Er, the military in question for this hypothetical example speaks the same language as the civilians they would make war upon and knows the terrain and is from the same culture and therefore understands the civilian social dynamic. I mean, there's lots of obvious difference between an American soldier and Taliban fighter, but between a soldier and American civilian? "Training and a better gun".
I'm shocked that you could consider invoking historical references to equate the US military skirmishing with desert tribesmen from another culture with overweight American gun-nuts. If the brown people we currently fight don't really have answers to C-130s or mortars or MARPAT, then I'm not sure that hypothetical North American insurgents would, either.
I don't have time to put together every thought I hav eon the subject. Suffice it to say I believe an armed populace discourages tyrannical government more than an unarmed populace. The same way I don't want to register my IP address and cell phone to be able to post online, I don't want to hand over all forms of self-defense against mass civil unrest or war.
Finally: Whether you believe it or not, the purpose of the US 2nd amendment is self-defense, including from government. If you don't feel that is necessary, be inellectually honest and advocate for its repeal.
>Whether you believe it or not, the purpose of the US 2nd amendment is self-defense, including from government. If you don't feel that is necessary, be inellectually honest and advocate for its repeal
If you feel that I'm being "inellectually" dishonest, have the courage to stand up to me and tell me directly, instead of implying that I am (assuming, as you have, that my point is actually another point entirely, of course, which itself seems a bit intellectually dishonest).
>The same way I don't want to register my IP address and cell phone to be able to post online
I see what you're going for here, but to pretend that this isn't functionally what is required in order to "post online" is unrealistic. I assume that you're posting from behind seven proxies and a few Tor jumps? Otherwise, I don't really see how you haven't created a link between the things you post and the devices you post from, which the government can then exploit.
If you feel that commercially available guns would equip the US civillian populace to repel the US military, that's your opinion. But I strongly disagree that this presents any realistic impediment.
Commercially available guns are the same or better as the guns used by US soldiers for the most part.
If you are talking about the US military doing aerial bombardment etc, of course these guns will not be a defense.
But if troops are going street to street, commercially available guns would enable resistance.
And the point here is not that the population would be able to win an all out war against the fully equipped army. That is a nonsensical scenario. It is that an armed population would be able to resist the Army, making all out war the only option. US army won't launch an all out war against the population, so this level of resistance is sufficient.
>So your argument is based on the trope that gun owners in America are overweight?
Yeah, that must be what my argument is. Don't bother reading any of the rest of my comment; you might become exposed to nuance. As long as you're not exposed to nuance, you will be able to go toe-to-toe with the 101st Airborne. There won't be massive casualties. You are exceptional.
I don't see any nuance. I don't claim to be able to go toe to toe with the 101st airborne. And I certainly don't claim that overthrowing an oppressive government wouldn't involve massive casualties.
Are you saying anything that isn't straw men?
And considering your question of coming from the same culture - you are assuming that the US military would be willing to go to war against their own people - a very different proposition to the wars they have been fighting.
Even the war in Iraq is considered not to be what they signed up for by many service-people.
>And considering your question of coming from the same culture - you are assuming that the US military would be willing to go to war against their own people - a very different proposition to the wars they have been fighting
Hey man, I'm just replying to things! I am not assuming that the US military would be willing to go to war against their own people -- I'm just responding to that already established hypothetical. I infer that you want to yell at people who claim that, by your alleging that I called Yank citizenry fat. The clownfight you seek is upthread, where people established that we were talking about the US military going to war against their own people. I didn't establish anything.
So you claim, but anyone who opens up the "discussion" with "So, [misrepresentation of parent opinion], huh?"[0] is clearly not seeking a discussion and is instead seeking a clownfight. You had every opportunity to prove me wrong.
I didn't misrepresent you - the text I quoted was part of your argument. If you didn't mean it, why did you say it? If you did mean it, then why not simply stand behind it?
Sharing the same language and social background would make military occupation more difficult, as it reduces the ability to other the occupied population. It also makes it easier for insurgent elements to infiltrate your own units. For an example of this, consider the infiltration of Iraqi units by insurgents and the ensuing problems they caused.
As for training and "better guns", the service weapon of the Army and Marines is the same weapon system family as is the most popular rifle in the United States: the AR15 (with military variants, the M16 and M4 carbine). Additionally, private owners are likely to have optics on par or better than are available to servicemen. And better-maintained weapons--you don't have to look far to get stories of infantry complaining about their gear. During the day, they'd be about equally matched individually. At night, NVGs and thermal sights would give the occupation forces an edge.
The infantry "better guns" that are out of reach of civilians in your scenario would be things like anti-material rocket launchers (AT4, SMAW) , grenades, and LMGs (M240s, M249s, etc.). With the exception of the rocket launchers, all of those are things that can be improvised or worked-around with the correct doctrine.
Rocket launchers, and more generally the air support and artillery that forms the true bulk of American land warfighting capability, are things that are vertboten when used against civilians. There's no credible armored targets requiring their use (except for perhaps captured law-enforcement surplus MRAPs) and so their deployment against a native insurgency would likely fall outside of the rules of engagement. Additionally, calling in airstrikes on insurgent positions in American cities has severely negative long-term implications for peacekeeping.
In short, fighting an urban or even exurban native insurgency the US military would possess only a slight material and technological advantage and even that would likely be severely undercut by having to follow very conservative ROE unless they wanted to rile up resistance further.
~
As for your remark on historical references, if you want something a little more contemporary and probably more reflective of what we'd expect to see in your hypothetical scenario, please consult the history of Ireland in the 20th century.
Your remark on "overweight American gun-nuts" is misinformed. I know that's a popular stereotype, but it is neither accurate nor even useful. Again, the sort of engagements we'd expect wouldn't be "Let's hump our gear ten miles to the AO", it's "So, after work tonight, let's do this mission on the local garrison". To be blunt, for that style of warfare, you can use women, children, fatties--anybody that can hold a gun.
Also, on your last point--they have developed countermeasures to things like mortars and counterbattery fire and whatnot.
~
Underscoring all of this thought experiment is something you're missing: in a supposed US insurgency, the huge non-combat advantage of the armed forces goes away. Our adventures abroad are backed by a logistics system and lift capability that boggles the mind, only made possible because we can keep all the ruckus of battle away from our airbases and factories and transportation hubs. In an insurgency, that massive advantage--one that's nearly taken for granted in the last two decades of warfare by our populous--disappears.
Hmm. Big guns "that can be worked around with the correct doctrine" and unnamed "developed countermeasures to things like mortars and counterbattery fire and whatnot" and the assumption that the military loses its entire support system all at once. I think you believe in an organizational capacity that doesn't actually exist in untrained civiliian populations (or are personally part of a militia whose training is sufficient to back up your words). Thanks for your thoughts!
So, at the risk of feeding the troll still further...
What I meant by "big guns" is that the equipment the theoretical occupying force would have access to that the insurgents wouldn't, like rocket launchers. The stuff like grenades and LMGs are things that can be substituted--to some degree or another--by things like Molotov cocktails or hi-capacity magazines.
"Countermeasures to things like mortars and counterbattery fire" is not some special doctrine utterly beyond the reach of American populace; instead, it's the observation that, if you shell an American position, you need to be somewhere else in a minute or two before your position gets blown up. This is something that is quite empirically learnable, and something that has been learned multiple times by untrained insurgents fighting US occupying forces.
> the assumption that the military loses its entire support system all at once.
Where are you getting that assumption from? I made no such claim.
> I think you believe in an organizational capacity that doesn't actually exist in untrained civiliian populations
I think you live in a fantasy world where civilian populations both have no trained members (false) and are unable to improvise and learn tactics of their own through trial and error (also false).
You keep coming back to the same circular "I define the civilian population as incompetent and worse than the military, therefore they are incompetent and worse than the military", despite a lot of evidence and arguments that your assumption is wrong and your conclusions incorrect.
If you want to actually pull on your big kid pants and argue why each of my points in the preceding post were wrong, please do. If you just want to continue shitting out little paragraph-long "but but but civilians populations are always going to looose" zingers lacking any critical thought, we've all got better things to do.
Yet you keep replying! You're a solid troll, though -- I especially like the way you're willing to descend into insulting me far before I insulted you, but I'm glad the gloves are off. Could you be the other guy in a sockpuppet account? It's funny -- I'm the one claiming bullshit without evidence or argumentation, but your posts are really really light on what these "correct doctrines" actually are, why the civilian population would have access to any of them, how the resistance would communicate, insisting on the primacy of various rules of war that would have presumably been rescinded if the kind of tyranny that required standing up to was running the military... It's almost like you're just bloviating about American exceptionalism, handwaving about "doctrines" that all good minutemen surely already know. Sorry, but you guys have the biggest, best-equipped military in the world. No matter how Rambo the local shooting club might consider itself, it doesn't seem up to the task. But what do I know?!
>If you want to actually pull on your big kid pants and argue why each of my points in the preceding post were wrong, please do
Oh, don't worry. I can't do that! You won't accept it. That'd require not having an untenable position you're honour-bound to defend! I think you've already decided that your exceptionalism will protect you. I'm just having a bit of fun!
>"Countermeasures to things like mortars and counterbattery fire" is not some special doctrine utterly beyond the reach of American populace; instead, it's the observation that, if you shell an American position, you need to be somewhere else in a minute or two before your position gets blown up. This is something that is quite empirically learnable, and something that has been learned multiple times by untrained insurgents fighting US occupying forces
Uh. So you're arguing against the general use of mortars? "Get out of the way" only works if the mortars didn't kill you already. This isn't a doctrine, it's common sense. Yet, something tells me mortar operators still successfully kill people. Presumably it's not so easy to just... dodge. You're the obvious military expert, though -- maybe people do dodge mortars and they're basically useless once the Correct Dodge Doctrine permeates the opfor!
>> the assumption that the military loses its entire support system all at once.
>Where are you getting that assumption from? I made no such claim
Yeah you did. Where? Right here, from this linked post [0]:
>>>Underscoring all of this thought experiment is something you're missing: in a supposed US insurgency, the huge non-combat advantage of the armed forces _goes away_. Our adventures abroad are backed by a logistics system and lift capability that boggles the mind, only made possible because we can keep all the ruckus of battle away from our airbases and factories and transportation hubs. _In an insurgency, that massive advantage--one that's nearly taken for granted in the last two decades of warfare by our populous--disappears_
Emphasis mine. Man! Wow! I thought for a brief moment that you were a genuine person and not a troll. This cinches it. Thanks for the game, gg no re
You're really concerned about my opinions, aren't you? Hey man, if you don't think the quoted bits of my comment weren't just evidence-free appeals to the poster's claimed superior knowledge of the military capabilities of untrained civilians, you're welcome to elaborate on all those unexplained countermeasures and doctrines. Why I have to offer a 'counterpoint' to unsubstantiated claims is beyond me -- something tells me it's because you disagree with me, and that you wouldn't hold yourself to the same standard were our positions reversed. Why do I say this? Your previous interactions with me, which were disingenuous as hell.
Nope - nothing disingenuous. Other posters may not have offered evidence, but they have offered arguments and explanations that can be evaluated and rejected on their merits.
The only person in this thread who has claimed superior knowledge is you, because that is the the only basis for being dismissive rather than offering alternatives.
I do disagree with you. What does it even mean for our positions to be 'reversed'? We are simply people who disagree with each other. What is there to 'reverse' about our positions?
As for my previous disingenuous interactions, if you are referring to me quoting you about overweight gun owners, I stand by that. You were simply being dismissive and I was pointing that out. Nothing disingenuous about that. If you didn't mean it as part of your position, you wouldn't have said it.
>What does it even mean for our positions to be 'reversed'? We are simply people who disagree with each other. What is there to 'reverse' about our positions?
This is a pretty common English turn of phrase ("what does it even mean to 'turn a phrase'?"). This is what revealed your hand. Good try!
Yeah - that's the usual flippant kind of answer - pistols and rifles are no match for the military.
But it's a bogus position - if a significant portion of the country is armed, a very strong resistance can be mounted. In any such situation it wouldn't be the 101st airborne against a civilian population.
So if you're pro-civilian resistance to tyranny, I suppose you supported the Oregonian federal occupation, the civil disruptions caused by Black Lives Matter, and the Alcatraz occupation?
Forgive me, but lately I've run into a lot of people who talk about the importance of enabling civil resistance until they actually see civil resistance and suddenly they're the living embodiment of law and order.
A president-elect exists having soundly lost the popular vote. Over half the voting population is begging the electoral college to be faithless. The very first acts pledged by the presidents staff are to immediately challenge long-standing civil rights issues only pressed by a relatively small minority of those polled.
What is your metric for tyranny, zepto? When, exactly, is the civil disobedience part of the founders intent? Do people need to shoot a gun to invoke the intent of the 2nd? Is having a gun with them not enough?
I think it's relevant to any discussion of the 2nd amendment to ask what it's actually for. I think the intent of the 2nd was to enable political expediency, but maybe you imagine something grander.
A president-elect exists having soundly lost the popular vote.
Soundly? A plurality, yes. Soundly seems like an exaggeration. What to you justifies the use of soundly?
Over half the voting population is begging the electoral college to be faithless.
Are you saying all (or nearly) who voted against Trump are in support of faithless electors?
I agree the voting population is split and there's a lot of dissatisfaction (to put it mildly). This sounds like hyperbole to me, which makes you sound like you're misrepresenting the facts, which plays right into the narrative that those against Trump are out of touch.
I'm not sure what your threshold of "soundly" is, but it's not a margin of 10000 people were talking about. It's an odd word to take exception to.
It's a genuine question Americans need to ask though: if presidents can win while losing the popular vote, does the current electoral college system exist only to enable that? Or can/should it do more in exceptional cases?
I'd argue that if the only reason the current system exists is to allow the Republican party to win on a popular loss (which is what it enables, Democrats only take the presidency with huge popular vote margins) then it should be no surprise that we are seeing widespread protests and civil disobedience.
I suppose were lucky that Democrats as a whole are less likely to own a gun.
My threshold for "soundly" would be at least 2 percent of popular vote. I agree that an actual threshold would be subjective. What's yours?
That we can have disagreement between the electoral college and the popular vote is also an issue that we need to look at very seriously. I'm not contesting that. I'm contesting your contention that Over half the voting population is begging the electoral college to be faithless. To my reading, there are two interpretations:
- "begging the electoral college to be faithless" is a colorful rephrasing of "voted for the candidate that did not win the electoral college"
- over half of those who voted are now asking electors to be faithless
Is there another interpretation that I'm just missing? I'm open to correction.
I guess it depends on what message you're trying to send and who you're trying to send the message to.
If you're addressing those who already agree or are likely to agree with you, the language doesn't matter as much, as it's clear what side you favor. Exaggeration, hyperbole, misrepresentation will generally go unnoticed or be forgiven. Your message is effectively "I'm on your side" and serves to energize those you agree with.
If you're looking for a wider audience, the language matters more, especially in a political environment as polarized as the one we're currently in, where both sides are hypersensitive to language and how it's used. Also, people respond emotionally: it takes active effort to parse messages rationally, particularly if they're messages you're not already inclined to agree with. This is why I'm paying attention to words like "soundly". Those who agree with you don't really care. Those who don't are going to respond emotionally, put off by the language and no longer listen to the content of the message.
Given the attention I've paid to this, you're not going to be surprised that it's something I think is really important. I'm not ready to accept that the divide in America is insurmountable, but to close it we need to be engaging each other across the divide.
If the Electoral College votes for Trump, there needs to be cross-party support in government to fight the efforts Trump you oppose, which means working with people who don't already agree with you.
> My threshold for "soundly" would be at least 2 percent of popular vote. I agree that an actual threshold would be subjective. What's yours?
The counts are not in, but it appears that >2% is indeed the number we're settling at. Historically the democrats need to win by 4% to reliably take the white house. I'd say that it is relative between the average statewide absolute margins and the popular vote's margin. This election was "close" for Trump in many districts, but is not close for Trump in the popular vote.
> "voted for the candidate that did not win the electoral college"
You do not "win" EC votes in most states. EC voters are installed to reflect the will of their states, but it's an explicit feature that they can override popular votes if they feel exceptional circumstances have been enacted. Ostensibly, this is why the system is the way it is. Over the last few decades, we've seen this system cleverly modified to strongly favor very specific states in the union.
Wisconsin, for example, has enormous political power over the entire nation. Not because it has more people, provides more resources, seats government, etc. No, the system has been carefully centered around areas where voting margins are narrowest.
In a simple popular vote, Clinton soundly defeated Trump. In our system, less than a quarter million votes decided an election with a margin million_s_ of votes on the popular. The truth is that this engineering takes place because those Republican politics are not remarkably popular or competitive outside of specific regions where a sort of slanted ideological arena has been constructed. The Republicans can't really outspend the Democrats effectively over time, so they limit the field to these battleground states with clever politicking.
> I'm not ready to accept that the divide in America is insurmountable, but to close it we need to be engaging each other across the divide.
I'm not sure exactly what you'd like me to say. Several people in Trump's proposed cabinet think I am a sub-human who needs to be re-educated to be less queer. I find it very difficult to be "centrist" about fundamentally asking me to accept that.
And that's just my personal axe. People of color have a whole another thing going on. A thing that certainly has roots in the actions of the Obama administration, but that Trump's new cabinet is promising to promote.
What exactly are the centrist terms of discussion for de-militarizing a police that recklessly endangers people of color and then refuses to prosecute police officers who violate new laws?
> there needs to be cross-party support in government to fight the efforts Trump you oppose, which means working with people who don't already agree with you.
I think we should do this from a civil side. But I also think civil disobedience is entirely appropriate at this juncture. People begging for order are the people with the least to lose.
So yeah, it's misdirected insomuch as we can simultaneously agree to work to keep the country running, but if it's used as a baffle to stifle unrest and upset, it's wrong. I maintain a professional relationship with people in my organization who voted one way or another, but I am very clear that I think this is a disaster. This is not a contradictory position; it's a quintessentially American one.
And for the record, I am all for modifying the system such that the popular and district votes come back in line. I am also very much in favor of runoff voting being mandated at a national level so that idiots like Stein and Johnson can run and not risk destroying close elections.
"The counts are not in, but it appears that >2% is indeed the number we're settling at."
Great! The numbers I've seen show it closer to .5%. For example:
"The most comprehensive vote-tracking analysis is published by David Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. As of 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 14, according to Wasserman’s calculations, Clinton led Trump by 784,748 votes -- specifically, 61,422,098 for Clinton, 60,637,350 for Trump, and 6,691,311 for other candidates."
Clinton 61,422,098 47.7%
Trump 60,637,350 47.1%
other 6,691,311
total 128,750,759
With the total vote not yet counted, different sources, sourcing the data at different times, I'm open to other sources for this data. I think one of the problems with the Electoral College is that it changes voting behavior, particularly in states that have a strong bias towards one candidate or the other, affecting the popular vote. This makes it more difficult to assess what the actual popular vote would be if there were no Electoral College. Publicizing exit poll results can have a similar effect, as can time zones. I also haven't looked closely enough to see what the estimates are that these different effects would have on the actual outcome.
"You do not "win" EC votes in most states."
Perhaps a poor choice of words. It was only an attempt to express how a state's votes get allocated to a candidate. (Btw, do you think that choice of words was important to what I'm trying to say? Or that it's a reflection of me in general, that I'm ignorant and to cast doubt on everything else I'm saying? I don't think I'm even arguing that the EC is a good thing! Am I giving you the impression I am?)
Regarding "engaging each other across the divide", I'm not implying some kind of centrist agenda. I do think there needs to be compromise of some variety if we're trying to address the issues of the population in general. Two buckets don't describe the population, yet the presidential election is effectively a binary choice. Yet we seem to be making it such when we not only stop listening and talking to the people who voted differently than we did, but actively work against them? I'm all for fighting for issues you believe in. I also want to make sure that I'm working to make sure I'm not alienating people who agree with me on a particular issue (or may, with some constructive discussion) by refusing to listen to what they have to say. Listening doesn't mean agreement, nor does attempting to understand constitute support. I also want to make sure I'm doing what I can to make what I want to say as effective as possible at reaching the people who don't necessarily agree with me.
Am I confused here? I'm honestly asking if there's a useful distinction between engagement (which I'm trying to argue for) and centrism (which I disagree with).
But I also think civil disobedience is entirely appropriate at this juncture.
Completely agree. I also know there are people who may want to support the same issues in other ways. I also hope it's clear that I'm not trying to silence or stifle any unrest and upset. I want it to be constructive. If you have suggestions for me on how to be more effective in conveying that message, I'd appreciate it, especially as I haven't necessarily been very effective here :)
I've been trying to make clear that I'm discussing language that's useful in making change. I'm not arguing about the Electoral College, or Trump's choices for cabinet positions. I think both of those are discussions very much worth having, and ones I am having. Just not here. I also want those discussions to bring people together, not further polarize society. Something I try to keep in mind is that if Clinton had won the Electoral college, there'd be a huge segment of the population very upset right now as well. Whether or not you think one side's feelings are justified doesn't deny the fact that they're having them.
If you don't want to talk about tactics for constructive discussion, that's fine. I certainly can understand that, too. The reason I entered the discussion is that I think you can be more effective at making your case by taking into account the words you're using to do so. So it's on me for entering a discussion about the Electoral College without explicitly wanting to argue one way or the other. I also take it upon myself to have not been able to do so here, given that was my goal.
Thanks for taking the time to engage with me. I've found it useful. I've appreciated it.
So... We are at 2% now with millions of votes still uncounted, and canvassing is giving back votes to HRC.
We've seen beginnings of evidence of strange vote count issues in some counties in Wisconsin that gave more votes counted for Trump than ballots cast in total, and as these are corrected Trump's lead in that state lowers noticeably and even threatened to flip some districts.
I'm curious if, upon this information, you're still in favor of the EC not being faithless.
Keep refreshing those numbers. They're changing rapidly, and the ones you used were at least a day old when you posted them.
We're almost at the point where even conservative counts put us at a point where no president has ever lost the election while winning the popular vote by this much.
If we cross that threshold we need to think long and hard about how the system can structurally provide that big a bias towards a specific candidate.
I'm incredibly frustrated by my inability to express clearly enough that whether or not the electors should be faithless was not why I initially commented. Hopefully I'll do better in the future. I wish you the best. Be well.
The point at which the 2nd amendment becomes relevant is the point at which a sufficiently large part of the population becomes motivated to act together to overcome an oppressive regime.
Being armed and yet not acting collectively to overthrow the government is the essence of government by consent.
You assume a great deal with that statement. Namely that more of the "101st airborne" than not would be willing to open fire on their friends, family, and neighbors. And that other elements of the armed forces wouldn't face the exact same issue on a larger scale.
Also, in the US, significant gun ownership is for the 2nd Amendment purpose of being a safeguard against a tyrannical government.