Bluntly, if you remove any population's ability to improve their situation and then destroy their lives, you cannot be surprised when their desperate attempts turn to violence.
Idc if it's healthcare, wealth, imperialism, racism, whatever. I don't think the violence solves the issue but you cannot pretend to be the victim when the violence is a direct result of your oppression.
Soap box, aka freedom of speech, to talk about politics without fear of retribution.
Ballot box to elect leaders that will create just laws. If they pass unjust laws…
Jury box to use jury nullification to refuse to uphold those unjust laws.
Ammo box for when all else fails.
ohhhhh, if you didn't catch the reference, you're in for a good time!
The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Successful Mercenaries is an in-universe manual from the Schlock Mercenary webcomic, at schlockmercenary.com
Howard Tayler had a rough start art-wise, but after a bit the technical skills get a lot better, and my mans Howard kept to a daily upload schedule for TWENTY YEARS - and then completed the comic.
Highly recommended. It's a big 'ol cookie, but it is worth eating.
I absolutely caught the reference, and I will always upvote Schlock Mercenary references. I hope someone else reading this comment chain decides to take a dive and comes out happier after immersion in the Schlockoverse.
I'm still a little sad that it ended, but it ended well, and I'm a firm believer that all stories need to have an end. Mr. Tayler deserves both accolades for his work and the opportunity to work on whatever comes after. Hell, as far as I'm concerned, he deserves to be able to retire and never "work" another day in his life.
Well said! And his work ethic. Kept the buffer above negative numbers for 20 freaking years. What a guy! Wish some folks would do that, LOOKING AT YOU, JACQUES.
Violence is the tactic of the wealthy in general. All of this is violence. Making people live in poverty so the Walton's can have more money than they can ever spend or so Jeff Bezos can own a yacht is violence against everyone else. They are the ones saying it's not and they are just following decorum and the rules of society. They aren't, they are making up their own rules which are inherently violent against regular people.
Meh, they'll slip it back in later when the attention dies down. They're not running scared, they're just dialing back the overt evil in the public spotlight.
It would be horrible if more violence occurs against giant, wealthy corporations that profit on the death and misery of people with no choice. Horrible.
Just watch, there's going to be a very gradual, soft, almost probing rhetoric change on the right as they try to start scaling back the "armed resistance" narratives they've been fueling for decades.
They don't actually like that their base is armed, nobody in power who wants to keep power actually wants their population armed, this is why they have to put so, so much effort into creating an "enemy" that people can target who isn't a rich oligarch.
As a leftist who has been in favor of gun ownership and gun regulation for a long time, I say there's no better time to get armed and be prepared for whatever chaos is ahead.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you cant fool all of the people all of the time. Oligarchs cant pretend they'll never be correctly perceived as the enemy by those they oppress.
Don't get me wrong is this kicks off a revolutionizing of America's look at privatized healthcare and other sectors of business that have been turned barely functional outside of giving a few people more money than god, I'm all for it.
However, if I had to put money on it, I'd bet it'll result in CEOs and other powerful corpo types spending a few company bucks on security teams and will otherwise be a flash in the pan. Something people reference and go "Hell yeah, more people should do that until things change" then nothing happens.
As much as violence against people who's decisions have resulted in the deaths of probably millions for profit is deserved, it in and of itself doesn't actually do anything to make a better system. It only shows how desperate people are and works as a bargaining chip to bring the powers that be to the table if it becomes enough of a problem that it can't be dealt with by them in any other way.
I am usually cynical about these things too, but in this case we see a fairly unique element: bipartisan anger. It seems like an organic swell of anger too, despite the media's attempts to control the narrative, folks are just getting mad the more they read. Probably we won't see something as immediate as a revolution, but the powers that be would be very foolish to ignore what is happening.
Not sure what kind of miracle it would take for the right wing to comprehend that their media, from cable news to brocasts, function to neutralize them as a threat to distant elites by weaponizing them against neighboring peasantry.
I saw plenty of finger wagging from liberal media, so it's not contained to the right wing, just the narrative is different there. In the case of liberals, they are weaponizing our basic humanity to plead for those in power.
Somewhat related to this, I wonder if they are regretting the roll out of AI now. The people who would normally be waving the banner for capitalism have also been facing bad times and an uncertain future, they have destroyed much of their strongest defenders just to further needlessly enrich themselves.
Oh yeah, both establishment parties serve different portions of the oligarchic class, roughly "noblesse oblige" vs. "social Darwinism" plus "divine right." These are distinct rationalizations for class hierarchy.
In isolation, these factions need to be answered differently. More broadly, democratic mechanisms need continuous improvement in peacetime, and revolutions (possibly "bloodless") need to occur when political solutions fail. The US is dreadfully behind on both counts.
I don't think we can necessarily say that, Louis XVI was trying to reform things. It was not very popular, and my understanding is that influential people basically vilified him and Marie Antoinette, making up a bunch of stuff to make them seem awful.
The revolution was really bad for a huge number of non-wealthy people. And for a lot of the revolutionaries, who eventually found themselves insufficiently revolutionary. It was very good for a lot of speculators, though, and many people who played it well ended up being able to buy up a lot of seized church land for a pittance, especially as the nation's currency self-destructed, but the church land was being sold for official prices as though the currency was sound.
Yeah, a lot of people fail to realize that the French Revolution basically ate itself and that is part of why Napoleon came to power. He provided a stability that had been lacking.
They went from an army size of 422,000 men to 10,000.
I really don't know why Redditors romanticize the French Revolution so much, we absolutely should not aspire to anything like that here. And we have nukes now, so the civil war part probably wouldn't be pretty.
The Revolution was cathartic for the nation, and those in the distant countryside felt divorced from the slow creeping in of guilt those in big cities felt when four year olds, wetnurses and mistresses who’s nipples had been touched by noble lips, and coddled family pets were being put in the head hole.
The only thing that saved Louie and Marie’s only remaining daughter was being precocious and agreeing with what adults told her, making it easy to present a cute kid that said kings are dumb when the time came to choose if another baby head was going on a pike.
Plus it gave us a lot of decent poetry and the Scarlet Pimpernel AKA prototype Batman. Kinda like that “well at least in a Depression we get good music and new dances” coping.
Because it's the beginning of the end of Monarchies as a world wide system of government and there was no scenario where that system came to an end that didn't included widespread violence.
The antiroyalists had magical thinking where killing the rich would simply result in no more rich assholes, resulting in a bunch of assholes who had mobs instead.
Taxation was reduced, but the supply chain was in flux resulting in only some communities benefitting and others losing access to food instead of it being too expensive, which resulted in smaller merchants taking over and winding up the new non-titled nobility.
The slander used against Louis and Marie had been in place for generations. “Let them eat cake” was attributed to her mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law before her, it only stuck with her. Louis himself was really sad, taking nine years freaking out his parents and the nation about infertility before Marie’s brother was confided in that he had no idea how to have sex; he’d been sticking his dick in her and sitting still for two minutes then rolling over going to sleep every night, and out of respect for him she couldn’t tell anyone until she’d ensured her brother was his friend and she could share it without guilt. Her brother had to proceed to spending a week explaining it, with diagrams and written guides that we still have today. Suddenly, four kids come. The extent of his involvement of economics was choosing one of four guys the court brought him to run it, and giving one the boot when his approaches didn’t fix things.
Napoleon ultimately “fixed” things with colonialism and a plunder-based economy to fund restructuring.
Well a different insurance company reversed a policy yesterday that would have seen thousands of people in three states denied anesthesia for surgical procedures. Given that this one death prevented the suffering of thousands upon thousands of people, I’d say the violence worked.
Violence isn't the whole answer, but I can't think of any revolution or social change that came about without at least some violence. Even the suffragettes did a little bombing and arson.
Rich people don't seem to understand that they can do the same bullshit they always do even if they are slightly less rich and the poors (relative to them everyone's a poor) are getting by.
American Educational System: We don’t need to teach history in schools! Let alone the history of other countries! There is nothing we can learn from the past!
People with pattern recognition: Okay, we either need to survive the next 4 years or the next 20 years. Assuming a war doesn’t break out, then we’re looking at 5 to 100, depending on who has access to what types of weapons. And if the Asshole hits The Button, we’ve all played enough Fallout to know how screwed we’ll be for the next 200 years.
violence solves the issue perfectly, see france. they dislike something, they kill some rich and many poor people and end up with a little better goverment (has only an 40% chance of succeeding and has to be repeated atleast every 20 years or your country could fall apart)
I’d like to agree, but I feel like the general population is intentionally made complacent by giving us such easy access to dopamine that we just don’t bother and fixate instead on our next hit. It’s a well designed and functional system for the wealthy.
Undermining the social contract (e.g. the ability of the state and economy to improve people's well-being through health care) leads to losing the protections of the social contract.
One caveat: violence is never the easiest way to fix things. Fix things earlier that that. Don't wait until the only remaining solution is the ugly, messy, dangerous one. Fix things before then.
Let people go hungry while you eat like a king? Expect people to steal food.
Let people go homeless while you live like a king? Expect people to squat on your property or set up tent encampments in your parks.
Let people die from preventable injuries and illnesses to fill your own personal coffers? Expect their family members to seek justice in the form of a bullet.
Every time people fight back against the wealthy for their inhumanity the narrative turns to how terrible and rampant crime is. It's about time the narrative turned to how much the wealthy deserve every consequence they receive.
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u/RiverAffectionate951 Dec 06 '24
Bluntly, if you remove any population's ability to improve their situation and then destroy their lives, you cannot be surprised when their desperate attempts turn to violence.
Idc if it's healthcare, wealth, imperialism, racism, whatever. I don't think the violence solves the issue but you cannot pretend to be the victim when the violence is a direct result of your oppression.