Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reference please?
I'm assuming they are referencing the somewhat contentious Milgram Experiment.
Stanford prisoner experiment is also applicable
Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon
281–290 of 445 posts
Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I personally am a fan of leaving it Why?
It’s a check on populism. Also, changing the rule slowly seems more likely to have good outcomes than removing the rule altogether.
The US is already way overburdened with "checks on populism" relative to other democracies: the bicameral legislature, the state/federal power sharing, the strong, independent judiciary interpreting a written constitution...
Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon
#283Source is apparently a preprint (that is, not peer-reviewed) uploaded here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.15.22277693v...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…
>> Yeah, I don't think so. This feels like a survey of people who consume too much news and social media and have become increasingly disconnected from the reality on the ground. This says it all. The talk is there, social media (or any one who will listen) seems to be a popular public journal for people to vent feelings and use it as therapy. I even have friends that txt their anxiety about the political situation a…
If we look back to a “time traveler,” John Titor we can see that the war will be between cities and rural areas. I can see how that could become true.
Whether you believe he was an actual time traveler (or more precisely, a multi-verse traveler), is a whole different story…
Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
just look to Vietnam. The military can occupy but it gets expensive. To win a true war you have to keep the local population happy and bombing them Won't achieve that. Plus you have to think the people in the military are going to be ok bombing local populations and possibly areas they have family. It isn't so cut and dry. I think a break could happen. We are at the end of this empire and the fall is going to be bad.
You must not be American otherwise you'd know the answer to the (rhetorical?) questions. The American Civil War showed us the atrocities each side was willing to commit. It was warfare at a level the rest of the world wouldn't experience for decades to come. And unlike the first Civil War, the United States didn't have the means to destroy the rest of the world should their weapons fall into the wrong hands. The worl…
The Civil War saw a US Army General, Robert E. Lee, defect to a cause he did not truly believe in, because he refused to fight against his home state. You might also want to consider how many veterans there are in the USA, that is, people with military service experience now living as civilians. Last census poll put that number at over 18 million, across all branches of service. Some might re-enlist to fight for the government, but you wouldn't even need 10% of them to go rebel to have a multi-million man rebel force with military experience and contacts within every branch to possible sympathizers. Absolute nightmare.
Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon
#285The Civil War was preceded by a constitutional issue divided geographically. The question of slavery in new states was forced by pro-slavery presidents, congressman, and justices. They sought to erase all middle ground, the tenuous bridge maintaining the union. Once it came to blows, the geography of slavery allowed the slavery states to band together. The upshot is that not all of these factors seem possible at once…
Further on this... Free states refused to honor slaves states' "property rights." If a slave were to make it to a free state, they could get away and the authorities wouldn't do anything about it. If someone owned (I hate this language) a slave and traveled through a free state they could potentially lose "their property" with no recourse. I don't know which states have actual fighting forces that makes a civil war l…
No, fugitive slave laws required return of slaves from free states to slave states. Free states activists resented it, because it imported slavery.
This was by Supreme Court decision by the way. Also, the judges making decisions in runaway slave cases were financially motivated to rule that "this person is ex slave", so kidnappings of free black people were common. (Man, children, women were kidnapped in free states and sold in slave states.)
The slave states had slave patrols - armed men looking for escaped slaves. They would also check people on trains and borders, whether no one is escaping. It just so happen that slavery don't hold itself - it requires a lot of effort, arms and violence to keep slaves.
Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current situation with abortion will pose a threat similar to the slavery divide. There's a clear division of states which allow it and those with bans. Some of the states with bans are threatening prosecution of women who cross state lines for the procedure. There's a similar situation coming up regarding gay and trans rights. Some states will continue having equal rights. Other states may not. This situation wi…
But how does this effect the wealth and power of elites? That's the point. A civil war has to be organized from the top, and elites, who always look out for their own self-interest first, aren't going to organize an expensive, disruptive war to prevent 10yo rape victims from getting an abortion.
> A civil war has to be organized from the top
No, it doesn't.
A regional separatist movement (which the first ACW was, but not all civil wars are) generally is top-down organized, with a specific conscious elite decision to break away, but civil wars more generally don't need to be, at least to get started.
EDIT: In general, the discourse around both revolutions and civil wars in America tends to be full of misconceptions driven by the fact that both the American Revolution and the American Civil War we're elite-driven regional separatist movements, which are not the norm for things labelled as either “revolutions” or “civil wars”.
Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon
#287Earlier 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 police and the military all have a noticeable conservative bend at least at the lower levels. I think this is the gist of of it, i.e. what the leaders of the forces holding the monopoly on violence really believe, no matter if the lower levels are right-leaning (and I agree with you on that). If the majority of those leaders (both at the federal and at the state level) are pretty much on the same page I don't s…
If enlisted soldiers revolt against the officers, I don't see that working out the way you're describing. If loyalty fractures along party lines, there will be two chains of command, and I don't think it would be remotely difficult for the two structures to reorganize themselves. The police do have a strong and unified party preference, even in the most left-leaning cities.
Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon
#288Earlier 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.
Does not seem to be a democratic way of handling secession. Makes me wonder why Hong Kong should be free in the view of most westeners, but not Texas...
No post body was provided.
Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon
#289Earlier 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…
> 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. No truth to it at all really. I'm pretty much a full-on socialist and I own firearms. In fact, I'm not sure I know anyone who doesn't own a firearm. There are more firearms in the US than there are people, so what kind of fool honestly believes they are al…
> so what kind of fool honestly believes they are all in the hands of less than one half of the population
Seeing as how only 30% of Americans own guns [0], all the guns are literally in the hands of less than one half. So it’s not foolish to believe that. But it’s true whether I believe it or not.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem...
Re: Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon
#290Turchin's political stability indicator predicts this due to rising economic inequality, overproduction of grads with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt [0][1].
However, civil wars usually occur in poorer countries [1][2]. Also the proportion of the world in civil war is 1% and falling exponentially [2].
Finally, Metaculus gives a 5% chance of US civil war before 2031, where a recent July bump is discussed in the comments (Roe, Jan 6) [3].
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/463608a
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/political-...
[2] https://www.nber.org/reporter/2011number3/economic-shocks-we...
[3] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6179/second-us-civil-war...
Notes: The Harvard December 2021 youth poll participants gave as 35% chance in their lifetime: https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/fall-2021-harvard-youth-p...
Rasmussen 2018 poll: 33% likely, 10% very likely before 2023 https://www.newsweek.com/second-civil-war-likely-one-third-a...
Does anyone have a graph of this probabilty over time from a consistent source like rasmussen? https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/que...