this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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At this point is the USA prepared for anything?
If an 18th century army ever tries to invade the country again, the US is well prepared thanks to the second amendment.
Nah, the army would win. We have a bunch of individuals with firearms that practice using them on the range or maybe hunting. That's a far cry from opposing an actual military. Sure the tech outpaces the army's but most people are just going to hide in their houses. The rest will be seen coming and when martial law is enacted and they go house to house seizing guns, it'll be over. It's not like they can't learn how to use modern weaponry. Most people vastly underestimate discipline and organization.
This assumes there is no modern military for this premise.
For the first few battles.
After that the survivors will figure out how to fight an insurgency
Lol-snort - could you imagine such an army vs. literally one person, like even a 400-lb couch surfer with bad aim or perhaps a literal 6-year-old child, but with a single semi- or full-auto and an extra box of ammo? Especially with a scope attachment, the opposing army could be like "okay we attack tomorrow at dawn" and the person ends the threat while they are still in the camp drinking coffee.
Or as we see happening in Ukraine, a handful of drones could do it from the air, and it would take them awhile to figure out where the threat was even coming from.
Human beings are hopelessly ineffective against the might of such military machines. Just like the school-children of today, who being young & inexperienced, look to their leaders to take proper care of them:-(.
That’s like a right wing doomsday prepper fantasy. Them and their arsenal against a mob of whoever trying to take their stuff.
But they always stop before the end where they get killed anyway. Only so many bullets and starving people with nothing to lose aren’t giving up.
I laughed because you are right, but you're heavily discounting the fact that most people would cowtow immediately if they thought they could get the slightest bit of protection.
I mean, the sales pitch works to get them to buy the guns. After that point whatever they do with them is no longer the salesperson's concern... :-P
The same goes with prepper gear - like, what amount of food & water is going to help you survive a nuclear winter? Especially in comparison to paying taxes to a government that will formulate economic strategies that lead towards nations never using such weapons in the first place, b/c their wealthiest business-people stand too much to lose.
I can barely imagine the mindset of a prepper who readies themselves for all manner of attacks against them... but then refuses to take a vaccine? Or wear a mask, or simply stand 6 feet apart and/or reduce going out especially during peak times, and also works to prevent others from having access to those vaccines or wearing masks of their own volition.
Some people are more vulnerable to different types of "attacks", disinformation being one of the most effective that has ever existed.:-(
wolverines!
Only two survived the event (1984) version. Man, that film didn’t age well. The Chinese were our allies, Nicaragua and Cuba I think were part of the attackers. Russia is still an enemy, though.
A single guy or small unit with hand-held weapons would be obliterated by artillery as soon as the army figured out which general area the shots are coming from.
18th century artillery? I suppose it also depends on whether we were talking a squad, platoon, etc., whether the single person has to defend a particular area like their home with family inside, whether this whole army was in one place, whether the army intentionally traveled through time vs. simply were teleported there against their will (in which case they likely could be convinced to surrender, especially upon seeing a helicopter - and like, wherever they came from were they a defensively minded unit, like would their morale be crushed to realize that neither victory nor defeat would ever allow them to see their loved ones again - plus these defenders could literally be their own family members as in descendants), etc.
But without going into such details, my point was they technology has advanced quite a bit since the 18th century, which would give someone with a modern gun a decided advantage for them to make use of.
Cannons have been around since the 12th century.
I thought they were extremely imprecise, especially vs. a singular target - devastating vs. an entire army, but not an individual.
But they're also great at destroying buildings and shit, between these and some trebuchets and stuff they could really do a number on an area then move in with the troops, they also had no issues just throwing bodies at the problem. Anyway I was just pointing out the technicality around the term artillery.
First off, if that dude stayed still, just take cover.
Secondly, they had CANNONS in the 1800s. Do you know the effective range of a modern semiautomatic rifle? Effective ranges would be around 300 meters.
Some "couch surfer" who can barely hold a rifle wouldn't hit shit over 150m.
And again, if they just sat in the same spot, even muskets could take him down.
Goddamn American fantasies. Get better fantasies.
We’re prepared to give up the pretense of democracy.
It seems like people are just ready to give up on civilization. Return to monke, I guess. Perhaps A.I. will go to the stars in our stead.
And Elon Musk will take it there! (TM) In his own head at least, and the minds of anyone gullible enough to fund it, if only those darn spaceships would stop blowing up and work right - maybe he should have paid his workers perhaps?:-P
The exploding spaceships isn't really a problem. That's kind of the intention of the testing process. The way NASA does things, where everything is meticulously tested and nothing can fail ever, works, but it's slower and more expensive. Destructive testing is faster, and has the benefit of possibly revealing failure modes you didn't forsee.
I mean... explosive testing sounds even more expensive though, bc you cannot reuse the same components? Also, where does the need to do a rush job come in - if something takes a decade, then what's so bad about waiting a decade? The point about total cost is well taken though.
We probably will agree that each have their merits, and a little bit of both could actually go a long way - like a fast-moving alpha stage vs. a more stable beta model.
Unfortunately from everything I've read (admittedly not much) I thought the US government has gone virtually all-in on the Musk train, with little funding leftover for additional models. Then again, space isn't really a prioritization at all right now, compared to e.g. Ukraine, Gaza, Climate Change, infrastructure, inflation, etc., so that too makes some amount of sense.
At this point the remaining shredded tatters of democracy are necessary but insufficient to dealing with the challenges we currently face. Though e.g. Germany seems to be doing quite well, so it may be the particular implementation of rather than the entire theory of democracy that has gone off the rails.
for war, probably
Not if it involves knowledge or information, in addition to it rather than physical weapons only:-(.
Always prepared to support and send money to israel
Sadly, I cannot refute this. Especially if you add "so long as oil profits are still possible".
Not much if anything at all. We have to keep us safe now.
That was the big takeaway I got from COVID.
No one's going to protect me from other people's carelessness but me.
Also if there every really is an apocalypse, I don't want to live through it. :D