Krono

"invited" is questionable, I know my governor was pressured and put under duress in order to accept Trump's national guard deployment during George Floyd.

But what about a clearer example: President Eisenhower deployed National Guard troops to Arkansas to enforce the desegregation of schools. The national guard was explicitly not invited by the Governor of Arkansas. Was this a civil war?

The front lines of the Ukraine war are well defined. You can see them on a map.

So it was a civil war when National Guard troops were deployed in an attempt to quell the George Floyd uprising?

In the 60s we had everything you just said: extreme state sanctioned violence, mass shootings, national guard being sent in, judges houses being burned, many political assassinations...

And they all happened in much larger numbers. There were so many bombings and bomb threats, and tons of plane hijackings, and the overall crime rate was so much higher, and there was so much racial violence, and and...

So do you think the US went through a civil war in the 60s?

I agree that things are looking bad, and getting worse, and this may end up in some sort of a civil war. But it seems you and I have a much different definition of "civil war".

You're totally right, but things get a lot murkier when we get into secondary- and third-order effects.

Bush's economic policy of bailing out Wall Street while letting Main Street fend for itself lead to 10s or maybe 100s of thousands of excess deaths.

Bush's defunding of education created an unknowable number of excess deaths, and this undereducation was a major factor in the election of Trump.

Well I agree that is a bad move; it's authoritarian, violent, expensive, unnecessary, and most likely unconstitutional.

But does sending National Guard troops to another state constitute a civil war?

You're right, saying things like "front lines" is an oversimplification. I have listened to a lot of Robert Evans, and I agree that if a civil war happens it will Balkanize America.

With that being said, you agree none of this is happening yet? Surely we are backsliding into fascism and violence, but you would agree we are not in a civil war, because we do not yet have multiple different factions, upstart states, militias and insurgencies?

So what are the 21st century metrics for a war?

I have an honest followup question to this meme (because I lived it): how long do you expect the girlfriend to stay?

At age 23 I was in a great relationship, we were in love, then I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I stopped being able to do physical things, I dropped out of school, I was bedridden. She went from being my girlfriend to being my nurse. She cared for me for a year, one long miserable year, then she left.

Is she at fault for leaving?

W Bush is responsible for 1-2 million deaths, depending on how you count the bodies.

They were killed for political reasons, they were killed for profit. They were labeled "terrorists" in order to justify mass extrajudicial killings.

We can argue which is worse: Trump or W? Trump has done more damage to institutions, W has more blood on his hands, Trump has 3.5 more years to do damage, etc. But let's not whitewash the horrific and unjustifiable crimes of the W administration.

If we use the original definition of the word "meme", which is "a unit of cultural transmission" then yes literally everything is a meme.

It was coined to be analogous to the word "gene". One of the similarities is that the borders of genes and memes are fuzzy: when you split a gene in half, you get two genes. Both genes and memes are nested inside of themselves like a Russian doll.

The misdefinition of "meme" as "image macro on the internet" was ill informed, and is thankfully going out of style.