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Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

It'd be even worse most likely, as US troops are gonna act much differently domestically and would almost certainly be much more reserved. Gonna be much harder to shoot potential enemies when they literally are your friends (taking a looser, FB-ish value of friendship).

Better for the world would just be splitting up the US, like AT&T was. Perhaps 3 or 4 ways? Then you'd have much smaller countries to deal with, easier to make changes and reflect citizens' desires. Plus it'd create some competition, for trade and so on.

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> It'd be even worse most likely, as US troops are gonna act much differently domestically and would almost certainly be much more reserved.

That's highly optimistic. I would say that history does not generally support the idea that militaries in general, or the US military in particular, are more reserved when dealing with a perceived internal existential threat than they are fighting overseas.

> Gonna be much harder to shoot potential enemies when they literally are your friends (taking a looser, FB-ish value of friendship).

That's one view. Another view is that its a lot easier to see the enemy as an intolerable foe against whom any means are justified when you don't see them as "loyally fighting for their country" the same as you, just on a different side, but instead as potentially fatally betraying your country.

I'd say the history of domestic armed conflicts (including the US Civil War) suggests that the latter effect is often at least as strong as the former.

>That's highly optimistic. I would say that history does not generally support the idea that militaries in general, or the US military in particular, are more reserved when dealing with a perceived internal existential threat than they are fighting overseas.

That's... Not exactly true. History has actually shown the contrary, WASP are usually very soft on other WASP while bloody on everybody else. Examples:

-The US civil war is a perfect sample. I don't think you could find another battle in history but Gettysburg were opposing armies of many tens of thousands fought with just one civil casualty (and an accident, this one). Usually, after a battle is won there is this period of pillaging, raping and general dead and destruction. If you want to see how a real after-civil-war-repression looks like, look at what Cromwell did in Ireland, it's the stuff of nightmares. (Which also supports my argument, because he was very soft on his British opponents).

-There is also the anglo-american war of 1812. The British "sacked" Washington, with, again, only 1 (ONE!) casualty. I mean, come on, it's like they weren't even trying. For contrast, look at what a real British occupation looked like at the time with the suppression of the rebellion of the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka in 1818.

My point: If the US start killing each other seriously, that would be a new in history.

be much harder to shoot potential enemies when they literally are your friends

If this were the case, the US wouldn't be notorious for high numbers of police shootings. It's far more likely that if there is some kind of US civil war it would be race-based, like the previous civil war and the Indian wars.

You're assuming the police and the military attract the same sort of people, keep them under the same sort of discipline (or lack thereof for the police), etc. That's not my impression at all.

In fact, there tend to be two different types of militaries, the expeditionary type, which is ours, and the internally focused type, which our increasingly paramilitarized police seem to be becoming. The latter suck when they're asked to fight a "real war", and one advantage we in the US have right now is that their numbers are quite small compared to the size of the nation or our formal military, something less than a million total.

They would simply bring in UN "peacekeeping" force. Problem solve. Foreign military on US soil shooting citizens. I don't know if you have seen UN vehicles staged at various bases around the US, I've seen them at a National Guard staging area. The system is already in place. There have been sightings of UN troop movements along the US/Canada border.

That would just make target identification utterly trivial. And the UN finds it very difficult to find competent troops for much less hostile environments, what country would sign up for this sort of debacle?

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