just a little while longer and we'll be together ن

“Who doesn’t call a dork like that back?”

You can bleed them. When the US Army come patrolling through your neighborhood, you might be able to take a few of them with you. Hell, you might be able to run away and do it again and again- theoretically, you wouldn’t be alone, and they couldn’t possibly engage in endless manhunts for every single person who dared to resist them. And they’d never feel safe, with the possibility of a sniper behind every window.

Of course the Army could call in artillery and air support to just level your neighborhood. What would this get them? Well, it would piss off a lot of people off when innocents die, and play into the hands of the rebels. It would make a lot of soldiers in the professional military seriously consider whether they were doing the right thing or not, whether they were on the good guys’ side. And finally, it would simply kill innocent people, and nobody wants to rule over a nation of corpses.

The aim of a tyrant is to control, not to kill. What they want is to be able to have militarized police point guns at people and cow them into submission to whatever dictates they might want to impose. If those people are instead waiting behind their doors and ready to shoot first when the jackbooted thugs come around, they’ve already failed.

So the point is to fight. If you resist, you’re not being controlled, and you’re also undermining attempts to control others who can’t or won’t fight; you might die, of course. That’s more or less why Patrick Henry famously said “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!”

As long as people can resist, they can be free, and tyrants can never succeed. But when you’re talking about people who have no firearms using swords and knives and clubs against modern military weapons it actually becomes pointless, because you can’t bleed them at all- they’ll just gun you down.

I was always kind of skeptical about Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, because visiting every kid in the world did not seem reasonable. But the pirates only visited me, so they were probably real.