Quote of the Day
These people are playing with matches… I don’t think they understand the scope and scale of the wildfire they are flirting with. They are fucking around with a civil war that could last a decade and cause millions of deaths… and the sad truth is that 95% of the problems we have in this country could be solved tomorrow, by noon… simply by dragging 100 people out in the street and shooting them in the fucking head.
Mr. Wheeler
June 2012
The Pig Trap
I’m not sure it is quite that simple. There is a huge “swamp” to be drained to reduce the size of our government to that which it is supposedly limited to by the U.S. Constitution.
That said, if it were possible to avoid the civil war as described by the execution of the appropriate 100 people I can see a case being made for that. It is similar to the adage, “A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords at dawn.”
It is most definitely not that simple. He seems to be in denial that there is a significant segment of the population, concentrated in the big cities, that can reasonably be classified as domestic enemies. There is no way we can make them other than enemies but we can make them other than domestic via the National Divorce. They, of course, feel the same way about us which is the key factor that makes the National Divorce feasible.
The killing of 100 people is sort of a reboot of Stalin’s “no man, no problem. Of course, Stalin actually killed millions.
One can argue about how much of the population is on the other side vs just disconnected. The high end would be about 40% which is the absolute floor for the Democrat vote ( It was 48% in 1860). The low end would be about 4% (Sanders vote in 2016 Democrat primary/total population). As the Threepers assert, this is enough to make a revolution. Bolshevik and IRA movements had substantially less. Take a midline estimate of 22% As near as I can tell only Pol Pot and the British government in Ireland ever succeeded in killing this much of the population. Pol Pot provoked a Vietnamese invasion and most of Ireland eventually became independent.
Ya, what Richard said! It use to be that easy. Say 30 years ago. Them days be gone.
The only thing I can disagree with Richard is that of supply lines. Big cities, where your 22% are. Connot be resupplied. Unless China and Russia get in the game. And then only at bare shelve, day to day minimums.
To me the southern border invasion is a sacrifice play.
Move people in, pull the rug out of the economy, crane up civil war through infrastructure destruction. And when they’re finished killing each other, they will be little more than Libya on the world stage.
China and Russia will be able to do whatever than want for the next 50 years. Tech being what it is? Maybe longer.
Most big cities are on the coast or adjacent to an international border and can be supplied from abroad. For the rest, it really depends on what the military does. At any rate, Leningrad stood siege for years. About a million died but I expect our Bolsheviks to care as little as theirs did.
Agreed, but who can or will resupply them? China can barely feed itself, and Russia would rather we all starved at this point. And anything extra is going to our enemies.
Europe is being shut down as we speak. And in a civil war, dollars are going to be crap on the international market.
Everything we import to survive will come to an halt. Even if you could find a boat to bring supplies, what you going to pay for them with?
They say the last act of a dying empire is to loot the treasury. (Happening now). But the real last thing is the population gets looted by barbarians. (Being imported now). Those cities are going to be kill zones of the highest order.
We don’t have enough military left in this country to do more than guard a bunch of elitists up in Martha’s vineyard. They ain’t coming out to the country, unless their looking for a meal.
The rest of us are on our own. Ain’t going to be no resupply.
The Bracken article that was linked by Archer below posits the use of Federal LE. Given that every Federal agency seems to have a LE arm including the EPA and the Ed Department, not to mention the 35,000 in the FBI and the 80,000 new IRS agents, this seems entirely feasible. Especially if communications were interdicted which is child’s play.
Love Matt’s stuff. Great story. Wrote before the border invasion. (Though they might be the ones in uniform.)
There will be plenty of them turning off the electrical grid also.
No power = no power.
And the 80,000 new IRS agents are going to live where, and eat what? All the while kicking in doors and killing whitey for the fun of it?
Have you seen half of those fat-asses? Most of them are people the WEF wants dead.
Study logistics bro. For 2,000 conservatives, maybe. For the whole country? Free-for-all shit-show is all they get.
Every day, there’s a nice round one hundred people that could be executed to make the trains run on time or whatever. The only limiting factor to this principle is when there are ninety-nine or fewer people left.
Ergo, this is not a moral course of action or line of reasoning. QED.
If those people were managing the death camps, I think I could make a good case contrary to your assertion.
At that point, we’re down to the Trolley Problem, aren’t we?
Choice 1: You do nothing, 100 people die today killed by 10 devoted murderers.
Choice 2: You kill 10 devoted murderers, then 100 people aren’t killed that day, and the 100 per day they would have killed every day after that aren’t killed. But you have to get up off your butt and kill those 10 yourself.
That’s a far cry from the choice of “I kill 100, I get the [policy outcome I like]”. That puts you in the murders category that someone will be justified in killing.
The issue with the trolley problem is that it only gives you a contrived choice, and you don’t get to, say, kill the power that makes the trolley move, or derail the trolley, or shout at the people to get off the line.
If you can get to the endpoint of “100 people aren’t killed per day” by any other method other than killing the 10 death camp guards, that should be done first. Those 10 could be arrested for conspiracy to commit murder before the death camp opens. A death camp isn’t just something that springs up on its own; it requires an organization and tacit or explicit government approval to operate, so set up the available authorities to protect individual rights and protect individual rights of self-defense. If the death-campers are relying on government complicity in either action or inaction, make it clear that government agents acting in support will be held to account in their individual capacity, possibly on the spot.
Rabid dogs have to be shot, because there is no other recourse. If your proposition is “A better world awaits us if we shoot 100 rabid dogs per day”, the limiting factor of the proposition is when we run out of rabid dogs. But we also have the available option of what to shoot them with. A .50 BMG is available, possible and ready to go now. But if someone comes up with a syringe-gun that will immediately knock them out, and also deliver a serum that cures rabies before they wake up, that’s a better option. You still have the .50 BMG if that doesn’t work. That’s still subject to straightforward economics if the syringe-shot costs $500 per shot compared to $5 .50 BMG; you’d have to live an exceptionally wealthy nation to have the option to make that choice.
So, rather than “let’s kill the 100 people per day that are most directly threatening to my life”, how about “let’s not have a government/societal structure where even one person has the power to threaten my life without exposing themselves to personal risk of the same or greater magnitude”.
In other words, “Don’t start none, won’t be none”, FAFO and the Seventh Peelian principle as fundamental principles.
A big problem with killing leaders and cutting camp supply is instead of liberation you get Bergen-Belsen.
In the age of information warfare, it would seem we’ve suffered a coup and the intellegence warlords are in control. Killing Zuckerberg does nothing, nor killing the people who coerced his and others censorship of the internet. How do you liberate the power the federal institutions stole and return it to the States and the People?
At one time, Congress treated the budget like they were spending their own money.
Our problem is that Congress has been coopted by the bureaucracy. We have surpassed the point where more people work directly and indirectly for the government than work for private industry. The “Swamp” is electing their own candidates.
So how to reverse this sorry mess. I propose a fourth branch of government, the Lean Branch, whose job it is to seek out failed government programs and agencies, agencies that have outlived their function (the ICC comes to mind.) and programs and agencies that have become corrupt. When such an instance is identified, Lean pulls their budget and disbands the program or agency.
To be sure that Lean does their job, their only budget comes from shutting down programs.
This is not a job for statesmen. It is a job for the most avaricious of bureaucrats who will in turn shut down other bureaucrats.
Ideas along those lines:
Those employed by government or deriving a significant fraction of their income have a conflict of interest. They don’t get to vote in elections at that level. I’d include active duty military, but not part-time reservists. It does include everyone on welfare; the prospect of bread and circuses loses its shine when it means you’re eroding your voter base.
Finish the legislative session with more debt than 95% of the outstanding debt at the beginning: you’re disqualified for the office, even if you were just re-elected. Runner up gets the job. Lame duck sessions start being about cost cutting, not last minute pork.
Lifetime limit of 10 years (of working days, counted day by day) of safe government employment at any level. If you want more than that, the day’s duty must include activities that are inherently risky. Something is not inherently risky if it doesn’t necessarily involve issued PPE or recurring training to mitigate the risk. It’s a working day if you are exercising any powers ofyour office or deriving any special official deference.
Along the lines of the Lean a branch, include a house of Congress whose only power is to repeal laws, and they only need 30% to do it.
I agree, it’s not that simple. 100 people might remove some of the most influential leaders, but it will leave thousands or millions of “true believers” to continue the work. Weeding them out (out of power, not out of life) is a vastly more complicated problem.
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Matt Bracken wrote about this concept, with the “other side” holding that belief. Read What I Saw at the Coup.
Basically (trying to avoid spoilers), the Bad Guys in government think they can stop the “freedom” and “patriot” movement by eliminating just a couple thousand (not 100) key people without a trace. And then those couple thousand’s support base realizes what happened, quietly mobilizes, and all hell breaks loose. CW2-lite under 4GW rules.
Leftists read it and think it’s Right-wing dystopian violence pr0n (and being written by a White Guy, probably racist). Conservatives read it and think it’s a warning a la Orwell’s 1984 — and that just like 1984 the warning will not be heeded by the Left.
Either way, it’s a short read, and recommended.
“There is no way we can make them other than enemies…”
I can think of one way…..
Making them martyrs is seldom a winning strategy.
You just need to make enough of them. Let’s ask the Carthaginians their opinion on turning enemies into martyrs.
Your handle is well chosen.
The concept espoused is sound. The actual number is way off. I think the number of people who need to be removed from society in order to return America to freedom now numbers WELL into the tens of thousands…perhaps hundreds of thousands. But doing so WOULD solve many of the problems we face.