OH "The next American civil war will be fought inside Fortnite, so it won't be that bad."
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Also, what I think might be a bigger driver of pacifism in the West is an aging population. The young want to prove themselves, and the slightly older want to protect their young families. But the elderly? They just want a quiet life, and aren't going to risk that for anything.
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Put another way: pacifism as a social strategy is great....until you run into your first non-pacifist. The reality is that pacifism is a hypocritical philosophy: someone else always dies to defend it.
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That's the fundamental problem with libertarianism.
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Most libertarians I know own enough guns to arm an army platoon.
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Sure -- but when the barbarians Huns show up -- do the same libertarians come out in force like an actual army would?
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Sure. Fighting to be left alone isn’t just a rhetorical gag.
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Maybe - but I doubt it.
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Time to run what I call The Red Dawn Test: If a foreign nation were to invade and occupy parts of the US, who among your friends (or national political factions) would cave to the new masters, and who would take to the mountains with stolen weapons and fight as partisans?
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Pretty dumb of the Huns to bring guns to a dronefight
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Yes, that's the bet of the West. Whether against foreign enemies, or domestic ones, they just hope that the same automation that creates economic turmoil at home and abroad neatly solves the problem by making wars and law enforcement cost only money, rather than political will.
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I think such hopes are wrong for two reasons: 1. The harm of automation (and everything else going wrong) will make itself felt faster and stronger than the possibility of simply ignoring it via automated organized violence.
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2. Pacifist societies incapable of physically defending themselves are skittish ones, quick to surrender. I lived in Northern Spain when ETA was still kidnapping and blowing up the odd public space. The social impact of a bomb was astonishing. All fight disappeared in a moment.
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And this was in a society that had endured Europe's most violent and brutal civil war within living memory (the local parliament building still had fascist bullet holes in it). But they had no appetite for a war of attrition, and folded, and gave the Basques what they wanted.
End of conversation
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