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vyelkin posted:Yeah as fun as it is to joke about balkanizing, I think this is accurate. No matter how many memes they might share about how it's time to murder your political opponents, very few Americans actually want to risk their lives for anything and there are enormously powerful people and institutions with a huge interest in keeping the country together at least in name, so that the logistics and supply chains and physical capital of things like Walmart or Amazon or the military-industrial complex remain intact and functional. As a result, a scenario that could theoretically lead to the breakup of the country, like for example the complete capture of federal institutions by a radical minority that enforces an unpopular agenda on the entire country by force, is more likely to result in the other side seeking some kind of accommodation with the new ruling elite rather than seceding and fighting, because all those vested interests will be insisting that nobody rock the boat too much and thus interfere with the functioning of business as usual. I just feel that "The Imperial Core will forever absorb all internal tensions and cannot be meaningfully destroyed, challenged, or damaged from the inside" seems as extreme an option as "american syria is inevitable." Ronwayne has issued a correction as of 17:59 on May 25, 2022 |
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May 25, 2022 17:52
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Ronwayne posted:I just feel that "The Imperial Core will forever absorb all internal tensions and cannot be meaningfully destroyed, challenged, or damaged from the inside" seems as extreme an option as "american syria is inevitable." Rome or Constantinople or whatever didn't have netflix making men into docile cows
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May 25, 2022 18:00
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https://twitter.com/as_a_worker/status/1529472784027504641?s=20&t=mF1xFcXbTQ0sS3SxwoLHBw corn prices
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May 25, 2022 18:01
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projecthalaxy posted:Rome or Constantinople or whatever didn't have netflix making men into docile cows The capitol was stormed and police stations burned within the past 24 months, the cows might not be active enough yet to push past the system's capacity for crushing internal threats, but they are far from docile. Ronwayne has issued a correction as of 18:05 on May 25, 2022 |
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May 25, 2022 18:02
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Ronwayne posted:The capitol was stormed and police stations burned within the past 24 months, the cows might not be active enough yet to push past the system's capacity for crushing internal threats, but they are far from docile. also Netflix is crashing
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May 25, 2022 18:32
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Ronwayne posted:I just feel that "The Imperial Core will forever absorb all internal tensions and cannot be meaningfully destroyed, challenged, or damaged from the inside" seems as extreme an option as "american syria is inevitable." Everything is stable, until it isn't.
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May 25, 2022 18:34
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Yes. Also, every so often Netflix forget their entire existence is only possible if they remain less annoying to use than just pirating stuff. They're one of the corporations subject to immediate discipline by end-user customers.
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May 25, 2022 18:34
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The bread is running out and they're getting awfully stingy about the circuses
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May 25, 2022 18:47
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People are too cowed by the government to do anything. The power is too entrenched in the capitol and the people are weak, despite their national myth of being strong warriors. We have a society where a small group get their way in all things and have successfully atomized and destroyed society to the point that there is nothing that can be done. Anyone who says otherwise is either an idiot or a cop trying to entrap people. Stop being a moron and remember: The Soviet Union will never fall.
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May 25, 2022 18:48
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projecthalaxy posted:Rome or Constantinople or whatever didn't have netflix making men into docile cows the Byzantians were arguing over the gender of angels as the Turks were owning them and that was their downfall, or so is written in Turkish history and the National review, so it’s a bit like Netflix https://www.nationalreview.com/2003/06/weapons-mass-distraction-walid-phares/amp/
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May 25, 2022 18:55
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War and Pieces posted:What state was it where the Gov kept firing National Guard generals untill he got an anti Vaxer? National Guard is a different story, yeah, and I think Oklahoma. Even then, the number of vaccine deniers is still pretty low. Just because some chucklefuck governor says it, doesn't make it so, and the DoD can cut funding to those units until they fall in line, so the state will have to dig deeper to pay bills and wages.
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May 25, 2022 19:26
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Ronwayne posted:I just feel that "The Imperial Core will forever absorb all internal tensions and cannot be meaningfully destroyed, challenged, or damaged from the inside" seems as extreme an option as "american syria is inevitable." Yeah I mean I've been wrong many times before and I could well be wrong about this too, that's just the way I feel today. Could be different tomorrow, who knows.
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May 25, 2022 19:36
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Historical analogies are generally dumb because you can't drop a wall around a historical moment and declare it distinct and separate from its unique situation and causes and therefore use it as a basis for analyzing anything. People have been arguing for hundreds of years if Rome even 'fell' so using it to say something about the current moment is dumb. The Soviet Union spent its entire existence fighting much of the world and emerged from a very particularly decaying empire. None of these are even remotely like America. To make historical analogies you have to reduce them to such generalities they are useless. Clearly, you'd understand Jan 6 more if you read about the Peace of Westphalia. Understanding history deepens contemporary analysis but it's never a roadmap.
FuzzySlippers has issued a correction as of 19:55 on May 25, 2022 |
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May 25, 2022 19:53
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i think that vyelkin is right that right now there are enough powerful organizations, like multinational corporations and the military, that have an interest in maintaining the basic arrangement of government and legitimacy that they'll want to keep it in place, but it isn't impossible that the calculus changes at some point.
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May 25, 2022 20:02
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FuzzySlippers posted:Historical analogies are generally dumb because you can't drop a wall around a historical moment and declare it distinct and separate from its unique situation and causes and therefore use it as a basis for analyzing anything. People have been arguing for hundreds of years if Rome even 'fell' so using it to say something about the current moment is dumb. The Soviet Union spent its entire existence fighting much of the world and emerged from a very particularly decaying empire. None of these are even remotely like America. To make historical analogies you have to reduce them to such generalities they are useless. Clearly, you'd understand Jan 6 more if you read about the Peace of Westphalia. Understanding history deepens contemporary analysis but it's never a roadmap. The collapse of the USSR is also a very different analogy not just from an ideological standpoint but from a nationalist one. It didn't collapse into fifteen states because there were 15 different centres of power all claiming to represent true Soviet ideology (which is more or less how I imagine a theoretical American balkanization, with every side claiming to be Real America), it collapsed into fifteen states based on the separatist nationalism and discrete state institutions of the fifteen national republics where the primary claim to independence (for the republic leaders and for many ordinary people, though never for every single ordinary person) was the claim to a distinct national identity as Latvian/Armenian/Russian/etc. instead of Soviet, and by the late 1980s often constructed in such a way that being Soviet was seen as mutually exclusive with that national identity - you can no longer be both Latvian and Soviet, you have to pick one or the other. Same with the balkanization of Yugoslavia, where suddenly Serb or Croat or Bosnian identity was more salient and important than Yugoslav identity. Conversely, while it is possible that the United States could collapse into people caring more about being a Texan or a Californian or a New Yorker than an American, or even conceivably come to see American identity as hindering the development of a more important and salient national identity as a Texan, Californian, or New Yorker, I don't think it's close to that point yet.
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May 25, 2022 20:19
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Ronwayne posted:The capitol was stormed and police stations burned within the past 24 months, the cows might not be active enough yet to push past the system's capacity for crushing internal threats, but they are far from docile. I think everyone is waiting for a mass movement to join tbh. The security state will crush individual and smaller groups. If one achieved critical mass and isn't total bullshit I think there's a lot of potential recruits. Unfortunately there's no left wing organization on a national scale here to harness any of that steam. So I guess people will just continue to join right wing militias instead.
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May 25, 2022 20:48
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Ronwayne posted:Yes. Also, every so often Netflix forget their entire existence is only possible if they remain less annoying to use than just pirating stuff. They're one of the corporations subject to immediate discipline by end-user customers. but how else would they sustain exponential growth forever and please the shareholders
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May 25, 2022 20:59
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skooma512 posted:I think everyone is waiting for a mass movement to join tbh. The security state will crush individual and smaller groups. If one achieved critical mass and isn't total bullshit I think there's a lot of potential recruits. one last goon project for the road
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May 26, 2022 06:53
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pancake rabbit posted:one last goon project for the road d&d is a better spot for forming a right wing militia than here
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May 26, 2022 07:03
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Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party [C-SPAM Faction]
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May 26, 2022 07:04
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Masculine Thrust posted:When fascism comes to America it'll waving the rainbow flag and holding a copy of Anti Racist Baby, which it will use to club to death the new Fred Hampton for "doing a no growth. Doing a class reductionism. Doing a multi racial whiteness." interesting
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May 26, 2022 07:31
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jetz0r posted:d&d is a better spot for forming a right wing militia than here What's our color on the Paradox map though? I vote for bright pink.
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May 26, 2022 11:34
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https://twitter.com/ToomersWs/status/1529595863110131712
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May 26, 2022 17:37
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I'm claiming Pittsburgh simply so that PFC can't nab it
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May 26, 2022 18:02
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Oh Bishopric of Grand Canyon for sure. We worship the great Shovel that dug our sacred ground.
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May 26, 2022 18:07
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Digging Vermont being an Elector of this HRE and not shocked at all that Iowa is too lol Honestly the Electors are just those first primary/"battleground" states.
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May 26, 2022 18:17
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awww i thought it was canada labeled as the new holy roman empire
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May 26, 2022 18:46
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Goddamnit Republicans, abolishing democracy is one thing, but reinstituting Gavelkind Succession is ONE STEP TOO FAR
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May 26, 2022 19:08
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maryland is hosed up. did they cede most of the state to seize a couple hundred miles north?
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May 26, 2022 19:11
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i say swears online posted:maryland is hosed up. did they cede most of the state to seize a couple hundred miles north? delmarva is hosed in a land scramble theres no way 3 states will share it
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May 26, 2022 21:42
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I don't think mobile would bend the knee to peninsular florida lol. I could see southern alabama including eastwards of the panhandle to idk walton county or so
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May 27, 2022 03:58
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DrSunshine posted:Goddamnit Republicans, abolishing democracy is one thing, but reinstituting Gavelkind Succession is ONE STEP TOO FAR Don't be absurd - look at all of those neat, contiguous borders mostly drawn by de jure lines. This isn't the result of Gavelkind, but a ruler breaking down some obnoxious superdukes and ensuring the restive new dukes have more productive things to do than plot against their ruler by giving vassals other vassals' de jure county holdings.
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May 27, 2022 04:29
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top comment on this article from 5/27/22, "America May Be Broken Beyond Repair" https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/opinion/uvalde-shooting.html   the next two: 
Mokelumne Trekka has issued a correction as of 18:03 on May 27, 2022 |
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May 27, 2022 18:00
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Mokelumne Trekka posted:top comment on this article from 5/27/22, "America May Be Broken Beyond Repair" quote:Two years ago, David French, an anti-Trump conservative, published a book, “Divided We Fall,” warning of the possible crackup of the United States. It included two chapters imagining scenarios for how the dissolution of the country might happen. One involved a mass shooting at a school in California, to which the state’s people reacted “with white-hot rage.” French envisioned furious state politicians defying the Second Amendment, leading to a nullification crisis and blue-state secession. Even the end of the article is saying the dissolution of the country sounds better than the hell of this status quo.
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May 27, 2022 18:18
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imagine being dumb enough to think the red state blue state paradigm is real
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May 27, 2022 18:27
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It's petite bourgeois + national bourgeois vs white collar professional + international bourgeois with the working class used as pawns by both.
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May 27, 2022 20:28
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I was proud of this country when participating in a genocidal imperialist war, but I stopped flying my America flag when Trump served McDonald's at a state dinner
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May 27, 2022 20:34
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what would actually happen if a state just decided to outright ignore, say, the second amendment? what would the federal govt do?
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May 28, 2022 09:19
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I mean the states that have legal weed are all ignoring the federal government but if California had their state police and natty guard go door to door collecting guns I can see a lot of lawsuits or whatever but as we have seen from Jackson to Trump, you can just go "okay they've made their decision so let them enforce it" and they can't do anything. The system only works if you give a poo poo about it. When the mayor of New Orleans took down the Confederate statue there there was a lot of huffing and puffing from the chuds and I think lawsuits but he just chucked it in a warehouse and ignored them. Obviously this plan won't work because the cops and natty guard would be taking their own guns but if you just confiscated them all over a few weeks and tossed them into the incinerator/smelter it's not like the feds are going to roll in and give away free AR-15s to replace them. Unless the Republicans are in charge. 
Dr. Kyle Farnsworth has issued a correction as of 09:35 on May 28, 2022 |
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May 28, 2022 09:32
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i say swears online posted:imagine being dumb enough to think the red state blue state paradigm is real Every state is blue cities, red suburbs and rural areas. The key difference is the ratio of population in those areas.
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May 28, 2022 10:03
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