You outnumber the police and you’re armed to the teeth. “The US military would just crush the population” argument is not particularly convincing either. You assume the military is some perfectly unified, ruthlessly efficient machine, which doesn’t describe the US military in foreign wars, let alone a domestic one.
Even the shitty GOP is unwilling to tolerate prolonged ground wars, casualties, recruitment problems, political backlash, and occupations of populations that are actually hostile to it. Yet somehow we are supposed to believe that the same institution would suddenly function flawlessly whe turned against your own citizens? The assumption that everyone would simply follow orders indefinitely while Americans were being killed in huge numbers is absurd. There’s a reason you haven’t sent soldiers in to occupy Tehran.
Eventually they would run into a very simple problem- if armed resistance was genuinely widespread, half-measures would not settle it. It would either have to escalate to levels of violence sufficient to kill Americans on an enormous scale, potentially millions, or it would have to back down / simply stop functioning. You also have the fact that your military has never been more poorly managed than it is right now.
Yes, the US military has vastly more firepower than civilians. Congratulations. Nobody disputes that. The question is whether it could politically, institutionally, and psychologically use that firepower against its own population on the scale necessary to win such a conflict- and if it’s your position that your own military WOULD do that to you, and that is why you are choosing not to act? Great- then your political morality is just one in which the government’s entitlement to your obedience increases in direct proportion to how willing it is to fucking kill you.
You outnumber the police and you’re armed to the teeth. “The US military would just crush the population” argument is not particularly convincing either. You assume the military is some perfectly unified, ruthlessly efficient machine, which doesn’t describe the US military in foreign wars, let alone a domestic one.
Even the shitty GOP is unwilling to tolerate prolonged ground wars, casualties, recruitment problems, political backlash, and occupations of populations that are actually hostile to it. Yet somehow we are supposed to believe that the same institution would suddenly function flawlessly whe turned against your own citizens? The assumption that everyone would simply follow orders indefinitely while Americans were being killed in huge numbers is absurd. There’s a reason you haven’t sent soldiers in to occupy Tehran.
Eventually they would run into a very simple problem- if armed resistance was genuinely widespread, half-measures would not settle it. It would either have to escalate to levels of violence sufficient to kill Americans on an enormous scale, potentially millions, or it would have to back down / simply stop functioning. You also have the fact that your military has never been more poorly managed than it is right now.
Yes, the US military has vastly more firepower than civilians. Congratulations. Nobody disputes that. The question is whether it could politically, institutionally, and psychologically use that firepower against its own population on the scale necessary to win such a conflict- and if it’s your position that your own military WOULD do that to you, and that is why you are choosing not to act? Great- then your political morality is just one in which the government’s entitlement to your obedience increases in direct proportion to how willing it is to fucking kill you.