FRANCIS: Ah, once the vote has been taken.
REG: Well, obviously once the vote's been taken. You can't act another resolution till you've voted on it...
This is a serious story but this made me burst out laughing. Sorry, the PR agent for these heavily armed militias was unable to return my request for comments.
No time is usually reserved for breaking news. No outlet is going to hold a story on today’s building fire because the fireworks factory owner deserves 24 hours to respond.
Most are loose gatherings of people who like shooting guns where people come and go week to week.
Everyone should have a week or two of supplies just in case. Look at what happens during large scale natural disasters. Prices go way up and supply goes way down. Why bother with that?
But in a real society collapse situation, our plan is much, much shorter term and much darker. That's just the reality of the situation. Why starve and suffer when you can just happily exit as a family in a way if your own choosing?
Society collapsing was supposed to be the unlikely and somewhat comical (in that it is a bit over-the-top) motivator for people to do something prep that we should do anyway.
If society actually collapses, you really don’t want to be the person with lots of highly-demanded resources.
Look at actual societal collapses. The starting position of the resources within the map is almost irrelevant.
Besides, the first rule of being prepared, is you don't talk about being prepared.
As you should. For all of the things that can happen between normal life and full societal collapse. The point is, X months of anything is useless in that last case. The only precedented way of evading death or poverty in the wake of societal collapse is to get out.
> you don't talk about being prepared
You're thinking of a zombie apocalypse film. Picture, instead, the warlords and their armies in Sudan or Ethiopia. Whether you talk about it is irrelevant. Your home will be torn apart, and your body pressed into service, irrespectively.
I ask because I see so much resistence to good prep online but never from people who've been through disasters.
A few weeks was what I kept ready during the pandemic, just in case I got ill and didn't want to go shopping for a fortnight. Plenty of natural disasters are in that kind of range, even outside the pandemic.
Civilisation collapsing needs a stockpile of about however many months it would take for you to turn your garden into a residential farm and get to harvest season, plus a bit for if that doesn't work… or if raccoons steal in the night everything the ravens didn't steal in the day.
So, to coin a phrase:
how about never? Does never work for you?What I haven't even considered is that although there's a few cases where your immediate community can work together on stuff like this, an actual collapse leads to a power vacuum and breakdown of supply chains, so your immediate community needs to not only be self-sufficient for food but also defence from looting, and yet somehow also not important enough for to the original government to try to keep running, nor for any warlords who spring up in the vacuum to try to pillage, and also not for any foreign powers to peace-keep or annex.
Hmm, I wonder: if the USA suddenly collapsed as hard as the USSR, would Mexico and the Texas region start fighting? Or Cuba and the Florida region?
1. prep your residence in can't you can't leave for days on end - something you should do to prepare for h5n1.
2. stock a bug out bag: most of you are in range of wild fires. So you need to do it.
We barely were able to find a hotel to go to.
Afterwards, my dad kept 4-6 duffel bags full of water, first aid, clothes, MREs/dry meals, and other gear so if we ever need to get out of the place, we'd be ready.
So yes, it's a good idea to have some supplies ready because you never know.
Ironic given I reserve that title for ISIS who seems to have just recently radicalized another person to run over a bunch of people in New Orleans.
I have no particular love for these militias, but I’m not ignorant enough to believe the stuff media goes about parroting.
Luckily that was never asserted.
That's a strawperson. It doesn't have to be all. Groups that call themselves 'militias', arm and train themselves, plan violence, and sometimes perpetuate it. It's reasonable for the public to be concerned about them.
If that's true, your accusation makes sense.
You don't even need the other person; you can have these conversations by yourself. Or if you need to feel like you're socializing with someone, just tell me what to post and I'll post it for you.
Here: 'I disagree with the premise that American media spins American militias to be far worse than they actually are.' Now you can respond!
An far better approach is, ask; be curious. People have wildly different ideas than you. Here you cut all that off and reduce the world to the narrow range of what you can think of, and the even narrower range your expectations. The great advantage of talking to others is they have different ideas totally outside and independent of yours.
Baseless accusations are not ok, even if they are commonplace on social media. They are morally wrong. Bearing false witness is a sin. I don't want to be accused, to have this put on me; nobody does.
It's hard to take you seriously when you're doing the same thing that you're labeling as morally wrong. It's the internet, and we're anonymous for the most part, I have absolutely zero expectations of you.
But yeah, that's how a conversation goes. You made a claim (that was wrong), I have told you it's wrong now, and thus the conversation goes. Trying to assert your form of communication is morally superior is quite an interesting take, but to each their own.
Anyways, as I predicted, we'll be at an impasse here, because apparently my communication method is far too immoral for your tastes.
> I have absolutely zero expectations of you.
You wrote: "I'm sure you disagree with the premise that American media spins American militias to be far worse than they actually are." That's an expectation.
> The majority of "militia members" are just like me, middle age ex-military guys who lost their kids to an unfair, biased and broken "family court" system.
I can believe that and really I expect it. The majority of any movement aren't really true believers trying to burn things down.
How do you reconcile that with the militia group members that are planning and plotting and acting to burn things down? The most visible example was the January 6 attack, but of course there are plenty more.
Are they just segregated into different groups? Are there a few around but you think of them as ineffectual cranks? Do the groups, in this way, have different circles: the hard core, maybe another layer, and the people who like to hang out?
The majority of any movement aren't really true believers trying to burn things down, but some movements do try to burn things down. People just there to socialize sometimes find they supported something awful and turned a blind eye, when they should have done something or at least walked away. A genuine question: With everything happening, doesn't that cross your mind?
Cite? I mean, really, what?
Are you discussing assassinating politicians with your militia members? Did any of them march on the Capitol? If not, you’re not comparable to AP3. (If so, um, call a lawyer and a psychiatrist.)
This makes so little sense as to border on unhingery.
That is crazy, you'd think that would be illegal under the Civil Rights Act. White criminals had a separate police force from black ones.
would a police group dedicated to investigating the mafia be a violation of the civil rights act?
I think you've misunderstood. It's clear from the article that the "Black squad" was so named because it specialised in investigating suspects who were Black, not because the officers in it were themselves Black.
A BFOQ can only apply to private hiring discrimination, not "having a separate police force when you are suspected of a crime based on race" discrimination. It's not employment rights at issue, so occupational qualifications are not relevant.
OTOH, the issue here is probably more 14th Amendment equal protection than statutory rights.
On the gripping hand, American police departments having racist practices that are internally well-known, and not being held accountable for them is..not at all surprising.
I was watching an interview the other day from one of the Tuskegee Airmen and just going by his physical appearance he looked as "European" as I do.
> A Las Vegas police spokesperson told me they stopped “dividing squads by a suspect’s race” a year before Kinch retired.
and later:
> In 2016, he turned in his badge, a year after the saga broke in the local press.
If all those facts are consistent, they had a 'Black squad' until 2015.
Edit: An aside in an article and piecing together facts that were not necessarily intended to be consistent can result in bad misunderstandings. We need more information to understand it.
But at the same time, let's be careful about proceeding like scientists and making the null hypothesis 'it wasn't racist' or even 'there isn't racism', requiring 99.9% certainty. That's one way members of the status quo perpetuate bad things, even without meaning to. It's a rationalization ('I'm thinking about this scientifically!') for plain old self-serving bias - I'm innocent of anything until there are scientific levels of proof, and then I'll still keep questioning it and probably just refuse to believe it. It's an impossible mountain to climb; in those discussions, the status quo will never agree.
There are other approaches, such as a preponderance of evidence, to borrow the legal term.
As near as I can tell Black Lives Matter did not arise out of some sort of spite or radicalism, but out of the conditions Kinch's stated experience suggests. This pretty well contradicts the Civil Rights Act, something Kinch's stated experience also suggests.
I don’t understand this. There’s an insane level of detail here that if true immediately reveals his identity to those involved. How does withholding his name change anything?
> On March 20… He’d helped persuade Seddon and his lieutenants to fire the head of AP3’s Utah chapter and to install Williams in his place.
There can be a difference between revealing identity to some and revealing it to all. I'm not sure how much difference there is in this case specifically but it's not my life, not my call.
I think the “albeit” is just an aside. It isn’t necessarily enhancing his ability to create distrust. It is slightly confusing though because one could of course imagine a way of writing the report anonymously that would add additional distrust; if he was vague enough it could be hard for anybody to know that he wasn’t talking about their organization. But he’d have to be pretty vague.
To some extent, the FBI has at least sometimes done just this. It's possible that some new leader like Kash Patel can remove the threat of the FBI infiltrating and betraying militias, but then what about moles infiltrating the FBI once they become effectively the same thing as the militias?
There's a fundamental difference between acting as a law enforcement agency, and acting as a militia seeking to wage secret war on a class of citizens, where if your intent is to STOP various humans from planting bombs etc. you're acting like law enforcement, and if your intent is to plant the bombs you are the militia even if you're wearing a law enforcement name.
This is shown in the struggles of the mole: would've been morally easier for him if he was just looking to rack up a body count. He wanted to protect what he saw as innocents, and so he had to calculate to what extent his infiltration was causing collateral damage, and when he acted on that he fled, cover blown as far as he knew. If he was more interested in just body count he might have been more blase about how things were going.
> Remarkably, the AP3er defended Williams’ loyalty each time I asserted he’d secretly tried to undermine the group.
Is this how journalists protect sources? Seems strange to me.
It reminds me of how the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. Oh, that was scary, well, whatever, the dudes in jail, shrugs. Because it failed to bring the building down. For me, I was like, holy crap people are trying to blow up the WTC arent they going to....keep trying? but that's just not how people think. Super scary thing that failed == ho hum.
And WTC and OKC were (at least somewhat) successful attacks! J6 caused damage but failed. We’re really bad at taking failed attempts seriously.
From overdoses, right? Sort of different from terrorism in many meaningful ways.
Still not terrorism. Left-wing militias are a problem in some parts of the world. They aren’t in America.
Our domestic terrorism comes almost exclusively from radical Islam and right-wing nutjobs. (Who, somewhat hilariously, see eye to eye on more than they realise.)
No. Of course we've had left-wing terrorism. It's just not been as prevalent, organised or present as the right-wing form. (And I'm aware of zero currently-operating left-wing militias anyone considers a threat in America.)
Is your impression that “right-wing” should designate a hive mind within which there is no conflict?
Because that's not what right-wing (or left-wing) has ever meant. The political universe isn't divided into two teams that conflict with each other but lack internal conflict.
Alternatively, I guess you might accept divisions within the Right but think that the term right-wing is defined in terms of proximity to Trump's cult of personality, but, no, while Trump is a right-wing figure (or perhaps an opportunist leveraging a right-wing base) loyalty to Trump is not what defines someone as being ”right-wing”. In either case, being violently opposed to Trump is not inconsistent with being right-wing.
But in this case jumpcrisscross is identifying political violence as an almost exclusively religious (technically muslim which seems a bit off to me, but whatever) or right-wing phenomenon - presumably including political violence against leftists and rightists as perpetrated under the banner of the right wing (although note in another comment he has clarified his position somewhat). If leftists declaring autonomy and militantly seizing a chunk of Seattle isn't terrorism to him then there are some interesting meaning-of-words questions to resolve here - like what he think "right wing" means. It might be that political violence is by definition right-wing to him.
Extremism isn't something that has been accepted as a right-wing position, historically speaking. The right wingers - like everyone - prefer to enact policy from government. Anti-government vigilantism is one of those highly ineffective strategies that nobody really lays claim to.
It’s really not. It may be extremism, but it’s not threatening or using violence against civilians for political means.
> political violence is by definition right-wing
Wat? Left-wing guerillas are all over the Americas, Africa and Asia. We just don’t have a lot of them right now in America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest#...
Call me old school, but it sounds like there were threats of violence for political purposes. I'm not sure how an armed and ideological group can seize an area and block the police for any interesting length of time without being a terrorist group. If not political purposes, why are they doing it? If not violence, why do they need guns (there were a few shootings) and how are they holding the police off?
And you aren't really addressing the point I was challenging you on - how are you identifying 'right wing' and 'left-wing' here?
Then every bridge protest, any strike that gets contentious and/or gang activity is terrorism. They’re not. What you describe is an attempt to consolidate power; not sow terror.
The definition of terrorism is famously ambiguous. But if we expand its definition to include Seattle then must also include armed marches and counter-protests. That still leaves us with a domestic terrorism problem that is overly concentrated amidst right-wing extremists.
> how are you identifying 'right wing' and 'left-wing' here?
Broadly, by partisan orientation. More loosely: by authoritarian and individualist manifestos versus collectivist and anti-capitalist ones. The closest we’ve had to left-wing terrorism since the ecoterrorism era is Luigi, and that’s partly because he’s almost impossible to fit on a one-dimensional metric.
as an independent i have a different perspective, the left are the violent ones and consistently push us towards a civil war with their bigotry and inability to stop attempting forced “progress”.
If you meant to respond to me, and not roenxi, nobody is forgetting the riots. They were a menace. But they weren’t terrorism and wouldn’t respond to antiterrorism tactics; they’re mass lawlessness. Same as Seattle. The solution is enforcing the laws on the books against flagrant rulebreakinh. That doesn’t work for terrorists.
For the record, and this is true for all humans, speaking words that you've INDEPENDENTLY thought of and come up with all on your own - they leave your mouth differently than words you've heard another say and now your just repeating... it's instantly and immediately identifiable - it's like an advertisement came on, totally different tone, incantation and inflection.
Your comment was the text version of that.
(I live just up the street from the police station at the center of the whole thing, so I paid close attention to all this stuff while it was happening.)
And a piece with the increase in homicides, Mayor Durkan reported that SPD had received a 525% increase in reported crimes in the area when compared to the previous June. Obviously not all of the crime was committed by protestors, but the protestors were the ones that drove out the police presence and the city tolerated the situation created by the protestors for nearly a month. Regardless of whether the situation is best described as domestic terrorism or not, it's clear that public officials were willing to tolerate violence enabled by left wing protestors "letting off steam" too.
It was quite a spectacle.
I do feel like "reclaiming a public street" is slightly different from "attempted coup d'état" though.
Dismiss them at your own peril. The FBI did
It’s still not going to work. When will the left learn that changing peoples mind by lying will not work?
The only reason anyone thinks otherwise is because they were completely incompetent. But being bad at overthrowing the government doesn’t mean you didn’t try.
Even if it was a spur-of-the-moment mob action, something like that was always coming due to inaction in addressing the increased violence from the different right-wing groups.
> We’re really bad at taking failed attempts seriously.
To that point, Osama bin Laden had multiple attempts attacking the WTC. They realized that it was going to take a lot more than a car bomb to take down those buildings and made improved plans from a car bomb. Which is just some of the data pointed to by those that are unbelieving that a truck bomb was the sole cause of OKC.
The amazing thing is how the right was able to essentially rewrite the history of Jan 6 over the last 4 years. Right after the incident even many Republican politicians in DC were calling for Trump's resignation and impeachment (or at least some resolution that would not allow him to run again). There was a huge amount of alarm in the immediate aftermath. But then the narrative about the events of that day slowly started to turn into "it was just a peaceful protest where a few bad apples got a bit out of hand" (that came right after the "it was antifa" stage which didn't last too long when it was clear that these folks were Trump supporters). Trump certainly minimized Jan 6 (to his benefit) and the rest of the GOP began to go along just as they've gone along with the idea that the 2020 election was "stolen" from Trump (and if they actually believe it was stolen then they can come to the conclusion that Jan 6 was justified as some of them do).
Of course the Democrats call it an insurrection - that’s what their base wants to hear and benefits them at the polls.
But look at what they do in totality - after calling him Hitler the Democratic leadership was wishing Trump a speedy recovery after the assignation attempt.
You don’t wish Hitler a “speedy recovery”.
It’s mostly political theatre. J6 was a riot, but the republic was not able to topple.
They might have incentive, but that's irrelevant to whether it was an insurrection. And it was, it was textbook.
https://acoup.blog/2021/01/15/miscellanea-insurrections-anci...
>No ancient Greek would have had any trouble in understanding what happened on the 6th or that it was a serious attempt (albeit an incompetent one) to seize power. Having a leader or a political faction move with a mob (often armed, but not always so) to try to disperse the normal civic assemblies of a Greek polis and occupy their normal meeting place was a standard maneuver to try to seize power during stasis. As Dr. Roel Konijnendijk, an ancient Greek history specialist, noted in this excellent discussion on the r/AskHistorians reddit (where he posts as Iphikrates), “In the Greek world, most attempts to seize power by force tended to take the same form: the seditious party would contrive an opportunity to gather in arms while their opponents were unarmed and off-guard, and seize control of all public spaces.”
(The link author has a PhD in ancient history)
(the "acoup" name is incidental, it stands for A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantries)
And while yes, the Dems have flip-flopped between calling Trump Hitler and wishing him a speedy recovery, that's because they're spineless slaves to proceduralism who won't break decorum if the fate of US's democracy depends on it.
The crowd was unarmed. Its actions were mostly wondering around (respecting the ropes!) and taking funny pictures.
At no point was the republic at risk of falling.
so when the left literally changed wikipedia entries, what was that? not rewriting history?
to put it bluntly, it’s hard to have sympathy for your case when the left does the same. when will the left stop complaining that the right is doing things they are also doing?
when will the rest of you figure out that parties are the problem?
Thank you for saying something that has me opening my mouth and getting in trouble.
Given that I am a Lockean liberal at heart, I object to describing the entire left as doing the same thing as the right. There is still a portion of the left (admittedly shrinking) whose foundation is based on science, math, logic, and history.
However, that said, I see a lot of similarities between progressives and MAGAs in their denial of facts, shouting down others who disagree with them, and preferring conspiracies and truthiness because it feels better. Magas do carry it one step further in making up case law, inventing legal theories out of whole cloth (textualism), and making choices that degrade the function of socicity that make things better for everyone except stockholders
> When will the left stop complaining that the right is doing things they are also doing?
progressives, not the left. when the right stops being a bunch of snowflakes.
They won't as long as they get a molecule of attention.
This is an important side-light on the concept that media sources are 'grifting' and only interested in what will make them money. It's surprisingly common for media sources to turn away from stories that could be sensational and give them money, but at the expense of a cause (such as these paramilitaries) which someone at the media source supports.
In that case, the person at the media source making decisions will understand that the story is sensational and attention-getting, but will quash it because to run the story would be hurting the paramilitaries…
The cops I've seen in those meetings talking about how the communities they are policing are "subhuman animals" that "just need a bullet" are still in Seattle PD, as well.
They also had connections with some state legislature members, such as Matt Shea.
The wider public in America more or less blocks out the risks involved. "They're not actually going to blow up the power grid."
Hell, just look at the tech industry. Endless whining about not needing to be regulated, and what have they done? Built an enormous surveilance machine, lead by executives who preemptively kowtow to any authoritarian leader. Europe's attempt to regulate this is still angrily opposed by heaps, even on this very site.
Normalcy bias — it's an absolute killer. The same cognitive failure that has people in a fire thinking it's "just part of the show", or "just something in the kitchen", until it is too late, and panic overtakes everyone. I've never seen a story of a fire where someone in the situation said "I wasn't sure what was going on, but it didn't seem good so I left early, I'm alive because I did!".
Normalcy bias can kill us all if we aren't careful.
Until now I would have said this is an extreme minority view, even though it's quite obvious and aligns with the core values I've seen on this site over the last 15 years, and thus presumed were tech in general's view.
Maybe I just need to get off X, the Everything App™, 90% of my news consumption and commentary is through there.
Or is it so addictive like social networks seem to be?
But.... I am no longer there. Too much noise and distraction drowns the sane voices. And I can't stand Musk any longer.
I tink it totally depends what your niche is. What bugged me about Twitter is that after Musk took over it was no longer mostly RSS feed-like but all the politics came in. That all ranked higher even when not from accounts I don't follow (now I get notifications from Musk even after muting him)
> Or is it so addictive
why switch one megacorp for another?
People think they need Facebook, X, whatever to stay up to date. Not so. I have a few online newspapers/sites I scan a few times a week, and that's it.
IMHO (and it's really just MO), Twitter, Facebook and alike are a 100% useless waste of time. (Maybe Facebook had some use in the beginning for staying in contact with more "friends" than I could have by other means.)
I feel better for it. And as I said, I will guarantee you that won't miss anything important going on.
I made a decade long transition from dropout waiter => startup founder => exit => Google thanks to getting to soak in all the tech stuff on Twitter, without having the formal education.
It's hard to say without being reductive, but TL;DR it's turned into a very know-nothing atmosphere, to the point it certainly swamps the prior positive effects.
Good example yesterday: OP is excited about Elon newly announcing a new interest in non-regretted user-seconds.
Elon's talked about it a bunch, so some people gently correct OP.
Some other people gently point out this...isn't something you can metric.
Everyone's being polite and pointing out indirectly the excitement is irrational: it's an old idea, and not an actual metric you can optimize for
OP half-rolls-back that its a new idea, but is still excited about the implications.
Someone tells him directly "non-user-regretted-seconds" isn't a metric, he doubles down and says its standard in industry.
I reply saying it's Elon-invented, not a good or bad thing, but certainly not a traditional metric.
OP replies saying that's not true, OP saw it in use at Google a decade ago.
It's a day later and it's completely unclear to me: A) if this is an actual phrase that was used prior to Elon B) if it is a phrase, how it could be a metric and C) if OP is right that it was in use before Elon, given our time at google overlapped by 7 years and I've never, ever, heard of anyone having a metric like that (could someone have used it as a term of art in a meeting? sure! but generic "amount of time people enjoy using our thing" isn't worth noting as a distinct term, unless you actually collect info on it)
The only way I can think of to even engage is to say pretty much the above, but it's too aggro and "cares too much" for the level of current discourse, especially since the premise is we should be excited Elon cares about this.
A more factual approach, like trying to find the first instance of "unregretted user-seconds" isn't convincing. I'm not sure how you'd prove the first use was after a certain date.
Even if I try searching for refs between 2000 and 2020 only, there's ~3 pages of obviously re-dated results, i.e. referring to Elon as Twitter owner with a date of "2013"
Then, just because it wasn't on the internet at a certain date, doesn't mean it wasn't in use regularly at Google before that date.
Then, the clunky pseudo-scientific phrasing makes it impossible to debunk there wasn't another form of "unregretted user-seconds" I should be checking.
There's only 8 pages of results for "unregretted user-seconds", all tied to Elon/Twitter, but that means nothing because again, clunky phrasing means maybe there's another form I should be checking, and maybe it was a phrase that had been locked inside companies until Elon used it publicly.
So what was the point of even reading, thinking, replying about this?
Nothing. Waste of time.
I found your writing useful.
Hopefully the landscape will improve.
I wasn’t impressed. They do the same thing the major news outlets do - craft a narrative then selectively use findings to support it.
Their expose on tax records is a good example - they calculated billionaires tax rates based not on income (as everyone thinks of) but rather total wealth to arrive at shockingly small numbers (intentionally).
Maybe they do a better job of in depth articles but the overall quality isn’t that impressive.
It's because just accepting a prepackaged story like this from a single source would completely fail to meet the standards of journalism.
He just up and joined a bunch of radical militias that he strongly disagrees with? I mean... maybe. But you'd of course be very suspicious of everything he says and his motives for coming forward.
Genuinely asking: what other evidence are you looking for?
Unclear. Depends on how supportive of it Trump is. He might legitimize it by pardoning the Jan. 6 attackers. Many of them thought they were acting on Trump's orders, after all. There was one platoon-sized Proud Boys unit on Jan. 6th that showed military organization and discipline. The rest were just a mob.
Having a private army of goons can be useful. That's what the SA was in the Nazi era. The SA was a big organization, 20x the size of the German army at peak. Eventually, it was put down once Hitler was firmly in power. See "Night of the Long Knives".[1] Other countries have been through this. Sometimes the goons ended up in charge, or at least as a large faction to be kept happy.
This is often seen after internal unrest that yields a large, restless, armed group. Germany got there by losing WWI, but not being crushed. Haiti is a classic example. Afghanistan seems to have gone down this road - all those former "fighters" have to be fed and kept busy.
The closest the US came was the "Bonus Army" camped out on the Mall after WWI, demanding a bonus for veterans.[2] The Bonus Army had 17,000 veteran soldiers, and some political and police support. Eventually they were forcibly dispersed.
US militias don't match any of those classic situations. They're mostly wannabees. If you encounter militia types, ask them if all their members use the same ammo. If not, they're a rabble, not an army.
Do we get to see the actual documents the original author talks about?
Sure, but there's plenty of opportunity for asymmetric warfare. Several power stations have been attacked in various parts of the US over the last few years. They could be probing the power system for vulnerabilities (and there are plenty of those). Also, look at how lowish-cost drones are coming to dominate the Ukraine war.
Sometimes, some token investigative journalism is allowed. (So long as those revelations do not challenge the status quo, natch.) Maintaining the charade of being the Forth Estate. Less so over time, as the "infotainment" biz model pioneered by USA Today transformed the industry. What kids today would call "enshitification."
FWIW, Propublica is a member of the so-called Fifth Estate, explaining why they can do what actual journalism.
There's no shortage of street gangs, kill rappers, cartels,ethnic crime families, ransomware groups, terrorist etc that are actively killing people or committing wide scale crimes. Go join them and you could have a compelling story. Join the Nuwabian Moors and get to work on infiltrating the SuperMax.
Even corny ass biker gangs with their name on their "cut" occasionally get in shoot outs and have more interesting things going on then what is basically a middle aged version of the boy scouts.
Practically, why are there not militia groups with Navy SEAL/Delta-level tactical abilities? Or at least near to that? Is it personnel selection effects or bc that level of training requires time/money investments that are out of the reach of non-professional organizations?
I think the militias don't get the top-of-the-line retired military people. They get the wannabes, the people who love the trappings of being tough and deadly, without the actual skills or training. Putting on my amateur psychologist's hat, I'd guess that the militia types mostly washed out in the military, but are still looking for what they went into the military to try to find - a sense of belonging and identity.
The real SEAL/Delta level people don't go into a militia to try to find that - they found it for real in the real military.
Also “mil-spec”, and in a totally different context i.e. big box retail, “contractor grade”.
I guess not enough of an overlap between anyone anti-mask and any convenient promotional memes.
A trope of many action/thriller movies is groups of top-notch professionals becoming disenchanted with democracy and forming terrorist organizations. While movies aren't reality, it's striking that even watered-down versions almost never seem to happen. Maybe the military is just that good at filtering out those types during psychological testing, or maybe belonging is far more important than ideology.
The more mundane reason is probably because it's more appealing to use those skills to enter law enforcement or become a private military contractor than knowingly and overtly breaking away from society to form and maintain an organization that uses violence to achieve specific political aims.
„In 2018, the German Federal Criminal Police Office uncovered a plot involving unknown KSK soldiers to murder prominent German politicians such as Claudia Roth, Heiko Maas and Joachim Gauck among others, and carry out attacks against immigrants living in Germany.[7] Also, earlier that same year in a separate investigation, the State prosecutors in the city of Tübingen investigated whether neo-Nazi symbols were used at a "farewell" event involving members of KSK.[8][9]
In June 2020, German defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer announced that the unit would be partially disbanded due to growing far-right extremism within the ranks.[10] The KSK had become partially independent from the chain of command, with a toxic leadership culture. One of the force's four companies where extremism is said to be the most rife was to be dissolved and not replaced.[11]“
Because SEAL/Delta units are made up of statistical outliers who can keep their cortisol levels low under conditions that 99% of us absolutely cannot.
Also, in experience with self-organized volunteer organizations in different fields (not militias, etc.), the lack of discipline, organization, motivation, just basic thought is often shocking. The dysfunction can be overwhelming. I'm not surprised that very few have developed real capabilities.
> Navy SEAL/Delta-level
Maybe you didn't mean it literally, but that is a pretty high standard. It's like asking why you don't see local basketball players with NBA-level ability. 99.x% of military personnel, with years of training and experience, don't reach those levels.
But that may get back to your point about discipline, motivation, intelligence, etc.
Re SEAL/Delta-level: I guess I'm asking two distinct questions.
1) To use your basketball analogy: while NBA-level skills may be an unreasonable expectation, why do the videos seem to show middle school or JV-level competence? I'd expect that D3 college-level competence wouldn't be super difficult, but evidently that isn't a correct assumption.
2) What is the practical requirement for a world-class tactical unit (or near that level, e.g. D1 basketball or a bad pro team)? I wouldn't expect current militias to be at that level, but what about less developed nation-states?
Highly trained tactical teams are useful for precision strikes. Most goals of a militia don’t require that much precision, if I had to guess.
That seems like a narrative someone might tell, but I don't know it's true at all, or if it's part of their training. Lots of PSTD out there, even among elite soldiers. Look at the person who blew up the vehicle in Las Vegas.
I've read interviews with them saying that killing is unnatural and you never get used to it.
2) World class units require world class funding. Training and equipment are not cheap. The amount of money spent on the military by the US government is a big factor in tactical superiority, not just for the front-line units themselves, but also the massive amount of logistics it takes for them to operate at that elite level anywhere on the planet at the drop of a hat.
One common form of US military aid is training elite units in partner militaries, often in less developed countries. This has an evil history, training death squads and other war criminals, knowingly or unknowingly. It also has a cost-effective and good history, training Ukraine's elite units, for example.
(My impression is that it's a cost-effective compromise solution to a very difficult, expensive problem: The institutions of militaries are sometimes highly corrupt and incompetent; the Afghan military is an example. Fixing that problem would require building a new military, which could take 20 years at great cost and may be impossible: The corruption usually comes from the government, whose corruption comes from elites and from society-wide political problems.)
You can find some competent people and create a small, isolated organization, and train and equip them, and do it cost-effectively. The Afghan military was hopeless; their elite units were reportedly very good.
I think it boils down to their ability to make money as well as practice their craft. Militias in Brazil will be paid in secret by the government to fight drug traffickers and vice versa. They can be hired out by rival cartels fighting against each other too. They can have jobs to protect loggers from eco-terrorist or to protect swaths of forest from illegal logging.
There isn't much "work" for private militias in the US. Private security has demand but it's fairly small scale. Their isn't really the opportunity to field brigades with 1000s of well trained soldiers for regular off the books military action.
There's a great deal of work for private US militia's, China has a substantial contract with a subgroup spun off from the private contractor formerly known as Erik Prince's Blackwater.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Services_Group
TBH it's a full time investigative exercise keeping track of them all. The linked article gives a very partial overview of one arm of many and tails off after 2021.
There's not really much domestic demand for American PMC services. In Brazil the militias are locals that primarily have other income.
The US is paying a billion dollars to a PMC to secure the green zone in Iraq, but it's not like all those people will be militia in the US in a certain area.
FWiW one general definition of militia is:
A militia is a military or paramilitary force that comprises civilian members, as opposed to a professional standing army of regular, full-time military.
The militias on the other hand are more so made up of normal people moonlighting as soldiers.
> Militias in Brazil will be paid in secret by the government to fight drug traffickers and vice versa.
these "militias" in Brazil are not militias by your criteria.
From my PoV the described activities carried out by paramilitary groups in Brazil are similar to the activities carried out by US PMC's, and there's as much of that kind of work available to US contractors as there is for Brazilian operatives.
They can only exist, because someone else paid to train their people. The training would otherwise be far too expensive.
[1] https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites...
It feels like the "no scammers" thing you see on Craigslist ads; as if some scammer would say, "Darn, and I was really hoping to cash in on THIS one; I guess I'm out."
To your point, the groups will likely continue to train (seemingly illegally), but the quality of the groups will definitely be degraded due to the more limited pool of qualified trainers driven by the presumably high-deterrence of state laws. The original comment above asked why we don't see high(er) performing militia groups, and these types of state laws seem like a strong contributing factor.
Probably important to consider that everything you know about SEALs etc are filtered through a massive PR system anyways. So you might not be comparing the same level of quality of video either. Good editing can do wonders.
I saw a joke about Navy Seals awhile ago that went something like:
A Navy Seal and a Delta Force operator are chatting in a bar. The Navy Seal immediately starts talking and bragging for hours about all the amazing things he and other Seals have done. The entire time the Delta Force operator smiles and nods.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_SEAL_sele...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Boat_Service#Recruit...
This exactly - a few 300-pound dudes taking a break from their McDonalds to look like they really mean it by firing long barrelled weapons at some cardboard target. All this escape and evasion training, with all the wilderness stuff too - it's nonsense, little guys playing soldier is all.
Examples from the past are easy to come by (COINTELPRO), but a recent example would be the failed 2020 kidnapping plot of Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan at the time.
Thirteen arrests were announced, and the FBI has admitted to using three informants and two special agents. The defense argued that there were at least twelve.
Using the official number as a conservative guess, that's still 5 feds for 13 arrests (a 38% ratio!)
Now imagine if instead of 13 dudes trying to kidnap a governor, it was a local militia trying to arm and train hundreds or thousands of people. The full power of the US government to crush opposition is terrifying.
FYI an informant is not a fed.
Let's set aside talent, access to experience trainers, facilities and equipment and just look at time on task: real special forces operators spend 30-60 hours per week, 48 weeks a year (assuming 4 weeks of leave) working on their craft. Finding people that can put that kind of time in would be rare.
When you look at the other factors, the gap widens.
So if the militia doesn't hold a candle to the SEALs the why do they matter? Because of modern point and shoot repeating and guided weapons. We're seeing that in how the Russians are taking people off the streets and out of prisons, giving 1-3 week of training and throwing them at the Ukrainians. We saw that with the Ukrainians when they stopped huge Russian armored columns with man-portable anti-tank missiles. Bullets, grenades, ATGMs and drones really don't care about the experience level of their target. Artillery, even portable stuff like a pack mortar or repeating grenade launcher takes out any Spetznaz or Rangers in the general area you aim at just like it does any other soldier. The age of the super-proficient ended with the US Civil war: the revolver, repeating rifle and machine gun level skill gaps pretty quickly..
I think we have a different view now. In the UK we are looking at a Post Office scandal where the upper management literally prosecuted its own employees for theft instead of admit a billion dollar computer system was buggy. And this started in 1990s, was printed in newspapers by the mid-2000s and only got serious last year and prosecutions will probably go through to the 2030s
I mean if the punishment for your misdeeds is thirty years delayed, and basically consists of retiring and being embarrassed in front of friends it’s hardly a punishment.
And it rather makes this “moles” efforts … well it’s not much of a deal for him is it really.
But all that shit's a powder keg, they're hoping for some nonsense like "race war" to set them off, and until then they have a lot of deniability.
Verfassungsschutz moles have procured weapons for Nazi terrorists(1999-2011).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalsozialistischer_Unterg...
Whole thing smells.
I get a sense that we are beginning to see a resurgence in lone-wolf style operator activism and crime (or terrorism, etc., depending on your view of things), sort of like was more common 30+ years ago, a la the Unibomber, Skyjacker, all of the serial killers in the 60-80s.
The reasons of “why now” and “why lone wolf” are complicated but mostly boil down to high availability of information (awareness of opsec) and relatively low trust amongst social groups and of institutions, coupled with a more online and more destabilized male demographic the younger you go.
I would think that radicalization is more likely caused by the center being more and more obviously fascist or corporatist or anti-people or whatever term you prefer.
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Have you read Potkin's Stalin diary? His theory is the October Revolution succeeded, where all prior attempts had failed, because Emperial Russia's elites couldn't be bothered to bolster the ruling regime, yet again. Potkin further says this is how all successful revolutions play out.
Are you referring to something like that?
Potkin completely changed my view of the "reactionary centrists", like the NY Times. The Village, the Beltway, whatever our elites are called. For whatever reason, they no longer give a shit about democracy, neoliberalism (much less all social progress since woman's suffrage), and the "maritime order" of the post-WWII America hegomony.
So much so, the reactionaries (Heritage, Federalist Society, etc) are orchestrating another Constitutional Convention. The goal is to lock-in their world view.
For better or worse. And now we'll find out.
"Nobody want's to rewrite our Constitution! That's absurd!"
I know I sound "shrill" and alarmist and nutty. Simply restating outloud what reactionaries themselves claim are their end goals makes one sound insane.
Thanks for reading. Also, I'm keen to hear other people's hot takes.
But manufacturing a right wing conspiracy is more important than discussing real narco terrorism that kills thousands of Americans and Mexicans every year, floods our country with lethal drugs, and finances North Korea and Chinese crime organizations.
How many headless corpses did the Oath keepers leave on the street last year?
How many metric tons of fentanyl did they smuggle?
Yep.
While it may be small scale and clownish in appearence from a distance, it is real and does result in bombings, shootings, death, injury, and disruption.
Here is a really nice book to give some perspective: End times, by Peter Turchin Best most terrifying birthday present I ever got, I think.
Actually I think I'll put it as a post in and of itself, folks here may like it.
he wouldn't be distributing crap if either of those happened. The cops or killers would be in possession! I mean was he going to say to the cops WAIT don't arrest me and hands stuff to bystander01!!! I can't take this article serious at all.