistent. it’s a strong belief in democracy as a process with no bounds/constraints, as an ultimate good in and of itself. and it’s sort of my point: in the “civil war” frame, Democrats are super unlikely to instigate violence. your neighbors will vote away all the things you value, out of religious beliefs you disagree with or merely out of spite, but that’s okay, so long as they do so democratically.
i meet enough democrats (little d) who say they wouldn’t comply with a draft, even if enacted democratically. my thoughts are that there’s at least a few things similar to that: decisions where your own interests shouldn’t be subservient to the will of an abstract majority. the surprise with abortion for me is that for my whole life, that was de-facto such an example. it wasn’t treated as a thing that had been decided democratically, just as a thing which was. then some people far away said “abortion should be decided democratically”, and the number of people around me saying “actually no it shouldn’t” was way smaller (i.e. zero) than the number of people who say that about things like the draft. i still don’t know how to square that, but to answer your “what were your expectations towards the Democrats here” question, well, you asking that is the answer to why i think “civil war” talk is so beyond the pale.
I promise you that even if everyone in my state turned up to vote, we’d still elect fascists. This is clearly a system failure.
Daily reminder that memes can’t predict the future.
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Probably, at some point. Wealth disparity is wrecking a huge swathe of the population’s way of life. They’re restless and want change.
Politically, divisiveness is continually reaching new heights. Politicians, republicans for the most part, are more reactionary and less productive. They are now fueling the fear and anger of their constituents and it won’t end well.
The US right now looks like Germany just before they put the Nazi party in power.
Lots of FUD, angry constituents, a faschism-adjacent party on the ballots, and lots of hate.
Edited: I wrote a bunch of stuff that my American grade education taught me about Nazi Germany but it was wrong.
Like how Nazi Germany was very one minded - it wasnt. The Nazi party at best represented 33-39% before they stopped counting.
Or that the population they targeted was more or less numerous. Trans people are < 1% of the population. The Jewish population was right around . 79% by best estimate prior to becoming in very real danger.
Great article, thank you!
There’s unfortunately a lot to compare with the two parties.
What safety plan? We can already get shot at Walmart.
🤔 Do you have any family or friends abroad or by the Canadian border? Can you get to the Canadian border in late October? There’s a bus that’ll take you over the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, and all you need is a passport book or card and a good excuse. Just tell them you’re going to gamble at the casinos there.
There’s a thousand mile expanse of woods and bullshit across the northern states where you could just walk through the forests into Canada.
Or you could drive into Mexico if you know anybody there, such as that is.
Cruise to the Bahamas, perhaps…?
There’s a thousand mile expanse of woods and bullshit across the northern states where you could just walk through the forests into Canada.
I’ve always wanted to get eaten by a moose.
I mean, if it’s a choice between getting eaten by Canada’s moose army and being thrown in a literal concentration camp, I think it’s an easy pick
Project 2025?
I left the country to study abroad in 2012, and after 2016 was firmly in the camp of never moving back
Can I ask where you moved?
Sure, I moved to study abroad in Salzburg Austria and graduated here It’s a very pretty city
How do they react to migrants and how long did it take for you to integrate?
Come to Canada, y’all
No, don’t. We need to build more homes first and we’re already way behind.
We’ll bring construction workers and food overly-laden in sugar and salt
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Albertan here, please don’t it’s just 2015 era US politics instead right now
We can’t be certan that that’ll happen, but no matter if it does, or where you live, shit’s gonna get wild sooner or later. Global warming is getting worse and worse as I’m typing this, wars and straight up genocides are happening everywhere, and fascism is on the rise. Stay safe, for in the case we as a species survive this shitstorm, future generations will rise again. If we don’t, then good night everyone.
