GuyIncognito

This video summarizes my feelings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKbEaZ-Jnws

Why!? Why, Combinator!?

Have you not seen the memes? Or are you saying that the Great Leaf Forward isn't real, and I spent my life's savings on pictures of Mao Zedong for nothing?

If the fine people of Minnesota have access to RPGs or high calibre machine guns, it may as well be made of butter

We very badly need air defences. We don't have so much as a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile, let alone anything long-ranged.

After WW2, the various industrialists who financed and supported the Nazi party all got off scot free. I hope that isn't the case this time around.

We sent a bunch of these to Ukraine. They didn't perform well - got stuck in the mud easily, the armour wasn't sufficient for the threats, and the height didn't help with not getting hit. They're appropriate for colonial policing operations, which is why they're perfect for ICE, provided the Minnesotans start shooting back

They have no defined borders, the most extreme among them claim the whole middle east, and they just keep getting more extreme. The progression is obvious

At least it's interesting to watch!

I agree, the separatists should go on down to the US

I got rid of it years ago, thankfully, but I've heard the talk. As it stands, we wouldn't make it a week outside of a guerrilla war, and I don't know if we have a strong enough society or motivated enough populace for guerrilla war. We could make ourselves a hard enough target for them to avoid if we invested heavily in expanding the military, but where are we going to get the weapons? America? They could turn them off remotely I'm sure. China would be a good option, but America might invade us right away once they found out we were doing that. It's a big problem.

Even if we could get the Europeans to do anything more than write a strongly-worded letter, they don't have much in the way of military might themselves. Frankly, I don't trust them to help unless something changes, but the ticket is deterrence. We need to make ourselves a hard enough target that the Americans aren't willing to try to take a bite, and it's going to take a combination of alliances (we should ally with Mexico, since America is coming for them too) and armaments.

Regarding shifting social spending to defence, I think it's a bad idea, at least without other major changes elsewhere. Part of our problem is motivation - we've had 40 years of neoliberalism telling us the state owes us nothing besides tax credits and we owe the state nothing besides paying our taxes and obeying the law. We're already halfway to losing public healthcare, so we won't even be able to fight for that. We need a fundamental paradigm shift to save this country, and I'm not sure if we have the will or the imagination.

"You have to earn my vote" is very different from "you'll never get my vote no matter what you do." You can kind of say whatever you want though, given that the Democrats never tried to earn votes.

You should realize there is a spectrum between "working within the existing Democratic party structure" and "violent revolution." The former is as unlikely as the latter. But now that I put it into words, maybe you're right. Maybe all change in America is equally impossible - the establishment is too powerful and entrenched, and the American people just don't have it in them to fight for anything. Maybe you just have to ride this doom spiral all the way to the bottom and rebuild from the rubble before anything gets any better.