A comment from Tsgt Joe on the Home-field Advantage story
With both sides portraying the current troubles and election as an "existential struggle for the soul of our nation" I'm thinking more and more good people will be inclined to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. It wont be as one sided as conservative folks like to believe. There are trained veterans on the liberal side who feel quite strongly that the conservatives are causing all this mess and need to be stopped.
I want to share some of my thinking behind the story.
First, I agree that there are trained veterans on all four sides.
Four sides?
Left, right, lunatic left and lunatic right.*
Depending on how the dance plays out, does the center come together against the lunatics chucking Molotov Cocktails and pulling people out of their vehicles (a mobile castle) and beating them to death?
Imagine a hundred parallel universes where Plantet Earth is in an essentially identical state. How many of those universes would have the center come together? Twenty-of-one-hundred? Five? One?
The lunatic fringe's bench strength
In my humble estimation, this is one of the lunatics' huge weaknesses.
Let's look at Colton from an ecological-niche standpoint. Who would lunatics be most likely to find and promote?
If you go to a tavern where veterans are known to congregate, how many who claim to have been in some form of Special Forces actually were? Is every person who claims special valor somebody who earned it? Maybe half are pretenders. Maybe one-in-five actually made-the-cut...maybe one-in-twenty.
Let's run with four-of-five people who claim or imply having been in Special Forces as being pretenders. Having been in a large organization, I can attest that the best liars get promoted faster than those who actually do their job without drama.
That is the intellectual basis for Colton and Gregious (or the first generation of lunatic trainers) being pretenders. How quickly will they adapt? Great question, Lysenko (an agricultural scientist) hung on until the mid-1950s and millions starved.
A slow escalation in defense-response favors the lunatics evolving to match.
A breathtakingly rapid escalation of defense-response is more likely to shatter the lunatic's ability to recover and respond. Getting back to the electric fence. If the voltage increased slowly, the animals will learn to defeat it. If the full power of the fence hits one of them directly in the face (or ears), then fear will prevent them from getting close enough to the fence to "learn" anything.
*Hat/tip to Matt Bracken. He breaks out three groups, Loonie-Left, Left and Right. To make Bracken's observation something the center-Left will consider, it is prudent to include the Loonie-Right. Frankly, do you intend to look up a thug's voting history if he is standing thirty feet from your house and he lights the wick of a incendiary device...or are you going to center-punch his sternum?
You left out a major character in your discussion.
ReplyDeleteBig Government.
In my way of thinking, big government is just waiting for the left and right to start going at it causing violence and havoc and then it would be the excuse they need to implement the following:
Gun confiscation
the end of freedom of speech
the end of freedom of assembly
Forced quarantines of activity where were are either in our houses or in re-education camps.
Need proof? Canada. New Zealand. Many European nations all have these features and far less freedom that we do.
Is the government left leaning?
Without a doubt. Even so, they see left wing radicals as merely being a tool to be used to create the scenario where they can 'justify' the implementation of these restrictions.
This is about control and power consolidation. The written rules such as our Constitution and Bill of Rights are of little consequence.
Hello Glenda! Good to see you in the readership and commenting.
DeleteI do not dispute anything that you wrote.
The story jumps around but it does have a focus. One side is using thugs and criminals as their brown-shirts and jack-booted shock troops.
This is destabilizing and that dynamic can, and will be used to steal more freedoms.
The underlying premise of the story is that the other side will continue to use thugs as long as it is cost-effective. So the best way to neutralize that strategy is to attack the basic economics of their business model.
Jevon's Paradox states something to the effect that as efficiencies increase, total consumption of the driving resources will increase.
When normal people start reacting in ways that make retail-thuggery uneconomical then people seeking turmoil will turn to other methods.
The story is a vehicle to illustrate a few ways that retail-thuggery can be made far more expensive vis-a-vis the net turmoil produced.
Wow, woke up to see my name in lights.
ReplyDeleteERJ, I admire the way you think things through in an organized manner. I would agree that there are 4 camps (Left, Right, LunyL and lunyR) but the MSM does a good job of blurring the difference between the right and lunyR. The left has been conned into believing most of the right is this monolithic block of racist, sexist block of knuckle draggers who are coming to put folks back in chains. While most of the leftys I know(retired govt. employees and their pampered children and grandchildren) wont be hitting the streets with guns they will support the government guns crushing those white supremists and any actions by the right will be painted as white supremist.
My thinking on this may be flawed as I'm just an old(72) retired guy with some social anxieties who does most of his interacting on line, usually on conservative blogs.
Small addition, I use Tsgt Joe because I was in the Air force from 68 to 80 and earned the rank but I learned welding, heat treating and sheet metal- I learned nothing about military tactics or weapons. I've been a strong unionist my whole life and am a retired Foster Care Program Manager for the State of Michigan. My drift from the left came in 3 phases. First the acceptance that the socialist model of human behavior was flawed, second that abortion was sinful and lastly the nonstop lying and corruption from the left.
DeleteIF one of the four sides is the lunatic right, where are they while the lunatic left is rioting and burning ? Or rather, is the so-called lunatic right as large a player as the other three ? If they are, they have been acting very restrained during this time of looting, burning and rioting. Either the numbers of the lunatic left are greater than the lunatic right making them more visible, or perhaps they are more visible due to their more public presence in the headlines due to their participation in illegal riots, assaults, murders, arson, and looting. Either way, there is much more evidence of a large lunatic left player in the equation than a large lunatic right player in the same equation. Or perhaps the members of the so-called lunatic right are more shy and retiring individuals who are more content to stay at home and watch the fighting and riots on TV and videos rather than to participate in them. Pr perhaps the lunatic right respects the law more than the so-called lunatic left.
ReplyDeleteThe devil is in the details.
DeleteUsing your's and my definition of "loony" as "Someone who easily justifies violence against property or person based on the other person's politics", the Loony-Left is ten times larger than the Loony-Right.
If you use the other side's definition of Loony-Right "Anybody who supports the use of standardized testing or other metrics that evolved when the economy was dominated by white men is a white supremacist and therefore a Loony-Right" then the Loony-Right is ten times larger than the Loony-Left.
I think you have it about the loony right. I cant convince my lefty family that the loony/supremest folks represent such a small part of the right that they could be a rounding error. When asked about right wing riots my usual reply is that it will be quick since they have to be at work in the morning.
DeleteERJ- I think you have it right about your definitions of the Lr and LL. Good logic !
DeleteAt 30 feet, I'm making CNS stops. No sense messing around at that range.
ReplyDeleteThat said, we've discussed that very subject here, recently. We've made the decision that if anyone within eye shot lights a wick, they just became a legitimate target under the laws of the State of NC. We will be defending against an immediate deadly threat to ourselves or others.
One of the beautiful things about a semi-automatic weapon is that you are not forced into an either-or decision.
DeleteWith a semi-auto, you can send two "money shots" and one "swing-for-the-fences" shot as quickly as you can touch off one shot with a bolt-action.
As we have just seen in Seattle just recently with a loony-left walking down the street with a lit molotov, and the cop who gets burned didn't shoot him first.
DeleteLeft, Right, Looney Left, Looney Right? Sounds reasonable.
ReplyDeleteI would submit there is also at least one or two more groups involved. One being the movers and shakers behind the scenes that
don't fall into any of those political groups. They are above politics most of the time and manipulate people and events all over the world regardless of the local political structure.
The sixth group are those who have NO actual political beliefs.
They are simply the people who like to see shit burn. The ones
who enjoy the violence, drama and adrenalin of what is going for it's own sake. The truly sociopathic/psychopathic personalities who can't be understood by normal people. And currently many of these people are being PAID to be part of the shit show.