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Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon

science.org

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Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon

#21

Is it bad that I'm not surprised by this? Or the fact that I'm kind of in the 50% that can see it coming.

Maybe I'm too naive, but I feel absolutely no need nor desire to act violent towards my fellow Americans. I feel the divineness growing, I don't know what a "civil war" would actually look like. It seems like most Americans already live in bubbles where most people are aligned politically, so who are they going to fight?

Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon

#22
Remind me also how many believe in astrology and young earth creationism?

Also, to even entertain this idea, where would the battle lines be drawn? Political differences aren't even blue state/red state anymore, let alone North vs. South: it's more like urban vs. a spectrum of less urban.

Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon

#27
mmmmmmmmmmm, the science.org writeup of the actual study somewhat exaggerates the findings.

The survey was not primarily about this question, but here's how it was worded:

"In the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States."

The allowed responses were: "Do not agree", "Somewhat agree", "Strongly agree", "Very Strongly agree"

47.8% said that they "Do not agree" and a further 36.4% responded "Somewhat agree". A further 2.1% did not respond. So, only 13.7% gave one of the top half of the answers ("Strongly agree" or "Very strongly agree").

This paper was just posted to medrxiv today, but I've seen this list of survey questions elsewhere (perhaps this was posted elsewhere a month or two ago?). It's not a great paper -- many of the survey questions are pretty slanted (though this civil war-related one is not), and they're slanted exactly the way you would expect given the conflicts-of-interest disclosure in the paper that every author on the paper is a member of multiple left-wing anti-gun political organizations.

Still, have a look at the actual survey questions and responses. They're somewhat interesting despite the study's problems: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.15.22277693v...

Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon

#28

Civil war, for what? Every time I see this mentioned, I think, "for what?"

A deeply religious conservative America, or a secular progressive America.

Groups are not seeing eye to eye on the fundamental role of government, and lines in the sand are being drawn.

Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon

#29
One of the biggest problems is that most current gun violence doesn't necessarily represent any sort of targeted pattern (i.e. shooting up a political convention or party headquarters). It's malls and schools because that's such an easy way to create shock and awe.

If we do wind up in some sort of civil conflict, I imagine it will look a lot like Ireland from the 60's to the 90's, which was by no means a good time.[0]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles

Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon

#30

Source is apparently a preprint (that is, not peer-reviewed) uploaded here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.15.22277693v... > Participants: Cross-sectional nationwide survey conducted May 13 to June 2, 2022; participants were adult members of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel. 8,620 respondents, but I don't see how they were recruited or how potential bias was accounted for. Given how weird some of the interne…

I guess it depends on what you count as "over politics" - I think a lot of people would be willing to engage in violent resistance to something like "the president declares the constitution suspended and all elections indefinitely postponed", but not to something like "the Supreme Court overturns Obergefell vs Hodges". I find the referenced numbers perfectly plausible if they interpret the question to mean something like the former.
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