Not sure what the point is here exactly. Every single country that has ever had a revolution had to deal with these things.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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The point is that if you convince yourself there's no chance of succeeding, then maybe you won't feel so guilty about not even trying.
Yes let's downplay the US military like it's just any other. No biggie
the military is what the ghandi trap is for. one doesn't defeat them in combat, we be brutalized by them publicly in a way that radicalizes enough of the remaining population that they have to kill everyone in order to prevent the revolution.
so in order for it to work you have to lay the groundwork beforehand teaching people how to have empathy for the victims of systematic violence. in which your enemy isn't the military but propogandists.
I remember some guy from history saying something along the lines of "turn the other cheek", if only I could remember who that was and what happened to them and if they achieved any sort of meaningful impact on society.
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yes, that's why most revolutions result in dictators.
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And before all, who is willing to intentionally miss (perhaps forever) the remaining episodes of their favorite show to make that all happen?
Yeah. We can't even get people to agree to stop using social media networks that spread misinformation and fund the worst elements in society. You can't even SUGGEST it to them without being met with angry, ignorant, defensive nonsense. If we can't even manage that, how are we going to convince them to risk everything on revolution? I think we've Brave New World'd too hard - the old rules do not apply.
I don't know what the answer is. But the problem is clear.
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Kurzeghast(sp) has a great little video that ends with essentially "there is literally nothing stopping us from having a better healthy post scarcity society but ourselves. There is no reason for it except for the mindset that perpetuates that we can't"
There are also lots and lots of guns wielded by lots of misguided poor people being paid by very rich people who have nearly infinite resources at their disposal.
I'm not saying the conclusion is wrong - but it's not easy either.
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Not to mention, "how is someone supposed to organize any of this without getting disappeared by the FBI or CIA."
Easy. Get disappeared by ICE instead.
Most of the people here live paycheck to paycheck and can't afford a $500 emergency.
So the risk of even just getting arrested, and held in custody for a week, would be enough to ruin one's life.
That puts a damper on protesting, until you or your family are directly impacted. It also inhibits willingness to strike.
And it also explains why so many protesters are of retirement age -- they don't have a job to lose if they miss work unexpectedly for a few days.
In a lot of ways, we were already conquered.
Ultimately the same for all other authoritarian states with a "docile" population. Fragile living conditions threaten their livelyhoods, preventing many from joining the fight.
Until those fragile living conditions are threatened. Then people will think "I'm fucked if I do nothing and might not be fucked if I do something. So I will do something."
Forces of capital have been trying to find the level just above the tipping point for many decades.
What do you think they want all your data for? Yes, it's to find out what you like to buy, but more importantly the concept is to figure out what levels of discomfort, disappointment or despair you can take before you stop buying the product.
From new phones to life-saving medication for your spouse to how many monthly fees your bank can get away with charging you. They aren't coming up with prices from nowhere, the money doesn't represent labor and parts, it represents an adjusted level where enough people will reach before they become a problem.
We were conquered by comfort. We had enough money to throw at those willing to produce things for vast sums of wealth, that we threw vast sums of wealth at them to make us comfortable.
Not secure. Not safe. Not healthy.
Just comfortable. Nice, predictable, reliable routines that give just enough satisfaction to make you feel like you're not in immediate danger, and for our survivalist brains, that's enough.
Even our discomfort is comfort. Working 13 hours a day moving other people's furniture sucks, but you can still scroll your phone, you can still get sugary snacks and a bottle of alcohol at the end of the day. You will still undoubtedly read some story that will make you feel special for working hard, a message that you're a "real" person and a "true citizen" and that makes you comfortable with your hard days and self-medication to get through the week.
To say nothing of the vast, vast number of people who are completely tuned out from conscious thought and just shuffle from one easy reward to another. Scroll your forums, check your likes, eat your burger and soda, yell at someone on a forum because they don't like a thing you like. Watch the advertisement for the new thing that successful people own... you can afford one of those things, right? Maybe save up a little longer, and you can get one!
We live in margins of debt and safety, we let culture shape us, we have long since given up shaping it. There's an app to do that for you.
I disagree that 'comfort' was a cause. That line of thinking comes from the same puritanical austerity narrative that has been used to tell the working class that our circumstances are due to poor character rather than because we were talked out of demanding more.
It's victim-blamey, but like all victim-blaming narratives it has the virtue of restoring a sense of control, a sense of "this is the thing that I can decide to do that would have prevented this."
...which isn't to say that I don't think we can't identify things that could have stopped this. But I don't think a vague assertion that people here are more distracted or 'comfortable' than elsewhere helps. Also - a lot of people are not comfortable. But they may deal with that by at least enjoying the distractions or not staring into the sun of things they don't think they can change.
Ultimately, we ended up here through corrupt systems. The Trumpers were right to want to 'drain the swamp', they are just so blinded by antimosity that they fell for a grifter because he promised to hurt people.
All the pillars of democracy have been under attack since Reagan - high quality journalism and education to maintain an informed voter base, a voter base with enough time to research issues, and political campaign laws to keep government working in the public's interest.
Occupy Wall Street tried to sound the alarm, but journalism was already too corrupt and the movement was successfully sold to the public as 'annoying college kids demanding free things'.
So now we have a significant chunk of the voter base that doesn't know what habeas corpus is, or anything about how our checks and balances are supposed to look, and thinks what makes this country "a free country" is that we blow shit up with fireworks on July 4th - and doesn't see why authoritarianism would be so bad.
And the rest of us who are looking on aghast are honestly afraid of our police, of Trumpers openly talking about lynching us (and yes - they have more guns than us. Most liberals still refuse to consider becoming armed), and of losing everything and dying in a prison cell run by a for-profit corp.
This is a stage-4 cancer diagnosis on a social scale, and people are still figuring out if we want chemo or to try to ride this out as long as we can.
On top of that, while conservative social media spaces are full of people threatening violence, all of the platforms are coming down hard on any space that discusses anything more provocative than holding a sign in a nonn-threatening manner in a way that abides any police order given.
There is no place to organize, and no one is proposing or organizing any serious strategy. Seriously -- I've gone to local meetings, and all any activist org or politician will say is "organize with your neighbors (organize what?) and try to do mutual aid".
That is not a meaningful response to an organization like the Heritage Foundation.
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In many successful revolutions, an army was a part of uprising. Serving in the army does not make you any less of a voter.
To get that kind of momentum going against a literal police state would be difficult to say the least. Such a movement would also likely be smothered in it's crib by the surveillance state we built ostensibly to keep us safe from the terrorist boogeyman that America created.
Even if the revolutionaries win, there's no guarantee that the government that comes as a result would be better in any way. Great warriors rarely make great rulers.
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My biggest fear is what emerges after.
No, no, don't you know, this time it'll be different. Every time a government was violently overthrown by the local population what came after was either dictatorship or warlordism. But this time it'll be different! Trust me, bro!
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Violent revolutions almost always result in bad governments for exactly this reason, i.e. it's only fringe idealists that get it together enough to lead one, and such people are usually terrible at doing actual grown-up governing.
It's why it's so infuriating to see right-wingers claim that basic social safety nets and tackling inequality are Communism, because it's like, if you want Communism then pushing half the population towards that level of desperation is exactly how you end up with it.
We are in the middle of a revolution, just not one of, for, or by the people.
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"How would they deal with the army?" Probaby even better then other folks in shitty technicals like Afghanistan and Vietnam did to be honest. They aren't going to nuke American rebels because then they'd win a big radioactive pile of shit. Think they'd shoot missiles in NYC? Fat fucking chance. Even tanks rolling down Main street is gonna set off alarms.
The soldiers, firing into the crowds, brought death to tiananmen square. Survivors were simply run down. The tanks never fired a shell, because they didn't need to. In the decades since then, nothing has emerged to shift that power dynamic in the favor of the people.
We're not worried about missiles, stealth aircraft, armor penetrating rounds, their stupid microwave cannons, drone strikes or whatever other sci-fi bullshit looks good on television. We're worried about armored vehicles rolling down mainstreet while there are thousands of people there, and the crowd crush that results. We're worried about one zealous national guardsman with an M2 firing blindly into a march as it crosses a bridge. We're worried about any leaders that emerge being quietly disappeared overnight, about our families being singled out by a teen at a fusion center that's watching Joe Rogan on their phone, or about the simple fact that the military could just turn off critical infrastructure and our cities would grind to a halt. We have no way to stop that.
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And the majority of people are libs and conservatives that think ”capitalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the best we got.”
I'm not sure the answer to this question but I'll be ready with my de-ICE-ing agent.
Americans don't know how to cooperate, they're raised with a "me first" mentality. They can't fathom the thought of laying down their lives for their countrymen, so unless you propose to them a revolution where every one of them gets treated as the main character and everybody else as the supporting cast, they won't lift a finger.
Also "the fellow countryman" being racist and fully supporting of the whole process doesn't exactly help with motivation.
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Forget blackjack, we're just gonna let the Hookers run this one. They will always do a better job than those fascists.
Every single hooker I've ever met had more of a moral compass than the US far right, so I'm with you there.
If the US collapses before I die. I can die happy.
This is an evil country. It makes war on the world. It threatens the world via control of the reserve currency. To say nothing of the abuses it visits on its own citizens.
Total collapse. Balkanization. Don't care how. No expectation of surviving the fall. But as long as it falls I can die happy knowing that life on this planet has a brighter future than it did with the US at the till.
They should just disunite and become 51 independent states. Then they don't have to project their internal differences onto other countries any more.
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Listen, at least tear it down for the rest of the world, what you do after that is up to you, but for the love of god just stop the existence of the usa
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Before you can throw a revolution you have to build a revolutionary society. Without that it's nothing but a coup.
I'm sure there were people in Rome that saw the fire, looked around and realized they were surrounded by self destructive fools.
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The other thing to consider, and maybe this is already addressed, is that there's a stunningly large proportion of the population that is not only okay with this, they want it. And it's not a situation where those people who approve or simply don't care are segregated out by regions, they're literally living next doors and up stairs. They're cousins and sisters and fathers and bosses and coworkers and so on. This is not some super easy "why doesn't the larger of the two simply eat the other?" kind of situation, and no matter how hard anybody wants to try and reduce it down to that, sorry, that's just now how things work.
So more in line with Nazi Germany than confederate 1860s USA
To be fair it's not a "somehow". Nearly every democracy on Earth is more functional than the USA.
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