alt Hacker News> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law.
I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
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What confuses me is that no revolution is required. All we had to do to avoid this was to vote. Voting would still (probably) work.
Right? The French know how to riot.
I can only hope what people will decide make trouble about is also what I consider necessary. If we could all agreed what was necessary to make trouble about there wouldn't be nearly as much to be making trouble over. It's a very double edged sword which does not necessarily do a very good job at bringing any more clarity of what the moral path was to the country.
The other day in Kansas City some lady set fire to a warehouse that was being sought for purchase by ICE. They are on video and quite nonchalant.
Mass unemployment would/will be the catalyst to mass uprising. All of the fuel is in place (ICE, Epstein, rising costs of everything, unaffordable housing, general lack of hope and faith in the government, etc.) High unemployment numbers will be the spark that sets it all ablaze.
On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter.
But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
Who is the arbiter of "necessarily trouble"? You? Only people that politically agree with you?
> What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level.
They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.
> I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times.
To put things in perspective, the whole humankind, as in 99.99% of population, is utterly underreacting.
I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.
General strike! Close the ports, close the airports, steal dozers and park them on railroad tracks, teachers on the streets in front of their schools to protect their students, blockade the grocery distribution centers, so that the shelves go bare, just stop everything, everywhere.
When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.
It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. The Founders were just being giant assholes (j/k). While the French Revolution just a few decades later was more status quo. A lot of starvation and poverty just pushed the population over the edge.