We’ll see, whip guy could easily switch to a gun though and you wouldn’t reach step 3 for a long time
My own big problem with it all is that we keep talking about guns to fight back, but drones and the network of surveillance cameras that exist we also really need to talk about, including the doorbell ones that law enforcement already has access to.
Its internet power fantasy meme to feel good and empowered. Something for protestors to share around and consolidate the community. Maybe works well for unionizing context but I don’t think people think about what exactly would happen in a real world what-if scenario for civilians overthrowing a modern nation-state or a privately owned militia.
If you live in a five-eyes country they already know your face, gait, bodytype, and have for at least a decade. Mask and funny walks ain’t doing much either since the cameras are everywhere every block every other house.
If it ever comes to a boiling point to the point of civil war and the federal military is forced to enact martial law or billionares hire entire personal merc armies with black market stuff, no amount of poorly trained armed civilians and hacked together makeshift diy weaponry can stand up to today’s high tech sci-fi ass killing technology. This isnt the 20th century anymore.
long range directed microwaves cooking your body from the inside out. Thousands of suicide bomb remote control drones. Privately owned rods of god. Supersonic sound generators that rattle your brain into a concussion while blowing eardrums. Thats not even getting into chemical-weaponry-but-we-still-use-it-tee-hee shit like white phosphor strikes or manufactured plagues.
The only thing really stopping that scenario is that any nation state even a corporatocracy that starts systematically killing its own citizens in full blown genocide in broad daylight has effectively announced itself at war with every other nation-state on earth. And it really would take just that to take down a 2.5 trillion dollar yearly defense budget or a consolidated trillionaire sovergn state.
Don’t forget all wars are economic. Even with all of that technology, a reactionary gap exists where guerrillas can do damage.
But yes, it is scary and it will be hard.
Maybe once this is over we chill on weapons development? Idk.
We need to do some hard thinking about systemic fixes in a vacuum. We really don’t have a perfect answer to preventing eventual power disparities that eventually accelerate in a game theoretical sense, imho, and we probably want as best of an answer as possible to rally around and hopefully one day test. Patching what we have now is a more reachable option, but even that needs to be defined better as well, imo. I’m talking ranked voting, removing money influence, market collusion, market manipulation, oligopolies, no media monopolies, removing taxes havens while not incentivizing the chasing of loop holes; vs direct democracy or adjacently less-representative forms.
I totally agree. I think we need big changes. The leader of our country implied we’d be doing stuff like that, but he’s a banker, so who really knows.
To play devil’s advocate, because this is where my fears and doubts lie, is do we (as humanists/anti-authoritarians worldwide) have enough nation-states with enough manpower to fight back the current openly fascist ones if it came to it given that authoritarianism and tolerance to it is worryingly on the rise in traditionally democratic first-world countries? It seems that maybe due to current analytical tools like palantir, psy ops from social media and regular media, (or for one reason or another); mass-control government factions are reaping the benefits of a sedated population, the outrage may simply never reach a point of action because it is being actively dissipated the Goldilocks amount relative to the rate of increase in power disparity.
On the other hand, if the other guy also had a gun, you could get lucky and go straight to step 4.
When they said “The only person who can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” I didn’t imagine I would ever embrace it. But here we are.
on what basis?
