Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by teg4n_ » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

dukeofdoom wrote: post #237

teg4n_ wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird add to grind. States have had mail in voting for years and it has not been a problem.

It's at the center of the dispute over the credibility of the last election. While mail in voting has existed before, never at scale where potential fraud would decide elections. te.

The “dispute” over the credibility of the last election is fabricated and not based on any concrete fact other than that Trump lost and didn’t like that.

Also entire states rely on mail in voting as the primary method of voting. If mail in voting was so fraught with fraud every one of their election would be suspect but they aren’t!

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

#302

Post by corrral » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 9:21 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #201

CSMastermind wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's really hard to imagine a full blown civil war just because of what the battlelines would be in a right-left split in the country. I've heard people jokingly say, "One side collects guns and the other collects mental disorders." That's obviously an unfair shot but there's some truth to it. Left leaning areas tend to be centered around city centers where right leaning areas tend to be rural and control things…

The money is in the cities/suburbs. Any attempts to choke them off will inevitably hit everyone hard. At least those in cities will be close to aid delivery. Modern rural life is completely non-viable without copious amounts of gasoline. Plus, there's a lot that happens between farm to table in modern agriculture. COVID showed us just how sensitive our lifestyle is to disruptions.

Rural areas also tend to be at least as dependent on domestic shipping as cities, and not a lot of rural dwellers are growing enough of their own food to avoid starvation if that's disrupted. Not like back when a really high percentage were farmers who grew both cash crops and varied crops & small animals for their own consumption. If all the crops for a 50 mile radius are soy beans and feed-corn, and there are no processing plants for either nearby, and you're not close to a large port... you're gonna have a bad time if the trains stop running and gas gets scarce. It's not like any but a small percentage of rural folks would be sitting back well-fed while the cities starved. The best-off of all might well be the coastal cities, in fact. The notion that mostly-empty red counties can just deliberately starve out the cities and win seems extremely far-fetched to me, in this our modern economy.

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

#303

Post by xthrowawayxx » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 9:21 PM UTC

leshow wrote: post #170

xthrowawayxx wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Increasing theocracy and dissolution of church and state separation Can you give an example of this?

Recent decisions by the supreme court.

I assume you're talking about abortion.

How did their ruling infringe on the separation between church and state?

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

#304

Post by corrral » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 9:23 PM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #251

trasz wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's the right leaning majority that's ruling the country.

The idea of a "right leaning majority" is pure propaganda.

Right-leaning majority of the land, not the people, is closer to true.

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

#305

Post by BurningFrog » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

seabea wrote: post #163

jonnycomputer wrote: post #7

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

A civil war doesn't need to be between two regions (like in the American Civil war). I think most people (including myself) envision a "Handmaid's Tale" style coup from by an extremest group / government faction with an ensuing rebellion. I would like to think it could never happen. But I also wouldn't have ever expected to see the halls of Congress violently trespassed by a bunch of rednecks with confederate flags.…

Even if they take over the Capitol, hang Mike Pence, and shoot some democrat lawmakers, I don't see how they rule the country after that.

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

#306

Post by belorn » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

pmyteh wrote: post #150

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #6

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…

These panel surveys are reasonably good. The better pollsters (like Ipsos MORI) spend a decent amount of effort recruiting a broad sample of people for their panels, and results are statistically adjusted for non-response bias etc. That said, the usual problem with political polling (that you can only poll people willing to answer pollsters' questions) applies extra here, as all respondents have agreed to be part of…

In order to estimate how close a country is to a civil war, the people they should poll is those involved in the military. An attempt to take power through violence without military backing will look something like the 6 January 2021, which is to say a bunch of crazy people dressed up as Indians and cowboys who thought that storming a building means controlling a country.

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

#307

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

thechao wrote: post #42

jonnycomputer wrote: post #7

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

The voting system in the US (FPTP) is fundamentally unfair. Combine with post-red-map gerrymandering, it is becoming obvious even to the people "on the wings" that our election system fundamentally disenfranchises large swathes of the population. As a short hand, think "Democrats and Independents in red states" and "Republicans and Independants in blue states". Being disenfranchised sucks . The system is designed to…

> prevent you from having any ability to even change the system

But the best solution to that is to just invert the system so that the federal government has the least impact, the states the second least, and the local municipalities the most. Which was what the last civil war was fought over.

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

#308

Post by Izkata » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 9:25 PM UTC

Aaronstotle wrote: post #238

Izkata wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like most Americans already live in bubbles where most people are aligned politically We're not. The most likely geographic split would be urban/rural, cities against everyone else. Around half the population is tightly concentrated and align mostly with the Democrats, the rest are spread out and align mostly with Republicans. Even blue states are mostly red outside of cities. For just one example of somet…

Even with the Urban/rural split, are rural people going to come into Urban areas to fight?

They don't need to: Guess where all the cities' food comes from.

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

#309

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 9:27 PM UTC

hunglee2 wrote: post #52

eh...America is way too big (territorially) for civil war. I mean, how would you even organise it? There's not two sides which could cohere into organised military forces. Worst scenario will be an increase in temperature to what we already have now - anti-federalists who might engage in intimidation, street fights with rival groups and perhaps acts of sabotage and terrorism. In the grand scheme of things, fairly low…

Well, it did happen once already.

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

#310

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 9:27 PM UTC

snapetom wrote: post #222

chasd00 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the whole secession thing blows me away. I live in Texas and had a couple friends who were on that bandwagon. I asked them had they thought about going toe to toe with the US Marines while bombers are over Austin and drones over everywhere else. All i got back was silence. The union will be preserved at any cost, there's precedent for that. No state will secede without defeating the US military first.

Except the South, presumably Texas sympathizers, are way over represented in the military. The next largest region of over-representation are your flyover states, which political lean red. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/costs/soc... You assumption that Texas would have to go toe to toe with the US Marines is a big assumption when many Marines are from Texas or would be politically sympathetic. If…

> Except the South, presumably Texas sympathizers, are way over represented in the military. The next largest region of over-representation are your flyover states, which political lean red.

That's not true. The overrepresented regions are basically the South and the West. The Midwest “flyover states” and Northeast are the most underrepresented areas.

And while the South is overrepresented, (Also, military recruitment isn't necessarily politically representative of the states it is drawn from; sure, the Deep South is overrepresented, but that's also a big part of the reason the Blacks are super-overrepresented in the military (making up nearly triple the share of the military as of the country at large.) And Southern Blacks politically don't look the same as “the South” more broadly.