This is what the start of a monumentally fucking stupid coup looks like.
I don't think it will succeed, but even if only a couple of generals throw their weight behind it, people will get killed.
If this does happen, there's also not gonna be even a fig leaf attempt to minimize civilian casualties among the armed forces supporting it. Once the fascist militias get involved you're going to see fascist death squads deliberately targetting innocent people because that is how far right paramilitaries have always, always operated.
Seriously, pay attention to this shit and stay safe.
It doesn't need to be an actual coup. 4D chess does exist, it's just never played to save the world but for maneuvering to attain power.
Off the top of my head this could be a way to get the right people into the right places for the future, when a coup would have actual broad institutional and/or popular support. They could, for one, justifiably be counting on some of these cadres retaining their new positions under a Biden presidency. Secondly, the new appointees might have been tasked with creating Trump-loyal networks within the military as well as gathering solid inside intel on potential supporters and adversaries - people to put on lists for liaisons, for promotion, on kill lists. We're only going to hear about the high profile appointees but the mid and low level clerks and officers - that's where the real work and reshuffling would be going on, and very quietly at that. If the plotters are clever they would see this kind of deep infiltration as a must and thus the immediate priority (something revolutionary lefties would also have to do at some point down the road if we are to destroy this monstrous system).
In all major military operations there's a fighting force and a decoy force. The grandstanding, Trump's clown act, the high profile scandals could just as well be a decoy to cover the more mundane and systematic taking of power. It takes different parts playing in concert to execute a scheme, or as David Mamet once put in his manual for script writing - none of the constituent parts of a sailboat look themselves like a sailboat. The part we're seeing is the flashy show part, the rest is either unseen or not there at all but from our amateur sidelines perspective those two are equivalent.
Really shouldn't get my hopes up with words like "decapitation" when they're just getting fired
yeah from the Outside , like boy do you guys realise in your little american Brain that shit is getting very concerning , very very fast currently .... I know you long for the " is it Funny ? , Im soo uneffected !? lol !" Notion...
Which is this stupid narcistic american tick , but boy oh boy , .... All trumps needs to succeed is you considering it to long to be just "funny " and "exciting"
Some real Mene Mene Tekel u Pharsim - Hours are happening right now....
It's obviously very concerning but other than things those of use who are able have been doing anyway (stocking up on food and essentials, getting a gun and learning to use it, getting involved with local orgs, etc) there really isn't anything we can do. So the options are either spend the next few months paralyzed by fear about the implications and what's coming, or to find it funny.
“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee? But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” - Camus
Without mass organization there is very little we can do about a coup, and now is a profoundly difficult time for any sort of mass organization.
Yeah exactly. Not to mention the thing that could potentially stop Trump doing a coup is if he thought the military wouldn't back him, as in officers, soldiers etc.
Thing is he's just fired people who would tell him that and replaced them with people who will tell him whatever they think he wants to hear.
This general lack of "upheavel " in your life / in the collectiv american experiance , is why you can not imagine it. But thats not going to stiop it , it will insure that it will happen.... ..What is the "Big thing" that ever happend to the American Puplic ? There is not much there "Great depression ?" ,a "Big thing " simply did not happen to the american puplic until now,... .. It is also what sets Europe and many other Nations appart from the USA ..,.. Most of them have had a "Big thing " happening to them collectivly that forms their Todays Concience ,...
Americans simply did not,... But they Can not Imagine that they lack this expierence , that they lack a Experience and a humility that they can not Imagine themselfs .... whats coming now will chang it... You will be Humbled ....
you dont Argue , thats the first lesson of beeing humbled,...
You simply just listen for once , when I tell you what will happen now :
The Strong will do what they can and 1800CATS4GOLD and his friends will suffer what they must , until they finally see !
and thats that and thats it...
Godspeed...
While it would rule to see the Dems eat shit the biggest concern with these nutcases if a coup does take place and succed is the very real possibility of China getting nuked down the road.
i honestly believe china has a better industrial capacity for war and defense than the united states does
I don't think it matters much since a direct confrontation between US, China or Russia would destroy the fucking planet
hey at least the nuclear winter will cancel out the global warming for a bit
For a bit. Then when the skies clear the global warming will renew at an increased pace. At least that's what the literature says.
No one ever said fixing climate change was going to be a 1-time thing. It will require restructuring society and production.
But if we all come together and realize our common interest in a habitable planet, we can keep the nuclear wars going indefinitely so the earth can start to heal.
That's insane. Clearly we need to invent AI to have a reason to block out the skies forever, Matrix style
I still think we should explore detonating nukes in the Sahara to generate a prolonged nuclear autumn.
Unfortunately if the factories shut down, the soot level in the air will decrease which will crank up sunlight and global warming will shoot up extra fast. Global dimming is a thing
From what I've read not really. China is still massively lagging behind in terms of power projection, first strike survivability and retaliation. While they're already good enough to deter Europe the US would remain mostly unscathed atm. The PRC just started rolling out their fancy new ICBMs last year and still have too few to counter the US comprehensive anti-missile defense cluster. The old Dongfeng-5 being very very likely to get destroyed in an American first strike. Besides that pretty much all industrial and urban centres in China are along the East coast and can be taken out rather easily by the US military. We think of China as this rising unstoppable high tech world power but the militarisation of the American state is on a whole another level and gives them an advantage that can quickly nullify any adversary's purely economic superiority.
Yeah, one of China's conclusions from the fall of the USSR was that massive investments in arms, and having defence concerns superseding all other policy priorities, is fucking stupid, the USSR was able to maintain their advantage in terms of conventional military power in Europe for decades, but what did is matter for when Communism fell practically without a shot being fired.
Nonetheless the concept of a winnable nuclear war remains a tragic oxymoron. China still has around 100 ICBMS, meaning ~200 warheads, and their planning on doubling that arsenal. The Pentagons own tests indicate that anti-Ballistic Missile systems only have a 40-50% sucess rate (and those tests are done in ideal conditions). Even if we generously assume that China is only able to launch 50% of their missiles after suffering from a first strike . That still leaves 50 Nuclear warheads falling onto dozens of American cities, which alone should be enough to ensure that no reasonable person would ever consider Nuking China.
Which is why whats going on is pretty scary
It's not 50 though, that's the point. They have, by most open source accounts, around 20 (to maybe max 40, maybe) Dongfeng-41 missiles. This is the entire extent of their capability to strike the US. Sure, they also have 2 SSBNs but those are so noisy we should by now assume they are being trailed 24/7 by US attack subs and will be sunk first thing just before a first strike. Dongfeng-5 missiles are too big for the PLA's tunnel network and sit in silos. Moreover, they take like an hour to prepare for launching, so you can write them off as well.
Now, no one really knows how effective the DF-41 is in penetrating the US anti-missile shield but the Russians believe that their own newest, most sophisticated Yars ICBM (which should be even more advanced in terms of survivability, at least on paper, what with its flat trajectory, short engine burn time and autonomously manoeuvrable warheads) has around 65% penetration probability. At the end of the day this is a numbers game, the only way to reliably retaliate is by oversaturating the enemy's defence capabilities. Back in 2011 (I think, need to look it up) there was an interview with a former Soviet and current RF missile defence expert Yuri Saveliev who was raising an alarm about how Putin's neglect of the strategic missile forces was making Russia lose its deterrent credibility. By his calculations, due to the necessary phasing out of expired Soviet ICBMs and SLBMs, combined with the meagre production capabilities of new replacement missiles, Russia would have only around 230 credibly functional strategic missiles by 2015. In his view almost all of them (99%) would be halted by the American anti-missile shield consisting of bases in Poland/Romania, ROK, Japan, US, Canada as well as the sea based AEGIS systems. In view of this I don't think that Chinese prospects are currently optimism inspiring.
All in all we just might be in for a re-run of the arms race in preparation for WW2 between Nazi Germany and the USSR, only this time around China has less defence in depth in terms of available land and there doesn't seem to be anyone for now to take on the second front/lend-lease role.
I suspect that's a vast over-estimate of Aegis/ABM systems. I honestly doubt their ability to stop an R7 more than half the time, let alone anything with MIRV capability. Also I'm pretty sure China will have its D-5 network prepared if things look even remotely like kicking off.
Trump is off his nut but he's not "immediately nuke the world with no warning" off his nut. He'll brag and bluster first.
Yeah maybe. I was just trying to say that if the "great minds" in charge of the US nuclear arsenal wanted to militarily mitigate the threat of China eating into American hegemony now would be the best time, since with each passing year the outcome would get more and more dire for them. Will they go for it, no one knows. On the one hand the US never nuked the USSR even though they had a head start of two decades in terms of parity and almost one decade in terms of pretty much complete and total impunity. On the other hand they never had outright apocalyptic nuts controlling the American state and military. If it was just Trump I wouldn't worry, since people like him prioritize their personal safety and well being above all else.
I never thought I'd be depressed by the idea that a world-ending nuclear war was not possible.
Thats how you know 99% of chapos are just kids that like socialist aestetics.
If this happens there is a non zero chance we all get nuked. And with 'all' I mean all of the world.
As nuclear hellfire engulfs the earth with my last breath before I am instantly vaporized I utter "I hope you're happy bernie bros"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle
While researching for his upcoming book, the narrator travels to Ilium, New York, the hometown of the late Felix Hoenikker, a co-creator of the atomic bomb and Nobel laureate physicist, to interview Hoenikker's children, coworkers, and other acquaintances. There, he learns of a substance called ice-nine, created for military use by Hoenikker and now likely in the possession of his three adult children. Ice-nine is an alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature and becomes a seed crystal upon contact with any ordinary liquid water, causing that liquid water to instantly transform into more ice-nine.
Also a pretty bitchin' Joe Satriani song.
Allegory for nukes from the Vonnegut novel Cat's Cradle.
Great book.
Biden will definitely do that. But in the meantime they can cause holy hell by stacking the middle ranks. I don't think Biden has the balls to do the political purge needed there.
what's up with this meme where if someone's not literally posting their suicide note at the end of the world they must be white? your emotional response of stone cold terror and anxiety is still valid, even if it's not outwardly reflected by every single other person.
No you see, when fascists take power, historically the white communists have turned out just fine.
Nah you run up in places like Atlanta, New Orleans, and Houston, it won't be fuckin chuds running the show. I'm fairly confident armed right-wing death squads gonna try and hit people in the rural Black Belt in the South, but have real trouble in cities with significant POC and lib populations. They'll try, but you can't run into someone else hood and starting shooting. People will shoot back
Yeah but the worst case scenario is they blockade the cities and starve everyone out. Supplies have to be trucked in daily, if that stops things get real, real quick. That said, I'm not really sure what happens if you have rural militia blockading chokepoints on the highways vs. urban gangs with equipment looted from police precincts. In that scenario I don't think anyone wins except billionaires who own most of the arable land out west.
Nah, rural people need the cities for finished goods, machinery, fertilizer, pesticides, and everything else. The idea that there are still hard-scrabble farmers who could band together an fight off city people is utter bullshit. It's not 1880 anymore, farming is an intensely industrialized and mechanized practice that requires huge amounts of inputs from outside the community. Rural areas simply don't have enough warm bodies to bring in a harvest without mechanization and migrant labor. If they tried to blockade the cities they'd starve before a city with an international airport did.
Where do you think people out in the country get their medicine, fuel, and tech from? Cities. You don't build machine parts out in the middle of fuckin nowhere for local demand. We live in an Amazon-age.
Let the burbs and the countryside go a couple of weeks without insulin, for example, and you'll see people calm the fuck down to get what they need.
The US' largest, most left-leaning cities are on the coasts anyway, and would have easy access to multiple natural harbors that are some of the largest and most navigable ones in the world. I'm not scared about a rural blockade, I'm fuckin scared for my homies stuck deep in Trump country.
ruin the material conditions of a lot of people
what do you think that term means?
Yeah. I am guessing most of the people who think this is super exciting are in a position where they can delete their browsing history, rip down their Che Guevara posters, peel the left wing stickers off their laptop case and keep their heads down if it does kick off.
We're not gonna see brownshirts rounding people up outside perhaps a few rural towns where the biggest armed presence is some weird fucking right wing militia. What we're gonna see are death squads and terror attacks. Those will absolutely target whoever they find who looks different. They won't have the NSA database handy. The kinda people who think this looks entertaining are largely gonna be those much more capable of blending in and keeping their heads down.
I disagree. The militias are going to scrape through all those archived Twitter posts and go around knocking on doors.
They already did that to a city council woman who supported defunding the police. The police doxxed her, gave out her address, and some rwnj went to the wrong door and raped her neighbor saying he was going to teach her a lesson. "I’ve received threatening messages and voicemails from men stating they, ' hoped I didn’t need the police ' when something happened." As if police do fuck all for rape cases to begin with, they don't even test rape kits (wonder how many police officers they're protecting by doing that).
Then there's Portland where those anonymous vans just round people up and disappear them. Great tactic for fascists to copy.
Making sure the top leadership in the army and police support Trump when push comes to shove.
Other guess is that he's removing people who would refuse to follow orders to roll tanks into cities with ongoing protests.
Libs are out to brunch. Who's gonna be protesting between now and January 20th?
Either way, it's high time for people to get ready for the worst no? Not because it will happen, but it's going to effect the most vulnerable people in your life. Panama is very US friendly if migrating is an option for you.
Either way, it’s high time for people to get ready for the worst no?
Going to fire all my hand-picked appointees so I can initiate a coup with career bureaucrats who hate me even more than the folks I just fired. :-/
I mean, maybe Trump will find a Brigadier General willing to drive a tank into the capital building and declare the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton. Maybe Michael Flynn will come riding up Pennsylvania Avenue on a white horse with all the goons at Langley singing "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" in parade formation behind him. Maybe the DHS will being raiding governors' offices in blue states, while Joe Biden flees to exile in Canada.
But, like, I'm not holding my breath.
But a coup is not the same as a revolution. A coup is made by the few, which are, oh what a coincidence, the privileged elites. A revolution is the way to go.
When Melania says that Trump's a sore loser, she means it as a warning.
I know how to fix this, Biden just needs to move further to the right so that they don't want to do a coup anymore. If that doesn't work, maybe we could give Trump Czechoslavakia and see if that convinces him to stop.
