That is because law enforcement aren't actually well trained for breach and clear against targets who are actually laying in wait and armed. They pretty much only do breach and clear against unarmed and sleeping targets.
It's why the Uvalde cops were frightened little piggies, they know that whoever is going in first has an over 50% chance of being shot if the person knows they are coming.
However, that is supposedly literally their job, to willingly go into dangerous situations and literally keep the peace. To that degree, honestly good on these pigs for actually doing their job.
The political and organizational de-federalization of the U.S. is already well underway and we are really just starting to see the preliminary military conflicts with things like Trump actively threatening Chicago.
If this leads to actual Balkanization has more to do with if the regions have strong identification with each other and themselves more than the federal government, which given how destabilized people's identities are due to the internet is unlikely to manifest in that way. On the other hand, intense regionalization may occur as a reaction to internet generalization. For example, I have seen more people joke about Wisconsin retaking the Upper Peninsula of Michigan than ever before in the last couple of years, and quite often todays jokes are tomorrows policies.
Turchin believes that all crises stems from elite over-production, where there are not enough spots at the table for elites to place their children so their children inevitably turn to the people and use them to overthrow the existing elites and install themselves in as new elites.
This is of course a ridiculous underestimation of the amount of conviction from the proletarians it takes for a revolution to actually occur, be implemented and successful. Elite over-production is just a symptom of funneling money and power into smaller and smaller familial circles, which squeezes everyone, a single cause among hundreds that fires off the revolution.
I will say that your metalworking example proves my point, it's just that what the metalworkers in Bronze Age Europe had different surpluses in different amounts to work with than those in Central America. It's not like they knew about each other and were working towards some idealized goal. They were able to screw around with the existing surpluses they had access to. Like working with pure copper is cool unless you are looking for something that has the property of bronze or know that it exists, and unless you have created large surpluses of tin in your excavation of copper there is no reason to experiment with that kind of alloying.
Agreed, it is reductionist. But my point wasn't that all things are born out of surplus, just the vast, vast, majority and certainly the majority of social structures.
And agreed, the major problem with games like Civ, Paradox, D&D etc is that you do technically have perfect knowledge of what is supposed to come next on the tech or level up tree. You have a level of accurate mathematical foresight that just doesn't actually exist within real life experimentation. It is 100% gamer brain.
Literally look at any river civilization. Hell, even basic potlatch societies. It's literally not even worth listing the examples, this is anthro 101.
Natural surplus allows for complex social structures to develop, as more time can be spent socializing than on simple survival. In some cases, the environment this social complexity develops in lends itself to more complex segregation of labor, which leads to more surplus, which leads to more social complexity. The river builds the city, which creates the canals that grow the city.
Social complexity precedes labor segregation, but labor segregation has a tendency to reinforce social segregation. Societies that collapse are mostly those that run themselves out of surplus, and are therefore unable to sustain social complexity which leads to a swift degradation of labor complexity.
The belief that scarcity is the mother of invention directly comes out of neoliberal austerity politics. Most of the time invention comes from those who already benefit from the surplus, but are compelled through some social complexity to want more. Which of course, they know because they give all the resources to 'productive individuals', but they for some reason believe that if they limit the surplus, people will be spontaneously inventive.
In this scenario, Group B is always under a state of natural surplus.
The children are not the commentariat, and the commentariat is terrified that they may become the future targets of political violence, therefore they are going to do their best to exercise as much power as they can to make sure this doesn't happen again.
The joke of course is on them because all this has done is demonstrate that they are vulnerable.
As far as we are aware, that isn't how matter works, and perfect knowledge would have to operate within the confines of existing physics. You don't just magically have lasers, and lasers don't magically realign atoms into carbohydrates.
As well, perfect knowledge only means perfect foresight if you think the world is completely deterministic. Otherwise it only gives you perfect knowledge of the percentages. Which is far more likely given the way quantum mechanics appears to work at the moment. Still incredibly powerful, I grant you.
Correct, that is the whole point of the thought exercise, does the ability to have perfect knowledge defeat the ability to literally break conservation of energy and elimination of opportunity costs. In my opinion, it does not.
Idk why you are bringing concepts such as 'colonization' into it. It is a game scenario, where they are both likely to become colonizers.There is no larger morality of genocide at play here. This isn't real. You could just as likely say that Group B perfectly knows how to psychologically manipulate Group A, and uses that to farm them for unlimited resources. That would at least be a more compelling game outcome than 'cotton candy asteroids'.
Disagree. Perfect knowledge doesn't mean you know how to do anything and everything, it just means that you know the extent of knowledge and all physical limitations. Technology is not actually magical. If you cannot physically muster the resources to place an asteroid made of cotton candy into geostationary orbit, then the knowledge of how to do it is pointless in a competitive setting.
Group A literally breaks those physical limitations, meaning that they have all the time in the world to develop that technology, if they wanted, which to be honest they wouldn't have to.
I have been a podcast oldhead for awhile, and I heard from a DSA buddy that the Bernie crowd had this hot new podcast from some of the boys that had done the satirical Beltway podcast, which had a funny bit of the guy firing his intern after he changed his pfp to a Christmas avi and not being able to figure out how to change it back.
From there the Chapo Boys complained about the subreddit being cringe, so I checked it out and realized that these idiots were actually treating reddit like a real old school forum, with dog piling, strategic posting, and applying twitter posting rules to just blast the absolute shit out of some of the most annoying people on the internet. From there I realized that the people who really got the anti-imperialist side were being relegated to r/moretankiechapo, but it rapidly started to leak into the main subreddit. It was a lot of fun pissing on know-it-alls.
After the first quarantine, I started looking for alternatives in the event that the sub got banned, which seemed inevitable as the fuckers would accuse us of 'raiding' when all we would do is mass ping assholes and it was their choice to come to our subreddit and think they could duke it out with literally the most prolific posters on the site.
I found the original discord, chapo2's discord, and here. Discord fucking sucks for this kind of stuff, and having its own infrastructure appealed to the tankie in me, so I inevitably came here and settled in once the ban became permanent.
If we were to 'game' this out, the only way Group A loses is there is some sort of extremely early game or mid game conflict wherein Group B annihilates all of group Group A with like, a nuke or bioweapon.
In every other scenario, Group A wins simply because they can expand their population exponentially to the point that Group B literally has to expend all of their limited resources attempting to contain group A. More hands means more laborers and researchers than group B can ever actually muster.
Basically, Group A never has opportunity cost, while Group B does.
It's the thing where they aren't actually counting or comparing numbers to actually popular creators.
That said, I'm sure his events were more popular and attended than whatever social media hacks the Democrats were using.