That said, I don't think the results are crazy, on their face (though I don't myself expect a civil war). There are a number of groups openly proposing political violence, increased partisan polarisation, and a breakdown in the normal political processes (Congress has been essentially non-functional for a while, the Supreme Court have taken a decidedly activist turn, state legislatures are actively discussing subverting the next Presidential election, and trust in politicians of all parties is at historical lows). It's not clear how these will be resolved, and a further increase in political violence is certainly a possibility. Will that amount to civil war? Not close, in my view, but we live in unusual political times.

Gerrymandering for example is extremely beneficial for elites in both political parties, but increasingly corrodes peoples faith in the system. It’s the perfect example of people actively harming the United States, and never spoken about in those terms.

I don't know why people are still pushing this narrative when the hearings have made it perfectly clear at this point that there was orchestration and support among the government, Capitol police and likely even the Secret Service. The "crazy people dressed up as Indians and cowboys" were useful idiots meant to make the whole thing seem like a clumsy farce.

We can also observe the reaction (overreaction) that turkey had to the coup, and how the world perceived those actions.

Now compare that to what ever secret conspiracy that led to a bunch of useful idiots making a clumsy farce. How realistic is it that those events will be the start of an US civil war?

Nobody takes the hearings seriously since they're political theatre. But if what you say is true, I definitely look forward to those people in government and the secret service to be charged with treason or sedition. It's been 18 months, so when should we expect that to happen?

...Can you explain this?

My brain translates that to "We fudge the numbers because we know dome portion of them are being deceptive."

I'm pretty sure that isn't what that's supposed to mean is it?

If actual views on the target issues are predicted well by demographics and independent of the response biases beyond their correlation with the demographics, this should work well.

If they aren't, though, this potentially magnifies the impact on the overall result of subsamples that are potentially most unreliable because of small size.

It is clear the Supreme Court is taking an activist stance. One member of the court has pretty much stated he is in favor of overturning previous rulings that granted sexual rights. The Court is now erring on the side of taking rights away rather than on increasing them or keeping the status quo in place.

Nearly all the places that talk about secession are the same states that generate less federal tax revenue than they spend. Which is both why it would be a terrible idea, and why people get upset about it. Few people who know they are getting a handout enjoy having everybody else know it, and it makes them bristly.

I live in Texas and had a couple friends who were on that bandwagon. I asked them had they thought about going toe to toe with the US Marines while bombers are over Austin and drones over everywhere else. All i got back was silence. The union will be preserved at any cost, there's precedent for that. No state will secede without defeating the US military first.

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/costs/soc...

You assumption that Texas would have to go toe to toe with the US Marines is a big assumption when many Marines are from Texas or would be politically sympathetic. If it came to it, the US Military would likely face a large breakdown and crisis within itself.

That's not true. The overrepresented regions are basically the South and the West. The Midwest “flyover states” and Northeast are the most underrepresented areas.

And while the South is overrepresented, (Also, military recruitment isn't necessarily politically representative of the states it is drawn from; sure, the Deep South is overrepresented, but that's also a big part of the reason the Blacks are super-overrepresented in the military (making up nearly triple the share of the military as of the country at large.) And Southern Blacks politically don't look the same as “the South” more broadly.

I just don't think the secession people have thought about the level of violence required to actually secede. And even then what happens next? A blockade and sanctions then the entire state slowly starves to death or submission. Maybe Texas could form an alliance with Mexico.. ok now the United States declares war on Mexico. I don't think Mexico would want that.

the whole secession story just falls apart after 10 minutes of thought.

If the US didn't goto war to preserve the union then the US, as defined the US constitution, ceases to exist. There is no provision in the constitution laying out the right (or even the method) for secession.

Sure there is. It is called the amendment process, and requires a supermajority vote.

Unless, you are going to claim that using the amendment process, officially, as laid out in the constitution is some treasonous act, that the military would stop.

(Funnily enough, I have see people make this silly argument! That it is unconstitutional to use the official constitutional amendment process, and is treason!)

You can't aim a gun at someone to changing their beliefs, much less kill your way toward that goal. What you will do is create more and more costly asynchronous warfare, as we have seen with people in other nations that our military has tried to subdue (ie Hearts and Minds). Modern communication has created and maintained rebel organizations over great distances with little investment and minimal effort. What's worse is modern warfare usually empowers the targets of that military effort. eg Running some tanks over to Texas is basically agreeing to destroy those tanks when they are inevitably captured or left behind, because it's too vulnerable and expensive to bring them back from the front lines (which would be everywhere), as the Russians have learned.

Obviously a lot has changed since 1861 but it seems odd to act like it's totally inconceivable

The incentive and reasoning is a lot weaker than in the 1800s, so I wouldn't say similar. Now it's more of a nostalgic fantasy and it's known that the sentiment endures.

> Obviously a lot has changed since 1861

That's the point.

Texas has a bit of a unique history compared to other states, it was it's own country at one point and they made sure that we learned it, even in US history courses. Part of what makes the idea realistic is that the state could support itself, if it had too. There are major air & sea ports/trade, energy, food, defense, medical, technology, research, etc. While it seceded from the union, it really didnt do much in the civil war - but the most telling is that it still went with being a part of other states instead of becoming a Republic again. The idea of being an independent country is more of having this mental place to escape too when things are not going their (currently republican) way. The 180 the state did from its heighten Independents/secession rhetoric during Obama to going full-on Trumpism kowtowing is dizzying.

And unlike the first Civil War, the United States didn't have the means to destroy the rest of the world should their weapons fall into the wrong hands. The world has an interest to concern itself and intercede. When you say the end of the empire is going to be bad, that's not the half of it - it's almost unthinkably bad.

There are things that can be done with no dependency, but they themselves are not as useful without dependants. Take cobalt mining for example; it's not something you need anyone else for, but once you got all that cobalt, who's going to process it? Who is going to buy it?

Same goes for more fundamental things like wheat and corn, either you do it at a small scale where you can't really live off of the returns, or you do it at a large scale but now you need dependants to buy it off of you.

(in the concepts I wrote I assumed independence from an isolationists perspective which isn't realistic but somehow does seem to coincide with the not-very-well-thought-through independence wishers)

Generally, in the country in the Europe I've lived in, the people who want to secede are those who don't want to see their taxes go to the country's lazy and scammy region (almost all countries have one).

A lot of that money goes to roads and infrastructure, so it's a little more dramatic than it sounds, but importation of goods would take a hit if those roads degraded, let alone if someone put Czech hedgehogs and foxholes at the state line because your stupid ass didn't look at the logistics of secession.

If you think Brexit was stupid, imagine Idaho deciding it didn't want food from out of state anymore.

An explanation I've heard for this is that the people upset with overpaying taxes aren't the people getting welfare benefits, but they see those people and think that the benefits are not deserved.

And medicare/medicaid/social security total to ~half of all Federal spending in the US, so that's not nothing.

How is this any different than when some rich techie on HN says "I know it's not good for me personally but I want higher taxes because that's the right thing to do"?

For all its touted net-contribution to the federal budget California would not survive on its own, as it depends on electricity from other states and water from the Colorado River (a shared resource between several states). To be sure, California puts these shared resources to extremely productive use and pays back the value to its neighbors, but this kind of interdependence probably would not exist if California went rebel.

If a civil war or rebellion did break out I don't think it'd happen along state lines. The kind of power the states now wield actually depends on the existence of the union, so I don't see them wanting to destroy that relationship.

but they want to secede from existing states, not from the union

Now, of course, if you were at war, such dependency would hurt, for sure. But on the long term, country borders don't mean that much to capitalism.

(I have no data, but as suspect it's actually only a small minority of local politicians clinging to keeping a large part of a the small part of the pie.)

I suppose the metro government has something to keep in here too (national waters in Mediterranean see, maybe ? Links to the drug cartels ? No idea.)

But I suspect the French government that will announce true indépendance for Corsica would be met by forks and pitches _from_ the Islanders.)

> the same states that generate less federal tax revenue than they spend

False.

This is from the PDF listed on the page that you linked:

    To establish a nationally representative panel, members are recruited on
    an ongoing basis through address-based probability sampling using data
    from the US Postal Service’s Delivery Sequence File. Recruited adults in
    households without internet access are provided a web-enabled device and
    free internet service. A probability-proportional-to-size procedure was
    used to select a study-specific sample. All panel members who were aged
    18 years and older were eligible for selection. Invitations were sent by
    e-mail; automatic reminders were delivered to non-respondents by e-mail
    and telephone beginning 3 days later.
    
    A final survey weight variable provided by Ipsos adjusted for the
    initial probability of selection into KnowledgePanel and for
    survey-specific nonresponse and over- or under-coverage using design
    weights with post-stratification raking ratio adjustments. With
    weighting, the sample is designed to be statistically representative of
    the noninstitutionalized adult population of the US as reflected in the
    2021 March supplement of the Current Population Survey.

It's one thing to be willing to fight in a civil war, which involves all of the things you just mentioned, and another thing entirely to want to instigate those things.

Plenty of people are willing to say "I am willing to commit violence" on social media. My gut feeling is that if 4% say they will shoot someone, < 0.4% will actually do it.

gestures broadly at the entire history section of the library

But, I think it's a bit unfair to make, what appears to be, a very bold assertion, without explaining it or allowing criticism. I have no interest (or qualification) to criticize your sources, but I would hope that someone would criticize mine.

The two commonly cited books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.L.A._Marshall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing

r/AskHistorians doubts it: https://redd.it/22o24j https://redd.it/2od6eg

edit: for an example, the entire US military is around 0.45% of the population. Only a small fraction of that is not purely support. Around 0.2% of the population are police. The vast majority never kill anyone.

There are more people in the army then there are women having abortions, so if abortions is a big enough issue to address, people killing in the name of should also be considered an issue.

>Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who was also not involved in the study, agrees. But she suspects the survey responses overrepresent the number of Americans who would be willing to turn to violence because, she says, surveys tend to overstate what people actually think. “The numbers always tend to be shocking, but in essence, are probably not true.”

Hardly sensational to lead with "all this is probably BS" but that probably wouldn't get as many clicks. For sure the alarmist title got me to read it, only to wind up feeling I wasted my time.

For some lesser cause? Another murder of an unarmed black person, even by police, seems unlikely to cause it. Economic inequality? Doesn't look like it. Illegal aliens? Again, probably not. Climate change? Also no.

That would have to be one hell of a mob. How would they exert pressure? Unless their "pressure" is lawful then they'd just be arrested like the Jan 6 people.

How many Senators are willing to die for the Electoral College vote? How many are willing to do so after they just saw several other Senators shot dead in front of them?

This says it all. The talk is there, social media (or any one who will listen) seems to be a popular public journal for people to vent feelings and use it as therapy. I even have friends that txt their anxiety about the political situation and when it reaches peek anxiety, the words civil war get thrown in there. But, it's clearly just a way to release the temporary anxiety they are feeling after having spent too much time consuming click-bait media - most people are too comfortable and self-serving in their lives to engage in long term life and death violence.

People here really did not do well, mentally or physically, when they were told they could not gather at bars or restaurants for months. And they really didnt like the disruptions to the sports seasons. The majority are not the extremist (be its very definition) that would actually be willing to give up football on Sunday to cosplay civil war 2.0.

Also, the logistics are not there - not that I can see anyway. Many people would defend their home and cities, but wont be motivated to march thousands of miles into unfamiliar neighborhoods to get shot at by g'ma and a 8 y/o. I think people, even other Americans, underestimate the actual patriotism of people in this country.

Whether you believe he was an actual time traveler (or more precisely, a multi-verse traveler), is a whole different story…

Virtually no political polling is. I know of no political polling agency/company that submits their polls to peer-reviewed journals.

If creating parallel world is new normal for journalists then loosing trust of public in news is natural.

I hope that manipulation and government propaganda pushed in news will be naturally eliminated. The question is, how far they will go to keep our attention.

While you're right that polling that has traditionally been spot-on, or very close in the past has occasionally been way off in the last five to ten years.

However, isn't Ipsos a fairly well-respected organization in its field? The kind with enough experience and resources to account for any kind of biases?

I'd like to see another big polling organization as the same questions and see if the results are the same.

4% of respondents were pretty sure they were going to kill someone soon

So, if there's a 4% margin of error, it's could be either 8%, or 0%.

God help us. It's almost impressive how biased this sample is. I'm dying to know what else the "Ipsos KnowledgePanel" thinks. Will report back with any eye rollers.

I can only assume it's that low because people tend not to think very hard about poll questions, so are considering only some narrower-than-the-actual-question version of it that they've replaced it with in their heads. Or else a whole lot of people are very honest and don't think they'd be able to actually do it—should, yes, but would? Doubtful enough that they'd answer "no" to the question.

I suspect it's the former because I doubt that many people would be open and introspective enough to admit they don't think they'd have the stomach to do things they think they should do. Try another angle with some extreme but plausible hypothetical scenarios rather than such a general question, and I bet that number shoots way up.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

Having just read about the Spanish Civil War, I can see how this will potentially play out.

It will begin with a high profile assassination, then the extreme right will use the protests that will follow as justification for escalating violence, similar to the BLM protests. More violence. Maybe another high profile killing (on either side). Tit-for-tat murders begin, as they have in various government collapses around the world, especially in the 20th century.

The extreme left will undoubtedly respond in various ways beyond protests as tensions grow and the right will use whatever happens as propaganda to enrage their already agitated base. Whacko conspiracy theories and disinformation will make Trump’s term seem like the golden age of truth. Moderate conservatives, moderate liberals and disengaged independents won't know what to believe.

Meanwhile, in Congress, the conservatives who gain control in 2022 will grind the federal government to a halt with hearings and procedural moves. Then they’ll shut down the government with the budget. For months.

While the federal government is incapacitated, there will be a huge right-wing rally in some red state with full-throated attacks on the left. The ramped up crowd will head off afterwards and destroy a bunch of businesses and homes of people they suspect as being “pedophiles”. There will be violence and killings, recorded and shared freely as conservatives celebrate, similar what happens with Kyle Rittenhouse's actions. The state’s governor and local law enforcement will make minimal effort to prevent it and results in no prosecutions, and the fed response will be slow, as usual, and ineffective despite presidential condemnation.

This inspires other big events – full on Nuremberg style rallies – all over the country with similar results. Soon there will be skirmishes in the streets of major cities. The propaganda will be out of control, with front page stories, prime time videos and millions of social media posts filled with dead children and other atrocities, real or imagined.

Then it will really hit the fan when a group of black or Latino protestors attack a group of random white people who they associate with the right-wing. This causes irrational fear among the white population, and seemingly overnight, every other white “liberal” across the country will become suspicious or outright fearful of anyone of color. Mothers will pull their children from schools, or insist on “temporary” segregation for their child’s safety. Who knows what those children of color might do. The violence ramps up as POC communities are targeted, with the justification of “proactive self-defense” Law enforcement does nothing beyond platitudes and Uvalde like responses to shootings. They may even be at the forefront of the effort.

Fast forward and the 2024 election is fucking chaos. The entire right-wing will now accept nothing less than a win in literally every race, and it will be a presidential landslide anyways, because the Republicans are “pro law enforcement”, which, by this time means enforcement targeting mostly people of color and other “potentially dangerous leftists”. Americans have shown the memory of a goldfish and are easily scared. With violence spreading across the country, they’ll react by voting conservative, similar to after 9/11.

Then the right will have full control of all branches of government and start to pass all the laws they want. In addition to their current agenda, they will pass laws which essentially allows legalized vigilantism and an Amendment which cancels presidential term limits and other restrictions. Trump is pardoned.

California and other blue states respond, but the authoritarians in charge this time aren’t as stupid as Trump, learned the lessons he taught about the fragility of our laws, and use the power of the federal government to cripple the left through various voting restrictions intended to remove Democrats. It will all be “legal” and “constitutional” according to the right-wing SCOTUS. Eventually, the Democratic party will be officially declared an illegal organization because of its support for immoral lifestyles. The more the people rebel, the harder the states and feds crack down.

Then, it’s all a matter of rounding up the remaining resistance and the country becomes a de facto authoritarian regime. That’s when politicide turns into policide.

This is all a very probable future. We'll know it's starting with that first assassination. Look for it.

It won't be like that. It'll be exactly what you described....this isn't new - it's the way it always plays out in authoritian regimes....

It's not something unique to only one side.

If you go to reddit.com/r/all you'll find lots of user accounts saying the same about Republicans; not that they're wrong, but that they're evil.

(I don't identify as either side, but I've had to block nearly 100 subreddits from showing up in r/all because of the constant hate, and even then there will be random subreddits that make to the front page of r/all because it's about hating another group. I want to see interesting things, not witness an echochamber.)

https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/house-candidate-jerone-davison...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/01/marjorie-taylor-gree...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/us/politics/gosar-violent...

One can only hope; though it might have terrible consequences, like the republican's mask slipping more than it already has, leading to more violence.

> the conservatives who gain control in 2022 will grind the federal government to a halt with hearings and procedural moves

that's why I'm hoping the Jan 6th folks actually get Trump in prison, to get us back to some believable "hey your actions actually DO have consequences" normality. Listen, I can dream, right?

Politicide is like genocide, except you target only members of a specific party, like how the Trotskyists were killed by Stalin, or what Pinochet did to Allende's party in Chile. I haven't read this anywhere, but I assume that one usually follows the other.

I may have actually mixed them up in my original comment now that I look at it. Serves me right for spending too much time on Wikipedia.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/us/politics/gosar-violent...

“Policide” (and, confusingly for the distinction you are drawing, with near-equal frequency “politicide”) is used to refer to the analogy of “genocide” as understood in internation law where the target, rather than a people as a people is a political entity (almost exclusively in the examples I can find a polity, whether a sovereign state or some less polity, not a political faction or party.)

> Politicide is like genocide, except you target only members of a specific party

This is confusing (even leaving aside the problem that “politicide” is also a synonym for “policide” and is also used as a portmanteau of “political suicide”, giving it three distinct definitions in the same general domain) because you are using “genocide” in the sense of the frequently encountered mistakenly-narrow definition, and not the sense in which it is used in international law, to wit, to mean extermination of the members of a people rather than attempts to destroy the people as a people. But, yes, politicide has this sense with regard to extermination of members of a political faction, but it is not particular analogous to genocide.

> I haven’t read this anywhere, but I assume that one usually follows the other.

“Policide” doesn’t seem to generally be used when the target is a political faction, but if it were, politicide (in the relevant sense) would be an extreme method of policide, not something that follows it (a successful policide would make politicide superfluous, as there would be no one to target, the group no longer existing as a group and thus not having members to exterminate.)

One would imagine that the usual course would be escalation to politicide when other means of policide failed, though there are certainly instances where its pretty much zero to politicide.

(As far as the GOP goes, I think policide/politicide of a particular opposing faction isn’t necessarily wrong as a description of part of what they are headed toward, but misses the point. What I think they are headed for, unless saner heads within the party or defeat and replacement of it as a major party change the course, is an Christian Right American quasi-capitalist corporatist version of the Cultural Revolution, suppressing, violently where necessary, anything seen as ideological dissent from a particular authoritarian ideological vision.)

Nah, you've described the first 15 minutes, which is all that will happen. After that everyone will buy popcorn and go home to watch TV.

What a total utter crock of shite the posts on this topic are! YC needs to pay better attention to nutball posting on their website.

Checking your comment and post history it's quite obvious why you've taken exception to it. But you're a long-time HNer, maybe you're reasonable. Could you talk to your fellow conservatives and ask them to stop threatening the lives of their fellow Americans? People have been killed this year already by real nutjobs who were inspired by it. Just a thought.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/us/politics/republican-vi...

I don't know any conservatives who are threatening anyone. But I'm talking to you and so I ask that you tone it down and quit promoting paranoid BS. If your news stream frightens you, then I suggest you take Joe Biden's advice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-mztxHgYQo

(pretty good song, eh!8-))

The URL you posted

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/us/politics/republican-vi...

mentions no particular killings. The article states that threats are being made from the right. It fails to mention threats and real violence from the left(e.g., BLM rioting, etc.). The article is a slightly better-written continuation of the river of bullshit being posted on this HN topic today.

Also, consider your source: nytimes is shifting further and further left each month.

Dang needs to step into this gusher of BS and cap off the well. Why is this topic not yet closed? It is clearly not useful to a rational person (yes, yes, I have ceased to follow it), it being little more than a venting of anger on all sides, esp. the liberal side.

Or maybe this HN topic is a honeytrap intended to lure out whackjobs from all sides, so our friends in 3-letter agencies can practice using the Internet tools that Snowden et al gave away?

You've called me a nutball and whackjob (directly or by innuendo), which as I'm sure you are well aware, is against HN rules of civility. I actually accidentally break this rule all the time, but in this instance I really don't need to worry, as I'm sure you already know exactly what I think of you, so I don't need to elaborate.

You're taking this discussion personally. Don't!

I don't intend to "cancel" anyone and think the whole idea is a breach of rationality, ethics and etiquette. Just some good manners is necessary. Even a heated discussion with overreach is good. Discussion w/o emotional motivation/expression is rarely productive.

And remember, in any discussion, it is clear that you should not care (beyond etiquette and the law) what anyone else thinks of you. Otherwise you will censor your own true thoughts and others will fail to get your message. Then we all lose. That is part of free speech (an old idea, but a good one, perhaps not commonly in use currently).