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Comment by ryanmarsh | Hacker News Reader

The thing that worries me most about "Men Without Work" is that's one way civil unrest can break out and war start. If that sounds bizarre then you should come visit me in Texas. I'll show you a land where almost every man has 2+ firearms. Where they overwhelmingly voted Trump, and distrust the government. I'll show you a land where men are more aggressive in general and my county in particular where at one point there were more shooting deaths per violent arrest than anywhere else in the country.

I don't want to live here when men reach unemployment rates beyond 25% (as the article and book suggest).

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While I feel unrest could start there, I doubt it would persist. The army and national guard are just too well equipped and organized to deal with the problem. I'd put my money on 1,000 national guard troops vs 10,000 random Texans with guns. This doesn't even get into larger military hardware, such as planes and drones with missiles. Sure, people will die, and it would be a tragedy. It may move the political needle, but I doubt it would be some kind of meaningful uprising.

As a larger point, I think this diminishes the chances of a "french revolution" style revolution in general, where the huge masses of poor people revolt against the rich. The poor are not well equipped or organized in general, and military technology is increasingly becoming more powerful and longer range. Just think if the richest people were protected by working ED-209's that responded to their command. Even if we had the other 99% fighting them, could they really win?

Guess which communities the national guard and the army recruited those troops from. If it ever comes to that, you're expecting soldiers to shoot and kill people just like them, people whose friends and family they may well have served with, people who - if things had gone a little differently - could have been them or their friends and family. This would likely not end well.

Hey would do it. Soldiers are not trained to think about how they are similiar to their enemies.

They're also not trained to fight their neighbors.

It's true, it wouldn't start well or end well. But using military equipment at a long range, like a drone, does add a dehumanizing component. And killing people that are just like you is really the nastiest part of any civil war (since both sides are very culturally similar), but it doesn't seem to stop the killing.

This seems naive. People will happily fight others just like them and from similar backgrounds for all sorts of reasons. Civil Wars are infamous for it. "Brother against brother".

Are we talking about the same national guard that mowed down unarmed students in the Kent State massacre? You'd be surprised what strong structure can cause a person to do.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

Well, more the National Guard that's literally the same people as the armed rednecks in rural Texas. Keep in mind the National Guard are the "weekend warriors", only now many of them have months/years in actual combat zones and have returned to their home communities with those skills.

Not to mention this whole argument assumes the government isn't siding with the insurrection. Sounds like an odd point to make, but if there was a substantial redneck revolution, which side is Trump's government on? Who will be labeled the rebels?

It's incredibly risky to assume who is on which side of an actual civil war scale uprising. The chances of being wrong are very high, and the consequences are literally life and death.

Liberal students are them. A group of angry patriots, many of whom are likely to be veterans themselves, are much more likely to be considered us.

What do you think these guys are going to do, line up and wait to be carpet bombed? Guys who are essentially illiterate farmers have managed to keep insurgencies going against the US military for around 15 years in Iraq/Afghanistan. There's not an unreasonable chance that the dumb rednecks of Texas could do as well. But, these guys aren't all dumb rednecks - they're going to have support from a decent amount of people with US military, national guard, police, etc. experience. No one is claiming that they're going to march on DC and take over the country, but they could certainly turn sections of the US into something akin to the Syria/Iraq civil war situation.

I'm not saying they're dumb, you're right many people will have law enforcement and military experience. But they simply won't be equipped and supplied like normal forces, and I think that's the key difference. And yes, I agree that there could be a strong resistance movement to whatever happens by armed citizens, since guns are everywhere.

Viet Cong, French Indian War, George Washington, County Jones, and Benjamin Martin are just a few times in American History where a lack of arms or training did not result as you're expecting.

It's amazing how quickly you can teach someone how to handle themselves in a combat situation when their life depends on it. We're talking days.

Yea, I can tell you its already happening in PA.

A lot of those are poor examples because the gap between s peasant and a professional soldier has become much larger over time, particularly over the last century.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria.

You should read up on your French Revolution. It wasn't the poorest who revolted the most.

Love all the arm chair generals.

I would rather be one of 10,000 random Texans with guns than 1,000 national guard.

10:1 are horrible odds in an urban environment against well resourced, well equipped, intelligent insurgents.

Houston for instance is full of chemical engineers, tradesmen, software engineers, and all around handy outdoorsy people. You clearly have no concept of how hard it would be to occupy and hold such a place against such an enemy. I tried to hold territory in Baghdad amongst people who couldn't even shoot straight and we were regular army not weekend warriors and it sucked. It was unpredictable and constantly dangerous.

Nope.

If 10k Texans organized to start some sort of rebellion we'd certainly put forth more resources to address that. Nobody needs combat experience in Baghdad or first-hand economic knowledge of Houston to know that Texas would have no chance of succeeding in their civil unrest if it did happen under your feared scenario.

On a side note, I've hunted with Texans before and they put up deer feeders that make noises when they spit out food to draw in the game for easy shots. They also import exotic animals from Africa and stuff them on fenced private property. I don't call that hunting.

>Nobody needs combat experience in Baghdad or first-hand economic knowledge of Houston to know that Texas would have no chance of succeeding in their civil unrest if it did happen under your feared scenario.

Uhhh. I'd check the confidence at the door, here. Places in Iraq (and Afghanistan, where I was) were full of folks who were basically peasants and they utterly baffled us in their commitment and ability to make war. I would absolutely dread fighting an insurgency against a bunch of well armed, well educated, well trained, and freakishly devoted Texans.

Are you saying Texans would succeed? You didn't argue my notion that they wouldn't, just stated that it wouldn't be pleasant.

EDIT: @remarkEon that's ridiculous. We have ~ 1.5M active troops. Drones, aircraft, firepower and heavy surveillance which these Texans don't have. This is not Baghdad or Afghanistan geographically or politically; it's our turf and everyone would rally around crushing any rogue Texans. Some of you are worried about 10k Texans in some crazy hypothetical situation where they get disgruntled due to lack of job prospects like its the first time that ever happened to the south. Then someone says North Korea is not a threat. I yield.

@remarkEon's history of the US: Scrappily defeats the Redcoats and turns a country into a superpower in a mere 150 years. Survives a Great Depression. Takes down Hitler, the Axis of Evil, Osama Bin Laden. Helps overthrow several dictatorships. Builds the most powerful military in history. Avoids nuclear war with North Korea and other dictatorships. Does not fall due to over extension like most great empires. Ultimate demise: 10k Texans with deer rifles.

You'd have to be okay with a pretty dark, Mirror Universe, version of COIN to prevent them from succeeding, yes.

To be fair, there are ~28 million Texans, many whom are not sympathetic to the government and carry arms. I'd also reckon there are a number of Texans in the military that could possibly defect.

Anyways this is a fun exercise, not in anyway an exhaustive argument.

On the flipside - I'd propose in this simulation that there would be inner city civil unrest and the bulk of Texans, most of them armed, would join the force to squash that unrest or hunker down at home and mind their own property. I've spent a lot of time with Texans. Yes they have a ton of pride and many are more aggressive and have a distrust of the federal government. But they'd be more likely IMO to be against any movements terrorizing their cities, especially those that come from the city dwellers who have shown to be more violent historically in dire economic situations. Regardless of what happened, Texas is our #2 largest economy and we'd protect it federally with any means necessary.

The interesting part of your scenario is where you assume the 10k insurgency happens in a vacuum. The insurgency in Iraq only involved some tens of thousands of fighters but many hundreds of thousands or millions more were sympathetic.

Right, but what about all those people who like a stable government and life as usual in the U.S.?

If I see a bunch of gun nuts out there shooting at cops and troops, it's, frankly speaking, an easy call to make whose side I'm on. I trust the government we've got over the one those guys want to install by force.

Okay...I can detect the snark. Got it. I'd submit that you're seriously oversimplifying things, and given the poor track-record of "defeating" insurgencies in the past...like I noted earlier we'd have to engage in some pretty awful tactics. If you can stomach that, great. Not really sure that was the argument.

Yes, we'd engage in awful tactics against a home grown insurgency. Of course I can stomach that; any administration would respond in whatever ways necessary to crush the hypothetical Texans. They certainly wouldn't win as you suggested and were bring stubborn about.

Counter-insurgency is really easy. That's why Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are now stable and prosperous democracies. /s

A small and highly motivated group of insurgents can completely destabilise a region, rendering it ungovernable. No amount of resources can effectively manage such an insurgency, as we have seen in the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan. IS and the Taliban aren't very numerous, but they don't have to be. They aren't very skilled, but they don't have to be. They're never going to win by any meaningful definition of the word, but they're not going to lose either. At this stage, an uneasy truce would be a minor miracle.

That's the risk - not a sudden uprising followed by an Independent State of Texas, but a grinding low-intensity war of attrition that drags on indefinitely. Look at the Troubles in Northern Ireland for how such a scenario can play out in a western democracy. The Troubles lasted for thirty dispiriting years. A whole generation grew up knowing nothing but soldiers on the streets, snipers in tower blocks, "peace barriers" and wanton bombing. The vast majority of people in Northern Ireland wanted peace, but a cycle of tit-for-tat is incredibly difficult to break. With enough pent-up resentment and an inciting incident, it could happen in Texas.

> Counter-insurgency is really easy. That's why Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are now stable and prosperous democracies. /s

It's a lot easier to play a home game than it is to play an away game halfway across the world.

The US could bring a million soldiers to bear in Texas with very little difficulty. With those numbers, they could walk into every part of the countryside with rocks and beat the shit out of any insurgents. More importantly, they could occupy the territory with ease. It's much easier to occupy home turf than it is to occupy people of a different culture, ethnicity, language, and background.

Regarding the Troubles, I don't think that applies here. The Troubles were, at their root, a sectarian conflict. That doesn't exist in the US; it's not like there's a religious minority in Texas that feels oppressed by a government that will never, ever listen to their grievances.

> It's a lot easier to play a home game than it is to play an away game halfway across the world.

I think it would be much harder. It would be very difficult for the US to keep soldiers committed if they were deployed to Texas. There would be a lot of internal conflict for the military in a civil war situation.

I see your point. Have you thought about how such a militia would communicate, if they were working together? They would have to come up with new communication channels, seeing as how the government has it's hands in all telecommunications today. I think that would prove a great barrier, and perhaps it's insurmountable.

Knowing insurgencies these days, it would probably be so low-tech the government wouldn't be able to tap it.

Couriers on horses seemed to work for U.S. militias in the past.

Shut off the water, power, sewerage, fuel, and food supplies.

It'll sort out pretty quickly.

Most of the population will want out. The remnants won't have much by effective resistance.

As the French tankers learned in WWII, superior armour & firepower without coordination and communications as well as force unity doesn't buy you much.

I'd bet on 1,000 national guard troops refusing to mobilize, and military refusing to follow civilian leadership.

It's not about defeating the national guard or whoever outright, it's about being able to resist them long enough to attract defectors from the military and start a civil war.

The military and prisons to the rescue. Think Detroit.

Are you serious? You're giving them too much credit. They'd be squashed in two seconds if they ever organized. North Korea is a threat. Not some hillbillies in your neck of the woods with a few deer hunting rifles that don't have jobs. A larger threat locally that's been around forever and needs no speculation is inner city youths with no jobs, no education and guns. They started calling Chicago "Chiraq".

Well, those Texas/southern hillbillies are the ones running the US military.

Military workforce by state:

http://www.governing.com/gov-data/military-civilian-active-d...

Yah, imagine everyone at Fort Hood being ordered to invade Dallas and half the tanks driving off in the night to go protect the neighborhood they grew up in.

Which is why if such orders were being issued it'd be more like blue state stationed divisions sent to quell uprisings in red state areas and vice versa. This is a huge part of why I think a growing political divide is such a problem - we can be easily persuaded to attack each other when the problem isn't each other but the ones issuing the orders.

Texas is split inside itself:

http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/texas

(The map is even still a lie; there are large counties that voted Republican, but the majority of the red by area is tiny little county populations.)

I also don't think that people are particularly stationed by their home state.

Or Blackwater (Xe) mercenaries.

There just aren't enough.

A division stationed in a blue state isn't going to be made up of locals. It's going to have the same mix as the US military in general (read: Mostly southern states).

The National Guard will be more representative of their home base, but that is going to be smaller forces that complement active duty, not replace it.

I was meaning more of metaphorical constructs of blue and red rather than just the political jargon and probably should have used quotes. I'm an army brat and former DoD IC contractor and know very well how distributed personnel get.

And everyone at Ft. Hood will just sit there while Dallas is leveled.

First you'd need a political purge of the Army. Anything less would leave the door open to a split in the military. I think history supports this well.

A lot of blood could be shed before anything was "squashed".

Have you ever been in a civil war? I have. There are more guns in Houston, TX than there ever was in Baghdad. Local police/fire are cut from the same cloth as the locals, they'd be sympathetic to their neighbors. How do I know? They say so.

Also, there is nothing more terrifying or effective in a civil war than a sniper. Source: been there done that. The U.S. has the largest standing army in the world on opening day of deer season, all with high powered rifles and scopes.

Any uprising could be squashed eventually, but it would take a lot of ordnance, blood, and time.

Which civil war were you in? Where and when did this take place?

I'm assuming op is a military veteran that was sent overseas to protect US interests in a civil war; one such example would be Somalia in the 90s.

Baghdad '04 and '05.

Ok so how does Iraq apply to your suggestion that a civil unrest and civil war in our country could easily break out when Texans with guns hit high unemployment?

You also cited Houston which is the 4th largest city that has a crime problem not due to deer hunters, but of inner city folks and saw a crime rate explosion from an influx of people post-Katrina that had lost everything and had little job prospects. You didn't see country people from the gulf area bringing deer rifles into the city shooting people up and starting civil war.

EDIT: to JakeTheAndroid - the parent mentioned as part of their fear - "The U.S. has the largest standing army in the world on opening day of deer season, all with high powered rifles and scopes."

There's no evidence to suggest that those deer hunters would organize in the event of high employment to incite civil unrest which would result in civil war. We saw a rise in crime but did not see civil war when people lost everything with Katrina. And the rural people feared the most didn't do what was suggested.

The crime I'm talking about in the cities, esp. Houston, has existed for a long time. Rising unemployment does lead to more crime in the inner city, primarily by inner city people. I don't see deer hunters organizing and posing a threat. In fact, I'd guess they'd hunker down and protect their property and community and probably assist in any local response to the civil unrest if necessary, not the other way around, posing a threat to other citizens and the government itself as the OP speculates.

I think OP made the connection pretty clear.

In Iraq, the military attempted to take cities in turmoil and were successfully held by normal, everyday people not nearly as well armed as people in TX. You then support the statement by pointing out its already a dangerous place full of armed people being malicious.

OP didn't say deer hunters are the cause of crime, but pointed out normal people there, that well armed with high powered, long range rifles are numerous. They'd likely pose a huge threat.

So, if civil unrest was to break out due to unemployment, this seems like a potentially difficult situation for everyone involved. Pretty plausible to me.

I think the a general human pattern has been established that high unemployment leads to civil unrest, especially when you look in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Sure, you could say that their society is much different than ours, but that difference is shrinking, and I think claiming we are somehow exceptional requires some evidence, not the other way around. (Now that we're facing significant headwinds over the last 30 years, we're seeing our society becoming more violent via shootings, terrorism, and corrections, etc.)

North Korea isn't really a threat. Not such a one that the rusty superpower should obsess over it and follow it on evening news.

Any country with nukes and a disdain and distrust for both its own people and any country not like them is definitely a threat. Look back at history - the biggest threats were the ones that did terrible things to their own people.

We're talking about a country with 100k+ CCTVs monitoring their own people, loaded with anti-US and anti-South Korean propaganda, forbids internet usage, starves its people, has a top 5 military while being the size of Pennsylvania, and enslaves 200k+ of their own people falsely.

What evidence do you have that they are not a threat?

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