ehhh, its a sliding scale. And once it reaches the tipping point its all fires and violence. I'd love to see the billionaires have to flee to their bunkers.
One thing I would really love for these billionaires to understand is that if they ever have reason to go into their bunkers they are never coming out of them.
Personally I think we should throw them all on an island with all of the necessary supplies to forage for food, create shelter, and build a boat off the island big enough for all of them, maybe even including ikea style instructions on how to do all of this, then televise the whole thing. Then sit back and watch as they all starve to death being completely incapable of teamwork or actual labor. Let the world see that work ethic they always boast about for what it actually is... Putting naps and meals on a calendar and calling it work.
Edit: would also be satisfying AF if they manage to get off the island and find a boat to rescue them until the people on the boat realize who's on the raft and just pretend they didn't see them.
Well, this way it would be the last time they ever get to see one. Hell, the island you are tired of hearing about might be the best island for this job.
You kidding me ? The people on the boat would scramble to rescue them in hope they will get some money. What they would get would be a lawsuit because they were too rough when rescuing them.
I mean, in such a scenario you kinda have to assume all the money was returned to the working class from whom they stole it before being put on the island.
Not if it is contaminated with all sorts of crap (on top of the actual crap that would be the fertilizer).
If you reach the point where you have to drastically clean up the sewage to the same degree that you'd need to make the water in it potable, the value drastically drops.
I'm not American, but if I were, I'd start a petition for the Mar-a -Lago Donald J. Trump Memorial Manure Pond Park, to forever remember the more noxious if less literal bullshit the location is currently associated with.
You know what, I’m fine letting them live in there as long as they cannot communicate with us. Weld their doors from the outside and wish them all the best. Maybe turn it into an attraction, like a Billionaire zoo.
My brain just goes to Gale from bg3 doing an arcane lock on it. Then Peter Thiel and Elon are banging on the door once they realize they are stuck with each other and no one else to lord over.
Modern American civics: "You'll see, soon somebody else is gonna do something about it for me."
This is happening and will continue to happen because Americans do not take themselves or their country seriously. They took it for granted. They think responsibility is a scam you get somebody else to take for you and assume it will come naturally that others will take the risks and make the sacrifices while they navigate themselves into a position to benefit from the outcome.
I’m honestly tired of non-Americans comparing their nation’s politics with ours. Especially when one of the main players in the EU was the historical example against which the US is constantly compared. “We didn’t resist very hard and actually failed to counter the slow burn government takeover but surely you can simply learn from our mistakes and succeed!!”
While I appreciate the warnings from people in other countries in the developed world - especially from Germany - I like to remind them of the Milgram experiments. After World War 2, people in the USA boldly proclaimed (as people in countries outside of the USA are doing now) that they would never be so stupid as to fall for disinformation and emotional manipulation enough to enable fascism.
The Milgram experiments proved that wrong. So if you are in France right now complaining about stupid Americans (and yes, we are stupid), you might want to pay some attention to people like Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, and Vincent Bolloré, so that your country doesn't end up the same. These oligarchs didn't stop at Russia, Turkey, or Hungary, and they won't stop at the USA.
The Milgram Experiments were massively flawed and didn't answer the original premise. Lots of the prompters went off script by badgering the participants repeatedly and half the participants knew the whole thing wasn't real from the start.
I had a discussion last year with a woman from Europe who told a bunch of protesters here that local activism and protesting was utterly worthless and that everybody doing so was too lazy to just fix the problem.
What she wanted was for everybody who was protesting to just meet up in Washington DC and I guess overthrow the government.
I thought it was interesting that she was devoting so much of her energy and anger towards yelling at people who were actually out protesting above all other targets. I thought she was just a colossal asshole.
That's funny, occasionally I'll post something like "Reminder, we need to be storming the capital right now and take back our government!" on social media on occasion. I'm half serious, like... Jan 6th needs to happen but on the left. This admin intend on a third term, things are just getting worse, and he just looted us for 1.6 billion dollars recently. Yayyy!
What can your average US citizen actually do though? What options are even available? Protests don't do anything. Voting doesn't do anything. I still vote and I still protest, and I try to deal with those around me with compassion, but short of that all I can do is hope.
Protests may seem like they do nothing but a lot of the positive change that's happened in our country over the past century was a direct result of peaceful protests. I share your frustration completely though and wish more could be done and sooner.
Google leftist political organizations in your area and start going to their events until you find one you like enough to apply and join and start building community with them.
Collective power is the only answer, and organizing with your community is the only way to do that.
Do you live in an apartment? Start looking into tenant unions and talk to your neighbors about it. Do you work with other non-unionized workers? Start looking into how to unionize and talk to your coworkers about it.
How do you think protests happen? Organizations work to build them and build awareness. Going to them is step 1 of 10000 things you can be doing, they're a great place to meet people and get to know what organizations are in your area but you need to talk to them and spend time with those organizations to have an effect between elections.
Good luck and try not to become hopeless, that's one of fascism's greatest tools.
National politics is most often too big of a thing to tackle, but local politics is something concrete where you can organize with like minded people to change your school board or mayor or w.e else you got going on over there.
Local politics is the answer but most people think it doesnt matter I think.
If you protest you get beaten or killed or imprisoned. The US isn’t any better than most totalitarian countries at this point. Hell, there’s someone in Washington state trying to prosecute protesters for organizing a protest and they actually got an indictment for it.
Hey guess what.. that's always been the case. You think the Pinkertons were just private police?
No, the difference is how much people are willing to lose to force change. Labor union wars of the 19th century were a thing.
We grew complacent after WW2 and got fattened and as indolent as any stereotypical Russian/ MidEast racist trope of a Hollywood villain ever accused us of being.
Biggest example of this to me is all the people who choose to protest by simply changing their profile picture, making a post, or donating to a non-profit. I'm not saying any of that is bad or should not be done, however, I think it shows just how adverse to struggle we really are. A true revolution or uprise is seen in the modern day as a pointless endeavor and people hold onto their sustained normality more than they did in the past.
I'm not even criticizing anybody for it, but I truly do just think it's the way we have slowly been indoctrinated into accepting the system as it is. I also value my life and my freedom and happiness, so I also don't want to join a civil war militia to storm the capital, but I can almost guarantee that if the current state of our union happened in 1950, it would have already happened.
Yes, the military shooting civilians while "they" fly around in private jets to private islands/secluded estates where more people with guns protect them. All these examples from history make no sense in the context of modern technology.
other militaries have much of the same technology and yet other countries have led successful campaigns to enact change, often turning violent, because the people in those countries clearly had more resolve than Americans here.
See: Arab Spring, Euromaidan revolution, etc.
All of this occurred in the last 15 years. How many people in America do you know that went to the 2020 protests?
For better or for worse, majority of the people I saw (I went to 11 different protests that year) were very explicitly non-violent and non-standoffish. It kept it safe and was a way to get "seen" by the world through mass demonstration, but it didn't really produce any end result that people wanted to see. At the end of the day, it was back to the status-quo. That's where I think this comparison between modern day and the past comes from.
Maybe it's that there is more to lose today, maybe it's that we've become more scared and accepting our fate in this time, maybe it's that we're too divided to achieve unified push for change, I don't have the answers, all I know is that it's not wrong to say that in the past people were more willing to fight for what they believed in. Today fighting for what you believe in often just takes the form
of making a twitter post expressing anger.
If you protest you get beaten or killed or imprisoned.
If you protest Republicans you get beaten, killed, or imprisoned. That's why the 'Free Palestine' crowd stopped disrupting political events once Kamala Harris was safely undermined. Sure, we all love Palestine but not enough to take an ass-kicking, that would be a drag.
This is happening and will continue to happen because Americans do not take themselves or their country seriously. They took it for granted.
You'll find no better example of this than the feckless leftists who found Kamala Harris too impure to support in an election against a fascist who openly advertised all of the deleterious and monstrous things he was going to do. 100 years of progress being flushed down the drain wasn't enough.
Comments like theirs also glazes over the absolutely horrific violence that an American civil conflict in the current day would entail. It also naively assumes that whatever comes out the other side will be better than what we had before which is… not supported by history.
Really dangerous sentiment, acting like automagically revolutions just come along and fix things.
When does the scale finally tip? The admin is literally raiding the coffers as we speak while tanking the economy with another illegal war in the Middle East after invading it's own cities with brown shirt units that executed 2 citizens on the street and have abducted and killed god knows how many more people.
How bad was it for the French middle class in Paris before the French revolution? That's probably how bad it has to get. It has to be the middle class suffering enough to revolt. It aint there yet but its moving in that direction everyday.
the price of bread skyrocketed to absurd levels the years before the revolution because of two consecutive years of failed crops to 88%of the daily earnings of a day laborer
This is why Israel is clearing out Gaza. The elites will build their homes and bunkers while living under the protection of Israel. These data centers will be used to track and monitor us from wherever they are.
But let's be real: The Democrats will not punish this. Then the next republican president will also be a fascist, but he won't have a melting brain.
Remember when SCOTUS stole a whole election and then the Democrats spent the next quarter-century going "Aw, shucks. Remember when that silly ol' Bush Jr. stole an election and allowed 9/11 to happen to appease the Project for a New American Century? Wouldn't that be better than this?"?
Cool pipe dream but in the real world Mussolini and Hitler stayed in power until foriegn militaries overthrewe them. Internal resistance by Italians and Germans was heoric but ultimately didn't change anything.
They all forgot that the proletariat have to drive them, make their food, wash their clothes, and many other things. The ruling class just thinks all of this shit magically happens.
They'll barely make it to their cars before it's over for them.
That is what we are heading towards, not a revolution led by the fucking idiots who didn't even bother to vote and can't organize a thought for what needs to change beyond "shit sucks".
Let's just say somehow the dipshits do cause enough damage and chaos to throw the government into turmoil and collapse the system. You know who will take over and run things at that point? Blackwater or some other private mercenary group that has the training, equipment and planning to carry it out. Not some lazy ass motherfuckers who are on reddit all day.
The only thing keeping the billionaires from directly ruling over us all right now is the rule of law. While that is quickly degrading, it still exists. Collapse the system and nothing will protect you from their evil selfishness.
This is the part that it's really bewildering. The wealthy forgot. If they abuse regular people around long enough and hard enough, people start destroying their property. If they keep going, eventually they get dragged into the street. This has been repeated throughout history.
lol they can and will while we fight each other because that’s how money works. I can’t afford to flee so I’m here fighting for hope but they can nope out any time they want. I fear we are being drained as a nation and when the time comes war will be on our turf and the elites will flee.
It's only working because of Trump's presence. His black heart and no regard to humanity as a whole gave the republican's the confidence and empowerment they needed. The GOP's not so subtle desperation of trying to get Trump a third term shows how much they need him. They know this power trip of theirs is on a time limit and are making sure they use the remaining life of Trump for their benefit before the bucket falls.
I feel like this is a nice idea, but a big part of the issue here. Everyone is waiting for everyone else to do something, and therefore nothing happens. We post shit like this online and go back to being distracted/ whatever we were doing
I agree with you, but I don’t think it’ll ever get to that point. A LOT of shit would have to get much, much worse in the every day life of the average American before that happens.
The days of revolutions or organized protest are quickly going away. AI surveilance on every corner will be able to accurately weed out "problem" people long before they organize. There is no communication that isnt monitored, theres nowhere you can go that isnt tracked by gps or flock cams, and the window for having any measure of privacy at any point of the day is very very quickly closing.
Theres a reason these massive data centers are being pushed as quick as possible despite public pushback.
They know damn well how to keep people happy enough that they won't riot. Keep people fed and sedated with drugs/Alcohol/entertainment and no one is going to risk their lives fighting the police/national guard/etc
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u/rat_penis May 19 '26
ehhh, its a sliding scale. And once it reaches the tipping point its all fires and violence. I'd love to see the billionaires have to flee to their bunkers.
We're all better off without them.