SIGforum
Are We Nearing Civil War?

This topic can be found at:
https://sigforum.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/320601935/m/3160076524

December 06, 2018, 02:27 PM
Ryanp225
Are We Nearing Civil War?
quote:
Originally posted by ChuckFinley:
We need to pick a "best of" thread and keep Jallen on the front page from now on. It was good to see his name again.

It was. Smile
December 06, 2018, 03:28 PM
dewhorse
I don't think it will be a civil war as people are too fat warm and lazy, maybe that is just my hope as a civil war will destroy things and people that I love. It would take a black swan event to get it to the tipping point and posdibly beyond.

But I think we will continue to see the balkenization of the US along economic lines. So if there is a catastrophic event the shooting will not be along regional lines but neighborhoods lines and very few will be truly safe.

I have driven to work through active war zones and I would not want the people I care about to ever have to that. Very few are prepared for the carnage and evil a civil war brings.

Read about the yugoslav civil war and you will get a taste.
February 13, 2022, 11:55 AM
wcb6092
A House Aggrieved Cannot Stand

https://americanmind.org/salvo...rieved-cannot-stand/

Our rulers stoke a civil conflict because they want to win it.
Over the course of history, societies have chosen different forms of moral currency. In Rome, your virtue was determined by your nobility of ancestry and comportment. In Medieval Europe (and the first two centuries of the American republic, perhaps) piety was the determinant of moral virtue. Today, grievance is America’s moral currency. Understanding this is key to understand exactly what a civil war would be about.

January 6, 2022 brought the first anniversary of the turmoil at the Capitol. In addition to neurotic public remembrances, the date brought with it a wave of hand-wringing furvor over whether we are approaching another civil war. The prospect of a civil war is more than clickbait. The acrimonious division that was previously contained to the political realm now sets the terms of social interaction everywhere: in schools, restaurants, the workplace, the grocery store, the church. It is the price our establishment pays for its own radicalization. Confronting the civil strife that this rolling revolution creates is a dangerous thing to even talk about—when respected voices broach the subject, this signals to the masses that such a conflict is a possibility, and that increases the possibility of it occurring.

The coverage from outlets such as Politico and The New Yorker displays two types of “civil war” articles. In one, the author pretends he has no idea what such a war would even be about. In the other type, the risk of conflict is attributed wholly to the alleged delusions and purportedly violent tendencies of the political right. The former embodies a lame attempt at obfuscation; the latter suggests that one side of the conflict holds all the culpability for the rising aggression. But in their dissembling, both types inadvertently show that the true cause of the conflict would be a battle over the legitimacy of mass grievances and the deliberate refusal of those in power to address—or even acknowledge—them. Through their incessant denial that the public’s concerns have any merit, the media is fanning the coals that would ignite such a war.

Politico exhibits the idea that there are no grievances: “One side unreasonably believes that President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory was stolen, and the other side reasonably fears that former president Donald Trump’s followers are so slavishly under his spell that they are willing to hijack the legal apparatus guaranteeing free and honest elections in order to facilitate his return to power in 2024.” It’s that simple: one side is full of unreasonable, hypnotized conspiracy theorists, and the other side is rational, patriotic defenders of Democracy who would have no problem at all, if not for the threat posed by the yokels who unjustifiably oppose them.

The New Yorker’s reporter believes the civil war might occur because troglodytes and bigots have given up on democracy: put differently, they have grievances, but not ones that deserve any attention. For example, David Remnick claims the current strife exists because people were worried about what Obama’s 2008 victory represented: it “vividly underlined the rise of a multiracial democracy and was taken as a threat by many white Americans who feared losing their majority status.” Remnick goes on to say, without evidence, that the conflict is fueled by “the consuming resentment of many right-wing, rural whites who fear being ‘replaced’ by immigrants and people of color, as well as a Republican Party leadership that bows to its most autocratic demagogue and no longer seems willing to defend democratic values and institutions.” The institutional left is entirely innocent in deepening these divisions: “The battle to preserve American democracy is not symmetrical. One party, the GOP, now poses itself as anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic.”

Moral Currency and Political Power

When “grievance” is mentioned on the right, it is often invoked derisively to refer to today’s fetishization of “systemic injustices.” Throughout the late twentieth century, as the left became increasingly dependent on the votes of racial, linguistic, and ethnic minorities, Democrats encouraged those groups to understand historical hardships and injustices as debts that had to be paid in the present, perpetually. The paying of these debts took the form of many legal, economic, and educational reforms aimed at addressing these grievances, reforms which also served to justify the expansion of the state. Over the decades, many Americans logically came to the realization that leveraging these grievances (a way of calling in a debt) was a way to reap sociopolitical rewards.

Joshua Mitchell’s recent book ably demonstrates how these realities establish a moral economy. Grievance becomes currency—it can buy things. Like a kind of money, people are incentivized to collect and spend their grievances. I do not mean to suggest that certain minority—or majority—groups do not have some legitimate grievances; they do. Minorities and majorities both know well what can be gained from leveraging their grievances. When grievance serves as the moral currency in a society, it is natural that every individual will seek to realize whatever gains can be had from demanding satisfaction. The problem today isn’t the existence of grievances, or even a will to redress them. The problem is the fetishization and commodification of grievance.

Today’s populist discontent is a byproduct of the grievance economy—and a backlash against the unfair rules by which it operates. When moral virtue is determined wholly by the grievances held by a particular individual or class, this encourages an endless deliberation about which grievances are legitimate (and thus, embody real debts), and a toxic calculus to determine who has more grievance (and therefore, a more compelling demand for redress). In short, the people with the most grievances become the good people—people whose concerns are granted a disproportionate weight in public life. The people who purportedly have fewer grievances are implicitly marked as bad people—people whose demands for political satisfaction can be safely ignored.

The effect of this grievance economy is that you have an entire nation of people who have been trained to be aggrieved, but the regime rules by ensuring that certain grievances will be routinely dismissed. These are deemed to have arisen from historical “privilege”—privilege that must be surrendered so as to pay the debt to the aggrieved. Many people who seem to have little privilege are nevertheless deemed as beneficiaries of it. These are the rural, white members of the working class who have been abandoning the Democratic party at a rate identical to the one at which the left has fetishized minority grievance. When a society implicitly states “grievance is what matters,” but tells certain aggrieved groups that their gripes are illegitimate, it is no surprise that this creates alienation. Because a large government like ours is justified precisely on the grounds of its responsiveness to all the needs of its citizens, this alienation is understandably directed at the regime and its clients. As a result, our leaders’ dismissal of public grievances leads to one more grievance.

The irrepressible question is whether the citizens the media blames for our nation’s intensifying conflict have legitimate grievances, and, if so, why?

A Long Train of Grievances

Over the last 50 years, our leaders progressively outsourced our manufacturing, which had served as the backbone of middle-class economic stability. Not only did the government not incentivize companies to stay in America—the state actively accelerated the departure. This loss of millions of middle-class jobs finally produced a generation with significantly less wealth than their forebears—something that hasn’t happened since before World War II.

For a half century, the state refused to secure the border. Amnesty was periodically provided to those who had entered illegally, which incentivized others to come. Non-enforcement of labor laws that would bar illegal immigrants from working put low-skilled American workers in direct competition with foreigners, who would accept lower pay, making low-wage jobs harder to get. By the arrival of the Obama era, our elites were moving from a mere tolerance of illegal immigration to an endorsement of it: after all, many of the new arrivals were ethnic minorities—an aggrieved class in need of deference.

The influx of illegal immigrants has flooded the nation with drugs: notably, the often-fatal opioid fentanyl, almost all of which comes from our geo-political rival China. This results in an epidemic of addiction and drug death among the very groups most impacted by the betrayals referenced above.

To make matters worse, the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve and the flood of government spending have further undermined the purchasing power of what little money the working class is able to earn. The endless printing of money only increases a stupefying national debt. Of course, Americans’ diminished purchasing power is increasingly irrelevant, as a supply chain crisis (an effect of our dependence on foreign manufacturing) ensures that many needed goods are not available.

Moreover, a complete lack of accountability among our leaders fuels the alienation of typical American citizens. Obama’s IRS worked to combat conservative fundraising to minimize its influence in the 2012 election. No one was held accountable. States like California and Colorado are allowed to enact policies that directly subvert existing federal law——and it is tolerated. Obama admitted he had no legal authority to act unilaterally to address immigration——then he ordered DACA anyway, an effective amnesty for millions of people who entered the country illegally. The courts affirmed it.

Hillary Clinton illegally used a private server to conduct her business as Secretary of State and deleted over 30,000 emails from those servers, in direct violation of a subpoena. Not only was no one held accountable for the violation of data security protocols, but no one was held accountable for the destruction of evidence.

With the 2020 election on the horizon, all the institutional powers in America colluded to undermine and sabotage the Trump reelection campaign: creating misinformation disguised as news stories to damage Trump, while censoring any damaging stories to the Biden campaign by labelling them “misinformation.” This is to say nothing of the litany of procedural abuses that were implemented at the state and federal level to weaken the Trump vote, increase the Biden vote, and loosen rules to ensure election integrity in ways that would favor Biden. Much of this activity was patently illegal. Weeks later, after the inauguration, the media gleefully admitted to this malfeasance. But no one was held accountable.

All of this is to say nothing about the misery inflicted on the middle class by authoritarian lockdowns and the medical establishment’s unconstitutional political power during the Covid-19 pandemic.

These examples point to two compounding injuries. Affected citizens suffer the indignity of a government that routinely denies their grievances a place in the political process by ruling through policies it sets against them. It was this hostile disregard that led to the rise of a figure like Trump, an outsider who promised to address their concerns. The second injury did even more to amplify the current opposition to the regime: when the people elected Trump, the elite powers ensured that he would not be able to govern, and then ensured that he would not be reelected. Essentially, the state told Americans: “Not only will we not address your grievances, we will also enact safeguards so that you may not elect someone who will.” Thus, the people who claim to be defending American democracy have negated what little democratic power many citizens actually held.

As a coda to this litany of abuses, the elite institutions tell these citizens not only that their grievances are illegitimate, but that those grievances are imagined.

Then they pretend they have no idea why Americans are angry.

Sovereignty on Its Head

Today, the United States government has inverted the idea of sovereignty: it carefully takes account of the external demands made upon our nation by foreign powers and peoples, while it sees itself as internally sovereign in relation to the people it rules. The state does not recognize its obligation to respond to certain classes of citizens—and when the people use their vote to register their discontent with this abdication of duty, the state ensures that this discontent will be contained and neutralized.

In a democracy, the regime itself is not meant to be sovereign in relation to the citizens it governs: that’s authoritarian autocracy. Democratic government is not independent from the will of the people—on the contrary, if it won’t address their grievances, then it must yield to a majority of citizens’ decision to install officials who will. Ultimately, grievance is also the political capital of our society—the state holds sole power to decide whose grievances are legitimate and whose are not. The resolute rejection of the grievances claimed by half the country has understandably provoked an enormous anger. The continued refusal of elites to acknowledge these grievances only accelerates our cultural fragmentation—and thus increases the chances of what would surely be a catastrophic “civil war”—one that they claim they do not want.


_________________________
"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."
Mark Twain
February 13, 2022, 12:22 PM
coloradohunter44
Interesting and thought provoking. The state wants to rule and ignore the majority. This can't go on much longer.



"Someday I hope to be half the man my bird-dog thinks I am."

FBLM LGB!
February 13, 2022, 12:43 PM
CoolRich59
Still need to read the article, but have to say it was a little surprising to see a thread started by JAllen appear. Eek


_____________________________________________________________________
“Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again." - Will Durant
February 13, 2022, 03:54 PM
architect
quote:
Originally posted by coloradohunter44:
Interesting and thought provoking. The state wants to rule and ignore the majority. This can't go on much longer.
I would be inclined to disagree. Why? Because exactly who constitutes "the majority" depends on the specific issue being addressed. There is no majority of conservatives on all topics, nor is there a majority of liberals on all topics. Politicians who have been have been successful have done so by weaving a twisty path through the maze of issues and have become adept at setting one group at another over less inflammatory matters so as to distract attention from what is most vital to various contingents of their constituents. This strategy is as old as politics, and I see no reason why it should suddenly cease any time soon.

I also do not agree with the premise that "the aggrieved are morally superior to those they blame for their misery." I think many people, although perhaps not a clear majority, still believe that it is the individual who is most responsible for their own success or failure. This principle, and the historical support of this principle by our governments, i.e. by mostly giving individuals an environment in which they can better themselves (by being the "land of opportunity") stand in direct conflict with the reparations and redress injustices mentality.
February 13, 2022, 04:23 PM
Hildur
Civil war? Doubt it. Guerrilla war? I can see that coming.
February 13, 2022, 05:53 PM
stickman428
No, I don’t think so. I certainly hope not. Americans fighting other Americans is a concept I want no part of. What does that fix? I’d rather see the irresponsible and perpetually dishonest elites who hate America and Americans and think they are above any law and immune to any consequences of their divisive, corrosive rhetoric realize their actions have consequences.

Open riots in a country show a tremendous failure of leadership. You can only fool the people and encourage them to fight each other for so long. I believe there may be a more practical and less damaging course correction on the horizon and it may still be years away. But what do I know I am an idiot.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The price of liberty and even of common humanity is eternal vigilance
February 14, 2022, 04:55 AM
downtownv
This debate has been going on for a long, long time, yet here we are. Each side of the socio-political divide have taken turns, eating a big fat shit sandwich. I do not see that changing until at least Term Limits are installed. However, I can't imagine any of those in positions of power would ever willing vote for something that would remove that power.


_________________________

https://www.teampython.com


February 14, 2022, 09:57 AM
Lefty Sig
Term limits (all), bans on trading securities and commodities (Pelosi and others), bans on immediate family getting any business tied to anything the politician is doing (Hunter), bans on hiring spouses to be "consultants" or anything that would pay them with campaign contributions or taxpayer dollars (Omar), bans on "private mail servers" for any government activity (Hillary), bans on "foundations" when anyone involved is still in public office (Clintons), ban on personal use of remaining campaign funds after choosing not to run for reelection (all).

The list goes on. These grifters and criminals are fundamentally UNPRODUCTIVE people, and most could not do a damn thing in the real world. Start a business, manage a business, make a payroll? Nope. There are exceptions but most of them are useless.

The only way to get Congress to pass this is relentless shaming of them through investigative journalism and rigorous prosecution of everything they do that crosses the line. Somehow they passed Prohibition in 1920 so stranger things are possible.

The other choice is a constitutional convention. However I am terrified of that because the commies will come out of the woodwork and demand "economic rights", and now that the majority of Americans pay zero Federal income tax, and there is enough belief that somehow taxing "the rich" will pay for everything, there are enough voters to ratify it.
February 14, 2022, 01:15 PM
Fed161
The news media has as a big role in the divisions we face in our country. There has always been division, but it does seem worse now. You would think that conservatives and liberals live in different worlds, The fact is - they do. Fox and OAN have their opinion hosts. CNN and MSNBC have their opinion hosts. When you listen to them, you know what you are getting. But it's much deeper than that. In the allegedly straight news segments on all these networks, the story selections read by the news readers are wildly divergent. Two recent examples. Jared Kuhner, President Trump's son in law, was nominated for a Nobel Peace prize due to his efforts to to bring about the Abraham accords. This was covered in 100% of the conservative media outlets and 0% of the liberal or alleged moderate or mainstream media outlets. Same thing with the news about Trump's campaign being spied upon by the Hillary campaign. This news was covered again by 0% of the liberal or alleged moderate or mainstream media outlets and 100% of the conservative outlets. Does it happen the other way. Yes it does. Not as frequent, but it happens.

There is an interesting web site from Ground News that documents objectively true verifiable news items that are ignored by one side of the political divide or the other. If you don't know about it, it never happened.

https://ground.news/blindspot
February 14, 2022, 06:10 PM
Lefty Sig
I thought that it was odd to dredge up a thread from 2017/2018. But I just realized it was started by JALLEN, so I am perfectly OK with it.
February 14, 2022, 08:17 PM
Lefty Sig
Fed161.

It's worse than just omissions. The leftist media actively lies about things we KNOW are true because we can see them on video and read the legal documents of the cases. Kyle Rittenhouse's entire case and trial is a perfect example.

They make up false stories about conservatives and get them to run on every single leftist outlet simultaneously. The "Trump said bad things about veterans" or Dan Rather's fake documents about George W. Bush that were so obviously fake due to the laser printer font that it was absurd to even run the story. All you need are "unnamed sources close to the administration" and then you can make up anything. Or maybe the story was planted on purpose by someone in the government on the condition of anonymity, and no effort was made to corroborate it.

I always like the montages on Fox where they show every MSM outlet saying exactly the same thing over and over.

Yeah, Fox might not report some things, but I've never caught them just making shit up and lying through their teeth. And they've been on the right side of the Russia Collusion Hoax, Kyle Rittenhouse's innocence as a matter of law, the absurd impeachment over talking to Ukraine, the absurd impeachment over Jan 6th, the Jan 6th riot not being an "insurrection", the increase in crime being caused by permissive DA's, Andrew Cuomo needlessly causing the death of many senior citizens in nursing homes, the overreach of COVID restrictions, the border "cages" being built and used by Obama, the illegal alien "child separation" policy, and ON and ON.

And as time goes on it will be proven that Fox was right about ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, the ineffectiveness of masks, that COVID was a lab leak that Fauci funded and then covered up, that Fauci conspired against Trump to prevent him from being reelected, that Hunter and Joe took bribes from everyone, that everything on the laptop is real, and ON and ON.

How can Fox be right about every single thing I've listed and the MSM get it wrong every damn time?

It's like there are two worlds. We live in reality where, say for example a deadly bat virus with a peculiar feature that makes it ideally suited to infecting humans breaks out in China right near a level 4 viral research facility that is on record applying to the NIH for funding to modify bat viruses to make them more infectious to humans, we conclude it MOST PROBABLY LEAKED FROM THE LAB. We also understand that sex/gender are biological, based on well understood genetics, and women and men cannot change into each other and no animal on the earth with a spinal cord is non-binary UNLESS there is a genetic defect. We can see that Hillary and the Deep State created the Russia Hoax, while those ultimately responsible may have plausible deniability, people working for them did a whole lot of illegal shit.

The alternative world is one where the exact same evidence I just stated is ignored and the "natural origin" story is repeated for more than a year, allowing the CCP to destroy/hide all evidence. It is also one where people will say with a straight face and all seriousness that men can really be women and women can really be men if they think they are. They also say seriously that capitalism has failed and we need a new system, but only offer the systems that have failed spectacularly everywhere they have been tried, and then say that the reason Communist Cuba has failed is because they cannot engage in trade with the largest capitalist economy in the world. Then they say spending $5T on fuck-all will reduce inflation and will not increase debt. Then they say white supremacy is causing the attacks on Asians even though every video of an attack shows a black perp. And that Gerymandering is racist when Republicans do it, and perfectly fine when Democrats do it. And that voting laws that are more inclusive in Georgia than the laws in Delaware are Jim Crowe 2.0. They say global warming is going to destroy the earth so we have to use non-viable sources of energy that are thermodynamically and economically incapable of meeting our needs. And best of all the "mostly peaceful but a little fiery" protests with the newscaster standing in front of a building set on fire by arsonists.

I sit and watch the news on Fox or maybe Newsmax, and flip to CNN and see them deny reality. I ask my 18 year old son "is it me?" How is it that half of this country can live in a Matrix-like existence believing what the leftist media says in contradiction to all evidence and rationality? Am I missing something? Have I somehow been tricked by the non-leftist media and it is me that is in the Matrix? And how can half the people in the county, including many well educated people I grew up with, or am related to, believe so many lies and absolute absurdity and parrot it back with all the talking points, all the while saying everything is the opposite of reality and that Fox is all lies?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Lefty Sig,
February 15, 2022, 12:25 PM
oldbill123
I want to eat cake
February 15, 2022, 02:29 PM
nhtagmember
No civil war but I do see targeted guerrilla activities as a more likely possibility.

And I would think that media would be near the top of the list so the smug bastards shouldn’t think they’re immune from what they have done.
February 16, 2022, 12:52 AM
RoverSig
Some elements of society are always involved in a "war" with institutions that provide order. Criminals, various cults, gangs, enemy agents, grifters and scoundrels, etc., are all out there violating the rules and damaging the overall common good in their own private wars against order and civility. None of this is large enough in scale that it can be called "civil war." Our society has proven resilient enough to overcome or just ignore the lawlessness or disruptive behavior of those outliers.

Some people think that institutions with power and influence are also a threat to our society. It is true that there are -ists and -isms out there that would destroy the relatively well-ordered system that we have and replace it with one that is more authoritarian, causing the good citizens to opposed them in a civil war. But our Constitution provides a very effective system of diffusing and sharing power -- avoiding the concentration of power in any one branch of government or institution so that, despite conflicts, no one center of power emerges that can suppress the population -- and drive the population to wage civil war against the power structure.

Same is true about the various racial or ethnic groups, geographic interests, portions of the economy, religions, fans of certain sports teams, etc., in the U.S. Every one of these gets to make its case, and they all sort of play off against each other. No one gets to dominate for long, before someone else comes along to take back some of the power. In general, the rules of civility and the legal order have held up (except for that one memorable fracas 160 years ago).

In short - no civil war.