Matchism.org

A scenario: Suppose the people of Taiwan vote to convert to matchism a few years after the first adopter and then begin implementation of it. Many of The New People would already have training on matchism and matchism’s military tactics, and would immediately begin training the rest of the population. The government of China, which has publicly claimed that an act of independence like this could be taken as an act of war, may after some period of (failed) negotiations attempt to occupy Taiwan. With a small Locality force and little immediate backup from the rest of the matchish, the aggressor could achieve this relatively quickly and easily and with minimal cost in human lives or property damage. Unfortunately, running the country would prove to be far more difficult: With no leadership to replace, the actual government would remain matchish and the occupying force would find it extremely difficult to change or implement any policies.

Guerilla attacks would be commonplace and impossible to stop. For example, suppose as part of the proposed peer-to-peer cell phone system upgrade a targeting app could be installed such that any cell phone could be used to call out the location of an occupying force leadership target (be it by GPS, pointing it out on a map, or taking a photo and having the phone determine the location by matching it up with street view and aerial photography). A companion mortar-aiming app would allow any other citizen within range to hit that target. Or perhaps a micro-drone targeting app could be used to deliver a bomb to that location instead of the usual pizza or package from an ecommerce company. These would be huge advances over the current “drones and IEDs” technologies, and would render an occupied country ungovernable and yet with minimal risk to the civilian population.

But it gets worse: Because every official or employee of the occupying government would be a target of the matchish the world over, they would have to shut down all of their embassies and recall all of their officials to prevent them from becoming targets. But they wouldn’t be safe at home either: Because among the matchish would be a significant number of their own countrymen, each of whom would be duty-bound to take action and some of whom would not hesitate to take on the role of assassin if given the opportunity (and perhaps a substantial bounty). It might take no more than a handful of highly publicized assassinations to cause widespread defections and unrest, and a few dozen of them would surely cause mass panic and political instability.

This scenario does bring up another important issue: What would the US military’s response to this sequence of events be? Although as self-proclaimed “Policemen of the World” they have pledged to protect Taiwan in the past, would they intervene on behalf of a Matchish Taiwan? The expectation should be, based on Authoritarian behavior in the past, that they would not: As soon as the matchish become a distinguishable group within the US, these Authoritarians will attempt to marginalize them as traitors, just as they have any other group that they can separate out from the herd (e.g., in the 1940s with Japanese internment, and in the 1950s with communist sympathizers). And what better way to do this than to attempt to drive a wedge between them and the unconverted neurotypicals over the issue of war? Indeed, the Authoritarians in the US government might even encourage the Chinese government to take this sort of action: They would prefer the world to be black and white and to portray the issue as good vs evil and us vs them and to have an actual enemy rather than having to make one up. Supporting any Matchish Locality would put them in the very uncomfortable position of having to support a group in a foreign country that they consider to be committing treason in their own.

Not that the US military’s response in this scenario is of any practical significance: It is not out of fear of the Taiwanese or even the US military that the government of China does not invade Taiwan, it is more the fear that their relationships with other nations, and indeed their own people, would be sufficiently damaged by such an act that their own country could become unstable. Why risk losing their own positions of power when there is so little to gain? And note that all of these issues exist even with respect to all of the countries in the UN as well: Not only are they unlikely to be able to make any difference militarily, the Authoritarian leaderships of those countries would also likely refuse to do anything to support a group that they see as a threat in their own country.

Bottom line: The military viability of any matchish conversion may depend more on the activism of the matchish in other nations (specifically the ability to override the Authoritarians in those nations) than in anything intrinsic to the new Locality.

This scenario also gives some insight in to how the military will be organized and budgeted. As primarily offensive tools, the Marines will cease to exist entirely, as would all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons systems. The Navy will be reduced to at most a small defensive submarine fleet, with a logistical section that will develop policies and plans for commandeering and coordinating the use of pleasure, fishing, and merchant fleets in time of war or natural disaster. The Air Force would be relegated to surveillance, and even that primarily or even exclusively with drones, but would also have a logistical section that would enable use of civilian aircraft as needed (and as with the Navy, they might also have specification power over civilian equipment, for example requiring airdrop capability be built into cargo planes). An Army (the Global Security Force or GSF), composed of citizen soldiers and their professional leaders will make up the vast majority of the military.

Matchish weapons systems would consist primarily of small and portable devices, probably nothing larger than could be hidden in a garage and towed behind a pickup truck, such as drones or small missiles, and other low-cost, low-yield, and high-accuracy systems. Design and tactics for these would be crowdsourced to avoid the big problem the US has with its current weapons systems: Despite having spent billions of dollars on their development and production, the era of 3D printers and crowd-sourced designs and tactics has rendered many, if not most, of them obsolete.

The result would be a resistance force far more formidable than any the US faced in their “adventures” in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Those resulted in small wins in relative kill ratios (US soldiers to enemy combatants), but if you look at collateral damage (civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure) or absolute numbers of US killed or wounded they can only be considered major disasters. And those are supposedly cases where the civilian population was on the US’s side: An occupation of a country with a well trained and equipped and highly motivated citizen guerilla army would be unimaginably more costly. Not even counting the antiwar movement an action like this would generate among neurotypicals in the aggressor country: Now that we know what’s really been going on with SDAPs, any war of aggression against a matchish Locality would spawn an antiwar movement that would make the antiwar protests of the Vietnam era look like Veteran’s Day parades.

As to the objection that relying on a deterrent-to-occupation defensive force could lead instead to atrocities like the Nanking Massacre or the firebombing of Dresden (during WWII), one must also keep in mind that social engineering is a part of the process of deterring wars. The very discussion here that the only viable means of subduing a Matchish Locality would be to totally destroy it means that any proposal by a potential aggressor to attempt this would necessarily mark them as a madman and therefore almost certainly cause them to be removed from power before a single shot was fired (sort of a psychological version of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction).

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