Alright. Then imagine if it escalates into real social unrest of previously unseen severity and the “other side” came at them with guns with the backing of the government, which would bring me to my previous point that guns may even be a major contributing factor to government tyranny really happening.
Duterte actually GAVE people guns to “aid” him in his drug campaign during the time public opinion was on his side.
It would be a distinctly messy, distinctly American event. We do happen to have a gun culture unlike any other nation that’s ever existed, which does happen to contain a great many soldiers who have combat experience, along with millions of other LEO’s who mostly lean to the right.
Could a hypothetical tyrannical leftist government force capitulation through social and economic consequences? Perhaps, but there will be a lot of Waco’s if they try. Then they will be faced with the problem of finding people to do more Waco’s for the government.
"You want me to go over to that house where nobody’s ever caused problems and demand they give up their guns after the last place we went killed two of our guys?
No thanks. I quit."
Ok, I’d also like to reiterate once again that I’m not anti-guns. I just don’t think the argument that “guns are for defence against government tyranny” holds much water TODAY. Especially in the First World.
Again, we can agree to disagree on this part. I’ve simply not seen any examples even in any of the more chaotic places in my part of the world to be able to to buy it. It’d be like a socialist speculating that “they’ll get it right THIS time.”. This would in relation to MY thought process, not yours’s.
There are lots of other GOOD reasons I can fully agree with.
We’ll just have to wait for Civil War 2 for me to be proved correct!
I can’t wait for the Hollywood depiction of their version of events.
Hope Rian Johnson writes and directs it.
Actual communists want to line her up against the wall and shoot her along with the rest of the liberals.
Not sure how people think AOC is some Marxist. The same people seem to think Illhan Omar is a jihadist, when orthodox Muslims denounce her and everything she stands for from abortion to gay rights.
Sometimes it’s worth stepping out of our echo chambers.There is basically no organised Socialist presence in America. Unions were smashed, all the organisations around labour were infiltrated and destroyed. AOC and her ilk are essentially avatars for woke neoliberalism.
Critical race theory, standpoint epistemology, post colonial theory, these are all highly critical of marxist theory in one way of another and they actually impinge socialist progress. Which is why the woke brigade have found it so easy to embed themselves into the neoliberal business friendly democratic elite.
The actual Marxist revolutionaries I know agree. I have several friends active in the Poor People’s Campaign. Their problem with AOC is she’s not nearly leftist enough, and I understand why they think that way. These are people who believe in just about every leftist fantasy you can imagine, up to and including population control. You meet some interesting people in bars and Jiu Jitsu mats.
That still doesn’t mean that her polices and rhetoric can’t be broadly described as “Marxist”, which at this point encompasses a rather broad spectrum. She definitely represents the forefront of mainstream leftism that’s to the left of most democratic voters.
I don’t particularly see the value in drilling down to the differences between the various forms of failed leftist policies, so blanket terms are useful in that context. “Leftist” and “Marxist” are essentially overlapping terms in the USA to describe the fringes that seem to be driving democrat policy today. I fully agree that there’s a wide range of differences in the various failed policies that are often inaccurately called “Marxist”, depending on the time and place that it all unfolded. I just don’t see the value in spending a whole lot of time debating or understanding those finer points.
I’ve never aspired to be an expert in shitty ideas. It is easy enough to identify them as shitty and move on to understanding better ideas with better outcomes.
Whether tyranny exists depends upon the laws/policies/punishments/etc. in a society.
Water is wet.
If you’re implying that the US government is already tyrannical, have guns prevented this?
Any and every government is tyrannical by definition.
People love tyranny. Watcha gonna do?
Real communism ftw.
The Democratic Party’s policy is not being driven by Marxists that’s not a reasonable position to hold. The Democratic Party is one half of the state apparatus of the US empire. It is the face of liberal capitalism, western imperialism.
AOC is a “shitlib” in common parlance. She isn’t a dialectical materialist. She doesn’t call for a dictatorship of the proletariat. She is centre left by liberal (not leftist) standards.
Also ironically US communists are vehemently against gun control and attempts to disarm the working class is seen as bourgeois liberal boot licking.
For the record I am deeply opposed to both communism and liberalism.
You have already asserted that there are no real Islamic Nations that fully practice real Sharia. What makes you think any secular ideology won’t be distorted by people anywhere? It’s the roots of such ideologies that are dangerous when misapplied.
Have you ever seen a real communist state? Hippie communes don’t count.
“Marxist” is one of those mush-words that mean different things to different people. Not unlike “systemic racism”. I didn’t use it in this thread until you brought it up. I use general terms like that sometimes, but I always try to be clear about exactly what I’m talking about underneath those terms. Marxism is one of those topics that’s fully primed for a “No True Scotsman” argument that leads you straight to the Cave of Shitty Ideas. You can spend a lifetime exploring that place.
After all, one needs to pick a word when describing a set of policies that share common characteristics. In today’s American parlance I think it is fair to use “Marxism” as a blanket term to describe people who share the characteristic of pointing out flaws in the present system and concluding that government ought to do x, y or z to fix it. T
Conservative thought tends to reject that notion altogether, instead suggesting that government ought not get involved in things like “hate speech”, paying for your gender studies degree, or, to keep it pertinent, controlling the availability of firearms to people who’ve done nothing wrong.
That’s also a very broad description, but that’s a simplified version of how I see things lining up today in the USA. I will defer to your expertise on the finer points of failed leftist policies. I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t spent much time learning about the scholarly origins or historical narratives of that set of awful ideas and policies.
As I alluded to above, whatever’s happening now and whatever might happen in the future will be Distinctly American. We will use terms we know to understand it better and likely invent new terms to understand whatever happens that hasn’t happened before.
We’re the first America, after all.
Commies are just hippies desiring a nation wide hippie commune when cutting out all the bullshit and breaking it down into it’s most simplistic terms.
It’s the process of getting to their desired state, which would require signification transfer of powers to centralized authorities to effectively redistribute assets and socially engineer an entire population, and the ability to entertain the delusion that anyone would give up such powers once obtained, that fucks millions over.
This process is called socialism.
A lot of things have to go wrong for a free society to devolve into tyranny. It’s certainly not the case that an otherwise free society will become oppressed as soon as gun rights are restricted. But guns are definitely a pillar in the deterrent arsenal and their removal is often a step taken by oppressive governments.
In this case, I think the conclusion depends a lot on the interpretation of the evidence. The US hasn’t faced a technologically equivalent enemy since WW2, but our wartime success has been mixed, to put it mildly. Certainly no one has beaten us in a pitched battle, but it’s much more difficult to define what victory actually looks like. I think that an oppressive government would encounter much the same problem trying to control an armed population in the US. The thing is, it’s difficult to determine the difference between an armed citizenry acting as an effective deterrent and a government remaining benevolently representative regardless of it’s ability to be oppressive if it wanted to.
Why would such evidence even require bringing up the US’s military capabilities? Unless you have a large amount of vets both willing and able and able to take up arms AND train and organize a militia, the outcome of an actual armed conflict involving people who have no experience would resemble those martial arts guys standing still like a deer in the headlights when they receive a real punch to the face.
It’d end up like what I wrote about Tiananmen earlier if the participants were armed.
After something like this happens and is widely broadcast, who’s going to have the balls to engage in another one once they’ve seen the reality of it?
I wouldn’t call it a benevolent government, but rather, a government that relies on public sentiments for votes to stay in power and utilizes more efficient and diplomatic ways of controlling and maintaining the support of the population like the recent rise in popularism, social incentives and government services etc.
Even in HK, the CCP NEVER sent any troops in to control the rioters at any time. HK does not even have a military. The CCP would never resort to such tactics TODAY due to the international backlash it would receive. Surely they can’t be called a “benevolent” government?
They used a very simple strategy of letting the public get tired of the prolonged constant disruptions to their daily lives and the COVID situation to finally fuck them. Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves. Most of us in this region saw it coming and were lamenting on how stupid the rioters were.
I don’t think American servicemen and servicewomen will be eager to take up arms against Americans for any reason at all. Nor do any LEO’s I know. I don’t think they’re ready to go to war for Donald Trump and I don’t think they’re ready to go to war for woke.
The thing to keep in mind is that we presently have Americans in charge of America’s military.
My point was that even in countries with shitty militaries and lots of people who have firearms either legally or illegally obtained, armed conflicts have almost always resulted in the manner in which I described several times earlier.
And you’re probably right, which also is why I said earlier that such a thing wouldn’t be likely to take place in a First World country TODAY even if the population was unarmed. From what you’ve described, would they take up arms against unarmed civilians for oppressive reasons?
I brought up China to illustrate that even a country that can, and is willing to isolate over a million people and place a large number of them in re-education camps wouldn’t do this today for fear of international and internal backlash.
Which still doesn’t mean I’m anti-gun. I just don’t buy THAT particular argument.
I can read between the lines. I don’t find your support of unlimited gun rights to be sufficiently vitriolic. I now present this aged video as evidence.
