I honestly don’t know if Americans have what it takes to change the path we’re headed down. I haven’t really got much faith left in our society. We’re pretty pathetic.
Hope I’m wrong.
With all the uneducated, divisive disinformation, and faith-based worldviews out there it’s hard to even get people to agree that a problem exists, and therefore even harder to convince the electorate how to appropriately address it. Public medicine would fix this problem like it has in the rest of the world yet still many Americans believe it’s Marxism for some stupid reason.
Public medicine would fix this problem like it has in the rest of the world yet still many Americans believe it’s Marxism
for some stupid reason.
…because a group of politicians who need campaign funding to stay elected tell them “government bad” at every opportunity.
There is one party to blame here. Republicans. They made up the death panels bullshit. They made it so Lieberman could filibuster for the big insurance companies and keep them rich. They made it a goal to “own the libs.”
Democrats deserve criticism for their Neo Liberal bullshit too, but this wouldn’t have been pushed this far without the Republican propaganda and lies.
I think at this point it’s clear that there are problems to most people. The difficulty is more about agreeing on a) what the problems are and b) why they are problems, and c) how to fix them.
With the added difficulty that a decent portion of people have taken the “it’s hard to prove anything definitively” stance and for some reason decided that means they should believe alternative sources rather than the more logical “be skeptical of everything but also be rational about it”. If someone is able to get disinformation into official sources, they’ll have an even easier time getting it into alternative sources.
The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
All we can do it keep moving forward and try to take care of each other as we go.
Are you shooting down CEOs? No? Then you’re part of the problem with being pathetically weak.
Friendly reminder that killing CEOs isn’t the only answer. Sometimes it’s throwing tea in a harbor. Or tarring and feathering a tax collector.
Just do your part.
All those things are from a past where democracy wasn’t a thing and indeed you needed to uprise to an oppressive power.
This is still the case for the majority of the planet.
It is not the case in the developed nations. And even in the US Trump has won the popular vote.
You feathering a tax collector is an act against the will of the majority. This is not a revolutionary act, because you’re not acting brave and sacrificing yourself to voice a majority’s opinion.
Contrary, your actions are radical activism. You represent a minority, and yet you so firmly believe in your own righteousness that you justify violence.
We’re pretty pathetic.
I’m not some flag saluting, Lee Greenwood asshole, but you couldn’t be more wrong. You are on Earth and the truth is 5 billion light years from you wondering about your existence. Americans may not all have the best education. They may be apathetic at the polls due to distrust in the system. However, Americans are NOT pathetic. The media may have you convinced that we are divided on the left and the right, but we are divided up and down. You start to take away things and I’m sure you will find out how strong they can be. Americans have fought and will fight tooth and nail for what they believe in.
Americans are NOT pathetic
Buddy, we just RE-ELECTED a convicted felon and rapist who instigated an insurrection and illegally attempted to overturn an election AFTER we already fired him for massively failing, including in regards to the biggest crisis America has experienced since WW2. A guy that has openly stated he is anti-union and worker rights. We can’t even get on the same page about healthcare, despite having examples from other first world countries across the globe showing what we could do to better our situation. We targeted black people (still are), then gay people (still are), and now we’ve moved on to targeting trans people. Wealth disparity is increasing by the year. Billionaires OWN our politics top to bottom.
We’re categorically fucking pathetic.
I don’t think this speaks to how pathetic Americans are, but instead to how much the rich have us under their thumb.
We need to start working against atomization if we want things to get better, and I think this is/was a really good way to bring people together. Talk to the uninformed people in your life, be the healthy opposition to their beliefs that many people dont have. Make them understand who their real enemies are.
It is in the upper classes best interest that we close ourselves off, entering echochambers as we talk about how evil it is for someone to disagree with our own beliefs.
US politics are a ship. They don’t turn on a dime. We are headed in a better direction in the grand scheme. Short downturns happen. When Bush was president everyone thought the government was going to become a Christofacist regime. The end of times are not near. If you truly believe there is no hope, then why aren’t you taking to the streets with violence? I think THAT’S pathetic. You think the end is coming and you just sit and bitch online and do nothing.
You are on Earth and the truth is 5 billion light years from you wondering about your existence.
Quote is crazy hard but I disagree with you so much lol
You can’t act like the Civil War didn’t happen. We put men on the moon. We developed the Atomic bomb. We have 11 aircraft carriers. Whether it fits your argument or not Americans have grit and we will take back our power.
the truth is 5 billion light years from you wondering about your existence
What?
I went through your comment history to see if you are a gun owner, and I think you are not. So this makes you part of the problem you just posed in your comment here, since you have no means to commit to peaceful but aggressive armed protesting.
I don’t have anydesire to encourage people to do anything.
There are people out there who will always be useless bitches that passively complain all day other people aren’t doing things when they themselves don’t bother to make any effort themselves to try to change shit.
I am not a gun owner.
I have never fired a gun in my life. I have terrible hand-eye coordination. I know from just playing video games with guns and carnival “shoot the target with BBs” things how bad my aim is.
Also, I’m a coward and I know I could never kill anyone.
I would be of no benefit of you in the glorious revolution with a gun in my hands. You would be more likely to be shot by me accidentally.
This is really important knowledge to know about yourself. I wish more people were this self aware.
But a war requires a lot more than just soldiers. Even if we end up in a hot shooting Civil War 2 there are still many things you and other nonviolent folks could do for your fellows to keep them safe. Safe shelter and food mean even more than guns and bullets in a conflict like that.
I hope with every bit of my heart that we don’t have to go there. But if we do, you are not useless. Soldiers may fight a war, but logistics wins one. And in this hypothetical situation a lot of us are going to be very charged up with hot tempers and someone with a cooler head and an aversion to violence will be important to keep things from falling to chaos.
Don’t sell yourself short, Squid. A coward with a good head on them is a good person to have on your side in a fight. A coward knows how to prevent that fight that might not have been otherwise necessary.
I’ve always said this but got chased out of the room (downvoted to hell), peaceful protest is a bunch of bullshit and won’t do shit. It never will. It’s always just ignored. Rioting and violence IS the only option when protesting peacefully is ignored. I mean look at the George Floyd protests and how they actually made change. Look at the French and their protests…etc. Peaceful protesting is quite literally a bunch of people kidding themselves.
People love to use examples like MLK and Gandhi as the poster children for peaceful protest achieving results, and years ago I’d have naively agreed.
But the reality of it is that they could not have succeeded without the threat of violence from more militant alternatives, such as Malcolm X/The Black Panthers or the Ghadar revolutionaries/Babbar Akali Sikhs.
It’s the carrot-and-stick metaphor. The powers that be will ignore any nonviolent attempts for reform until a violent movement makes the nonviolent alternative more appealing.
Capitalism has long asserted that there are checks in place to protect people. Consumer protection laws, industry regulations, collective bargaining, and voting with your wallet are some of the myths that capitalism says are supposed to stop bad businesses from hurting people. But when we see these systems failing en masse, and the powers that be refuse to do anything about it, what recourse is left?
Both are necessary. The first creates public support. The second “creates government support”
The peaceful protest has a purpose. It is the purpose of due diligence. It is to show an escalation. A point at which other avenues were tried and ignored leaving one with no choice but to try others that are more militant. You try all the avenues. And leave the last resort as a last resort. But historically we know that more often than not real change happens when there is either the threat of violence or the actuality of violence.
People as a whole don’t seem to be invested until it impacts them. It’s hard to impact people enough with peaceful protest to change their minds. That’s why blocking highways or major thoroughfares were threatened with violence. Because the point of protest is twofold. It is to educate. But more importantly it is to inconvenience people. Because without the inconvenience, they do not get invested.
People don’t understand that more than protecting people, social policies such as housing, welfare, and medical aid programs protect the capitalist system itself.
social policies such as housing, welfare, and medical aid programs protect the capitalist system itself.
It was not always like this but yes over as 40 years the money has been looted and used against the working class.
It took wage slaves all this time but I think it is finally registering:
How is everybody working so hard, we are working more and we are more productive but nobody but few have any more money
The money is being extracted via complex legal, social and propaganda mechanisms and we are letting it happen by being obedient dogs fighting rich man’s fake news stories.
If you take a look at europe, there is plenty of countries who score way better on these issues, and the underlying system is still capitalism. It might not be perfect but if you include a social aspect and regulate in the interest of the population I believe it is the best system we have.
You live in a country that couldn’t elect Bernie as a president. There’s no peaceful protest happening. And yet you claim violence is the only option.
In reality, half of your country simply disagrees with you. Start your violence, get a civil war, and maybe you’ll finally settle things somewhere somehow.
But don’t bullshit about effectiveness of peaceful protest.
Trump won a majority vote in the most recent election. Peacefully, your country chose corpos over moderate middle (there’s no left in your politics). Their peaceful protest works flawlessly. You’re just not on the winning side of the protest so you call for violence. You will lose this fight too.
I understand why people are upset but its a sad reality, that you just don’t have the masses on your side. I think your point is the crux to all of this. If a majority doesn’t get behind your conviction then violence will not solve your problem.
Organized labor can also take some non violent action like general strikes. The important thing is the organization part, once you’re organized you’ve got power whether it’s violent or not.
A smaller less organized population can definitely use violence effectively, but it still takes critical mass to affect permanent change.
Join or create community groups and labour unions
I mean look at the George Floyd protests and how they actually made change
Did they really, though?
That looks like something that could have been written on here or reddit a week ago and would have been met with at least modest approval in regards to the oligarchy.
Dude, read the bhagavad gita. It’s all about inner peace during violence. A soldier not wanting to fight his kin on a battlefield. When you recognize that sometimes the cost of peace is enslavement you can take extreme action without any attachment to the outcome and remain in peace in your heart. I used to abhorrent violence still do, but I will act without attaching and face rip any monkey that is hoarding and hurting my fellows. MFRA… monkey face rip association… even Buddha has stories stating no karma is incurred for some situations of violence. You might be stuck in good vs evil dichtomous thinking. There is no good and evil in nature just nature. We make the definitions and than we suffer them. Cast off your definitions and cultured personality and see the real that exist in many many sahdes.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about where I’m coming from here, so let me clarify a bit why I think it’s dumb: the OP essay inherits the flaws of the Unabomber Manifesto it is signal boosting. It’s hand waving rhetoric and rationalization, right wing extremist flavored. Its only argument that violence will be useful is to bake in an assumption that of course it will, criticize other, independent options, frame the debate as a moral one about whether saving the world justifies violence, and make that argument with name calling.
I recognize that many people respect this type of argument, but they are wrong, it’s bad and stupid.
The one time I resorted to violence, it 100% solved my problem. I slapped my bully in class so hard people’s ears rang. We ended up becoming friends later on lol.
I had a guy trying to bully me a long time ago, i got fed up with him pretty quickly.
I turned around, grabbed him by the throat and pushed him up against the wall after which i punched him.
Never bothered me again, his and my own parents both agreed: “he had it coming”.
Now that i’m more mature, i actually feel bad for him because even his own parents didn’t try to defend him. Seeing how he behaved, this was definitely part of the cause.
He needed his parents to be there for him, but they just gave up on him from the start.
Oh good lord. He kept the gun and the fake ID?
I guess MS in Computer Science doesn’t mean you’re smart.
I spend my working life surrounded by PhDs, have done so for ~28 years now, and let me assure you: education and intelligence are orthogonal.
I’m guessing he kept it all intentionally. He had the manifesto on him, probably expecting “accidental” suicide by cop in hopes that his message would continue and not be painted over by the media. Yeah, he could have ditched the gun, but again, perhaps he didn’t want there to be any shadow of a doubt that he is guilty. This was an intentional sacrifice in hopes of making a change.
Yeah, I realized about 30 seconds after I wrote that… “he wanted to keep the gun and the ID as proof that he was the guy”.
He escaped clean, and then let himself get caught so he could make his case in court.
Let’s see if he plays the next hand: plead ‘not guilty’, refuse all plea agreements, and demand a jury trial.
To be fair if you’re never caught that’s probably the smartest thing to do.
Someone discovering a gun is 100% gonna call the police and bam they have a good clue.
I can walk 1/2 a mile in any direction and find a body of water or deep woods where it would never be found. Also, I’d field strip it and chunk the parts in different places.
Do you think he had access to those places without looking suspicious?
He was on the run in a town he has no connection too.