Yeah, he’s actually incredibly bad at this. As evil as ICE and the other border Nazis are, we don’t have an actual Trumpen-SS that answers only to Der Führer. He’s cranking the existing dials to 11, which says more about America in general than just him.
Well, the interesting point of failure for him creating a police state is that he's fixated on martial law as the method. A month or two ago, I was talking to a military nerd who mused that to occupy the US to a level similar to Afghanistan, we would need a ratio of roughly 40 soldiers per 1000.
Which translates to about 12 million soldiers. For reference, our current military numbers total (including support staff) a little over a million if you include reserves. Said expert said their opinion was that a successful occupation would require a force measuring 10% of the population.
Which would require you to conscript about half of all Trump voters in 2024.
That's an amusing thought.
If you think he'll go for the more feasible route of turning ICE into a secret police, the Stasi had a ratio of 1:175. Which is only about 2 million. Then you realize that the record-breaking ICE expenditures only allocated enough money in hiring to increase the number of officers...
from 20,000 to 30,000. And are currently having trouble recruiting despite lowering standards.
To put it bluntly, Trump either outright can't, or isn't spending enough to remotely approach the manpower he needs to sustain an authoritarian regime. I presume he and his people think AI will cover the gaps, but I think the technology is at best ten years away from what they would need.
Right, and despite the hysterical flag-based jacking off they all constantly do about “real Murrica”, lots of military people aren’t going to be interested in occupying the country and shooting their neighbors. Only the weirdest creeps in uniform are like that and nobody likes them.
I crunched the numbers on doing this with ICE, and their hiring budget alone should be over a trillion dollars. Also, it may be that the US doesn't have the logistical capacity to supply and equip a force that big.
My guess is that they think that AI and Drones will pick up the slack, but the technology just isn't there yet. Anyone who's looked into Palantir's products will discover that it's good at one thing: creating social maps based on input data. It was used mostly for PowerPoint presentations.
Plus anyone who’s paid any attention at all to, say, Ukraine over the last three years has found that you can’t take and hold territory with drones.
No but you can kill rusians with them. #maga #gop #republicans #Ukraine
You could combine the two to create a drone that will hunt down and/or kill everyone in a person's life, but that kind of response is going to just radicalize a populace, and it's still a drone, with all the weaknesses therein.
Anyone who tried to implement something like this would instantly galvanize the population against them because it sounds like something a supervillain would do. Machiavelli says that it's fine if you're feared rather than loved, but warns that you don't want to be hated.
And I can't think of anything more like to make anyone hate you than saying: "If you don't obey me, I will have drones kill everyone in your life."
It worked for Caesar. But he had more than two brain cells to rub together, and also did not surround himself with nothing but sycophants. Which didn’t work out for him either, but fucked the rest of us for a couple thousand years.
Plus you have to be effective and I have zero reason to believe that these people would be.
Yeah. That too.
I mean, Archer did a version of this in their final season and it immediately targeted the guy in charge. And since social media accounts would be part of the data used, anyone following Peter Thiel on Twitter would put him on the target list. And since it would likely be used against journalists...