Well, take care. In the meantime, listen to the 20 lessons on tyranny.

And maybe binge watch this guy, I think he’s onto something.

I’m not denying fear, violence, or victimhood. And I’m not equating oppressors with the oppressed. I should push back on the idea that naming cultural patterns equals blaming victims, or that only people inside the worst possible historical analogy are allowed to analyze trajectories.

I’m talking about how societies slide, not about who deserves what. Those are different conversations. I’ve been on the receiving end of state violence. I’ve marched, been gassed, watched movements radicalize too fast and burn themselves out. That’s exactly why I’m saying this: jumping straight to existential framing and armed horizons doesn’t protect anyone it only narrows the future until only catastrophe is left.

You don’t need to already be in a Holocaust to talk about escalation dynamics. In fact, if you wait until everything is unspeakable, analysis is already useless. Yes, fear is justified and preparation is understandable and necessary. But when fear becomes immune to critique, it stops being a warning signal and starts being a steering wheel.

My point hasn’t changed: there is still space, Real Political Space, for non-violent (not peaceful!) resistance, that can be powerfully disruptive. Once that space collapses, it doesn’t reopen because people were right about how bad things felt. I’m arguing against that collapse, not minimizing what’s at stake.

The reasons you outlined are why you are in trouble. As in, if they weren’t the case you would be in trouble. It’s a bit of a circular tautology. But they are not things that doom you. They are the shape of the whole you’re in. And it’s on you guys to find a way out. There’s no way around that. And no, the world is not coming to save you: there is no cavalry.

I don’t think you guys are doomed. I think the opposite, that the American people are a sleeping giant that can shake the world. And no, I don’t think you need to jump straight to shooting reach other.

You missed my point.

On the one hand yes you are behind on some kinds of labour organizing.

On the other hand, it’s not that simple.

a) you have a very long history of minority organizing. Black Americans, Chicanos, indigenous people, and other minorities have survived for generations. It sounds like a leftie cliché, but you guys should really take leadership from them.

b) you don’t have the baggage that comes with entrenched left wing politics. There is a thing like too much left wing politicking. In Greece for example, land of spectacular antifa riots, the left is absolutely paralyzed and completely fragmented. Too much history, too many reasons to blame this or that left faction for what they did 10,20,30, sometimes 60 or more years ago. You have a chance to build on a green field.

c) one thing you Americans actually have going for you is that you guys actually believe in democracy. You’re true believers. It’s a thing we in the rest of the world have always kind of being weirded out by you that you want to be electing judges and sherrifs and school boards etc. And you actually have this libertarian steak in you that’s kind of interesting when it comes to resistance. You have so much democratic institutional hardware just lying around.

d) you actually are close to some of the powerful economic structures, institutions, and pop culture centres in the planet. Anything you do will and already does reverberate globally in ways that others don’t.

So, while you do have very big challenges you also have very big opportunities. And friends man, you have friends. I know we give you guys shit all the time, but trust me, when Americans rise up and stand up we all feel a bit taller. I’m telling you this as someone who listened to RATM on the way to weekly marches getting gassed by the police, thinking we were trying to be as cool as the WTO protests in Seattle.

Not American, so feel free to stop reading.

It’s ridiculous to me how you yanks go from zero to a hundred like this. Either normality or civil war. Like there is no in between? You have an authoritarianism problem. So resist authoritarianism. What makes you think that the only way to resist is shooting people? Resistance is a spectrum, and you have barely started using democratic means to fight back (you just started electing democratic socialists), much less active procedural and institutional warfare (is Bernie demanding a vote for every procedural point requiring a vote? Are the Dems actually using any rat fucking tactic to make the state ungovernable? Are your local and state governments really resisting beyond making angry noises?). You have barely tried non violent resistance (not the same as peaceful!) but you’re such a violent culture that you jump straight to military solutions. Wtf. Those come at the very end, if everything else has failed. Has it? Nowhere near. So this talk about civil war, is that really useful?

It actually isn’t.

An ecosocialist world would not allow wealth inequality to become this bad.

We don’t live in one. The challenge is to make one.

It’s a biological fact when resources are constrained that a population will plateu.

Mice and fleas don’t have medicine, feminism, research centres and agriculture. Look at the world around you. In societies with high degrees of scarcity and high infant mortality, humans have tended to have a lot of babies. This is true now, and it was true historically. On the flipside, in societies with high development indexes, humans tend to not have many kids. From Japan to Sweden to Cuba, you see that fertility rates inversely correlate with human development. These are just observable facts.

I mean, the “I’m sorry if it makes me an ecofascist, but” line was a dead giveaway from the start.

Oh, so you get to decide who gets to have kids and how many? And the “trailer park welfare mom” is your problem? Like, the straw(wo)man you made up with ingredients from classism, sexism and eugenics?

Yea, that makes you a regular fascist. The “eco” is just the excuse.

What a bullshit dilemma.

And you are wrong that wealth inequality causes the drop in birth rates. The birth rate was higher in the Dickensian times of Britain compared to now. If anything, it is wealth equality, universal positive rights, and women’s liberation that tend to make people have fewer kids.

A ecosocialist world is a sustainable one. An ecofascist world is just a death spiral.

You first, buddy.

If not, this is just a slippery slope argument to “those other people shouldn’t exist/have babies”. That’s just the door to eco-fascism.

There absolutely are women who like Warhammer.

Historicals though… I’ve never seen a woman excited about fielding an army of Burgundians against a bunch of English. It can get worse… Napoleonics, ancient stuff…

Ok. Come back when red terror is the topic of discussion.

What’s a DEI chin??

Right. I’m wasting my time, I see. Go troll somewhere else buddy.

That’s 1995.

Let’s swallow the Russia bit, right? Because Russian history from Ivan III to Nicholas II is basically exactly imperialist colonialism.

And then you just focus on the China bit. Yes, the westerners did that to China in the past. Does that mean that modern day China is structurally incapable of being an imperialist country in the 21st century? Or because the CCP pays lip service to socialism (while Xi tells people to train as Confucians) we’re supposed to ignore the actual capitalist nature of its economy/society?

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The USSR did not fall because of a US coup. It collapsed because of its own internal contradictions.