American righties all “I’d like to see the left try, we’ve got plenty of small arms!” and like
my friend, let me tell you a thing about urban combat
Well what’s true about urban warfare is you can fortify prepared positions against bullets and use local knowledge and interior lines well enough that the defender’s at a huge advantage if you’re limited to small arms. You’d want air support or artillery, howitzers at least. Maybe you could do it with support weapons or explosive charges for breaching, but that’s very expensive in time and men, and explosives aren’t just lying around anymore. (Tannerite?)
I’m thinking of Vienna in the Austrian Civil War, the Karl-Marx-Hof housing development that leftists held against trained soldiers. Until they brought cannons in.
Which is the thing, when you line up your logistics and your politics (in a civil war, the besieger often starts off wanting to capture intact) to the point where you have heavy weapons, things change.
The MOVE bombing in Philadelphia - that was a group that had fortified their base, which was in a rowhouse block with party walls that could be tunneled through, and explicitly planned a dramatic final stand, but the Philly police had the logistical and political support to bring in a helicopter and bombs and they won it in a rout.
Guernica, you remember the Picasso painting, that’s from the Spanish Civil War, that’s a thing a right-insurrection pulled against a left-held town when it got bomber planes and worked up a “gloves are off” ideology.
The Siege of Sarajevo, that went on for years and there was hostile artillery in the hills encircling the town, but the New World Order crimped the besiegers’ materiel supply, denied airspace, and resupplied the city with UN convoys, you’d need US or Russian government patronage to pull that off.
The food supply - yeah, on one hand the just-in-time supply system cuts down stocks but from the French and Russian Revolutions we know cities are perfectly capable of fielding expeditionary forces of sufficient mass to seize food from more thinly populated areas.
(when it looked like Trump was going to lose and things might get rough in that direction, I looked up the location of nearby distribution centers, not the worst idea)
On the other hand, the idea that rightist forces would be able to lay sieges on cities strong enough to contain breakout attempts, long enough to force submission, prevent resupply by air or sea, either prevent reinforcements from elsewhere from breaking the siege or siege all leftist centers simultaneously while holding off any external intervention, but at that point we’re still talking militia guys with ARs and not an actual military, what scenario is that?
So yesterday I woke up in the afternoon and the big news was we were NOT going to invade Mexico, today featured two independent discussions of the political influence of erotic furry artist Jay Naylor.
From The Guardian.
wonder how many people will die for those sandbars
China has tanker plane and carrier programs in beta and can’t project power across water against challenge for shit, meanwhile the USMC has specialized in Pacific island conquest since the Spanish-American War, preemptive strike isn’t inherently absurd
Diplomatically though, do it right and you reaffirm SEATO in the face of TPP collapse, fuck it up enough and most of the world’s shipbuilding capacity’s in the Co-Prosperity Sphere, maybe this administration should get its sea legs first
(what China has is a missile program to scare carrier groups out of homeland strike range and a big noisy sub fleet for merchant raiding, but I’m not sure what the valence of Pacific trade is right now)
Trump, buddy, Australia’s the Anglophone racist frontier your supporters are gonna have to expatriate to if you fuck this up, don’t piss in the punch
*is killed in my iHouse by my hologram anime girlfriend like HAL 9000 in 2001 a space odyssey*
“gomenasai, watashi can’t do that”
I dunno if the last MCU overexposed him and they’re dialing that back but
My impression of Captain America lately is every few weeks the curatorial net passes on two pages of the best alt-right speech you’ve ever heard
Someone want to explain that?
Irish alt-pop like U2 and The Cranberries (favored charity: War Child, the displaced of the Yugoslav War) represented a R2P-themed superstar civic society in a culture that had been the site of Marxist armed struggle into the 90s huh
so, like, in Ancap Utopia what happens to people who don’t have money?
#you might say they’re given money by private citizens#but actually plenty of people are not in fact given money by private citizens#charitable donations (a figure which includes gifts of money to eg harvard) are quite low actually#and some former tax money would be redirected to private replacements for government services#plus many charitable donations are already tax-deductible#and many people—many *rich* people—complain that their taxes are far too high#these objections also basically apply to eg community funds#also the thing where humans aren’t rational actors#anyway. i’m talking about people who actually don’t have money
they would dance for the amusement of the wealthy, obviously
they would be free to live from the unclaimed commons, if the existence of such people persisted alongside town-dwellers in supply chain industries there would develop institutions by which they could offer themselves up for labor
these institutions would develop such that nature-dwellers would resort to them in times of famine or harsh conditions or scarcity and then return in times of plenty
town-dwellers would push to use their concentrated institutions to indebt extract more from nature-dwellers instead of being their bottleneck-clearing savior in time of need and getting the most marginal labor in return
this would tend towards Classical slavery. countervailing traditions like jubilee or bankruptcy might develop in mitigation
the ability to control famine or conditions or needs or access to viable commons or the terms of comparison of quality of life between city- and nature- will tend towards the domination of the free by the city-dweller society (as distinct from any given city-dweller)
so, like, in Ancap Utopia what happens to people who don’t have money?
#you might say they’re given money by private citizens#but actually plenty of people are not in fact given money by private citizens#charitable donations (a figure which includes gifts of money to eg harvard) are quite low actually#and some former tax money would be redirected to private replacements for government services#plus many charitable donations are already tax-deductible#and many people—many *rich* people—complain that their taxes are far too high#these objections also basically apply to eg community funds#also the thing where humans aren’t rational actors#anyway. i’m talking about people who actually don’t have money
they would dance for the amusement of the wealthy, obviously
they would be free to live from the unclaimed commons, if the existence of such people persisted alongside town-dwellers in supply chain industries there would develop institutions by which they could offer themselves up for labor
these institutions would develop such that nature-dwellers would resort to them in times of famine or harsh conditions or scarcity and then return in times of plenty
town-dwellers would push to use their concentrated institutions to indebt extract more from nature-dwellers instead of being their bottleneck-clearing savior in time of need and getting the most marginal labor in return
this would tend towards Classical slavery. countervailing traditions like jubilee or bankruptcy might develop in mitigation
the ability to control famine or conditions or needs or access to viable commons or the terms of comparison of quality of life between city- and nature- will tend towards the domination of the free by the city-dweller society (as distinct from any given city-dweller)
can you say that in smaller words please
also, (in the first place i don’t understand how you’re making all the poor people not be in cities and i for one am extremely supportive of a quite decent level of violence to avoid this. not living in cities is extremely bad) a) what unclaimed commons b) assuming these commons exist how are people supposed to know how to survive from them and once they know how are they supposed to actually do the work c) that sounds pretty bad actually
like, don’t read the whole town/nature things as too literal in a 2017 sense but the joke is that hierarchical, property-based societies such as ancaps naturalize aren’t the natural state in the absence of repression or ideal because of their voluntariness, but rather a uniquely stable state BCUZ they can extract such a surplus and dedicate it towards stabilization
and that these systems might freely allow exit but only into others or into an unorganized surplus that can be reduced to effective slavery while fully registering as voluntarism
(any other form understood as NAP violations/Oriental despotism/wevs)
and this is known because it is the progression societies often follow and how aristocracies come to understand themselves as redoubts of freedom
this has been bugging me for like, a year
What have we done
We put a hall monitor up against 4chan and I guess enough schools swapped in Joy Luck Club for Tom Sawyer that people thought America was gonna pick the hall monitor
And then every day we’d break up into sections of like 7 and spend an hour talking about this assignment in Japanese with a super-sweet, grandmotherly woman who would look really disappointed in you if you fucked something up
(there were also MWF lectures, the two years of college this lasted felt like side projects I was doing while learning Japanese)
Anyway the result is I literally have a neurotic block on pronouncing Japanese in a non-Japanese way, if you ever see me doing that please know I’m not being a ponce.
(the exception is words I pronounced before this - I say “anime” the normal way, so you don’t have to punch me)
• “HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead”?
• When Marco Rubio attacked Donald Trump for defunct product lines Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, then at the next conference Donald Trump had Trump Vodka, cuz it’s still a Passover-friendly brand in Israel, and then just had some steaks, and now he’s President of the United States?
• Turn Down for What?
The Burger King Kids Club, representing all the ‘90s identities:
Black
Hispanic
Nerd
Tomboy
Disabled
Stacy
Geek
Dog
with a laid-back policing culture the share of cars driving around with one headlight becomes a short-term economic indicator
Well I like the whole “you can subtly extract information from this scene” thing but Portland has really dim streetlights and I’ve had some scares
