The problem is, the government always has bigger guns. I agree that worldwide, governments will collapse, but not in the next couple of years.
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The problem is, the government always has bigger guns. I agree that worldwide, governments will collapse, but not in the next couple of years.
I think they run out of people willing to fratricide themselves before we run out of people wanting to be free.
Ergo, here come the robots!
Time to shame the neighbors for working in the gov't weapons factories, imo.
About that bigger guns thing. The government CAN'T nuke it's own people. Most of the military personnel would defect and join - or start - a rebellion the minute they did. Most of them have mothers, and most of their mothers live here, so they're not going to like mothers being nuked.
As to ordinary sized guns, rather than the big ones, American civilians have a LOT more of them than the US military. More than all the military forces of the whole world combined, in fact. Every time the Pentagon runs a simulation of a rebellion against the government, the government loses. It's never even close, actually. What happens in their tabletop exercises is that regional warlords cut ground transport at chokepoints, like the Mississippi, and the USG is reduced to air transport, and cannot project force on the ground. Bombing campaigns can't take clay. The Houthis proved that last year.
They also proved that hordes of drones made of sticks, string, and hand grenades make $1T carriers useless. One little dimple on the flight deck and that carrier is only a liability, incapable of projecting force. Decentralization FTW! Whatever the problem is, freedom is the solution.
Edit: freedom and guns, that is.
For "bigger guns", read control of media, communications, finance and surveillance. Just look at what happened to the Canadian truckers. Americans may be heavily armed, but they are not an organised force. Without something like "V for Vendetta" levels of organisation, it’s hard to see how fragmented civilian armies could mount any serious challenge to the state. Nor can I see the military defecting unless the government had already entirely lost legitimacy and control.
And do most people even want freedom? With freedom comes responsibility and all that. In Ireland, 60% of the population receives some sort of government handout. Are they going to bite the hand that feeds unless that hand can no longer do so? I suspect you have rather more faith in your fellow man than I do.
Gasp! what about that free press and privacy we ordered the USG not to transgress in the document that grants it the privilege of serving as our means of self governance?
Yeah, that's all actually not lawful in the USA.
You'd be quite shocked how quickly a few veterans can cobble some up. As I stated, the USG used to war game rebellions regularly, and never once won against civilians. US servicemen are volunteers, and swear an oath to defend the people, and the Constitution, not government agencies and corrupt bureaucrats, and most of them know the difference. Also, they have families, and if the USG is attacking civilians with military force, their families, mothers, brothers, wives, and daughters are in the crosshairs.
It's hard to understand how half of them don't join the rebellion.
Many will not. But folks that will put up with tyranny for ~$200 a month in food stamps aren't worth much to folks with merit, and most would meet Yuval Hariri's description of 'useless eaters'. They're neither going to rebel, nor oppose them that do, so I don't think they matter much either way. When armed civilians outnumber soldiers >100:1, any egregious tyrannical oppression isn't likely to be long tolerated, and soldiers ordered to illegally wage war on the civilian population they've sworn to protect, that they joined the service to protect, are naturally going to be conflicted, and some will be outright rebellious about such orders. They're being ordered to stop being the heroes they signed up to be, and become the villains they signed up to fight against. Most people really depend for their self esteem on a (often false) sense of being virtuous. Shooting at crowds of civilians is what bad guys do, and everybody knows it.
I don't think it's a leap of faith to expect soldiers to be extremely hesitant to shoot into crowds that could contain their mothers, sisters, and daughters. Maybe even to prefer to shoot at the assholes giving those illegal orders to commit war crimes. There were a lot of officers shot over in Vietnam. Such development isn't unpredictable, nor unprecedented.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree, but allow me to make two final points.
First, on war games: games have rules, but when your back is against the wall and there’s a gun to your head, rules evaporate.
Second, on people’s tolerance for tyranny. If the Covid nonsense taught us anything, it’s just how far reality can be bent before it finally breaks, and the answer is: much further than anyone imagined. No guns were required to persuade most to lock themselves indoors, to distrust their own eyes, or to accept that hospitals were simultaneously overwhelmed and empty enough for choreographed routines, that masks worked… except when they didn’t, that vaccines stopped transmission… until they didn’t and that “two weeks to flatten the curve” quietly stretched into two years.
I rest my case:)
But, if you sign up a bunch of foreigners to your army, no problems at all,...
You might read up on the Praetorian Guard. Maybe it was the Varangian Guard? Forces consisting of non-natives are notorious for treachery, mutiny, and revolt. That has always been a problem. It is why Rome grew from nothing with a citizen army, and fell to it's own troops comprised of Goths, although Theodoric simply cut out the corrupt garbage and kept Rome going for decades until his death.
I do get your point, that foreign mercenary forces are somewhat more willing to trample the natives. There's limits to that too, and this is alarming to those soldiers that join the military forces with a promise of citizenship. They are not unaware they are destroying the value of that citizenship when they're doing it.
No shortage of folks willing to sell their souls for the overlord's gold, for now.
They will be in shorter supply when that gold comes at a higher cost to the souls selling.