Okay obligatory occasional post about why bad peace is usually better than even the best war and why civil war would be horrible and you should pray against it. https://twitter.com/gaitanalyst/status/1199532562546343939

Some of you have seen war and most of you haven’t. Many have opinions or contrarian opinions or reverse contrarian opinions on who will win Wrestlemania Infinite: American Boogaloo. All our opinions are shit, nobody knows, and “but who would win” is a comic book fan question.

You think you are smarter and farther-seeing than the many professionals who’s lives were on the line and predicted they would win wars? You are not.

Insofar as there is a first meta-level law about wars it is this: war usually represents a grievous miscalculation by one or both parties about the outcome of violence, in a situation where both parties had every incentive to calculate correctly.

Insofar as there is a second it is: people are very bad at estimating the morale and resilience of their enemies and nearly always assume enemies will respond differently than they themselves would in the situation. This is so weird and common it feels like a cognitive curse.

The same people who talk about “bearing any burden...paying any price” believe opponents will give up if just bombed enough. People who frame things as victory vs. extinction for their own tribe assume other tribes are willing to trust themselves to the mercy of victors.

Twitter debates about this basically recapitulate this cognitive error in a bumper bowling context.

What is certain about civil war is that however it went down it would be utterly vicious. It would be much nastier than America’s first civil war, or any war America has fought both in terms of the scale and the scope of violence.

It is tempting (a la Pinker) to think that we are somehow more humane than our ancestors. But consider: the American civil war saw men LARPing as their great grandfathers fighting the British; those g grandfathers had been LARPing as Christianized Romans/Greeks....

...war crimes notwithstanding, the north and south mostly had a common religion - and they had religion, they thought they were accountable to God! - and did not view the war as total until it became such on its own (because of each side underestimating the will of the other).

In 2019, everybody from every side seems to accept without argument - and this is because modern war has tended this way, so we are all LARPing as PLA or Zetas - is that a civil war would be total or terroristic or even eliminationist.

Here we stop to remind everybody that if you have a face on Twitter it would take hours, maybe minutes, for interested non-state actors to find your family members. And that even if you don’t have a face the NSA or Jack Dorsey can still find you without a problem.

This is, of course, the unanswerable rejoinder to the “muh tanks and bombers” crowd. This is what modern civil war is. It’s Captain America successfully seizing caches and operating so hard and then finding out on Twitter that an elementary school was just disappeared.

Guns matter, sure. When you realize that almost none of the US’s infrastructure is hardened and that you could cut off power or water to millions with tools you can pay cash for at Home Depot...oh buddy.

Not that there’s not a million ways for the team that has already captured the state and its tentacles to hurt people. Children will inform on millennials, as will boomers. Control of all media goes a long way toward fucking up any positive plan you had.

But whatever chess moves play out for the armchair generals, the background would hum with targeted killings carried out by people with very little to lose who had already memed themselves into Kurtz-style ethics - cutting off arms to stop the vaccine crowd, as it were.

This is not just true of whatever side is out of official power. Historically, regimes have used paramilitaries to carry out terror/cleansing campaigns, rather than regular troops. Armies don’t want to do this shit and are too inflexible. So you get Arkan’s Tigers or Interahamwe.

Shitlibs who talk about killing rednecks using tanks and bombers basically don’t understand their own options. Put, I dunno, various sadistic tankies in charge and they would quickly realize the advantages of just arming their own auxiliaries and giving them semi-official cover.

what’s important to realize is that you can subtract all the culture away and just look at the tech and arrive at this battlefield. Terrorism in 1856 was visitors with *swords* at night. But in 2019 millions of Americans could build a passable IED without an internet search.

And if you take comfort in the belief that mostly people will accept your team once you get power - you will struggle bravely, but others will roll over for you - all I can say is that you have a lot to learn about people and about how many you have to kill to make them love you.