Comment by vintermann
13 hours ago
Look, I don't want to be mean because if you're in the US right now you're in a situation which sucks. But that situation of 10000 people with guns seizing a military base to bootstrap an effective civil war, is just so absurd I don't even know how to begin.
You're right, private communication is an essential tool of resistance, more important than any weapons. But if you start buying up old Blackberries to give to your kids and all your friends, don't you think that gets you on a watchlist in itself? Not only should your 10000 people have guns to take on a military base, they should have impeccable infosec too?
Pretty much all civil wars in history had foreign backing for one or more sides. It seems no one ever had enough domestic resources to confront the domestic resource control machinery - which makes sense when you think about it. Though the more optimistic way to look at it was that if you had that level of control, you'd win without a civil war.
> that situation of 10000 people with guns seizing a military base to bootstrap an effective civil war, is just so absurd I don't even know how to begin.
What about it strikes you as absurd? A country's military is spread all over the place. It's entirely practical to overwhelm it in a specific location by concentrating your forces there. You then have access to more powerful weapons in order to do it again.
> But if you start buying up old Blackberries to give to your kids and all your friends, don't you think that gets you on a watchlist in itself?
There are about a billion PCs and laptops made in the last 20 years that can run Linux and whatever communications software you want. If owning a laptop gets you on a list then most of the population is already on the list, and if the list contains everyone then it contains no one.
> Not only should your 10000 people have guns to take on a military base, they should have impeccable infosec too?
Have you considered the other side of that coin? All of these geniuses have their own forces and infrastructure being tracked into the poorly-secured databases of all of these private companies. Compromise those databases and drones start showing up in vulnerable places that weren't expected to be known. But to stop tracking everybody you have to stop tracking everybody.
The thing where members of The Party can turn off the telescreen doesn't actually work. If the millions of people who work for defense contractors are being tracked, you've got a significant vulnerability. If they're not, guess who was already working to infiltrate your defense industry to begin with.
> Pretty much all civil wars in history had foreign backing for one or more sides.
That's just true of wars in general. But also, supposing that something like this were to happen, where there was a sufficient fracture that it isn't immediately obvious who would come out on top, every foreign government would then have to position themselves. And then why would support have to come from some disreputable despots rather than e.g. Canada or Western Europe?
> Though the more optimistic way to look at it was that if you had that level of control, you'd win without a civil war.
If you have 100 people and they have a million, you lose. If you have a million people and they have 100, you win. If it's not that unbalanced then both sides fight until the cost of fighting gets higher than the cost of bargaining.