Tuesday, June 12, 2018

The Elephant In The Room

  

















"I want to expand a bit more on a post from last week. First, I want to address a misconception that at least one reader had. Intelligence for community security is not about spying on your neighbors. It’s not about collecting information on their comings and goings; to believe that or to have inferred that is to have missed the point entirely.
No one in the community wants to be robbed. No one wants to come home and find that their home has been burglarized. Last night, I forgot that I left some cash in my truck, which is parked on the street in my neighborhood. No one broke into my vehicle last night, nor did they break into anyone else’s in my neighborhood, and I like to think that’s because I live in a safe place.
But as we saw during Hurricanes Andrew, Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, and others, safe neighborhoods can experience major problems, too. Looting, robberies, people in extreme need doing desperate things — we’re at risk of being on the receiving end of these types of crimes. Earthquakes, wildfires, riots; there’s always something that’s going to affect someone somewhere. It’s only a matter of time before that someone is you. And so my message with the last post is simple: during the next disaster, we and our neighbors need to have a frame of reference where we understand the value of information. Timely and accurate information enables better decision making, and since no one is as smart as everyone, I want the cooperation of my neighbors to be engaged and help monitor the security situation in our neighborhood during the next hurricane, earthquake, or insert-disaster-here. It’s not about spying, it’s about informing the neighborhood of area threats so we can make better decisions about the safety and security of our families." - Forward Observer , from 6/11/18

It's great regarding intel "shared consciousness", but it's not comprehensive.
There's a discussion that has to take place prior, at least for the worst contingencies:
"Who's on whose team?"

For natural disasters/shared events, what "Sam Culper" brings up in the message is pure gold, and as usual, RTWT.

But in the spectrum of potential problems, a yuuuuuuuuuuuge gap is the assumption that co-location = shared outlook.

If you have a household up the street that’s nothing but recently-removed-from-the-hood hood rats, they may be on the side of looters, not the neighborhood, come The Unpleasantness.

If a neighborhood group didn’t know that, and are sharing intel product with Team Looter’s neighborhood cousins , that’s the security leak in the levee.

If everybody inside the Green Zone had been pro-American in Iraq, there would have been no need for giant hesco walls around our bases.

That’s even truer in Austin, Houston, or anywhere else.

It may be convenient to think that there aren’t any people on some spectrum of opposition to what you want, in any neighborhood, but it’s neither safe nor sane to do so.

At some point, there’s going to have to come a recognition that not everybody inside the castle walls now ought to be left there. Wobblers are either going to have to declare, or decamp.

The side to figure that out first, and act most ruthlessly once necessary, is liable to be the side that prevails locally.

And if it leads to you being dead, who cares what happens twenty years down the road?
This is the difference between a factional and geographic revolution, like in 1860, versus an economic and philosophical one, like France circa 1789, or Russia 1917. Your neighbors will denounce you, turn on you, and split your gear after you’re gone.

It won’t be a war by even competing zip codes, or a neighborhood-to-neighborhood conflict. It will be fought house-to-house, and door-to-door in the same apartment building.

And that’s what’s capturing current interest and fears: I can prepare to ride out and survive, and even shrug off a mere hurricane, tornado, earthquake, or flood.
Because when it’s over, the event isn’t going to come circling back to my place to get even.

But that’s not true when the neighborhood socialists decide I did too well, and they deserve some of my stuff to augment their lack of preparation, or to assuage their hatred for my wisdom and material comfort. They want me to share in their misery, and may well be prepared to go as far as to kill me outright to punish me for not being as dopey as they were in the first place.

While the preparations for a severe regional disaster are similar for those to survive societal collapse, the briefing paragraph on “enemy forces” is one helluva lot different under Option B.

Hence the intense interest in the subject of late: Americans haven't felt the need to choose up sides since about 1860, and the prospect of such necessity now is rather frightful to contemplate.

Unless folks are actually going to wear shirts and skins next time out, you'd damned sure better do some due diligence regarding sorting the nearest sheep from the nearest goats, at least mentally, before you start including people on "your" team who may have quite opposing views. And even may chose to act upon them, on the day.

Greedo would've killed Han, or turned him in for enslavement and torture, just for a few bucks, and the good graces of the local warlord. And the difference between the aptly-named Greedo, and that nice old hippie couple up the street who had Shrillary and "Bernie" posters on the lawn, or that sketchy-but-smiling group of probably-illegal-aliens up the block, in sportier times, will be...what, exactly?

The Second Place Award is ALWAYS a smoking hole in your chest.
Damned right Han shot first! And had every moral right to do so.

"Be polite, be friendly. But have a plan to kill everyone you meet."

Truer words were never spoken, boys and girls.
You better know who's a friend, who's neutral, and who's an enemy, before you have to face them over rifle sandbags.

Thus endeth the lesson.

15 comments:

Badger said...

Outstanding post, observation & implied actions.

Aesop said...

Choosing up teams for a game of "Cowboys and Communists", for keeps, may be the last thing Americans want to do, but we have to acknowledge that it's still on the list.

Anonymous said...

Come ‘The Unpleasantness’, there are already at least one if not two households within a rock’s throw that SWMBO and I have assessed will likely be on ‘the other team’, regardless of the flavor of the troubles. We had the discussion again last night watching “Who do you think you are?” that we’re one major logistics network breakdown away from Ireland Potato Famine circa 1845, in very short order. Loss of power or water in any of the LA/SF/Seattle/Chicago/NYC metro areas would be mass chaos, and that assumes that it was just human error and not Mother Nature which starts the party.

Ward Dorrity said...

A simple rule: do unto them before they do unto you.

Anonymous said...

I'm with you on this one. I live in a rural area. Most of my life I've lived in rural 'merica so this is nothing new to me. There are a lot of blacks around here. They seem different than city blacks, but that doesn't mean I trust them. They ARE different but they STILL slapped up the Hillary signs. Huh. What about the whites around here? They seem nice enough. I don't trust them either. There are some folks around here I know. Some I trust, others... not so much.

One other thought here... seems like any group these days has their infiltrators. Who are they? Where are they? Hell if I know. Trust. No. One.

Anonymous said...

FO is on the money. One part of developing a community intel program is to map the norm. Then identify the abnormal. If everyone has the same sheet of music to read from, the dirt bag doper gang bangers up the street will know where they stand, with nothing being said. In many cases, if the "norm" challenges the dirt bags, sooner or later, the dirt bags will move to a location that generates, for them, a lower paranoia level. -mission accomplished! If they are dirt bag conduits. Treat them with respect, identify their non team membership to the neighborhood, and take precautions. There are no secrets in a neigjborhood, and nothing neighborhood related is classified!

Anonymous said...

Bill Jordan wrote a great book: "No Second Place Winner".
He had been there and knew what he wrote about.
If you can find it, read it.

Anonymous said...

At least the hippies are easy to detect and get rid of. The largest minority in my area is Latinos. They aren't much of a problem for now. I don't see any of the Lowrider/Cholo/MS13/whatever around here at all. Maybe they are just keeping a super low profile. Blacks are unicorns here. But, I do see lots of NRA/Threeper stickers on trucks. I like where I'm at.

R.William Orians said...

Everyone knows everyone out here in these Buckeye hills . The hyper-partisan leftists are such a weak and pathetic bunch they pose little threat to the survivalist types driving around in their big lifted diesel trucks with rifles in the rack . Suitable munitions and preparedness is the norm out here in the flyover . I would place the whole pot on the table for a secure and resistant community if I had to wager . My deeply felt sympathy to those inner city dwellers that decide their invade and conquer tactics will provide them with anything other than a timely passing .

Haxo Angmark said...

a geographic choosing-up-sides is definitely underway, w/in and between states; Whites are leaving Jew York, Mexifornia, and Illinois in droves; I also will be pulling up stakes in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile my favorite Red Princess, Jewess Anna Piller-alias-Baltzer, has announced that's she's leaving St. Louis (yes, a city, but in mid-flyover country) and returning to the scene of her youthful depredations: the Albany/Berkeley communist nest in backbay San Francisco.

Jimmy the Saint said...

IFF can be even harder than just knowing your neighbor's politics or ethnicity. Civil wars are also tailor-made for score settling, so your biggest enemy may be someone you don't even know you're at war with. It can even be over petty stuff that you've long since forgotten: that girl you took to the prom 20 years ago? Might still be a guy who wanted to go with her who suddenly has the chance to right an old wrong.

Anonymous said...

Jimmy's got a point. Saw that on a Balkan collapse in the early 90's and this was a homogenous population, not the Serb/Croat/Muslim variety. Trust sparingly.
Boat Guy

RandyGC said...

Probably a future post knowing Aesop, but don't forget counter-intel.

All that stuff being discussed here? Don't make it easy for the other side to gather that info on you. Maskirovka and Dezinformatsiya are not just old cold war terms.

Anonymous said...

The average American thinks that the mid 19th century unpleasantness was a (The) civil war. not at all. Two Westphalian States waging Napoleonic war, with the oft overlooked Missouri/Kansas theatre as the exception. What is coming will be true civil War, yes, small "c" capital "W". The question that is really important here is at exactly what point will you walk next door, knock, and shoot your neighbor in the face when they answer, then kill all in the house regardless of age/gender/etc.? And what will really fry your noodle, to borrow a phrase from a popular movie, at what point will a friend/neighbor/co-worker/relative knock on YOUR door?

These questions are the reality.

That is civil War.

Anonymous said...

Be polite, be friendly, but be ready to k!!! Everyone of the pink pussy hat wearing brigade, and their supporters. And burn their house down, and shoot their dog, and everyone who runs out of the house. And if you don’t have the stomach for that, then grovel for your porridge, wretch.