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Comment by inscionent | Hacker News Reader

Civil War? Do you hear yourself. Take a breath.

I think you underestimate the number of people with weapons, a serious anti-government attitude, and some strong beliefs that most people would consider at best wacky. I don't think a civil war is likely. But when we look at past incidents like Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City, Jade Helm [1], and Malheur, it's not absurd.

A few years back I stopped at a blueberry farm just off the highway in Oregon. In under 10 minutes of conversation, a very nice grandmother was explaining how the Obama administration had made a deal so the UN could come in black helicopters and take all their guns, but that they were ready for it.

I got my blueberries and got out. But you can bet that there are a whole lot of people with guns and Millenarianist notions that are sure that this time it's really the end times, and that would not take kindly to government-enforced quarantines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Helm_15_conspiracy_theori...

In under 10 minutes of conversation, a very nice grandmother was explaining how the Obama administration had made a deal so the UN could come in black helicopters and take all their guns, but that they were ready for it.

Maybe she read about the Ruby Ridge incident, to which you only allude in the same breath as Oklahoma bombing, and knew that it was a story of a government coming to a guy minding his own business, and killing his wife, his son and his dog, for basically no reason at all.

That's certainly not how I'd sum it up. But I'll let people make up their own minds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge

I hope that at least you recognize how utterly different it is from Oklahoma bombing, which was a terrorist act, pure and simple. Note, for example, that McVeigh got death penalty, and Nichols got life in prison, while Weaver was acquitted from all charges other than failure to appear for a warrant that he was not served properly, and got over 3 million dollars of compensation from the government.

Sure. When somebody lists things as having one aspect in common, other aspects may differ.

I don't think that's all that unlikely these days. I wouldn't quite give you even odds on it, but I'd take that bet for 10:1 odds, assuming I could get paid in some currency (like Bitcoin or gold) that would still have value after the U.S. breaks up.

How close are we to a civil war? People have stated that someone infected with Covid19 should deliberately try to infect Republicans. They later said that they were joking. Were they? Will someone take them seriously and actually try? I say this to say that, at least in some peoples' minds, we are very close to a civil war.

In the US, if the military tried to quarrantine, say, Seattle, by force, what are the odds that Antifa or somebody would look at it as the Trump-run right-wing military trying to occupy Seattle against the will of the people? Would that trigger a full-out civil war? Hopefully not, but...

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