No, but you and your buddies could use your peashooters to raid an army base, kill the guards, and steal the keys to the tanks in a surprise raid. This is a very common occurrence in rebellions. When you see Syrian rebels or rebels in other countries, where exactly do you think they got their heavy weapons from? Do you think they made them in a garage somewhere?
Eh, for a lot of businesses, the few percent they pay in card fees is worth it to avoid handling large quantities of cash. Cash is a pain in the ass to actually work with on a large scale. Collecting it, counting it, securing it, keeping employees and random criminals from stealing it, etc. Plus lots of cash allows employees to steal from both the employer or the customer by giving bad change deliberately.
Not that businesses shouldn't accept cash, but there is a reason a lot of them don't want to mess with it. It's an enormous hassle.
Look at somewhere like Syria. Governments still get taken down by armed revolutionaries. Yes, there is the issue that governments are better armed. But there are a few fatal flaws in the idea that this makes them invincible:
A lot of expensive weapons systems like airplanes and tanks can be taken out by much cheaper and accessible systems like MANPADS and drones.
There will be people on the side of the rebels with previous military experience that will know how to use the heavier weapons.
Groups of revolutionaries armed with civilian-accessible weapons can find lightly defended military bases, storm them, and seize heavier weapons.
Rebel groups always receive outside assistance from foreign powers.
If a group of revolutionaries deposes the California state government, declares the New California Republic, and tries to secede from the US, they won't be fighting with AR-15s for long. They'll be using the strongest available civilian weapons to raid National Guard armories and other locations that may not be so heavily defended. They may even do so with the tacit support of those working at those facilities. Then their goal will be to hold out long enough against the US government that they can petition foreign powers like China to support their rebellion against the US federal government.
Revolts don't happen in a vacuum. Rebels don't need to hold out against the central government indefinitely armed only with light weaponry. At the end of the day, there's going to be some other well armed country out there that's going to be more than happy to see their geopolitical rival be embroiled in a war of secession. If California decided to rebel on Monday, by Friday the PRC would be loading every drone, antitank missile, and MANPAD they can find into crates, ready to smuggle them in container ships past the US Navy. Even if China didn't support the aims of the California rebels, it wouldn't matter. Hell, they wouldn't even care about the final outcome of the war. They would happily fund heavy weapons to the rebels just to make sure the US federal government was too embroiled in a crisis at home to devote many resources to places like Taiwan.
The real downside to artificial wombs is that we may rapidly become dependent on them. Half of pregnancies result in spontaneous abortion. With external gestation that assumedly wouldn't happen. That's a hell of a lot of evolutionary pressure which could have all kinds of consequences.
Someone should dress up like ICE themselves, and disappear people like this. When they insist they're citizens, just call their documents fake and usher them into waiting vans at gunpoint. That's the only way this madness will end. It's only when the lives of ICE agents themselves are at risk from this that thing have a hope of changing.
People also have this idea that collapse is this overnight thing, like a zombie apocalypse. But while that does sometimes happen historically, a gradual degradation is much more common and realistic. What that actually looks like on the ground is just a general decline in the standard of living all around. In an advanced capitalist economy, we rarely have actual shortages, where the supply of goods simply runs out. Rather, whenever the supply of anything gets tight, the price soars until demand drops.
As things degrade, everything's just going to become ever more expensive. People used to eating beef will have to switch to chicken. Then they'll switch to tofu. Eventually just rice and beans. And as prices rise, the world's poorest, a few million at a time, will find that they can't even afford rice and beans, and no one will be able to afford to give them food aid either.
Housing will gradually become ever-more expensive. We have a finite capacity to construct housing. And as natural disasters destroy more and more homes and infrastructure, we have to spend more and more of that finite capacity just rebuilding what we've lost, rather than constructing new homes. This drives the cost up ever-higher. People switch from owning their home, to renting an apartment, to living with roommates, to abandoning the nuclear family entirely and living in large extended households again.
This is what collapse actually looks like. Prices on everything slowly rise until we look around and realize that the global population has been cut in half by starvation and all but the riches survivors are living in penury.
Reminds me of a story of a friend of mine.. She did her undergrad and masters in classics and archaeology. As part of her studies she participated in a summer dig on the island of Cyprus. She spent the summer working on remote archaeological sites in the rural countryside.
Well one day she needed to go into town for something. She goes in to the only store in town, a tiny little grocery store. She finds what she's looking for then goes to check out. Suddenly, with horror, she realizes, "wait, I don't know how to talk to this guy. I can't speak modern Greek."
So she attempts the next best thing. She tries to talk to the shopkeeper...in ancient Greek. She tried to have a random conversation with someone in ancient Greek in modern Cyprus.
The shopkeeper looks at her like she has two heads, pauses for a moment, and says, in English, "lady, no one has talked like that here for two thousand years!"
Sorry. SCOTUS already is way ahead of you. They've already carved out broad dubious religious rights exemptions that allow doctors to let trans and queer people die if they show up needing care. I'm proposing that we simply give them a taste of their own medicine.
I never suggested Trump winning would be a good thing, or payback for anyone. And in my hypothetical, I was suggesting progressives might have a better time winning in a Republican primary than a Democratic one.
What you're saying is that you're so myopically blinded by partisanship, that if someone like Bernie somehow won the Republican nomination, you would still vote for the Democrat out of team loyalty. Again, this is all just sports to you. You don't believe in anything except the blue team winning.
Girl: this is my house, my name's on the fucking deed. GTFO you weirdo.