SatanicNotMessianic

I’m not going to be shorting TSLA. I’m a firm believer in the adage that the market can remain wrong longer than you can remain solvent.

I really do feel like the blush is off the rose, though. I think Elon lost it sometime during the Model 3 supply chain fiasco, and that his very public decline has been accelerating ever since.

I just don’t know what happens to Tesla once this too fails. Virtually all of their valuation is based on the Trump-level hype machine that is Elon, so getting rid of him will crash the stock like a Tesla in self driving mode. On the other hand he’s very publicly circling the drain.

The difficulty with that scenario is that the US is bound by two oceans and has a navy more powerful in some estimates than the rest of the navies in the world combined. Ukraine can be supplied because they’re contiguous with Western Europe. North Korea could be supplied by China, as could Vietnam. To supply the neo-confederates, Russia or China would have to cross an ocean and get past the US Navy, as well as the navies of other allied countries. Then they’d have to bring in the systems via either Mexico or Canada, both of which would be allied with the US.

I think you could imagine a scenario where they smuggle in small arms, but not artillery or other modern weapons systems.

It’s because they know it’s political theater. Bullshit posturing. Virtue signaling. As long as it gets the red state voters worked up so they’re not paying attention to actual issues, that’s what counts.

Texas is not going to secdee.

It feels like eating a toothpick and getting a bit stuck in your teeth leads to one of those infinite loop scenarios.

The Battle Cry of Freedom is pretty widely seen as being one of the best introductions to the civil war.

You also have to factor in the fact that the military today is not a bunch of guys with rifles. It is carrier battle groups, fighter jets, sophisticated artillery systems, and other platforms that require massive supply chains to deploy and maintain. That’s just what modern warfare is. US aircraft carriers alone are crewed by 5000+ people.

Raytheon, Northrop, and Lockheed are not going to side with Ohio against the US government. The question is about civil war, not about a single military unit going rogue until the members are arrested or killed. Keeping planes in the air and tanks running requires a lot more than Ohio can do. The Feds spend about a trillion dollars per year on the military, and some Confederate missile battery is going to be in trouble once they run low on things to shoot and when their vehicles start to break down.

I’m not a fan of the military industrial complex, to say the least, but it’s an absolutely necessary part of warfare today.

You have to understand that the US military today is a very different organization than it was in the 1860s. I know - I served and majored in military history for my first undergraduate degree, and studied the civil war in particular. I also come from a military family with a father, grandfather, and uncle who served as officers until retirement age.

Far right domestic terrorism is a real and developing threat coming from both former military personnel and from civilians. The election of a far right government that shreds the constitution is also a major threat to American democracy. But if the shit does come down, it’s not going to be because some Guardsmen decide that they’d follow DeSantis over Biden.

Military justice is no joke. Falling on the wrong side of it can end people. The military is also very integrated and has political as well as ethnic diversity. I’m not saying you couldn’t find an Army colonel who wouldn’t want to engage in an armed rebellion, but the country today is very, very different than it was mid-19th century, and so is the military.

Please do note that I do see the rise of American fascism as a real threat. It’s just not going to manifest because state Guard orgs decide to disobey orders.

I think it’s possible that there will be resentment, but those with rank would be risking everything for zero gain. It would be determined by the people who wear the birds and the stars, and although there have certainly been high ranking officers who have engaged in conduct we might consider treasonous, it’s simply not going to be a common enough occurrence.

A Handmaid’s Tale scenario, where the US goes down the path of a Christian theocracy, is a possibility that concerns me,

European nations will need to increase the sizes and capabilities of their militaries because the US is no longer a reliable partner, whether or not Trump gets elected again. As Trumpism has come to define the Republican Party, the US is no longer a reliable partner.

Because it is the process of years and decades, European nations need to start building capabilities now, even if Trump loses the election. The US has demonstrated that they can move to a Russian-aligned power as the outcome of a single election, which was unthinkable ten years ago.

I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around that, but every “adults in the room will prevent this” has proven very flimsy, and there’s no reason that a post-Trump Republican Party wouldn’t be subjected to the same kind of politics.

The only saving grace is that, as far as I can tell, there’s no post-Trump plan and the republicans might split into two parties once he’s no longer among the living. If that does happen, they’re going to have trouble winning national elections. Trump is such a narcissistic egomaniac that he will not have a successor designated, so it will turn into an open field.

It’s not a totally unreasonable impression, but no, this will not turn into a second civil war. The Guard units of each state can be called up for federal duty. The National Guard is part of the US Department of Defense and thus ultimately answers to the DoD and the US president as commander in chief. The US military has multiple components, including regular services (eg the full time Army), reserve components (eg US Army Reserve) and National Guard components. The latter two are part-time military with one weekend per month training duty plus an annual training. Guards members and Reservists hold regular full time jobs.

The Guard units are deployable by the governors of their respective states, and so can be used in emergency situations like natural disasters. They have also been deployed against what have been perceived as riots that threaten lives and properties of the individual states.

However, they are subject to activation by order of the US president and they fall under the national command authority. Guard personnel take the same oath to the constitution as other military personnel, and cannot legally refuse federal activation. Guards personnel would be subject to courts martial and face potentially extreme penalties including being discharged from service under criminal conditions, being stripped of rank and benefits, and jail time in federal prison. This would be what we call a career limiting rule.

So, if push comes to shove, Biden can activate the NG and order them to stand down or to implement policies to maintain order. Thinking the NG units and in particular their commanders would disobey a presidential order because they just love their state governor and hate the president so much is getting into Turner Diaries levels of right wing apocalyptic fantasy.

I only see this argument made by conservatives. It is a deliberate attempt to drive a racist and LGBT-phobic wedge between the white working class and the Democratic Party. I have never seen a progressive person demand less support for the rights of minorities.

I also favor raising the minimum wage, making universities free to attend, and having universal healthcare - but LGBT rights aren’t the reason we don’t have those things. The GOP is the reason we don’t have those things, and it’s not like if the Dems said “Fuck it, arrest and kill the gays” that the GOP would suddenly support workers’ rights.

If you want to help the poor, vote out the party that says shit like this.

That’s an interesting thought. At first I was wondering what would distinguish them from standard anti-aircraft systems, and then it clicked.

They’d have to be fast - at least with the ability to put on a burst of speed significantly higher than that of the target drone. Making it have an explosive increases the damage and potentially area of effect, but if you think about it like the kinetic kill vehicles designed to take out ICBMs, I think you can just whack the target drone hard enough to knock it out while potentially increasing speed, decreasing weight, and decreasing costs.