Category Archives: society

False dichotomies: global warming

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I dislike the fact that the public intellectual space and discourse is defined by the false dichotomies.

You are either for global warming (they call it climate change now because there was no warming) or against it. You are either pro choice or pro life. You are either an antifascist or a fascist. You are either an atheist or you believe in one of the middle-Eastern bronze-age theologies. You either believe that all people are the same or you are a racist.

I think the cause of this is the fact that people are not very good at thinking and having coherent opinions, but they are far better at forming groups around simplistic concepts. If you can reduce an issue to being for or against something, then you can politically exploit idiots who are unable to think in more complex terms.

Let me explain what I think, using issues of global warming, abortion, fascism and religion as an example. Let’s start with global warming in this article, and go on from there.

I see Earth as a complex thermodynamic system; it seems to be the only place in the Solar system other than the Sun, that derives a significant portion of its warmth from nuclear energy. I shit you not – more than 80% of the energy that keeps the Earth’s core in a molten state is derived from either nuclear fission or radioactive decay. This is the reason why we have such a powerful electromagnetic field, unlike Venus and Mars. Earth has a magnetic field on par with the gas giants. This is because the Theia impact, some 4.31 BY ago, gave Earth enough heavy elements for two planets, while expelling the light elements into what later became the Moon. As a result, Earth has its own nuclear furnace that keeps the inner core spinning within the outer core and the mantle, producing a strong magnetic field. This heat emanates from the core and eventually into space.

The second source of Earth’s energy is the Sun, which, obviously, heats up the atmosphere, the oceans and the crust during the day, and this energy radiates into space during the night. The speed of this release of energy can be moderated by the buffers, also called the glasshouse gasses. Also, since the equatorial areas absorb more solar energy than the poles, there is a thermal gradient between those. Depending on the amount of buffers in the atmosphere and the layout of the continents and the oceans, there is a certain variability to this thermal gradient between the equator and the poles; if the oceans can’t bring the energy from the equator to the poles quickly enough, the Earth starts warming up.

As it warms up, the oceans release carbon dioxide, one of the important buffers, into the atmosphere, because it is more easily soluble in cold water (which is easy to demonstrate by warming up carbonated soda). This then contributes to the moderation of the equatorial-polar thermal gradient, essentially smoothing the seasonal transitions and increasing the habitable area of the Earth’s crust. If it goes too far, it can make the equatorial areas very hot, but habitability of those areas is already questionable today, because they aren’t actually a pleasant place for humans. On the other hand, thawing of the polar regions would more than make up for the loss of equatorial habitability by opening up the currently inaccessible areas for human habitation. Another issue are the coastal areas, that would be flooded by the melt-water resulting from the polar ice. This would result in the gradual loss of the very densely populated coastal areas, but I see no cause for panic, since the gradual increase of the water levels would force people to simply migrate to a safer area. Of course, you can never eliminate the possibility of a sudden event, something of a Dansgaard-Oeschger variety, that would seriously threaten mankind, but those occur with some regularity in any case.

So, what is my long-term prognosis? First of all, I take my data from a vastly longer time-span than is the case with most climatologists; I work with the last billion years of climate. This includes several pre-Cambrian global glaciations, the Cambrian melt, warm period that started subsiding some 65 MY ago, entering a drier, cooler climate, increasing the thermal gradient between the equator and the poles, starting the formation of polar ice, and gradually absorbing the carbon dioxide gas in increasingly colder water, reducing the amount of atmospheric buffers. The polar ice on the other hand increased the Earth’s albedo, thus contributing to the situation by reflecting more sunlight into space. Eventually, this reached extremes somewhere in the late Pliocene, early Pleistocene, some 2.6MY ago, when the amount of atmospheric buffers declined to dangerous levels, where even the minor orbital and axial variations started throwing the climate out of whack. These are called the Milankovitch cycles, and the interesting thing about them is that they exist only in the Pleistocene; I heard about that once and it made me wonder so I looked into it and now I know why that happens. Basically, if the CO2 levels fall below the Pliocene levels, the Earth starts to balance on a very precarious edge of a runaway glaciation, where due to the lack of buffers in the atmosphere it becomes possible for more ice to accumulate on the polar areas than can be removed in the summer. Due to the albedo effect of the ice, this increases the problem in the next season, and so on. If left unhindered, this process will eventually and quite certainly result in a full global glaciation, poetically known as the snowball Earth, and that is game over for most forms of life on land, including humans. That’s the tricky part – the thermal curve of the last 65 MY has a clear downwards-pointing trend, and it’s because of the ring of seawater that formed around Antarctica, enabling the Coriolis force powered sea currents to quickly dissipate energy, de facto working like an air conditioner or a fridge, powered by Earth’s rotation and convection.

What humans did here with their industrial revolution and combustion of fossil fuels is to raise the atmospheric CO2 concentration to either early Pleistocene or even early Pliocene levels; the data isn’t clear enough. But what does that mean, exactly? Is it a bad thing, in a sense that the climate will undergo a dramatic change, destructive to human civilization, before it re-establishes itself on the Pliocene levels? Is it a good thing, in a sense that it either delayed or completely prevented the onset of the next glacial maximum, and possibly even brought us out of Pleistocene ice age altogether? I don’t know. Earth is such a complex thermodynamic system, I’m simply unable to make a precise enough simulation in my head to account for all the factors and variables. What I do know, with absolute certainty that comes from looking at the last billion years of climate data, is that without this increase of CO2 levels this glacial minimum that we call Holocene would ultimately come to an end, and we would sink into a glacial maximum, colloquially known as the ice age. Also, since the circumantarctic air conditioner keeps on pumping heat out into space, one glacial maximum will eventually cross the threshold of runaway glaciation where even the equator would freeze over, and that will last until the continental drift eventually breaks the heat pump of sea currents, some hundreds of millions or even billions of years in the future. Basically, this means it’s game over for life on Earth as we know it, and since the Pleistocene itself with its climatic instability means the process has already started, it is unlikely to take more than a few millions of years before the Earth cools down so much that Milankovitch cycles will no longer be able to bring it into a glacial minimum. So, without that evil beast of global warming, we are not safe in the bosom of Mother Earth with its perfect balance of climate and whatever bullshit the tree-huggers want you to believe. On the contrary, we live in a climate that is so viciously unstable, it forced animals to evolve hibernation and seasonal migration in order to survive the seasonal extremes. Earth is in its death throes, and it’s called Pleistocene. It’s only because our lifespan is so insignificant that we don’t perceive it as a terrible train wreck that it is. The only event in the last 65 MY that went contrary to the trend of gradual cooling and the eventual death in ice is our industrial carbon dioxide release.

But if you expect my prognosis to be bright, you’re wrong. I actually think our CO2 release is merely a “blip”. The circumantarctic current is a vast, unstoppable global force. With our pumping CO2 into the atmosphere we might actually trigger a Dansgaard-Oeschger event by melting too much polar ice at once, breaking the thermohaline circulation and resulting in some violent climatic extreme that might cool the planet down in one instant to simply sink all our CO2 into the oceans and resume the cooling trend, maybe even accelerating it. That’s what you have when you work with complex thermodynamic systems – it’s always chaos, and in chaos the scale can tip both ways in unpredictable ways. So yes, our CO2 release is the best news that life on Earth got since the extinction of the dinosaurs. It’s the only thing that could possibly delay or even prevent the runaway glaciation. It could also wreck the climate enough to wipe us out. But our prognosis was never bright, to begin with. We have our extinction event sometime in the future, in a runaway glaciation. It’s a certainty. What we did with our industrial civilization might delay it or prevent it altogether. It could also kill us more quickly. The thing is, I don’t know what will happen, because the thermodynamics of it all is too complex for me to simulate, and from what you’ve read so far you can see that I’m actually quite a bit ahead of the general trends in climate science.

And now we come to the conclusion: why the question “do you believe in global warming” makes me facepalm and despair to the point of tears. It’s because I know the level of superficiality and ignorance that lies beneath that question. It’s because I know I’d have to write this article in order to explain what I really think about it, and because I rarely think in yes/no dichotomies, that so rarely function beyond the level of elementary mathematics, where you have simple questions such as “is n, an element of N, an odd or an even number”, and all elements of the set result in unequivocal Boolean answers. The real world is more like the R set, in which such a question would apply only to an insignificantly small subset, making no sense whatsoever outside that range.

Some thoughts on evolution, free market and Hitler

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I was watching some YouTube videos made by people who rescue and refurbish old computers from the junkyard and return them to function. Basically, they take an old Core2Duo computer, fix some tiny thing that was wrong and turn it into a, well, Geekbench 3000 slug, so that one doesn’t have to buy a new i5 or i7 machine that would fly and work great, but instead extend the life cycle of an old, obsolete machine that will continue working below modern standards and annoy people for another 5 years.

Which made me think about analogies. You see, the leftist Western ideology, as formulated after WW2, wants to make us believe that all humans share the same hardware, all you need is install the right operating system of leftism and human rights, basically the right fundamental ideology, and run the right software, basically indoctrination, education and political correctness, and you get a good, emancipated human being. Then, if something doesn’t work, you blame pre-existing societal conditions, basically the software that interferes with the leftist ideological perfection, but you never actually consider the possibility that your premises might be faulty, that some types of hardware might be actually inferior and unfit for purpose (in translation, that some people might be simply to stupid to function in a modern environment, like trying to install Windows 10 on a Pentium IV computer; it might limp along, but it will work like shit).

Since the modern OS defines “good” as “opposite from Hitler”, let’s see how Hitler viewed those things. First of all, he didn’t see people as individuals, just as we don’t see computers as individuals. He would see humans as specific cases of some hardware type running a certain ideology and intellectual content. His rationale for getting rid of inferior races would be that they can’t function on the level that modern civilization demands, they basically can’t run the current OS and modern software, and keeping such obsolete or faulty hardware in function just drains the resources from the rest of humanity, it doesn’t actually add anything useful and takes resources away from the places where they could be desperately needed. Essentially, by killing a retarded child you free up resources that can be used for assisting 10 talented children; a computer analogy would be that by throwing away an old Core2Duo machine you allow yourself the option to actually put resources into buying a new i7 beast that will raise your overall functionality and productivity by a level that more than simply justifies the expense, so that getting rid of the old bucket actually isn’t a loss, it’s a gain. Keeping something shitty alive actually isn’t a net positive.

Also, there’s a matter of ideology. If some people’s heads are filled with an ideology that makes them want to kill you, you can either attempt to dissuade them, which is ineffective and costly, or you can simply kill them and produce new bodies with a non-hostile and useful OS to take the empty space. A computer analogy would be that you can take a box that runs Windows XP, and you can either install Windows 10 on it and thus refurbish it to work in a modern environment, or you can concede that it isn’t worth the trouble and simply throw it away and buy a new box that runs a modern OS quickly. Essentially, the concept would be that trying to teach inferior nations how to work on a German level isn’t worth the effort; it’s better to simply kill them all and expand the already high-functioning Germans to fill the empty space.

So, what we have here is akin to one of those philosophy seminar questions, such as “should we eat babies?”. If you react emotionally, you’re obviously too stupid to be there in the first place. If there’s something wrong with it, there should be a coherent rational response. In the case of eating babies, the rational response is that you don’t want to become a baby-eating monster, regardless of the fact that there is often an excess of babies and lack of food and the babies are nutritious. You don’t do certain things because the very choice of some options opens ethical floodgates that can destroy the connective tissue of human society. Growing decerebrated fetuses in order to harvest them for organs can make all the intellectual sense in the world, but it is such an ethically monstrous act, it opens the society to increasing horrors if practiced. Essentially, if you dehumanize other beings, if you lower the threshold of outrage over certain acts, it normalizes evil and society turns into a horror show.

This is an easy argument to make, but it’s faulty. In fact, evolution functions exactly along the lines of eliminating sub-par animals so that they don’t consume resources and contribute inferior genes to the gene pool. If you have wolves that have speed and strength sufficient for killing a sick or malformed deer, but can’t harm an average or superior deer, this will actually cleanse the deer gene pool and improve their population, primarily by freeing up the resources that would otherwise be wasted on something that either wouldn’t get the chance to reproduce at all due to sexual selection, or would reproduce with inferior offspring, or would be a nuisance in other ways. So, Hitler’s essential evolutionary argument is correct. His problem was that he had no faith in the power of free market of labor, goods and resources, among other things because his precious Germans were losing in the free market to Jews, who are arguably better. So, instead of letting the free market place resources in the hands of winners and let the losers wither away, he decided to replace that process with ideology and arbitrary assessments of superiority and inferiority. The result, of course, was a disaster and injustice of enormous proportions. I don’t, however, see a problem with the basic concept. Let people compete. Make just rules. The winners will accumulate most resources, and losers will starve. That’s actually perfectly fine and is recommended by Jesus – give more to those who already have the most, take away from those who are incompetent. That’s how you introduce healthy criteria of virtue into a society, instead of breeding whiners and victims who all demand someone to intervene in their favor in order to “redress social injustices”. The only social injustice takes place when you take resources from the successful ones in order to feed the unsuccessful ones. It’s like killing healthy deer in order to help the lame and sickly ones.

But our society went the other way – it decided that by existing, you have rights, and if reality doesn’t match that expectation, you call it injustice and whine until someone, either society or the state, punishes someone for success and compensates for your failure. This is not all that different from Hitler’s position – since his Germans can’t compete with the Jews on equal and fair terms, he will change terms and use the Germans’ advantage in physical power in order to simply kill the Jews and thus clear out the space for Germans. So, the problem with Hitler wasn’t that his philosophy and practice were pro-evolutionary and social-Darwinist, it’s the exact opposite: he didn’t have faith in social Darwinism because his chosen subset of mankind didn’t fare all that great in those conditions, so he decided to be a socialist and “redress injustices”.

A consistent believer in evolution would never adopt social interventionism. He would have faith that better will prevail, regardless of what he thought “better” to be. In order for better to prevail, it suffices to not rescue obsolete trash from the garbage heap and attempt to refurbish it, and not to play Robin Hood by taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots. Rather, buy that which is great, and avoid buying trash.

That works for humans, too. Give to those who inspire you. Don’t give to beggars who try to guilt you into giving them resources. Don’t feel guilty if worthless people are poor. Feel guilty if worthy people are poor, because that means that you didn’t support that which you deem worthy.

Your social responsibility is simply to support that which you deem worthy and great. Applied throughout society, that will make humans who are of no value to anyone fall to the garbage heap and die, all by themselves, without any need for some Hitler to act like an artificial evolutionary agent and kill them. Don’t feed that which is worthless, and it will die. Feed that which is worthy, and it will grow. Don’t have sex with something that is pitiful, and don’t feed that which is pitiful. As a result, you have instant eugenics of the best kind, without needing to resort to horrors in order to artificially implement something against the natural order.

So what is the conclusion about Hitler? What’s the problem with him? Basically, his problem is that he was a nationalist and a socialist. Because he was a nationalist, he tried to assure supremacy of his nation, against evolutionary free-market criteria. Because he was a socialist, he believed in state intervention with the goal of “redressing injustices”. The combination of those two was a nightmare of the worst kind. The problem wasn’t the eugenics, nor the concept of survival of the fittest, nor the concept of superior and inferior races. The problem was in the enforcement of arbitrary criteria. If you believe in evolution and survival of the fittest, laissez-faire. Hands off and let the successful ones succeed, and the unsuccessful ones fail. If your gardening demands weeding, it means you’re growing the wrong plants. Try growing nettles instead of spinach.

Ideologies and group identities

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I’ve seen an interesting way of thinking in the Western jurisprudence, a sort of an extreme individualism which sees every possible guilt only on a personal level, disregarding even the very concept of collectivism.

And yet we constantly see how people act in groups, with group bonds of belief and emotions, which create common thoughts and joint actions. When you have thousands of football fans breaking each other’s heads, your problem doesn’t exist on the individual level. It’s not individuals performing those actions, it’s the groups. Individuals are just instruments which the abstract group entity uses to assert its dominance, attitudes and beliefs. In that sense, nations really do exist as entities with emotions and willpower. Football clubs really do exist not only as administrative entities and players, but also as an idea that binds the fans into a group entity, connected on some very basic common denominator.

It’s very easy to get sucked into binding your personal identity with some group. When you do, it’s important to understand that you don’t become more than yourself, you become less. You don’t become something larger than yourself by identifying with a group, a group becomes something larger than it was by increasing its membership. You, yourself, simply ceded parts of your identity, and replaced your individual, personal thoughts with collective thoughts, collective emotions, beliefs and goals. It then becomes possible for you to attack people you don’t personally hate, but you hate them as part of your group identity.

For me personally, it’s interesting how I became capable of truly understanding some things about biological conditioning and inclusion of animalistic mechanisms in spirituality only after I chose to stop self-identifying as human. I literally stopped seeing my identity as part of that of human race, and started seeing myself as a separate species, that is still close enough to human to reproduce with humans, but no closer than a dog is to a wolf. I started seeing through social and reproductive strategies that were usually seen as spirituality, and my entire perspective on ethics changed. For instance, humans have no ability to tell good from evil if you separate it from what’s good and bad for humanity. For instance, if somehow some other species evolved on Earth which was far superior to humans, and the absolute karmic law would demand that humans go extinct like the Neanderthals before them, the humans would view that as evil. If an absolutely better species needed to go extinct in order for humanity to go on, humans would choose themselves. That made me think: what if all other ethical opinions commonly held by humans aren’t what God would want, but what the self-serving humanity wants? God would want sat-cit-ananda to manifest. Humanity wants there to be more humanity. That’s all there is to it.

As I said, it becomes interesting when you dissociate yourself from the group you implicitly belonged to since birth. You start noticing things, the same way you’d notice things if you dissociated yourself from some more obvious social identity, only with more profound, more liberating consequences. One of the most important things you notice is that people aren’t very interested in the truth, they are more interested at “being right”, being on the right side, and the right side is the winning side. It’s just an animalistic instinct of wanting to be on the winning side, because those on the losing side are traditionally either killed or sold into slavery. Also, if one side offers no advantages to you if you pick it, you pick the other side. Truth, reality, that doesn’t even show on your instinctive mind’s radar. Truth is what the winning side tells. Reality is that the winners live and consume resources. That’s what mankind is about, not God, not truth, not manifesting sat-cit-ananda. It’s about who gets to live, reproduce and have resources. God is what is invented to rationalize the winning side’s right to do what it does, and to allow it to keep what it had taken. If a real, true God existed who would question the order of things, he would not be acknowledged as their God. Essentially, if you had a-prefixed deities, where “a” stands for “absolute”, aGod and aSatan, and humans could choose which one is God and which one is Satan, what do you think, how would they do it? Using rational philosophy, metaphysics and transcendental ethics? Or by the criterion of being allowed to live, reproduce and consume resources?

What do you think what Allah or Jehovah are, in the absolute sense? aGod or aSatan? An entity that lets your tribe kill, plunder and rape, own sexual slaves and demands blood sacrifices, does that sound like the sat-cit-ananda Absolute that created the dual Universe in order to manifest His fullness as a multitude? From where I see it, from my non-human position, it’s either completely fabricated, made up as a sick fantasy of warlords and madmen, or it was inspired by Satan as a system of belief that will bind humans into groups that are most useful for his goals of keeping souls bound in ignorance and sin, and leading them to perform sinful deeds that will propagate their enslavement to this place.

I once heard an interpretation that a division between God and Satan is within religions and not between them; between individual ideas and concepts and not so much between whole ideologies. But I wonder. Some ideologies, as a system, seem to be consistently promoting beliefs that are conducive to ignorance, bondage and resistance to any change from that status, and people assume group identities based on those ideologies, aligning their destinies with the group vector.

So yeah, think about that the next time you cheer for your country on the football championship, when you identify with others based on what OS runs on your computer or a phone, when you identify with others based on your species, race, nation, religion or other stupid bullshit.

The only thing you actually are, is what you are when you stand naked before the spirit of God, in His light. Every other identity is a descent into some illusion or another, promoting and propagating bondage and suffering. And guess from which perspective your actions are going to be seen and evaluated when you die?

Live your life in such a way that you can stand before God, stripped of any kind of collective identity, and have God see your life as his own, something that was His manifestation in the relative world of duality. Because where you’re going, there are no football clubs, nations, races, genders or religions, and the only true judgment that is passed on any action is whether it is of God, who is sat-cit-ananda.

The flowchart of madness

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I was thinking about hierarchy of belief and how it can cause apparently unrelated problems.

Let’s illustrate it with a flow chart which shows how a terrorist attack at a gay club becomes possible:

flowchart

Basically, you end up with very bizarre beliefs and behaviors that are a logical consequence of accepting previous, apparently logical and sensible steps. That’s how you get people who believe that Earth is flat, that dinosaurs were contemporary with humans and that Earth is some 6000 years old, but that’s also how you get people who get to believe that the Earth is over 4 billion years old. They just follow a different hierarchy of belief: for instance that the world is real, that its laws are constant, that it isn’t a simulation that’s running on some astral computer, that it all behaves linearly independent on existence of observers, etc.

If at least one accepted belief in the chain proves to be false, the final conclusion will be worthless. So when we see a terrorist who takes an AR-15, goes into a building and shoots people (whether they are gay, Jews, workers in an abortion clinic or audience at a heavy metal concert is irrelevant), we naturally think he’s fucked up in the head because his beliefs and actions are contrary to all reasonable and accepted behavior, but the thing is, you can’t just dismiss his internal flow chart. There is some decision-making process he went through and came up with those conclusions. It doesn’t happen at random. Also, people don’t just happen to join cults at random. There’s a flow chart: is there a God, are there people who know God and can lead others to God, is this guru one such person, how should one act when he meets such a person, and you end up shaving your head, wearing a saffron robe and chanting 16 rounds of Hare Krishna a day. The conclusion sounds ridiculous when you’re unfamiliar with the particular flow chart, but when you think of it, people are usually lead down the garden path of consistency with all previous steps taken, where one thing follows from another, until you get something that appears to be completely irrational.

That Muslim shooting 100 gays, he wasn’t irrational. He just accepted that there is one God, he’s called Allah, he sent a prophet called Mohamed who revealed the perfect and authoritative scripture called Qur’an, and there are also the Hadith about his life and sayings that clarify matters further, this is all authoritative and if one wants to be saved for eternal life he must adhere to those instructions.

That those internal flow charts exist is obvious; the true question is, what is yours, and what if it contains faulty premises that result in fatal errors?

Does owning guns make sense

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I’ve been watching videos with Americans discussing guns. You know the drill: they want to be armed in order to protect their life and liberty, blah blah.

My question is: what is your opponent going to use to shoot back?

Let’s imagine several scenarios where a gun might be useful.

The first scenario is home defense against a burglar. Someone breaks into your house, is possibly armed, will possibly take your family hostage or harm them in some other way. Maybe it’s a personal enemy who decided to take revenge, maybe it’s a drug addict trying to steal your things in order to sell them. In this scenario, a gun is very useful. You’re not a victim, you can fight back and since you’re fighting from your known territory, the chances are you’ll win. In this scenario, the advantages of having a gun are so compelling, it should actually be obligatory to own a gun, and of course keep it locked in a safe so that your children can’t shoot themselves by accident or stupidity. The pros of owning a gun and being trained and prepared to use it for home defense so heavily outweigh the cons, it’s not even an argument.

The second scenario is personal defense in a public space. You carry a gun on your person in the street, at work or in a bar. If you’re attacked, you are not limited to your physical strength, and for women and weaker men this is a difference between being humiliated and beaten up in every physical confrontation, and being able to preserve your dignity. This is a strong reason for always carrying a firearm. However, if we imagine a realistic scenario, you’re not the only one who will carry a gun. If carrying a gun becomes the norm, it will be like the Wild West, where everyone wore a revolver like they wore pants. Altercations were very likely to turn deadly, and the fact that they were armed didn’t necessarily make people more careful, and they in fact got drunk quite frequently. So the problem is, you’re imagining a situation where you’re facing an arrogant bully, and if you have a gun, you can prevent him from assaulting you. The problem is, in a gun-friendly society a bully will always carry a gun, and a bully will practice with a gun the most. So you will basically only have normalized the escalation of violence, where you won’t have a fistfight against a stronger bully, you’ll have gunfight against a better marksman with a faster draw. In both situations you will be humiliated, but if a situation includes firearms, you’ll also be killed. Also, since the possible confrontation isn’t taking place inside your home against an invader, but in open territory, your actions will be scrutinized by a court of law even if you win. If the situation wasn’t clear, you may end up in jail. So realistically, the cons actually outweigh the pros, which is probably why American society migrated away from the Wild West model. However, there’s one situation where it’s good to be armed, and that’s a terrorist attack, of the “active shooter” variety, where you have one or multiple shooters who are indiscriminately killing civilians. If everyone is armed, this will completely discourage this form of terrorism, because it will look like an attempt of robbing a doughnut shop filled with cops. Not the brightest idea. However, have in mind that drawing a gun in an active shooter scenario makes you the prime target for the terrorists, if you’re the only one with the gun. That’s where my original question comes into play: what is your opponent going to use to shoot back? The San Bernardino shooters used AR-15 rifles and 9mm pistols. The Paris attackers used AK-47 assault rifles, hand grenades and suicide vests. Realistically, you’re going to have a pistol with you. It’s better than not having anything if you know what you’re doing and you’re lucky enough not to be killed before you can do anything or while attempting to draw the weapon, but you are still likely to be killed. If everybody is armed, your odds improve, but in that situation the terrorists are more likely to simply use the element of surprise and detonate a bomb. The better armed the target, the more likely the terrorists are to use stronger force. The worse protected the target, the more likely the terrorists are to deploy an improvised attack with light firearms or even knives. So basically, being armed and careful will help, but it will not solve the problem, because then you won’t have an active shooter problem, you’ll have a suicide bomber problem.

The third scenario is a temporary collapse of civilization due to some disaster, like hurricane Katrina, where the city infrastructure collapses, help doesn’t come quickly enough, and there’s massive looting and unrest. All the looters can be assumed to carry a handgun. Yes, if you don’t have a weapon, you potentially have a problem. However, if you do have a weapon, you will be very likely to become a looter yourself, or be mistaken for one, and killed. Also, your main problem isn’t looting, it’s having access to clean water and food, maybe medications. When you think of survival gear, think of water purification tools, not guns. The most likely thing to get you killed is diarrhea from drinking impure water, or infection from cutting yourself on something nasty and not having access to antibiotics. Here, again, the important question is what are you actually fighting? It’s lack of infrastructure, lack of essential resources, poor hygiene and looters. It might be more important to think about ways of bartering for things you need to survive than to think of survival in terms of repelling physical threats, although it’s useful to have a weapon.

The fourth scenario is one of the commonly mentioned ones, and it’s civil war against tyrannical government. Americans like to imagine it as a scenario from their war of independence, where some tyrannical force will take over, and some George Washington will assemble the freedom-loving gun owners who will start a guerrilla war against them and eventually prevail, because freedom supposedly always prevails. However, let me illustrate my point with some images.

This is Vukovar after its fall, in 1991. The Serbs are parading the streets of the fallen city, singing about their leader needing to send some salad because there’ll be meat, they’ll slaughter the Croats. All men of fighting age were either immediately shot or transported to concentration camps in Serbia where they were tortured, killed or exchanged for Serbs. The freedom loving men took up arms against the evil force, and they lost.

This is Grozny, Chechnya, 1995. The country was taken over by separatists who declared independence from Russia. The Russians were in a difficult situation, realizing that if they allow the Chechens to secede, their country might disintegrate. The Russians decided to win at all cost and, with a lot of help from pro-Russian Chechen forces, they won.

In American civil war, the South declared independence and tried to secede from the Union. After more than a million casualties and a country destroyed, the South surrendered.

If a civil war breaks out after totalitarian government takeover, there will be two realistic scenarios. Either you will be part of a small band of “terrorists” who will have little or no resources at their disposal and little or no support in the apathetic population, or you will be a part of a massive rebellion that will include a serious part of the armed forces, police and the national guard. In first case, you’re dealing with a Ruby Ridge or Waco scenario. You’ll be killed, regardless of how many guns you have. In the second case, you’re dealing with the American civil war scenario. You may win or lose, but having a gun of your own is of limited importance because if a wing of the military is on your side, you’ll be recruited into the armed forces of the rebels and you’ll be issued a rifle and other military equipment.

However, if you think you’ll be dealing with a George Washington kind of rebellion, that’s out of the question, that’s completely unrealistic. If a tyrannical government is in charge, the first thing they’ll do is create propaganda according to which owning guns is dangerous, and owning guns that are useful for military purposes is criminal, something only terrorists have a need for. They will have lists of guns and their owners, and they will send a SWAT team to your house to confiscate your weapons. You will be alone, facing an overwhelming force, and unless you run to the forest in time and become a fugitive from the law, you will be either disarmed or killed for resisting the law. The law will be what the fascists in power decide to make it. Nobody will ask you. The general population will obey the law, as always. They obeyed the Nazis in Germany not because they loved them, but because that’s was the law and that was the government. Most Americans will do the same.

I’ll tell you what the Yugoslav government did in Croatia as part of the preparation for Serbian takeover. They confiscated the weapons of the territorial defense, the guns that were supposed to be at the disposal of the people in case of war. Essentially, Croatia was disarmed. Then they began the process of the political takeover where all the power would be centralized in Serbia and dissent wouldn’t be tolerated. Nevertheless, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence and one of the first things we did was to capture the army barracks on our territory, with the little small arms that we had. We also bought weapons on the international black market. Essentially, we had to act like terrorists because the Serbs had complete control of the military. The police forces, however, changed sides, as well as some important military officers of Croatian nationality. We had to build an army almost from scratch; in the meantime, the enemy had everything from tanks to airplanes and warships. We were disarmed, but we had the advantage of every person being able to handle weapons, in Yugoslavia it was taught in schools as part of the normal curriculum, so the entire male population was able to fight as soon as they were issued a weapon. The fact that we were disarmed was a problem, but only initially. Very quickly, that problem was overcome and we crushed the Serbs militarily. So basically, it’s better to allow yourself to be disarmed initially, then bide your time, organize with a few friends, steal weapons so that they can’t be traced to you and form or join opposition forces. The initial attack at your freedom will succeed; your enemy will know what he’s doing and you won’t. He will come at you with overwhelming force. If you resist, you will lose. However, being armed isn’t the same as being prepared. If you’re prepared, you can allow yourself to be disarmed and still retain initiative and strike back later, when opportunity presents itself. Getting yourself killed in the initial power grab doesn’t help anyone but your enemy, so essentially, all those AR-15s that you Americans have at home because you’re “prepared”, be prepared to give them up, without a fight, peacefully. However, also be prepared to lay a siege on a police station later, steal the weapons and organize an armed resistance cell. That’s what civil war looks like, and forget being seen as a hero. You’ll be seen as a home-grown Bin Laden, and the general population will hate you. If this dissent manages to get support from a significant wing of the military, you have a chance.

So basically, that’s my take on owning guns with a purpose of being prepared. It sometimes helps, that’s true, but it’s perfectly useless against being dominated by a tyrannical government, because any such government will know perfectly well how to pull your fangs out. Again, ask yourself what will come for you. If it’s a burglar, no problem. If it’s a heavily armed SWAT team or a platoon of regular soldiers, what will your AR-15 accomplish beside making you a legitimate target and your death perfectly justifiable?