You do know it isn’t mandatory to let it happen, right?
Did anyone tell the DNC? Because they’re sure as hell ACTING like it is…
Seriously, we do not have to abandon our right to revolution
A couple weeks late now. For a popular revolt facing an overwhelming power imbalance, you need to rely on anyone in government being squeamish about massacring civilians.
The new government would rather kill a thousand innocent people than concede the God-Emperor ever being wrong about anything, and the new Senate minority would rather let them than violate procedural norms.
Americans are lazy bastards, and nothing makes them lazier than the cold. For as much as I admire Luigi, he will have thrown his life away for nothing. If he’d been a little bit sooner, or a lot bit later, maybe he could be a martyr. As is, he’ll be a footnote.
What you would need is several copycat killers, with some getting away, during the summer when Americans are comfortable protesting. Even then, American protests have recently been toothless, and haven’t made any effect on politics ever since Trump took office in 2016.
Revolutions are actually more like a powderkeg. Once a significant proportion of the population become apathetic and angry, all it takes is a spark to ignite it. This has repeated many times throughout history. Most recently in Syria, where a decade of civil war deadlock completely evaporated in a few months.
An excerpt from “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45”, an interview with a German after WWII on why they didn’t rise up:
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
Why do you think anyone that’s already part of the system would be involved at all?
It has to be us, the people, not some charismatic, or good liar that’s stuck in the concept of making the system work. It has to come from people that are tired of the fact that the system does work, just not for us
I mean the guy with 5oo$B is probably the one calling the shots and less to do with branding. His branding is now being a Nazi. So again. Probably more there to exert control. Unifying people doesn’t take people. It takes math. Like unix, Linux, block chain, etc.
Honestly a ‘folding’ esque blockchain democracy sounds kinda nice. We all use our computers to connect to each other anyways. Why not use it all to govern ourselves?
When you strip away the identity politics, and the people that voted based on platform, he swayed people to his side.
Was/is he a Roosevelt, a Churchill, a Hitler or Stalin? No, absolutely not. But pretending that he didn’t use his voice and appearance, along with calculated speech (by writers, but that’s secondary) to convince people to vote for him his, well, dumb.
Pretending that every election in the era of television and even radio before it wasn’t influenced by a candidate’s ability to sway people into trusting them is equally dumb. There’s room for argument that pre-radio, the ability of a candidate to sway votes by charisma was lower, it was still in place. It was just more labor intensive, which (imo) means that the barrier to entry for charismatics was higher. Biden wouldn’t have won against someone like Jefferson, but he might have had a chance against someone like Grant.
That’s what a charismatic is. They use their bodies and voices to shift thinking. If they have the backing of others in their party, it’s easier because they don’t have to rely only on their own skill at thinking and speaking. But go back and watch old debates. Not just Biden, all of them you can find. There’s patterns of speech, gestures, and there’s patterns of them across time, in every party.
Mind you, you aren’t going to see every candidate because some of them aren’t really allowed access to the public via the dominance of the duopoly here in the US. Even the bigger alternative parties don’t get the media coverage for whatever charismatic tricks they use to reach enough people to break through identity politics.
The ones that are picked to be candidates have either swayed minds in the parties’ respective power blocs, or have been chosen because they’re willing to play the role for those blocs, but they aren’t getting the pick if they can’t at least mimic the tricks a natural charismatic uses.
Even Walter Mondale, one of the lamest candidates ever, used the same tricks. Kerry tried. Dole tried (and did well to an extent). Gore tried, and partially succeeded.
And even Mondale, who was most definitely not a natural charismatic, did okay at faking it.
Biden had the advantage of over a century of people learning how to manipulate the media, and the populace, combined with an absolute batshit opponent that made even the non-identity voters turn out.
Democrats aren’t as good at rabble rousing, nor are they good at being willing to not pander to their base, so they miss opportunities.
But, yeah, Biden has charisma. He always has. It isn’t Obama levels of charisma, that guy is a master of it. Obama made you believe “yes we can”, even when you knew it was bullshit. He took the right messaging, the right advice and used his presence to drive it like a spike into anyone wavering at all.
Don’t buy into that whole “sleepy Joe” bullshit. He got old, he dropped the ball, but he has the ability to charm the fuck out of people. He’s just better at it in small groups than big ones. Little mistakes in timing that don’t read well to edge cases in camera, that he can avoid when he has feedback.
You do know it isn’t mandatory to let it happen, right?
Seriously, we do not have to abandon our right to revolution
Did anyone tell the DNC? Because they’re sure as hell ACTING like it is…
A couple weeks late now. For a popular revolt facing an overwhelming power imbalance, you need to rely on anyone in government being squeamish about massacring civilians.
The new government would rather kill a thousand innocent people than concede the God-Emperor ever being wrong about anything, and the new Senate minority would rather let them than violate procedural norms.
Yeaaa about that.
If we cant get people to the polls.
How do we get people to the streets?
While I agree it looks like apathy has set in, maybe Luigi can be seen as a catalyst for change through action.
Godspeed my USian neighbours.
Won’t happen.
Americans are lazy bastards, and nothing makes them lazier than the cold. For as much as I admire Luigi, he will have thrown his life away for nothing. If he’d been a little bit sooner, or a lot bit later, maybe he could be a martyr. As is, he’ll be a footnote.
What you would need is several copycat killers, with some getting away, during the summer when Americans are comfortable protesting. Even then, American protests have recently been toothless, and haven’t made any effect on politics ever since Trump took office in 2016.
Revolutions are actually more like a powderkeg. Once a significant proportion of the population become apathetic and angry, all it takes is a spark to ignite it. This has repeated many times throughout history. Most recently in Syria, where a decade of civil war deadlock completely evaporated in a few months.
What we need is a relatively small number people like this https://youtube.com/watch?v=V74AxCqOTvg
Inspiration doesn’t expire, it breeds like hope. History happens slowly and through a culmination of events. A catalyst is the enabler of the future.
An excerpt from “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45”, an interview with a German after WWII on why they didn’t rise up:
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
Wait until the price of eggs and gas goes up
Nothing will happen, people are willing to tolerate much worse things
That is indeed the problem.
Truth be told, it ain’t happening, but I get so sick of people shrugging it off and pretending that we don’t have a choice. We do
It’s just that the majority would rather watch the system get tighter and tighter because they think the noose isn’t going to be around their necks.
americans abandoned that a long time ago.
And who will lead this revolution? Biden? Kamala?
Go on. Who is the leader? Do we just gotta all rally behind Jill Stein now?
Why do you think anyone that’s already part of the system would be involved at all?
It has to be us, the people, not some charismatic, or good liar that’s stuck in the concept of making the system work. It has to come from people that are tired of the fact that the system does work, just not for us
Cool.
Give me a name. And stop stalling.
Are you dense?
No. I’m just aware of the need for a charismatic leader.
Civil rights had Martin Luther King. Among other leaders. The idea of doing this without leadership is the fundamental flaw.
I think we should be beyond any one human running everything honestly.
What we have here is Elon Musk helping out on Trump’s branding.
Even Team Trump, as fascist as they are, are being run by entire teams of teams. The spokespeople are just that, speakers.
A leader doesn’t make the decisions. The leader just unifies the people.
I mean the guy with 5oo$B is probably the one calling the shots and less to do with branding. His branding is now being a Nazi. So again. Probably more there to exert control. Unifying people doesn’t take people. It takes math. Like unix, Linux, block chain, etc.
Honestly a ‘folding’ esque blockchain democracy sounds kinda nice. We all use our computers to connect to each other anyways. Why not use it all to govern ourselves?
Horse shit. Charismatic leaders are what got us into our current mess
Biden was a Charismatic leader?
Enough to get elected.
When you strip away the identity politics, and the people that voted based on platform, he swayed people to his side.
Was/is he a Roosevelt, a Churchill, a Hitler or Stalin? No, absolutely not. But pretending that he didn’t use his voice and appearance, along with calculated speech (by writers, but that’s secondary) to convince people to vote for him his, well, dumb.
Pretending that every election in the era of television and even radio before it wasn’t influenced by a candidate’s ability to sway people into trusting them is equally dumb. There’s room for argument that pre-radio, the ability of a candidate to sway votes by charisma was lower, it was still in place. It was just more labor intensive, which (imo) means that the barrier to entry for charismatics was higher. Biden wouldn’t have won against someone like Jefferson, but he might have had a chance against someone like Grant.
That’s what a charismatic is. They use their bodies and voices to shift thinking. If they have the backing of others in their party, it’s easier because they don’t have to rely only on their own skill at thinking and speaking. But go back and watch old debates. Not just Biden, all of them you can find. There’s patterns of speech, gestures, and there’s patterns of them across time, in every party.
Mind you, you aren’t going to see every candidate because some of them aren’t really allowed access to the public via the dominance of the duopoly here in the US. Even the bigger alternative parties don’t get the media coverage for whatever charismatic tricks they use to reach enough people to break through identity politics.
The ones that are picked to be candidates have either swayed minds in the parties’ respective power blocs, or have been chosen because they’re willing to play the role for those blocs, but they aren’t getting the pick if they can’t at least mimic the tricks a natural charismatic uses.
Even Walter Mondale, one of the lamest candidates ever, used the same tricks. Kerry tried. Dole tried (and did well to an extent). Gore tried, and partially succeeded.
And even Mondale, who was most definitely not a natural charismatic, did okay at faking it.
Biden had the advantage of over a century of people learning how to manipulate the media, and the populace, combined with an absolute batshit opponent that made even the non-identity voters turn out.
Democrats aren’t as good at rabble rousing, nor are they good at being willing to not pander to their base, so they miss opportunities.
But, yeah, Biden has charisma. He always has. It isn’t Obama levels of charisma, that guy is a master of it. Obama made you believe “yes we can”, even when you knew it was bullshit. He took the right messaging, the right advice and used his presence to drive it like a spike into anyone wavering at all.
Don’t buy into that whole “sleepy Joe” bullshit. He got old, he dropped the ball, but he has the ability to charm the fuck out of people. He’s just better at it in small groups than big ones. Little mistakes in timing that don’t read well to edge cases in camera, that he can avoid when he has feedback.
The way American politics are going, it’ll probably be lead by Jack Black.
If there is a leader, any leader at all, who’d try to lead the progressive cause? And one that people would really behind?
That’d be a good first start. Even celebrities like Jack Black.
Shit. I’d march with him.
Jack Black actively chose to call out his fellow band mates who made a mild joke about the assassination attempt that hit Trump’s ear.
He’s not going to be leading any revolutions.