andsoitis
8 hours ago
The London School of Economics is taking the risk of civil war seriously, with many observers and experts having expressed concern. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/taking-warnings-of...
”Elon Musk’s comment about the inevitability of civil war in Britain might have been flippant. But similar concerns have been raised by journalists and academics within established democracies that over the possibility of civil conflict escalating to civil war”
mamonster
8 hours ago
>On April 21 2021, in a letter also signed by a group of retired officers, a former officer in France’s Ground Force, Jean-Pierre Fabre-Bernadac, made a stark warning. Published in the magazine Valuers Actuelles it denounced the growing chaos of French life, and warned of ‘racial’ and ‘civil’ war if nothing is done to prevent it,.
Ah yes, 21st of April, date of the failed Algiers putsch against De Gaulle.
mytailorisrich
8 hours ago
And interestingly, in France this is all a continuation of that period...
SideburnsOfDoom
8 hours ago
> Elon Musk’s comment about the inevitability of civil war in Britain might have been flippant.
It is IMHO a mistake to view Elon Musk’s comment as merely "flippant". We should take the risk from "Elon Musk’s comments stoking civil war", and his personal platform to amplify radicalism and propagandise hatred, very seriously.
Even if the civil war that he fantasises about is currently a nonsense.
mytailorisrich
8 hours ago
Sometimes what people predict is referred to as "nonsense" because they manage to infer things based on trends over a longer term than others who can only see what's right in front of them.
In this case, Musk (and many others) only extrapolate the trends at play for 50+ years to their logical conclusion, and actually I'd say that denying this it's becoming more and more a case of ostrich syndrome.
beardyw
5 hours ago
> Sometimes what people predict is referred to as "nonsense" because they manage to infer things based on trends over a longer term than others
Or it's just wishful thinking. Musk's comments generally suggest he has no idea about the UK.
alimw
5 hours ago
What do you think Musk is trying to do here? His purpose is not coolly to assess the probability of a certain outcome (nobody asked him to do that!) but rather to make that outcome more probable.
SideburnsOfDoom
8 hours ago
I'm not saying you're always wrong in the abstract "sometimes" that you pose. But I stand what I said about Mr Musk specifically in this case.
mytailorisrich
7 hours ago
Well, you also qualify your "nonsense" claim by "currently". This is the point, IMHO. No-one claims that civil war is imminent but it does look inevitable if the trends at play keep their trajectories.
SideburnsOfDoom
7 hours ago
> but it does look inevitable if the trends at play keep their trajectories.
I think this too is utter nonsense. Too much of the twitter brainrot.
But it does highlight the dangers that this poses, that people can easily fall into it as you have done. So, Mr Musk's incitement is a danger to you and others. Even if the "civil war" remains someone's fantasy.
mytailorisrich
7 hours ago
[flagged]
SideburnsOfDoom
7 hours ago
> cannot simply be dismissed as "utter nonsense" and "twitter brainrot".
I refer you to my earlier statement where I did just that.
> .... non-European immigration ... the rise of Islam ... you need to ask how this ends.
yep, standard-issue brainrot.
edit in case it's not clear, the burden of proof is on the person making the unsubstantiated lurid claims about "civil war".
mytailorisrich
15 minutes ago
HN is supposed to foster discussion and curiosity. I presented arguments to attempt to show that what Musk wrote is a least a plausible scenario (and the LSE link shows that this is taken seriously), whatever will actually happen (so "inevitable" is probably the interesting aspect to debate), whatever I think of Musk, and whatever I think of those issues in general. You keep being dangerously close to simply trolling...