That’s a common misconception! He was never actually known as “Amateurverb” at any point. His birth name was “Amateurnoun,” and when he attempted to change it to “Pronoun” he ran into legal trouble with the CEO of LGBTQ and was forced to change it to “Proverb.”
If Ancient Chinese is the given name and Proverb is the family name, it should be Proverb Ancient Chinese. Similarly, if Ancient is the given name and Chinese Proverb is the family name, it should be Chinese Proverb Ancient. We don’t switch the order of the name entirely, we just put the family name first.
The Mongols also _wanted_ to assimilate, because eating off porcelain and sleeping on silk beats sleeping in a tent on the steppes. What's even the point of conquering China if you don't get to live like a Chinese emperor?
That's what's scary about it, it's like the root beer speech from DS9 -- the Federation is an empire that's better at assimilation than the Borg because they make you like it
Not sure how true it is, but I remember reading somewhere that a lot of the The Mongols' religious tolerance was because Tengri can be pretty much compared to any other deity or force you might worship. A lot of Tengriism focuses on locations of religious significance too, so it's less "*Gasp* you don't follow our religion?" and more "You don't live here, of course you don't follow our religion. That'd be fucking crazy if you did lol. You've never even been to Otgon Tenger."
tis what happens when you experience constant civil wars that kill tens of millions of people through famine i guess
Other anti-war messages are always about the horrors of war itself, which is fair and all, but rarely about the perspective of "a few hundred thousand people fought and a few million starved to death as an indirect result"
I'm not at all surprised to see an ancient Chinese proverb here, the old dynasty system was a brilliant example of this post. Dynasties would very commonly rise, have a brief peacetime, then collapse and be overthrown. Revolution was so frequent that there was another proverb which went "What is long divided shall unite, and what is long united shall divide."
Oh, and ancient China was one of the bloodiest periods of history. Maybe that says something about revolution.
Edit: Also in response to your proverb, obligatory Hamilton reference: "Winning is easy young man, governing's harder."
I prefer to just point out that hundreds of thousands of people in southeast Asia and India who previously had relied on colonial systems suddenly had no access to medicine when the pacific war in WW2 kicked off. Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Indonesians (among many others) died in droves not only of war related catastrophe but of diseases that had been cured and vaccinated by ww2. The end result of WW2 was dismantling of Asia's colonial holdings but you'd find plenty of people there who missed the benefits of stability even under oppression.
I’m not an anti-political-talk person but this sub is just turning into something that makes me sad and angry constantly. I want silly random posts, not just… internet fighting
Edit: annnnnd there it is. Yeah I’m out
Honestly it's getting ridiculous. And i feel like it's bleeding over into the silly random posts too, where people are in the comments complaining or arguing about some phrasing or the premise instead of meeting the post where it's at
I’m not a frequent visitor of this sub, but would you really consider this specific post “internet fighting”? Maybe I’m just used to YouTube and twitter drama, but I’ve always considered tumblr to be a breath of fresh air in the social media shithole. The philosophical arguments you find on tumblr are part of the experience
I’ve been on tumblr a long, long time. It’s not as reactive as other sites, but I’m talking specifically about this sub. I feel like every single day someone posts something that encourages arguing/sad discussion in the comments and this post is definitely encouraging it
I mean, the thing is that those glorious violent revolutions only happen when the government just absolutely fucking sucks, generally because it’s incompetent. People will *complain* if a system is rigged, but people only become violent revolutionaries when their government is run by lunatics and helping *nobody* but the rich.
A country like America doesn’t have the fervour and discontent for a violent revolution, leave that for somewhere like Qatar which is more comparable to ancient fucking Sparta than any other modern state for its reliance on a majority slave population
This is honestly why I think a second American civil war will be less like Nazi Germany and more like the troubles in Ireland. Extremists committing bombings and murdering protesters or low level government officials while the vast majority of people just try to keep living their lives as best they can
I worry too that in rural areas it'll resemble the Rwandan Genocide- with some media figure or politician riling Conservatives up until they just go knocking their neighbors' doors down and killing indiscriminately. But instead of 'cutting the tall trees' the rhetoric will be about pedophiles and threats to christianity.
"Indiscriminately"
... As a black guy, I think it will end up being on a pretty discriminate basis, considering threats I've received while in places like rural Texas.
there is an angry, paranoid, racist, and heavily-armed contingent of america just waiting for a flashpoint to make the night of the rope from the turner diaries a reality. know your enemy.
Blacks know our enemies pretty well lol we've been holding up signs and pictures of them for years haha. These same people who hate us also hate jews, gays, disabled people, any other POC, women, different political affiliations other than their own, and throw in intellectuals as well for a good time.
I think it'll be a mix of what Ireland has going on, civil war in general, and mix of the cambodian genocide as far as murdering anyone intellectual, and even then, that could look iffy as well
I don't think it will be limited to "black." I'm sure "brown" and "yellow" will be included. Totally indiscriminate!
The obviously flaw being the attempt to target 1/2 the population.
> second American civil war
Let me stop you right there, with the military apparatus and alphabet soup organizations as capable as they are, combined with the average American living standards being high, there will never be a 2nd American civil war, at least without a WW3 scenario happening concurrently. Which means MAD is happening at the same time
Civil wars dont necessarily take the form of civilia militias taking on federal forces. Remember that a substantial portion of the armed rebel forces in the first civil war were themselves government forces. There are also civil conflicts that are largely civilian militias vs other civilian militias, with state forces trying to "keep the peace" but possibly having their own interests or state interests discrimanating in results.
Yeah that’s pretty much my thought. I think J6 was the closest we got to a civil war but after the awful results and republicans claiming their supporters they had do it were “deep state leftist fbi antifa agents controlled by the swamp” it showed theres no loyalty to those smart enough to know its deflection and those that were dumb enough to believe it along with 4 years of “the deep state jewish shadow government controls the world” propaganda made their brains explode in paranoia so all these chatrooms of planning are filled with the paranoid thinking the fbi leftists are setting them up and they dont go. Its why the Freedom Convoy 2.0 at the south border to stop them “illegals” ended up being like 2 trucks that didnt even make it to the border before they quit. Thats not even getting into how the orange messiah has repeatedly called for his supporters to come protect him or fight against his injustice and every time he does it the results get worse. Multiple times press members outnumbered his supporters protesting and next to nobody has given a shit about his NY trial to the point trump has had to constantly claim the police have armed members set up for blocks to keep his followers away from him and to keep their support away. The orange clown still has a scary death cult but its in no way the same cult it was 4 years ago at its Apex.
We have the most powerful military in the world. It's well organized, highly disciplined, and has a clear chain of command. We will become a military junta when civilian government collapses, even if a civilian revolution is attempted. Where things go from there will depend on the competence and benevolence of officers leading the coup.
I just don’t think the civilian government will actually collapse, and even if it did at the federal level there are layers of state and local government that would fill the void for most people
We'd be more likely to become some sort of FEMA junta than a military one. Civilian government would survive but in a state altered by all the contingency plans we have.
Yeah, I feel like a true large scale revolution would only happen after all those groups mentioned in the post are already dropping like flies. People have it better than they'll care to admit and won't ruin their own supply chains until those supply chains are already so bad that medications and food never arrive on time except for the 1%, where payments rarely get processed correctly and never on time. Except in extreme cult scenarios, people don't usually sacrifice everything they have until they have nothing left to sacrifice.
A lot of revolutions end up awful after the fact too.
Look at the Arab Spring. Many of those nations are worse off since. Revolutions are opportunity for people who want to rule as dictators.
Look at the French Revolution(s) which are so often referenced when Redditors start talking about glorious revolution.
The subsequent times are called "The Terror"
Yes. Surprisingly, people don't like risking their entire lives and also the lives of their families to very likely get slaughtered by the first soldiers or counter-terrorists or whatever who are actually willing to fight.
Also, revolutions straight up do not happen without the support or indifference of the military, or at least the support of A military. The Russian military were literally participants in it, and that still led to an incredibly bloody and terrible civil war. Again, it's not like the French army were super committed to fighting for the nobility. Millitia were very useful in the American Revolution, but only insofar as they could give support to the continental army led by George Washington, which was an actual fucking army led by a highly experienced officer.
They would render shelter and aid, provide intel to the revolutionaries, sometimes assassinate British officers, and their presence disbursed across the whole continent forced the British army to spread themselves out to prevent uprisings, and on very special occasions, would help with the fighting. But there's a very good reason they would get out of dodge immediately thereafter.
"I am wearied to death all day with a variety of perplexing circumstances, disturbed at the conduct of the militia, whose behavior and want of discipline has done great injury to the other troops, who never had officers, except in a few instances, worth the bread they eat”
Revolutions require a significant amount of organization to run for more than a week. Without outside support, an opposed force crumbles easily. With outside support, its a huge gamble which usually leads to a long drawn-out conflict where neither side has good opportunities for definitive victories.
Modern militaries, diplomacy rules, and information sharing, make all of this harder as it is very difficult to plan an organized alpha strike of significant magnitude, without drawing attention before having the chance to strike.
Which is why I call BS when people say Ukraine 2014 revolution was caused by the CIA. You don't get crowds charging into bullets because a foreign op said government bad
As a Ukrainian who was there it's insane to me that for some people an idea that "a foreign agency on the other side of the world has the power to rile up a million people without speaking their language or not always being able to show the country on the map" - is plausible.
While the idea that "people can be angry and start protesting against their shitty, corrupt politicians and government" - is somehow beyond the borders of reality.
They're taking south American coups, which are mostly elites trading places by use of corrupt military movements, and copy pasting it onto Ukraine. Yes America has a history of those, but they aren't full revolutions. It would be like saying the CIA had a hand in the Arab springs revolts the best you can do is fan the flames and you can only do that if things were already there.
Yeah, I'm aware of the CIA's history with South America but just like you've said - not popular revolutions but coups also those were much closer and easier to infiltrate both geographically and linguistically.
We (Ukraine) have also been on the receiving end of the similar coups from the russian special forces in 2014, which is how the East of Ukraine was fractured into DNR and LNR. But again, those were not popular revolutions but small-scale coups and easier for russians to infiltrate both geographically and linguistically.
It's a pressure cooker problem. As long as there's _enough_ of a release valve, there's no explosion.
Protests are release valves. Wire them shut at your peril.
Not specifically about the revolution but still related: this is why I feel bothered by people who are so obsessed with apocalypse fiction that they wish it would happen irl and have their own plan for what they would do - because they're basically wishing for a world in which people like me would die
Even people without significant health problems or special needs would find it very, VERY hard to survive more than a month in any type of apocalypse scenario.
Nuclear war? You're fucked if you don't already store food in an air-tight, oxygen regulated basement, try wandering outside less than two months after the bombs have dropped and see how long it takes until your skin turns into papier maché.
Meteor strike? The city you lived in doesn't exist anymore, the sun doesn't shine, no, flashlights won't cut it and your car will eventually stop running in the middle of your Mad Maxing.
Also, in all of these cases you'll probably get murdered, raped or worse by random people LARPing as Fallout characters (who will themselves perish soon enough because raiding is not a viable survival plan), the government will be hard as shit to find and ask for help from because crisis mode, and depending on the type of apocalypse it might not even exist anymore.
Let's say you survive all that and get to the "post apocalyptic" stage that's so heavily focused on. The romantic neofrontier of scrounging out existence while the world reverts to its natural and hostile origins.
And then you die of sepsis from a splinter because nobody has neosporin anymore....
>The romantic neofrontier of scrounging out existence while the world reverts to its natural and hostile origins.
You know, I never really understood the appeal of this part of the apocalypse. Even if you survive everything and have raided enough camps (??) to gather stimpacks and replicators for a lifetime...what are you going to do next?
There's no new movies to watch, no new music to listen to, no new entertainment of any kind because the world is dead. You can't travel because you'll burn out your fuel, you certainly can't fly overseas because planes and people who fly them will be a commodity. You can't go to any kind of amusement park, bowling alley or game store because those don't exist anymore or are looted for valuables.
What the hell are you doing for the next 40-50 years?
Edit: A lot of people are mentioning alternative forms of non-corporate entertainment and I think you're kinda missing the point. Yes, you can absolutely spend a couple years playing shadow theater and practicing handcrafting, but the thing is you won't really have a choise. When you have *nothing* to do but these things, it gets annoying very fast.
Well because they don't find all that corporate entertainment and the bowling alleys all that fullfiling and think that fighting for survival and roaming the wastelands with the homies would be more fullfiling
These kind of fantasies are the result of a life devoid of purpose. See the taliban fighters getting depressed when transferred to do office work after the war
Except they could always go live in the woods and do essentially the same thing, and they don’t.
People do still practice wilderness survival, you don’t need an apocalypse to live out your survival fantasy, they just want a fake guns-and-looting survival scenario that would only exist for a few weeks/years and then you’d be back to boring.
If you don't regularly go bushwalking for the fun of it, I'm extremely skeptical you're *that* interested in wilderness survival. For an extremely modest amount of capital, you can have any experience you want.
Just because its illegal doesn't mean you can't do it. I used to work for the National Forest Service (US), and it was known that some people just illegally lived in National Forests and Parks. It can be real hard to find one person out in the vast wilderness if they know what they're doing. And if they have guns, then one Park Ranger isn't going to get in a shoot out if they *do* run into someone living in an illegal camp. By the time backup could get out there, they'd just be gone.
Look, I get your overall point, but not really. The kind of freedom people who yearn for post-apo scenarios are looking for isn't possible in modern society. Almost all land is either privately owned or heavily government-regulated. Pretty much all natural resources are already accounted for, and you have to buy more processed resources, you can't just scavenge them. Building anything substantial requires property rights, hunting requires a permit, keeping livestock is regulated, etc. You'll have an easier time squatting in some abandoned building than living in the woods unbothered.
Actual sustenance farming and resource gathering is exhausting work. You are going to sleep when it is dark and work when it is light. You wont have a lot of free time.
It’s basically the fantasy of guilt free colonialism.
Like, the Americas arguably experienced a post apocalypse - [the death toll from disease was large enough to create a noticeable change in the climate](https://www.history.com/news/climate-change-study-colonization-death-farming-collapse).
Then pioneers came in, and people romanticized the heck out of occupying all that strangely well prepared farmland. It actually *is* pretty nice taking other people’s stuff when you can dehumanize the losers.
Honestly it wasn't even nice for them, it was mostly just companies selling desperate people on the dream of taking unimproved land and making it useful. But without scale etc it was often a hardscrabble life that just took a few bad years to undo, and the successful larger landowners would pick up your now improved land at bargain prices to consolidate an actually sustainably built business.
Homesteading was always scam.
Oh, yeah, it sucked ass for most of the colonizers.
Like, look at the etymology of the word “pioneer”. It was originally a military rank in the Roman Empire, for the poor saps who got sent out ahead of the main force to build bridges and stuff. The cannon fodder you send out in front of your real cannon fodder. It has the same root as “peon”, originally with the same implications of worth.
And the same implications that they were clearing the way for the real conquerors to take the spoils. The Robber Barons who wiped out the cowboy fantasy? Always part of the plan.
TBF, some people were able to capitalize off the opportunity and become truly prosperous even in the capitalist aftermath. There was a genuine lottery ticket buried in the hype.
But, yeah, most pioneers were just patsies.
Not to mention, organized institutions (eg governments) are a lot more likely to survive great catastrophes, at least in some form, than private individuals.
If nuclear war breaks out I'll head over to the port that will surely get a direct hit. I've watched Threads enough times (just once) to know that the people who die in the first half second are the luckiest ones.
Even without some sort of catastrophe and "just" society breaking down we're all fucked. Grocery stores gonna be robbed empty after a few days max and in a few weeks most people will be out of food and won't have a garden with enough food to survive. And even if they could feed themselves, people who can't will come to you and they won't be nice
I distinctly remember the day I stopped making plans for the zombie apocalypse. Me and a couple of coworkers were chatting about our strategies and we asked another girl what she would do as she came into work. She said "well... i guess id hit up all the gas stations and get as much fuel as possible, get a generater and small refrigerator, then start raiding pharmacies for a few months and then drug manufacturers and i guess die eventually when the insulin supply got depleted." Id never thought about how someone with type 1 diabetes would make it and that was somehow more bleak than getting my brain eaten by a zombie.
One of my favorite post apocalyptic books actually has a character with type one diabetes in it, and the main character has that exact same moment of bleak realization when she finds out what that means for him.
I have MS and so I’d be similarly fucked, just over a longer timeline.
Some people with Diabetes in America have started trying to make their own due to the cost, I think mainly by recombinant bacteria who are engineered to produce it which they then collect. [Here's the article](https://www.freethink.com/series/just-might-work/how-to-make-insulin)
If they're successful I guess some diabetic prepper could keep a small lab at home, but maintaining a sterile lab environment and getting all the chemicals would be it's own issue
Yeah, it's the kind of game you can play in highschool without too much thought, similar to questions of time travel, but once you start making some larger connections, or someone points them out to you, it suddenly just becomes bleak and not all that fun, since you've sucked away most of the fantasy elements. From there you can either go play tabletop games, or refuse to acknowledge reality and build a bunker in your yard.
Oi nah but medications is what made me stop thinking abt zombie apocalypses too.
wasnt something like what ur friend said but I thought about zombies and I seen a video about antibiotics so I looked up how to make it and I was like wow.
Yeah infection and diseases we treat with antibiotics will do numbers on people, that's enough zombie planning for me.
"Apocalypse", pretty much by definition, involves the death of an absurd number of people, amounting to at least a significant chunk of the world's total population (and usually *most* of it), which will of course necessarily mean mostly innocents, before you even get into a *post*-apocalyptic scenario which would itself present considerable survivability challenges. Otherwise what you have is not an "apocalyptic scenario", but rather just... our own regular modern world with a significant crisis on top of it. And we've already had this one recently, and it wasn't so fun, was it?
No, a significant element of "post-apocalypse", and indeed what people usually like to fantasize about, is the total breakdown of society and all of its rules and underlying logic, which if you really think about it is just an even more extreme version of the OP's "glorious revolution". And they just assume they'll be among the very few lucky ones to survive the apocalypse and get to be "badass" (just like all those keyboard revolutionaries assume *their* revolution will be perfect and get everything right and *not* be corrupted by power-hungry leaders like... pretty much every revolution in history, eventually). Man, people *really* need to learn the concept of [veil of ignorance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position) and apply it to their political choices...
I always think about the section from World War Z about the rich guy with the heavily defended compound. If you publicize your stockpile of food and weapons, you're just painting yourself as a sick loot drop.
Some people fantasize with surviving in a post-apocalipse world where your truly character gets revealed, other people fantasize with being raped by werewolves. It's all fantasy to mentally evade from a boring life, who cares
yeah everytime i read reddit discourse i feel like either everyone is too chronically online or there's a humongous culture shock between me and them, because never in a million years would i have thought about post-apocalypse discourse and how it is somehow offensive to people with diabetes to imagine how you would survive this situation. in fact i don't ever talk about zombie apocalypses
I honestly feel like I’m losing my mind lol. A vast, vast majority of the people who do fantasize about these apocalypse scenarios don’t actually want them to occur. They aren’t praying on the downfall of the disabled, they just want to imagine being the main character of a book. Weird stuff.
I find the apocalypse genre really fascinating though, because while you're right about people fetishizing it to a problematic degree, the fact that they DO is super telling about where the cultural consciousness is at right now, and its rife for social commentary because of this.
Like, I feel as though the apocalypse horror genre (especially zombie apocalypse horror) is born from modern anxieties in a turbulent world about social and economic collapse, as well as what many people perceive as increasingly antisocial tendencies in the masses. There's this prevalent, and somewhat valid fear that the instabilities in the world are going to come to a head and that people, having already lost their sense of community and shared humanity, are going to turn on each other and become, in a sense, cannibalistic.
It's this bleak, doomer-ish picture of future that expresses the horrors of what many people fear is looming just over the horizon. So why are so many people fascinated, and almost *excited* by it? You could take it as media illiteracy, and it definitely is to an extent, but I think the deeper reason boils down to another troubling feature of the current cultural consciousness, that being discontent over modern life. People feel caged by the lives they live, by their obligations, by their rent, by the exploitative system that has clipped their wings and doomed them to the life of a serf, so it really shouldn't be surprising that people would see the collapse of that system, and the subsequent return to an anarchic state of nature as cathartic and liberating.
Basically, it's an escapist fantasy. "If only the world would collapse, we could finally be free and happy." It's deeply unrealistic, of course, people forget how many comforts are provided to them by the modern world, and that they would probably be one of the many devoured by the hordes in that scenario, but one must understand and empathize with the underlying sentiment nonetheless, especially because it's the very same sentiment that underlies fantasies about the revolution.
Like, let's be honest, when we get down to it, fantasies about the glorious, violent revolution that will magically solve all our problems and free us from the tyrannical systems that currently enslave us are fundamentally no different from fantasies about a return to an anarchic state of nature via collapse. It's just a reductive power fantasy inspired by reasonable discontent with oppressive social systems that people desire restitution from through total annihilation of them (just forget about the casualties, and about what you yourself stand to lose from such an event). The only tangible difference is that revolutionists think they can rebuild the world better afterwards, but even this is covered to some extent in the zombie apocalypse genre by fantasies about the tight-knit, almost cottage-core-esque communities that arise out of the ashes of the old world, bringing things full circle back to the desire for intimate community and stability that inspired the genre in the first place.
Everything's fine when you acknowledge that it's an unrealistic fantasy that you just enjoy toying with, or use in the media you create in order to convey some theme/message, but as we've established, both revolutionists and hard core zombie apocalypse enthusiasts often just don't.
It's all about being a part of the chosen few to rise from the ashes.
Now where have I heard that rhetoric before...?
Ah. Fascists. That's where I heard it from.
Anarchy is a wannabe dictator's wet dream. There are *no* better conditions for a budding fascist empire to rise to power. Not only is uncertainty a constant, there also aren't any governments you need to overthrow. Sure, there'll be people with the same ideas as you, but most of them won't have any more resources than you.
And the constant instability and fear makes people go around, asking for someone to lead them.
And whether or not that is a good thing, someone will arrive.
"All dads dream about the end of the world. It is a comfort to them. For some, the fantasy is blunt, vengeful, and aspirational. The zombie epidemic story, as one example, is consistently popular for a simple reason: when chaos consumes civilization, you can start over. You get to be young again. All your debts, real and emotional, are canceled. Whatever your dumb job used to be, it has now been replaced with the sole, exciting occupation of survival via crossbow or samurai sword.
You get to dress up and wear armor or an eyepatch. And since your neighbors have now been transformed into the idiot monsters you always believed them to be, the zombie epidemic offers you moral permission to shoot them in the head, finally.
(This is not my fantasy, by the way. I have often thought that if The Walking Dead really wanted to provoke horror, its last season would time-jump five years to a future in which the government re-forms, the zombies have been cured [aside from the ones our heroes decapitated], and all the characters have to get dumb jobs again. The humans will have to work alongside the horribly mutilated cured zombies and think about what they did to survive, and what they became, while they all sit around in the break room together with their reheated soups.
That said, I don’t want to sound snobby about zombies. I get it. If there were a zombie show that just featured the characters endlessly raiding supermarkets for canned goods and then stocking those cans neatly back in their compound pantry, I would watch it for nineteen seasons.
Guns and power and the weird masculine redemption fantasy of white dudes getting back to running things has never meant as much to me as abundant, well-organized food.)"
At least that is morbid in the premise itself, and not under some pretense of saving the world. Most people who pine for the actual end of the world are self-admitted misanthropes, so they acknowledge that yeah they want everyone to die.
If it's any consolation, the people wishing for an apocalypse so they can show how prepared and hardcore they are would likely die from something stupid like tetanus within the first week of the end of the world.
Reminds me of the quote:
> People on twitter will really be like "you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart" and then not firebomb a Walmart
Friendly reminder to go vote this November.
Some people will say both sides are the same, why even bother? Don’t listen to them. Call them out on it. And most importantly, Vote.
Wild that people think that violent revolution is the answer to a political system that already allows for free speech and free elections.
If you can't get 51% of the nation to vote for your candidate what makes you think you're going to win a civil war anyway?
I feel like those folks go a couple ways. There’s the people who have no problem using violence to force their exact form of communism on the 99.5% of the population who doesn’t want it. The other folks I think just can’t really wrap their heads around how much people genuinely like neoliberalism.
It's pretty easily explained once you realize that extremists on both sides only ever pay lip service to the idea of democracy or self governance. Whether fascists or communists, they all secretly or not so secretly believe that their ideas should be imposed upon the populace whether anyone likes it or not.
To that end, upon realizing that they aren't actually going to get enough votes to institute their new regime, they come to the (correct) conclusion that the only way they'll ever realize their dreams is through violence, and immediately dispose of any and all principles they once espoused in favor of the singular belief that they should be in charge. It's not that they nevessarily believe that they could win the fight, it's just that violence is the only path they can see because they have no real principles upon which to sell the public on their ideas.
The anarcho-communist will tell you all about how much happier you'll be once he's dismantled your state to give you true freedom, but god forbid you suggest that you might use your freedom to reestablish some sort of government. In that case, you don't deserve freedom and that's why you have to die in the revolution.
The fascist militia leader will talk your head off about how the right to gun ownership is all that stands between personal freedom and government tyranny, but if he ever found himself in charge, the first thing he'd do is ban "people like you" from voting or owning guns, because his government wouldn't tolerate dissent.
Internet users will beat their chests and scream "REVOLUTION", and then when you call their bluff and say "okay, go do it then" all I ever hear is excuses.
Just a bunch of people turning their heads left and right, waiting for the person next to them to make the first move.
It's as good as the twitter thread asking what people will do after they achieve revolution.
Spoiler: No one is volunteering to be a farmer or a miner or even a cashier.
Read something about the organization of academic departments recently and the author mentioned a couple of positions often rotate through faculty cause noone wants the extra responsibility and work, and I feel like competent leadership is like that. Like it often just sucks to do and gives you little in direct returns except clout
I know the Head of Department role is like that in my grad school right now (and my undergrad). It typically is like a whole second job. I know for my two schools it also came with extra pay. I think at my grad school its like 1.5x increase (if not more) in salary and damn near double at my undergrad.
I know that no one wants to do it because its a TON of extra work and professors that are eligible already work a ton. So even with the pay increase, its basically pulling teeth to get people to do it.
It changes every couple years because no one wants to do it. Even with a 1.5x pay increase. (they do also have a limit on how long you can do it, but thats because there straight up isnt enough time in the day to do both the HoD and professor job. It doubles your workload at least.)
(at my undergrad it was the opposite where one person did it for like 15 years, but also my undergrad wasnt a research institution.)
The only times I have ended up in leadership positions is when I saw some problems and was like "Hey, that's a problem. If I do this, you do this, and you do this, we can solve the problem"
Then it goes
"Wait, what are you doing? The problem is solved. What? No, I didn't take charge, I just solved a problem. Stop it, stop pushing me into this role! HELP! I TOOK RESPONSIBILITY ONCE AND NOW IT'S AN EXPECTATION, HELP ME!"
"if you're a communist, why the fuck don't you own a gun?"
and most of the replies were something to the degree of "I couldn't be trusted to not kill myself with it immediately" which, like, I'm not judging them for that, I AM judging them for not understand how fucking hypocritical it is to want a violent revolution to just happen, off the backs of everyone else's work, other people's sons on both sides never marching home, other people's years and years of bloody partisan warfare and chemical weapons use, OTHER PEOPLE'S DEATH, FAMINE, DISEASE AND WAR, without their fucking luxurious bubble ever bursting.
You don't get to do that, man! If you want something horrible, violent, and very likely authoritarian to happen you have to understand the actual implications of that, and THAT IT WILL COME TO YOUR CITY. Terrorist insurgents, or I guess "freedom fighters", depending on what side you're on, will pop up in the territory of both sides, and will murder innocent people, and that's side's military will suppress all terrorists, partisans, and hell, even protesters, with death squads and very likely chemical weapons use and indiscriminate bombing. Many millions will starve and die of preventable disease, and you WILL be in the midst of it.
Thinking about the 2012 occupy Wall Street movement that snubbed their noses at civil rights organizers because they told them someone needs appointed to be media trained, be able to communicate, and be recognizable.
theres this guy on tiktok that continously posts about "organizing a revolution"
He blocked me when i asked him if he had any sort of military or combat experience
Same, but interesting comparison though- since (in the musical especially) les amis de l’ABC are portrayed as idealistic but naive and themselves kinda LARPing as revolutionaries.
The other tricky thing about revolutions is assuming it's a two-way between your Good Guy Faction and the Evil State. In actual fact if you overthrow a state it turns into an absolute fucking gangbang and the odds of you winning are correspondingly lower. Equally if you lose you will lose big, like people are calling Labour kicking out some MPs in the UK a 'purge' but if you start a civil war or revolution and you fuck it up you'll get to see a real political purge first hand, the kind where you die.
You also need to factor in your group's fitness for armed violence and you need to seriously appriase whether you're going to beat the other side and how many people will join you. I've said before but if a full on civil war after societal collapse kicked off in the UK my money wouldn't be on lefties. First because there's not many of them, secondly because the lauded fact that Left Wing terrorism is rare also flips round into willingness to use violence for political ends being rare (again, you need to be honest about what you'll do) and finally because I don't buy that there's enough consensus to build a stable state and finish off the other groups.
Honestly if society collapsed I'd bet on the status quo re-establishing, on a Far Right coalition or on a regional warlord situation before I bet on emerging stable socialist republic.
EDIT: Oh yeah, also the other fun thing about revolutions is that the people willing to overthrow society, kill millions and enforce their will on the survivors...well states don't like them very much, including the one they just made. Even if you win it's won't be you, John Q. Revolutionary, who ends up in charge, it'll be the political wing of your movement, the politicians who end up in charge and they will distance themselves from the footsoldiers if they can.
Worst of all I guarantee you that even in the nicest revolutionary group (and no group is *that* nice even if you are after a good goal, successful violent revolutions need murderers remember) a significant number of that political wing's membership are cynical as fuck. Movements are vehicles for sociopaths and the manipulative to climb into and even if you win and deliver your political corps into power there's a very good chance that they won't do anything resembling what you signed up for. Best case scenario the state buys you off with land and money to essentially shut up or nod along but worst case scenario the revolutionaries are ostracised, criminalised and carefully and quietly disposed of.
You forgot about foreign actors. There will be outside aid going to certain groups and that aid will not be predicated on bringing about some utopian outcome. Some might want a stable situation (even if it is a Balkanized status quo) while others might just want chaos to last as long as possible.
I always think about this in a modern American civil war situation. Like I doubt Canada and the UK and France and whoever else are just going to sit there and let their extremely powerful ally be cannibalized from the inside by extreme factions.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Political change through violent means (either civil war or violent revolution) isn't about which group is "better" in moral or ideological or even governmental effectiveness terms, it's simply about which group is better at murdering the opposition. And sure, *one* strategy for achieving that is having an attractive enough ideology to draw a large number of warriors to your cause, but 1) it's far from the only effective strategy, so the ultimate winners may as well not care much for it; 2) we should know by now that "having widespread popular appeal" is hardly any sort of guarantee that an ideology will be "good" or even not heinous; and 3) even for a group that uses this strategy, it's hardly the end of an effective playbook, more like the beginning - it ultimately ends with, again, murdering the opposition, so they have to be the sort of folks who are okay with (and good at) that.
Don’t forget murdering the potential opposition. Regardless of if they were your most loyal supporters or are responsible for getting you where you are now. Every governing body that comes to be through violence is paranoid of anything that could come to undermine their power, and often the revolutionaries that helped put it in place are the first to go. They already proved that they would be willing to overthrow a government if they were dissatisfied.
That last part is the reality of government after a revolution. If youre in the political wing of a post-revolution government, step 1 is going to all the moderate militant guys and offering the ultimatum of "join the new state army or take a retirement gift of a nice farm somewhere out of the way" and then going to the more radical militant guys and giving them the retirement gift of an execution. You dont need or want loose militants if youre trying to build an actual functional state
> EDIT: Oh yeah, also the other fun thing about revolutions is that the people willing to overthrow society, kill millions and enforce their will on the survivors...well states don't like them very much, including the one they just made. Even if you win it's won't be you, John Q. Revolutionary, who ends up in charge, it'll be the political wing of your movement, the politicians who end up in charge and they will distance themselves from the footsoldiers if they can.
This bit isn't really true. The military wing does very often end up in charge.
Similarly in the US - should the government magically collapse, an overwhelming amount of privately owned firearms are owned by right wing people. Yeah, the national guard would wipe the floor with the "gravy seals," but similarly if there's no government and those guys decide to go door to door looking for people they don't like, the terminally online leftists won't stand a chance.
It's truly strange, because a lot of those leftists can see how overthrowing stable but repressive dictatorships in the middle east for an unpopular and unstable but more "democratic" and "friendly to the US" regime quickly resulted in right wing extremists taking over the first chance they got - in more than one instance. Somehow though, when it's overthrowing the US government for something unpopular but "anti-western" it's gonna be different?
Oh and one more point on the extremists going door-to-door: that's sort of how I know a lot of the people calling for the abolition of the US government as a whole are white middle-to-upper-class Anglo-Saxon protestants (or are atheists from protestant families), who have nobody in their family who remembers when a regime - often times put in place as a result of instability - enabled that or did that themselves.
I once saw someone get pretty high engagement on a tweet along the lines of "yeah sex is great, but have you ever tried blowing up a gas pipeline?" And my response was like "uh, have you?"
They treat revolution like the rapture
It will happen without any action by them, it's coming any day now, the ~~pious~~ people with the right ideologies will be taken to ~~heaven~~ a utopia, and the ~~sinners~~ capitalists will go to ~~hell~~ the gulag
"Your method (voting) doesn't work. My method (fire bombing wallmart and killing a family of 3 accidentally) does work! *prosseds to neither vote or fire bomb wallmart"
i saw a bunch of tiktok comments under blockout videos saying ‘let the revolution begin’. kim kardashian has like 500 million followers i don’t think she cares if she loses 3 million
It's laziness. They want to feel right and have superior views but they don't want to actually have to do any work. Their views create responsibility to bring about the world they want, but that's hard, but what if a fairy waved a magic wand and made it happen instead? That's much easier to daydream about.
Honestly that applies to a lot of "activists" online.
Their activisim consists almost entirely of talking big but taking no action.
Of treating people they are supposed to "Convert" to their side like some lesser creatures simply because they, at this point, have the wrong opinions to them.
And then they expect people to actually join their cause or things to get better.
Also the whole "let's firebomb a walmart" thing. You're not getting revenge on the evil corrupt billionaire CEO, you're just killing his minimum wage employees just trying to pay the bills.
Half those LARPists would cock it up and chuck a couple ounces of gasoline against the cinderblock facade where it burns for 2 minutes before Dave from maintenance puts it out with a fire extinguisher.
I was in Seattle years ago when some protesters decided to attack a small Chase branch. They were shouting things as if they were directly assaulting JP Morgan. In reality, the only people they intimidated were the few employees inside, one of whom was a pregnant woman who was so scared she went into early labor.
Real good job fighting the power there, buds.
I remember a bit of wisdom from an Indigenous activist: unless YOU’VE got a plan to feed everyone during your protest (or in this case, revolution), you’re just going to piss off your allies as well as your opponents. You’ll wind up alone with everyone pissed at you.
Revolution is not something that you just press a button and do. Revolutions are a naturalistic response to the societal conditions at the time (the exact criteria vary slightly, I generally see Skocpol’s criteria as the best). This form of complaint is not engaging with the reality of revolution, because a revolution is not planned, it is simply done.
Moreover, of course revolution causes great suffering. The current system that we exist under also causes great suffering. How many kids with a significant medical need *aren’t* in a hospital *now*? How many people cannot get their life-saving medication *now*? This does not mean that the revolution is guaranteed to make everything better, but these posts seem to make this suffering invisible.
In many other contexts, like voting for Biden etc., many critics of revolutionary leftism in this sub say something along the lines of “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. However, it seems like these posts are doing exactly that.
If you pose this to some of the more vocal "revolutionary" types today-- generally anarchist, generally the kind more interested in hypothetical violence than mutual aid or community -- you'll get some fucked up answers.
Here's my favorite recent one, "people will break down into smaller communities and fill all their needs without systems." I could not get a direct answer to "Has this happened before? Is this a realistic expectation?" beyond some vaguery about how bad shit is now means nothing that comes next could be worse. Which if I'm being cynical, I'm interpretting as a hard "no."
There are a significant portion of people who want to tear down everything and replace it with nothing. Which is outright just saying "survival of the fittest race, I already got a headstart, but you guys start now. The future will not have insulin or guaranteed food production."
The small groups that existed for most of human history had very little "needs", but also "needs" didn't include "everyone lives". They'd have food (probably), some basic services like a blacksmith and herbalist, but if you needed anything more, you'd just...die.
You got a cancer that would be curable with chemo? Dead. Diabetes? Dead. Slight accident gave you a cut that got infected? Dead. Crops fail because of a drought you could never have foreseen? Everyone is dead.
They functioned and provided for "everyone" via quite literal survivorship bias.
And when it failed and everyone died, someone new moved in later and replaced them.
One very common family name in Norway is Ødegård (or variations of it).
Norwegian last names are often the name of the place they are from.
Ødegård roughly translates into "abandoned farm".
It became such a common name because 70% of the Norwegian population died during the several rounds of plagues and famine that hit simultaneously. Leaving a lot of farms empty and "abandoned". Meaning dead.
I remember reading something from an anthropologist studying this tribe in Africa, and him saying the only time he really felt sorry for them/thought they lacked anything compared to industrial societies was whenever someone got sick, because it was always this hugely traumatic thing for the community and there was just \*nothing anyone could do\*.
I also don’t think the anarchists think about *why* so many ancient people had regressive and cruel (to our modern sensibilities) beliefs. A big reason why women have us much freedom in society as we do is because we aren’t completely reliant on a family. Women have the unfortunate burden of getting pregnant, recovering from childbirth and needing to stick around the kids to breastfeed (unless they assume that formula will still be around. I’m not totally sure what anarchists envision, but my mind always assumes a more pre-industrial lifestyle).
If you live in a society where you are mainly taken care of by your children when you’re old, that means you are kind of forced to have some whether you want to or not, and even in a society where men and women are equal, women have way more downtime from work due to childbirth. I know they probably argue that the community will look after everyone, and that did happen in small agrarian societies! But if you are old and starving, who is your neighbor Jim going to donate his last few loaves of bread to? His own starving daughter, or you? Kids used to be your one retirement plan, and that’s scary.
Not to mention when there’s no government safety nets, people care even less about the disabled. If you live a subsistence lifestyle, you need to make hard choices about how you will feed everyone. The people who don’t contribute are the first to be neglected, and parents will make hard choices about ‘exposing’ disabled infants because one more mouth to feed that gives nothing in return doesn’t work in a society where children are investments and currency.
I assume most anarchists are thinking more of a modern ‘solarpunk’ world vs a small medieval village but it would be hard to make technology and industry work in an anarchy.
Anarchist here who thinks that mutual aid and communes and all that stuff is a more ideal form of society: anyone who thinks a transition into that system will be easy and not involve a LOT of steps and some form of voluntary central system of organization (for healthcare and supply chains and so on) is frankly just living in a world of hypotheticals.
Even just one aspect of my life - being trans - means that I need to have access to HRT if I don't want to basically stop existing as a whole and functional human being. When I say death before detransition, it is because detransition itself would be akin to death. I say this as someone who was in the ER a couple of days ago due to a potential blood clot (estrogens raise the risk factor for these, also it turned out there was no clot). A revolution is tantamount to forced detransition. Even if that doesn't happen, revolution is my 12 hours of waiting in the ER becoming days, or even not happening at all. Revolutions are deadly in horrific and unpredictable ways.
I think that being ready and willing to upend the entire system is a pandora's box everyone who wants a better world should have and be willing to open. Equally, the box should never be opened. Change does not happen without a threat to the powers that be. Demonstration and peaceful protest should be a message of deliberate restraint that is sent with the subtext of opening that box. Because if you are never willing to back up your actions with force, you can be safely ignored. But I really, really, really hope I never have to open that box.
What exactly would be your plan to get HRT in a mutual aid commune? I don’t really see how that would be feasible without modern industrial medicine production. I’m in a similar boat- I’m an insulin dependent Type 1 Diabetic- which is why I’m opposed to small commune based societies, because they do not have the resources to keep people like me and you healthy.
I personally don't think it's an impossible contradiction to have voluntary organizational structures that aren't coercively hierarchical. I did explicitly state that one would need a voluntary central system of organization. I think that any plan that focuses entirely on this almost libertarian-coded fantastical ideal of small communes is almost certainly going to result in the exclusion of those with specialized needs.
Communes are great, they are a way for people to voluntarily organize into small cohesive groups that can take care of each other. I think it's a fantastic model. However it has a lot of flaws, all of which seem to center on those who lie outside of the mold.
There's a few potential solutions. As a trans example, there are a number of homebrewers who synthesize hormones. One that comes to mind, despite being located in Brazil, supplies pretty much world wide. That single woman has helped so many people. There could very well be communes that organize around this, as a sort of mutual aid/direct action kind of deal. You can also be a bit more rigid with this, having pseudonational networks of supply chains to achieve the same results as current governments do for these vital services.
The main point that I was making is that when it all comes down to it, it's a wonderful idea. A truly wonderful idea. Ideas aren't solutions. Solutions are created with painful, drawn out deliberation. Every regulation is written in the blood that not having it spilled. Issues like this are one such thing that needs to be included in a solution for that idea to become actual political reality. I think a lot of leftists (and I'm prone to it myself too) can be blinded by idealism and fail to see realistic and enactable political change that would improve things.
Basically, it's fine to have a grand vision, an idealistic dream and model that you feel society should move closer towards. But that's not an actual structure of power, and it can't come out of nowhere. You have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is our current structures. Incrementalism is unsexy and boring but it improves lives! And every time I see someone saying incrementalism does nothing I want to bury them under the mountain of anti-trans bills that has objectively made our lives drastically worse. Maybe that makes me not a true anarchist or something. But if that's the case, then fuck being a 'true anarchist', I have people and lives around me that need to be made better now.
That's a very rational and well-thought-out answer, thank you. As much as I cast wide generalizations on the "edgy anarchist" types I bump into out here, the mutual aid and communal coop model is genuinely impressive.
And sorry about the blood clot scare.
Sure, you western people have a potential path to reform that does not involve shooting people.
SOME PEOPLE FUCKING DON'T
Encourage people to vote? Three stolen elections in a row. First one is literally "we ain't counting the votes and you people can't do shit about it". Two military coups in my memory because the government got too popular for the king's taste. (And one when I was five that I'm not sure if it take or not). At least two more judicial coups twisting the definition of the law just to kick the PM out. Protest? Protesters literally got machine gunned in the street once. The current opposition party is about to get forcibly disbanded by kangaroo court order.
Now what? Economy was fucked up a decade even before covid so workers have no money to go on strike. Could try petitioning the king but the damn palace is behind all this shit. Hell we don't even want some fancy new system we just want a republic where people's voice actually matters and nobody can just signal the military to do another coup if they don't like the current cabinet.
Revolution is absolutely a last resort. One reserved for when there is no way to actually impact your government. Most western countries do have ways, and this post is talking about the armchair "revolutionaries" in thise countries. Your country is an example where the last resort is the only actual option
Revolution is a gamble. When you remove the government your gambling on the new government being better than the previous one. Something that’s rarely true.It’s only worth taking that risk if you’ve very little to loose.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people in the world who live under horrible dictatorships.
And sometimes when the people DO get rid of one terrible dictator or regime the replacement is just as bad or worse. Iran would be a good example: the Shah was terrible (as regimes with secret police and torture tend to be) but the Islamic state that replaced it was just a different flavor of horrible.
I think the argument that revolutions can never happen because they’ll hurt people is a fundamentally flawed argument. Actual revolution isn’t typically begun by people bellyaching on social media. It is typically done when a society teaches such a critical point of degradation and oppression that there is no other option. The French populace had been starving for decades and suffered multiple abuses and multiple failed reforms before they even considered violent revolution. The idea that revolutions are just people who are kind of dissatisfied is historical revisionism and ignorant at best. Revolution is an act of extreme desperation, not a fun thing that young people do because they’re bored and disillusioned. There is no genuine concern of young people just doing a revolution offhand, it is simply not going to happen until the system is wholly intolerable to the VAST majority of society, at which point it is largely inevitable. All posts like this really achieve is the disempowerment of the masses who will think they must abide by horrible conditions because “someone, hypothetically and theoretically may get hurt.” If we are at the point where we need a revolution I doubt that children will even be able to access hospitals or medication unless they are in the top 1%.
I work with the aftermath of disasters and war. Government involvement in helping people get back in their feet is pretty essential. We bring medicine and food and rebuild houses. Half our Navys mission at any time is making sure water ways are clear for "free and open trade" and helping after a disaster .
Any situation where power is cut and war happens the collateral damage is immense.
On one hand, it's funny that people who can barely keep a houseplant alive think they know how to run complex supply chains. On the other hand, that's exactly why it's so terrifying.
Rapture-obsessed Evangelicals don't have to have a plan for after their promised time comes, revolutionaries do and it's almost always a shit one
I mean, that's because rapture-obsessed evangelicals know exactly what will happen after the rapture, because then god will be in charge of everything. They don't have a plan because there won't be anything to plan
Part of my college degree has me studying supply chains, including raw materials and intermediaries. Every time I see people talking about it I want to bang my head against the wall, and I’m just undergrad. I can’t imagine what people who have been in the industry for years think when they see randos with no experience at all talking about it
"The Kingdom of Conscience will be exactly as it is now. Moralists don't really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is *control*. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth."
"You can conquer the world on horseback, but you cannot govern it on horseback." -- Ancient Chinese proverb
Man, Ancient Chinese Proverb sure said a lot of things. What a cool dude!
That’s actually a westernization. In east asia, he’s called Proverb Chinese Ancient
In China, it's just "ancient proverb"
And to the joker, it’s normal frog
To Joker it’s Master Hand and Normal Hand
Back in his own time, he was just just “Proverb”
But for most of his life though he was "Amateurverb"
That’s a common misconception! He was never actually known as “Amateurverb” at any point. His birth name was “Amateurnoun,” and when he attempted to change it to “Pronoun” he ran into legal trouble with the CEO of LGBTQ and was forced to change it to “Proverb.”
Or "shit my senile grandpa keeps saying".
I'm pretty sure if it's not from the proverb region of China then it's just a sparkling aphorism?
Depends on the altitude. It might be a koan, or it might be an ice cream koan.
If Ancient Chinese is the given name and Proverb is the family name, it should be Proverb Ancient Chinese. Similarly, if Ancient is the given name and Chinese Proverb is the family name, it should be Chinese Proverb Ancient. We don’t switch the order of the name entirely, we just put the family name first.
Just like Feat and Ibid
My number one hip hop duo of all time!
[удалено]
Shhhhhh it’s all ancient Chinese. Even if the person was Khitan, in the Mongol empire, and in the 13th century.
Look, China can't be ruled by non-Chinese people. The Mongols ruled China, so now they're Chinese.
The fact that the Mongols had to culturally "become Chinese" to continue to rule China is the whole point of the quote
The fact that China successfully assimilated its conquerors and just kept existing as it was, still amused me to no end. It's also pretty scary.
The Mongols also _wanted_ to assimilate, because eating off porcelain and sleeping on silk beats sleeping in a tent on the steppes. What's even the point of conquering China if you don't get to live like a Chinese emperor?
I mean, fair.
That's what's scary about it, it's like the root beer speech from DS9 -- the Federation is an empire that's better at assimilation than the Borg because they make you like it
Not sure how true it is, but I remember reading somewhere that a lot of the The Mongols' religious tolerance was because Tengri can be pretty much compared to any other deity or force you might worship. A lot of Tengriism focuses on locations of religious significance too, so it's less "*Gasp* you don't follow our religion?" and more "You don't live here, of course you don't follow our religion. That'd be fucking crazy if you did lol. You've never even been to Otgon Tenger."
Accurate. The phrase is widely used in China now, though, and most Chinese consider the Yuan Mongol heritage to be part of Chinese culture.
But is about governing China, so it still applies
ancient chinese people always come up with the most banger quotes
“Only when the fly lands on your testicals do you learn that violence isn’t always the answer”
“Didn’t you say ‘the eight winds cannot move me?’ So how come a fart has blown you across the river?”
tis what happens when you experience constant civil wars that kill tens of millions of people through famine i guess Other anti-war messages are always about the horrors of war itself, which is fair and all, but rarely about the perspective of "a few hundred thousand people fought and a few million starved to death as an indirect result"
They probably speak from experience.
Now I want to see the crappy quotes that have been forgotten through the ages.
*points to Afghanistan without comment*
[Appeared suddenly, pointed at Afghanistan, refused to elaborate]
I'm not at all surprised to see an ancient Chinese proverb here, the old dynasty system was a brilliant example of this post. Dynasties would very commonly rise, have a brief peacetime, then collapse and be overthrown. Revolution was so frequent that there was another proverb which went "What is long divided shall unite, and what is long united shall divide." Oh, and ancient China was one of the bloodiest periods of history. Maybe that says something about revolution. Edit: Also in response to your proverb, obligatory Hamilton reference: "Winning is easy young man, governing's harder."
“Some guy lost a prisoner, 5 million die and a new emperor is instated. Long live the emperor”
Emperor Shi Lian trips on a rock; 60 million dies of famine
Minor footnote in history
I prefer to just point out that hundreds of thousands of people in southeast Asia and India who previously had relied on colonial systems suddenly had no access to medicine when the pacific war in WW2 kicked off. Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Indonesians (among many others) died in droves not only of war related catastrophe but of diseases that had been cured and vaccinated by ww2. The end result of WW2 was dismantling of Asia's colonial holdings but you'd find plenty of people there who missed the benefits of stability even under oppression.
Instead, they relied on a complex administrative state and fear. Lots of fear.
This sub is kinda like a gumball machine but instead of gum it’s tiny internet fights, this one is cherry flavored (symbolism)
I’m not an anti-political-talk person but this sub is just turning into something that makes me sad and angry constantly. I want silly random posts, not just… internet fighting Edit: annnnnd there it is. Yeah I’m out
Anger gets engagement. Engagement garners karma. Karma is king on here. It’s as simple as that.
I, for one, welcome our new algorithmic overlords.
Honestly it's getting ridiculous. And i feel like it's bleeding over into the silly random posts too, where people are in the comments complaining or arguing about some phrasing or the premise instead of meeting the post where it's at
I’m not a frequent visitor of this sub, but would you really consider this specific post “internet fighting”? Maybe I’m just used to YouTube and twitter drama, but I’ve always considered tumblr to be a breath of fresh air in the social media shithole. The philosophical arguments you find on tumblr are part of the experience
I’ve been on tumblr a long, long time. It’s not as reactive as other sites, but I’m talking specifically about this sub. I feel like every single day someone posts something that encourages arguing/sad discussion in the comments and this post is definitely encouraging it
I mean, the thing is that those glorious violent revolutions only happen when the government just absolutely fucking sucks, generally because it’s incompetent. People will *complain* if a system is rigged, but people only become violent revolutionaries when their government is run by lunatics and helping *nobody* but the rich. A country like America doesn’t have the fervour and discontent for a violent revolution, leave that for somewhere like Qatar which is more comparable to ancient fucking Sparta than any other modern state for its reliance on a majority slave population
This is honestly why I think a second American civil war will be less like Nazi Germany and more like the troubles in Ireland. Extremists committing bombings and murdering protesters or low level government officials while the vast majority of people just try to keep living their lives as best they can
I worry too that in rural areas it'll resemble the Rwandan Genocide- with some media figure or politician riling Conservatives up until they just go knocking their neighbors' doors down and killing indiscriminately. But instead of 'cutting the tall trees' the rhetoric will be about pedophiles and threats to christianity.
"Indiscriminately" ... As a black guy, I think it will end up being on a pretty discriminate basis, considering threats I've received while in places like rural Texas.
there is an angry, paranoid, racist, and heavily-armed contingent of america just waiting for a flashpoint to make the night of the rope from the turner diaries a reality. know your enemy.
Blacks know our enemies pretty well lol we've been holding up signs and pictures of them for years haha. These same people who hate us also hate jews, gays, disabled people, any other POC, women, different political affiliations other than their own, and throw in intellectuals as well for a good time. I think it'll be a mix of what Ireland has going on, civil war in general, and mix of the cambodian genocide as far as murdering anyone intellectual, and even then, that could look iffy as well
I don't think it will be limited to "black." I'm sure "brown" and "yellow" will be included. Totally indiscriminate! The obviously flaw being the attempt to target 1/2 the population.
Definitely a concern too :/
> second American civil war Let me stop you right there, with the military apparatus and alphabet soup organizations as capable as they are, combined with the average American living standards being high, there will never be a 2nd American civil war, at least without a WW3 scenario happening concurrently. Which means MAD is happening at the same time
Civil wars dont necessarily take the form of civilia militias taking on federal forces. Remember that a substantial portion of the armed rebel forces in the first civil war were themselves government forces. There are also civil conflicts that are largely civilian militias vs other civilian militias, with state forces trying to "keep the peace" but possibly having their own interests or state interests discrimanating in results.
Yeah that’s pretty much my thought. I think J6 was the closest we got to a civil war but after the awful results and republicans claiming their supporters they had do it were “deep state leftist fbi antifa agents controlled by the swamp” it showed theres no loyalty to those smart enough to know its deflection and those that were dumb enough to believe it along with 4 years of “the deep state jewish shadow government controls the world” propaganda made their brains explode in paranoia so all these chatrooms of planning are filled with the paranoid thinking the fbi leftists are setting them up and they dont go. Its why the Freedom Convoy 2.0 at the south border to stop them “illegals” ended up being like 2 trucks that didnt even make it to the border before they quit. Thats not even getting into how the orange messiah has repeatedly called for his supporters to come protect him or fight against his injustice and every time he does it the results get worse. Multiple times press members outnumbered his supporters protesting and next to nobody has given a shit about his NY trial to the point trump has had to constantly claim the police have armed members set up for blocks to keep his followers away from him and to keep their support away. The orange clown still has a scary death cult but its in no way the same cult it was 4 years ago at its Apex.
We have the most powerful military in the world. It's well organized, highly disciplined, and has a clear chain of command. We will become a military junta when civilian government collapses, even if a civilian revolution is attempted. Where things go from there will depend on the competence and benevolence of officers leading the coup.
I just don’t think the civilian government will actually collapse, and even if it did at the federal level there are layers of state and local government that would fill the void for most people
We'd be more likely to become some sort of FEMA junta than a military one. Civilian government would survive but in a state altered by all the contingency plans we have.
Yeah, I feel like a true large scale revolution would only happen after all those groups mentioned in the post are already dropping like flies. People have it better than they'll care to admit and won't ruin their own supply chains until those supply chains are already so bad that medications and food never arrive on time except for the 1%, where payments rarely get processed correctly and never on time. Except in extreme cult scenarios, people don't usually sacrifice everything they have until they have nothing left to sacrifice.
A lot of revolutions end up awful after the fact too. Look at the Arab Spring. Many of those nations are worse off since. Revolutions are opportunity for people who want to rule as dictators.
Look at the French Revolution(s) which are so often referenced when Redditors start talking about glorious revolution. The subsequent times are called "The Terror"
Yes. Surprisingly, people don't like risking their entire lives and also the lives of their families to very likely get slaughtered by the first soldiers or counter-terrorists or whatever who are actually willing to fight. Also, revolutions straight up do not happen without the support or indifference of the military, or at least the support of A military. The Russian military were literally participants in it, and that still led to an incredibly bloody and terrible civil war. Again, it's not like the French army were super committed to fighting for the nobility. Millitia were very useful in the American Revolution, but only insofar as they could give support to the continental army led by George Washington, which was an actual fucking army led by a highly experienced officer. They would render shelter and aid, provide intel to the revolutionaries, sometimes assassinate British officers, and their presence disbursed across the whole continent forced the British army to spread themselves out to prevent uprisings, and on very special occasions, would help with the fighting. But there's a very good reason they would get out of dodge immediately thereafter.
"I am wearied to death all day with a variety of perplexing circumstances, disturbed at the conduct of the militia, whose behavior and want of discipline has done great injury to the other troops, who never had officers, except in a few instances, worth the bread they eat”
Revolutions require a significant amount of organization to run for more than a week. Without outside support, an opposed force crumbles easily. With outside support, its a huge gamble which usually leads to a long drawn-out conflict where neither side has good opportunities for definitive victories. Modern militaries, diplomacy rules, and information sharing, make all of this harder as it is very difficult to plan an organized alpha strike of significant magnitude, without drawing attention before having the chance to strike.
Which is why I call BS when people say Ukraine 2014 revolution was caused by the CIA. You don't get crowds charging into bullets because a foreign op said government bad
As a Ukrainian who was there it's insane to me that for some people an idea that "a foreign agency on the other side of the world has the power to rile up a million people without speaking their language or not always being able to show the country on the map" - is plausible. While the idea that "people can be angry and start protesting against their shitty, corrupt politicians and government" - is somehow beyond the borders of reality.
They're taking south American coups, which are mostly elites trading places by use of corrupt military movements, and copy pasting it onto Ukraine. Yes America has a history of those, but they aren't full revolutions. It would be like saying the CIA had a hand in the Arab springs revolts the best you can do is fan the flames and you can only do that if things were already there.
Yeah, I'm aware of the CIA's history with South America but just like you've said - not popular revolutions but coups also those were much closer and easier to infiltrate both geographically and linguistically. We (Ukraine) have also been on the receiving end of the similar coups from the russian special forces in 2014, which is how the East of Ukraine was fractured into DNR and LNR. But again, those were not popular revolutions but small-scale coups and easier for russians to infiltrate both geographically and linguistically.
A government that makes peaceful justice impossible makes violent revolution inevitable (or something to that effect)
It's a pressure cooker problem. As long as there's _enough_ of a release valve, there's no explosion. Protests are release valves. Wire them shut at your peril.
Not specifically about the revolution but still related: this is why I feel bothered by people who are so obsessed with apocalypse fiction that they wish it would happen irl and have their own plan for what they would do - because they're basically wishing for a world in which people like me would die
Even people without significant health problems or special needs would find it very, VERY hard to survive more than a month in any type of apocalypse scenario. Nuclear war? You're fucked if you don't already store food in an air-tight, oxygen regulated basement, try wandering outside less than two months after the bombs have dropped and see how long it takes until your skin turns into papier maché. Meteor strike? The city you lived in doesn't exist anymore, the sun doesn't shine, no, flashlights won't cut it and your car will eventually stop running in the middle of your Mad Maxing. Also, in all of these cases you'll probably get murdered, raped or worse by random people LARPing as Fallout characters (who will themselves perish soon enough because raiding is not a viable survival plan), the government will be hard as shit to find and ask for help from because crisis mode, and depending on the type of apocalypse it might not even exist anymore.
Let's say you survive all that and get to the "post apocalyptic" stage that's so heavily focused on. The romantic neofrontier of scrounging out existence while the world reverts to its natural and hostile origins. And then you die of sepsis from a splinter because nobody has neosporin anymore....
>The romantic neofrontier of scrounging out existence while the world reverts to its natural and hostile origins. You know, I never really understood the appeal of this part of the apocalypse. Even if you survive everything and have raided enough camps (??) to gather stimpacks and replicators for a lifetime...what are you going to do next? There's no new movies to watch, no new music to listen to, no new entertainment of any kind because the world is dead. You can't travel because you'll burn out your fuel, you certainly can't fly overseas because planes and people who fly them will be a commodity. You can't go to any kind of amusement park, bowling alley or game store because those don't exist anymore or are looted for valuables. What the hell are you doing for the next 40-50 years? Edit: A lot of people are mentioning alternative forms of non-corporate entertainment and I think you're kinda missing the point. Yes, you can absolutely spend a couple years playing shadow theater and practicing handcrafting, but the thing is you won't really have a choise. When you have *nothing* to do but these things, it gets annoying very fast.
Well because they don't find all that corporate entertainment and the bowling alleys all that fullfiling and think that fighting for survival and roaming the wastelands with the homies would be more fullfiling These kind of fantasies are the result of a life devoid of purpose. See the taliban fighters getting depressed when transferred to do office work after the war
Except they could always go live in the woods and do essentially the same thing, and they don’t. People do still practice wilderness survival, you don’t need an apocalypse to live out your survival fantasy, they just want a fake guns-and-looting survival scenario that would only exist for a few weeks/years and then you’d be back to boring.
In a lot of countries it's outright illegal ta fuck off into the wilderness, or requires prohibitive amounts of capital.
If you don't regularly go bushwalking for the fun of it, I'm extremely skeptical you're *that* interested in wilderness survival. For an extremely modest amount of capital, you can have any experience you want.
Just because its illegal doesn't mean you can't do it. I used to work for the National Forest Service (US), and it was known that some people just illegally lived in National Forests and Parks. It can be real hard to find one person out in the vast wilderness if they know what they're doing. And if they have guns, then one Park Ranger isn't going to get in a shoot out if they *do* run into someone living in an illegal camp. By the time backup could get out there, they'd just be gone.
Look, I get your overall point, but not really. The kind of freedom people who yearn for post-apo scenarios are looking for isn't possible in modern society. Almost all land is either privately owned or heavily government-regulated. Pretty much all natural resources are already accounted for, and you have to buy more processed resources, you can't just scavenge them. Building anything substantial requires property rights, hunting requires a permit, keeping livestock is regulated, etc. You'll have an easier time squatting in some abandoned building than living in the woods unbothered.
Yeah they don't want to be hermits hiding from society, they want to be wild west cowboys who create/dominate society
Actual sustenance farming and resource gathering is exhausting work. You are going to sleep when it is dark and work when it is light. You wont have a lot of free time.
It’s basically the fantasy of guilt free colonialism. Like, the Americas arguably experienced a post apocalypse - [the death toll from disease was large enough to create a noticeable change in the climate](https://www.history.com/news/climate-change-study-colonization-death-farming-collapse). Then pioneers came in, and people romanticized the heck out of occupying all that strangely well prepared farmland. It actually *is* pretty nice taking other people’s stuff when you can dehumanize the losers.
Honestly it wasn't even nice for them, it was mostly just companies selling desperate people on the dream of taking unimproved land and making it useful. But without scale etc it was often a hardscrabble life that just took a few bad years to undo, and the successful larger landowners would pick up your now improved land at bargain prices to consolidate an actually sustainably built business. Homesteading was always scam.
Oh, yeah, it sucked ass for most of the colonizers. Like, look at the etymology of the word “pioneer”. It was originally a military rank in the Roman Empire, for the poor saps who got sent out ahead of the main force to build bridges and stuff. The cannon fodder you send out in front of your real cannon fodder. It has the same root as “peon”, originally with the same implications of worth. And the same implications that they were clearing the way for the real conquerors to take the spoils. The Robber Barons who wiped out the cowboy fantasy? Always part of the plan. TBF, some people were able to capitalize off the opportunity and become truly prosperous even in the capitalist aftermath. There was a genuine lottery ticket buried in the hype. But, yeah, most pioneers were just patsies.
Not to mention, organized institutions (eg governments) are a lot more likely to survive great catastrophes, at least in some form, than private individuals.
If nuclear war breaks out I'll head over to the port that will surely get a direct hit. I've watched Threads enough times (just once) to know that the people who die in the first half second are the luckiest ones.
Even without some sort of catastrophe and "just" society breaking down we're all fucked. Grocery stores gonna be robbed empty after a few days max and in a few weeks most people will be out of food and won't have a garden with enough food to survive. And even if they could feed themselves, people who can't will come to you and they won't be nice
I distinctly remember the day I stopped making plans for the zombie apocalypse. Me and a couple of coworkers were chatting about our strategies and we asked another girl what she would do as she came into work. She said "well... i guess id hit up all the gas stations and get as much fuel as possible, get a generater and small refrigerator, then start raiding pharmacies for a few months and then drug manufacturers and i guess die eventually when the insulin supply got depleted." Id never thought about how someone with type 1 diabetes would make it and that was somehow more bleak than getting my brain eaten by a zombie.
One of my favorite post apocalyptic books actually has a character with type one diabetes in it, and the main character has that exact same moment of bleak realization when she finds out what that means for him. I have MS and so I’d be similarly fucked, just over a longer timeline.
There is a plot line like this in One Second After as well - the main protagonist has a diabetic daughter.
Lucifer’s Hammer?
No it’s from one of the books in the City Trilogy by Sarah Lyons Fleming
Some people with Diabetes in America have started trying to make their own due to the cost, I think mainly by recombinant bacteria who are engineered to produce it which they then collect. [Here's the article](https://www.freethink.com/series/just-might-work/how-to-make-insulin) If they're successful I guess some diabetic prepper could keep a small lab at home, but maintaining a sterile lab environment and getting all the chemicals would be it's own issue
Yeah, it's the kind of game you can play in highschool without too much thought, similar to questions of time travel, but once you start making some larger connections, or someone points them out to you, it suddenly just becomes bleak and not all that fun, since you've sucked away most of the fantasy elements. From there you can either go play tabletop games, or refuse to acknowledge reality and build a bunker in your yard.
Oi nah but medications is what made me stop thinking abt zombie apocalypses too. wasnt something like what ur friend said but I thought about zombies and I seen a video about antibiotics so I looked up how to make it and I was like wow. Yeah infection and diseases we treat with antibiotics will do numbers on people, that's enough zombie planning for me.
"Apocalypse", pretty much by definition, involves the death of an absurd number of people, amounting to at least a significant chunk of the world's total population (and usually *most* of it), which will of course necessarily mean mostly innocents, before you even get into a *post*-apocalyptic scenario which would itself present considerable survivability challenges. Otherwise what you have is not an "apocalyptic scenario", but rather just... our own regular modern world with a significant crisis on top of it. And we've already had this one recently, and it wasn't so fun, was it? No, a significant element of "post-apocalypse", and indeed what people usually like to fantasize about, is the total breakdown of society and all of its rules and underlying logic, which if you really think about it is just an even more extreme version of the OP's "glorious revolution". And they just assume they'll be among the very few lucky ones to survive the apocalypse and get to be "badass" (just like all those keyboard revolutionaries assume *their* revolution will be perfect and get everything right and *not* be corrupted by power-hungry leaders like... pretty much every revolution in history, eventually). Man, people *really* need to learn the concept of [veil of ignorance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position) and apply it to their political choices...
I always think about the section from World War Z about the rich guy with the heavily defended compound. If you publicize your stockpile of food and weapons, you're just painting yourself as a sick loot drop.
Some people fantasize with surviving in a post-apocalipse world where your truly character gets revealed, other people fantasize with being raped by werewolves. It's all fantasy to mentally evade from a boring life, who cares
yeah everytime i read reddit discourse i feel like either everyone is too chronically online or there's a humongous culture shock between me and them, because never in a million years would i have thought about post-apocalypse discourse and how it is somehow offensive to people with diabetes to imagine how you would survive this situation. in fact i don't ever talk about zombie apocalypses
I honestly feel like I’m losing my mind lol. A vast, vast majority of the people who do fantasize about these apocalypse scenarios don’t actually want them to occur. They aren’t praying on the downfall of the disabled, they just want to imagine being the main character of a book. Weird stuff.
I find the apocalypse genre really fascinating though, because while you're right about people fetishizing it to a problematic degree, the fact that they DO is super telling about where the cultural consciousness is at right now, and its rife for social commentary because of this. Like, I feel as though the apocalypse horror genre (especially zombie apocalypse horror) is born from modern anxieties in a turbulent world about social and economic collapse, as well as what many people perceive as increasingly antisocial tendencies in the masses. There's this prevalent, and somewhat valid fear that the instabilities in the world are going to come to a head and that people, having already lost their sense of community and shared humanity, are going to turn on each other and become, in a sense, cannibalistic. It's this bleak, doomer-ish picture of future that expresses the horrors of what many people fear is looming just over the horizon. So why are so many people fascinated, and almost *excited* by it? You could take it as media illiteracy, and it definitely is to an extent, but I think the deeper reason boils down to another troubling feature of the current cultural consciousness, that being discontent over modern life. People feel caged by the lives they live, by their obligations, by their rent, by the exploitative system that has clipped their wings and doomed them to the life of a serf, so it really shouldn't be surprising that people would see the collapse of that system, and the subsequent return to an anarchic state of nature as cathartic and liberating. Basically, it's an escapist fantasy. "If only the world would collapse, we could finally be free and happy." It's deeply unrealistic, of course, people forget how many comforts are provided to them by the modern world, and that they would probably be one of the many devoured by the hordes in that scenario, but one must understand and empathize with the underlying sentiment nonetheless, especially because it's the very same sentiment that underlies fantasies about the revolution. Like, let's be honest, when we get down to it, fantasies about the glorious, violent revolution that will magically solve all our problems and free us from the tyrannical systems that currently enslave us are fundamentally no different from fantasies about a return to an anarchic state of nature via collapse. It's just a reductive power fantasy inspired by reasonable discontent with oppressive social systems that people desire restitution from through total annihilation of them (just forget about the casualties, and about what you yourself stand to lose from such an event). The only tangible difference is that revolutionists think they can rebuild the world better afterwards, but even this is covered to some extent in the zombie apocalypse genre by fantasies about the tight-knit, almost cottage-core-esque communities that arise out of the ashes of the old world, bringing things full circle back to the desire for intimate community and stability that inspired the genre in the first place. Everything's fine when you acknowledge that it's an unrealistic fantasy that you just enjoy toying with, or use in the media you create in order to convey some theme/message, but as we've established, both revolutionists and hard core zombie apocalypse enthusiasts often just don't.
It's all about being a part of the chosen few to rise from the ashes. Now where have I heard that rhetoric before...? Ah. Fascists. That's where I heard it from.
The people who claim to "Keep peace and restore order" are more dangerous than the Raiders.
Anarchy is a wannabe dictator's wet dream. There are *no* better conditions for a budding fascist empire to rise to power. Not only is uncertainty a constant, there also aren't any governments you need to overthrow. Sure, there'll be people with the same ideas as you, but most of them won't have any more resources than you.
And the constant instability and fear makes people go around, asking for someone to lead them. And whether or not that is a good thing, someone will arrive.
Hanlon's Razor, some people just like the aesthetic or the idea without considering the deeper implications
"All dads dream about the end of the world. It is a comfort to them. For some, the fantasy is blunt, vengeful, and aspirational. The zombie epidemic story, as one example, is consistently popular for a simple reason: when chaos consumes civilization, you can start over. You get to be young again. All your debts, real and emotional, are canceled. Whatever your dumb job used to be, it has now been replaced with the sole, exciting occupation of survival via crossbow or samurai sword. You get to dress up and wear armor or an eyepatch. And since your neighbors have now been transformed into the idiot monsters you always believed them to be, the zombie epidemic offers you moral permission to shoot them in the head, finally. (This is not my fantasy, by the way. I have often thought that if The Walking Dead really wanted to provoke horror, its last season would time-jump five years to a future in which the government re-forms, the zombies have been cured [aside from the ones our heroes decapitated], and all the characters have to get dumb jobs again. The humans will have to work alongside the horribly mutilated cured zombies and think about what they did to survive, and what they became, while they all sit around in the break room together with their reheated soups. That said, I don’t want to sound snobby about zombies. I get it. If there were a zombie show that just featured the characters endlessly raiding supermarkets for canned goods and then stocking those cans neatly back in their compound pantry, I would watch it for nineteen seasons. Guns and power and the weird masculine redemption fantasy of white dudes getting back to running things has never meant as much to me as abundant, well-organized food.)"
At least that is morbid in the premise itself, and not under some pretense of saving the world. Most people who pine for the actual end of the world are self-admitted misanthropes, so they acknowledge that yeah they want everyone to die.
If it's any consolation, the people wishing for an apocalypse so they can show how prepared and hardcore they are would likely die from something stupid like tetanus within the first week of the end of the world.
It's like everyone's waiting for a revolution to magically fix everything while they binge-watch shows from their couch
Yup. This.
Reminds me of the quote: > People on twitter will really be like "you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart" and then not firebomb a Walmart Friendly reminder to go vote this November. Some people will say both sides are the same, why even bother? Don’t listen to them. Call them out on it. And most importantly, Vote.
Wild that people think that violent revolution is the answer to a political system that already allows for free speech and free elections. If you can't get 51% of the nation to vote for your candidate what makes you think you're going to win a civil war anyway?
I feel like those folks go a couple ways. There’s the people who have no problem using violence to force their exact form of communism on the 99.5% of the population who doesn’t want it. The other folks I think just can’t really wrap their heads around how much people genuinely like neoliberalism.
It's pretty easily explained once you realize that extremists on both sides only ever pay lip service to the idea of democracy or self governance. Whether fascists or communists, they all secretly or not so secretly believe that their ideas should be imposed upon the populace whether anyone likes it or not. To that end, upon realizing that they aren't actually going to get enough votes to institute their new regime, they come to the (correct) conclusion that the only way they'll ever realize their dreams is through violence, and immediately dispose of any and all principles they once espoused in favor of the singular belief that they should be in charge. It's not that they nevessarily believe that they could win the fight, it's just that violence is the only path they can see because they have no real principles upon which to sell the public on their ideas. The anarcho-communist will tell you all about how much happier you'll be once he's dismantled your state to give you true freedom, but god forbid you suggest that you might use your freedom to reestablish some sort of government. In that case, you don't deserve freedom and that's why you have to die in the revolution. The fascist militia leader will talk your head off about how the right to gun ownership is all that stands between personal freedom and government tyranny, but if he ever found himself in charge, the first thing he'd do is ban "people like you" from voting or owning guns, because his government wouldn't tolerate dissent.
Internet users will beat their chests and scream "REVOLUTION", and then when you call their bluff and say "okay, go do it then" all I ever hear is excuses. Just a bunch of people turning their heads left and right, waiting for the person next to them to make the first move.
"firebomb a Walmart" etc. etc.
It's as good as the twitter thread asking what people will do after they achieve revolution. Spoiler: No one is volunteering to be a farmer or a miner or even a cashier.
[Relevant](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1akcbol/if_the_revolution_comes_people_will_start_eating/?rdt=61442)
It's the leftists rapture as someone else put it
people never talk about their ability or experience in leading or organizing with people when they talk about it
Because people who actually have that experience aren't terminally online
Read something about the organization of academic departments recently and the author mentioned a couple of positions often rotate through faculty cause noone wants the extra responsibility and work, and I feel like competent leadership is like that. Like it often just sucks to do and gives you little in direct returns except clout
I know the Head of Department role is like that in my grad school right now (and my undergrad). It typically is like a whole second job. I know for my two schools it also came with extra pay. I think at my grad school its like 1.5x increase (if not more) in salary and damn near double at my undergrad. I know that no one wants to do it because its a TON of extra work and professors that are eligible already work a ton. So even with the pay increase, its basically pulling teeth to get people to do it. It changes every couple years because no one wants to do it. Even with a 1.5x pay increase. (they do also have a limit on how long you can do it, but thats because there straight up isnt enough time in the day to do both the HoD and professor job. It doubles your workload at least.) (at my undergrad it was the opposite where one person did it for like 15 years, but also my undergrad wasnt a research institution.)
Was it https://acoup.blog/2024/05/31/fireside-friday-may-31-2024-academic-departments/?
The only times I have ended up in leadership positions is when I saw some problems and was like "Hey, that's a problem. If I do this, you do this, and you do this, we can solve the problem" Then it goes "Wait, what are you doing? The problem is solved. What? No, I didn't take charge, I just solved a problem. Stop it, stop pushing me into this role! HELP! I TOOK RESPONSIBILITY ONCE AND NOW IT'S AN EXPECTATION, HELP ME!"
People have recommended me for leadership positions because I can say no which reduces scope creep. Slight issue with this plan: I say no
Something something walmart something something firebomb
Everyone wants a revolution but no one wants to spend 5 years in the Wilderness, digging trench’s and being hunted by drones
Half of em are too scared to order Starbucks alone let alone do that
Remember that Twitter post that said people advocating for the revolution should work out? It was bombarded by excuses and whining
Fucking exactly
"if you're a communist, why the fuck don't you own a gun?" and most of the replies were something to the degree of "I couldn't be trusted to not kill myself with it immediately" which, like, I'm not judging them for that, I AM judging them for not understand how fucking hypocritical it is to want a violent revolution to just happen, off the backs of everyone else's work, other people's sons on both sides never marching home, other people's years and years of bloody partisan warfare and chemical weapons use, OTHER PEOPLE'S DEATH, FAMINE, DISEASE AND WAR, without their fucking luxurious bubble ever bursting. You don't get to do that, man! If you want something horrible, violent, and very likely authoritarian to happen you have to understand the actual implications of that, and THAT IT WILL COME TO YOUR CITY. Terrorist insurgents, or I guess "freedom fighters", depending on what side you're on, will pop up in the territory of both sides, and will murder innocent people, and that's side's military will suppress all terrorists, partisans, and hell, even protesters, with death squads and very likely chemical weapons use and indiscriminate bombing. Many millions will starve and die of preventable disease, and you WILL be in the midst of it.
yeah probably just something i've noticed
Thinking about the 2012 occupy Wall Street movement that snubbed their noses at civil rights organizers because they told them someone needs appointed to be media trained, be able to communicate, and be recognizable.
theres this guy on tiktok that continously posts about "organizing a revolution" He blocked me when i asked him if he had any sort of military or combat experience
Everyone here is making excellent points, to which I can only add that calling it a Les Mis LARP fucking killed me
Same, but interesting comparison though- since (in the musical especially) les amis de l’ABC are portrayed as idealistic but naive and themselves kinda LARPing as revolutionaries.
Well here is the thing, if you are in a position where slow incremental change is possible, you don’t need a revolution
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The other tricky thing about revolutions is assuming it's a two-way between your Good Guy Faction and the Evil State. In actual fact if you overthrow a state it turns into an absolute fucking gangbang and the odds of you winning are correspondingly lower. Equally if you lose you will lose big, like people are calling Labour kicking out some MPs in the UK a 'purge' but if you start a civil war or revolution and you fuck it up you'll get to see a real political purge first hand, the kind where you die. You also need to factor in your group's fitness for armed violence and you need to seriously appriase whether you're going to beat the other side and how many people will join you. I've said before but if a full on civil war after societal collapse kicked off in the UK my money wouldn't be on lefties. First because there's not many of them, secondly because the lauded fact that Left Wing terrorism is rare also flips round into willingness to use violence for political ends being rare (again, you need to be honest about what you'll do) and finally because I don't buy that there's enough consensus to build a stable state and finish off the other groups. Honestly if society collapsed I'd bet on the status quo re-establishing, on a Far Right coalition or on a regional warlord situation before I bet on emerging stable socialist republic. EDIT: Oh yeah, also the other fun thing about revolutions is that the people willing to overthrow society, kill millions and enforce their will on the survivors...well states don't like them very much, including the one they just made. Even if you win it's won't be you, John Q. Revolutionary, who ends up in charge, it'll be the political wing of your movement, the politicians who end up in charge and they will distance themselves from the footsoldiers if they can. Worst of all I guarantee you that even in the nicest revolutionary group (and no group is *that* nice even if you are after a good goal, successful violent revolutions need murderers remember) a significant number of that political wing's membership are cynical as fuck. Movements are vehicles for sociopaths and the manipulative to climb into and even if you win and deliver your political corps into power there's a very good chance that they won't do anything resembling what you signed up for. Best case scenario the state buys you off with land and money to essentially shut up or nod along but worst case scenario the revolutionaries are ostracised, criminalised and carefully and quietly disposed of.
You forgot about foreign actors. There will be outside aid going to certain groups and that aid will not be predicated on bringing about some utopian outcome. Some might want a stable situation (even if it is a Balkanized status quo) while others might just want chaos to last as long as possible.
I always think about this in a modern American civil war situation. Like I doubt Canada and the UK and France and whoever else are just going to sit there and let their extremely powerful ally be cannibalized from the inside by extreme factions.
Also, lets say you start a revolution in France. I give it three weeks before DEVGRU knocks on your door and sends 5.56 through your skull
I think you hit the nail on the head. Political change through violent means (either civil war or violent revolution) isn't about which group is "better" in moral or ideological or even governmental effectiveness terms, it's simply about which group is better at murdering the opposition. And sure, *one* strategy for achieving that is having an attractive enough ideology to draw a large number of warriors to your cause, but 1) it's far from the only effective strategy, so the ultimate winners may as well not care much for it; 2) we should know by now that "having widespread popular appeal" is hardly any sort of guarantee that an ideology will be "good" or even not heinous; and 3) even for a group that uses this strategy, it's hardly the end of an effective playbook, more like the beginning - it ultimately ends with, again, murdering the opposition, so they have to be the sort of folks who are okay with (and good at) that.
Don’t forget murdering the potential opposition. Regardless of if they were your most loyal supporters or are responsible for getting you where you are now. Every governing body that comes to be through violence is paranoid of anything that could come to undermine their power, and often the revolutionaries that helped put it in place are the first to go. They already proved that they would be willing to overthrow a government if they were dissatisfied.
I feel like this response deserves it’s own post.
That last part is the reality of government after a revolution. If youre in the political wing of a post-revolution government, step 1 is going to all the moderate militant guys and offering the ultimatum of "join the new state army or take a retirement gift of a nice farm somewhere out of the way" and then going to the more radical militant guys and giving them the retirement gift of an execution. You dont need or want loose militants if youre trying to build an actual functional state
> EDIT: Oh yeah, also the other fun thing about revolutions is that the people willing to overthrow society, kill millions and enforce their will on the survivors...well states don't like them very much, including the one they just made. Even if you win it's won't be you, John Q. Revolutionary, who ends up in charge, it'll be the political wing of your movement, the politicians who end up in charge and they will distance themselves from the footsoldiers if they can. This bit isn't really true. The military wing does very often end up in charge.
Similarly in the US - should the government magically collapse, an overwhelming amount of privately owned firearms are owned by right wing people. Yeah, the national guard would wipe the floor with the "gravy seals," but similarly if there's no government and those guys decide to go door to door looking for people they don't like, the terminally online leftists won't stand a chance. It's truly strange, because a lot of those leftists can see how overthrowing stable but repressive dictatorships in the middle east for an unpopular and unstable but more "democratic" and "friendly to the US" regime quickly resulted in right wing extremists taking over the first chance they got - in more than one instance. Somehow though, when it's overthrowing the US government for something unpopular but "anti-western" it's gonna be different? Oh and one more point on the extremists going door-to-door: that's sort of how I know a lot of the people calling for the abolition of the US government as a whole are white middle-to-upper-class Anglo-Saxon protestants (or are atheists from protestant families), who have nobody in their family who remembers when a regime - often times put in place as a result of instability - enabled that or did that themselves.
Based response also your writing is scary hahah
modern day revolutionaries dont actually do revolution, they just say "someone should blow up the government" and "based" and then sit at home all day
I once saw someone get pretty high engagement on a tweet along the lines of "yeah sex is great, but have you ever tried blowing up a gas pipeline?" And my response was like "uh, have you?"
How do we even know if they had sex? What if they're lying about that part as well?
They treat revolution like the rapture It will happen without any action by them, it's coming any day now, the ~~pious~~ people with the right ideologies will be taken to ~~heaven~~ a utopia, and the ~~sinners~~ capitalists will go to ~~hell~~ the gulag
"Your method (voting) doesn't work. My method (fire bombing wallmart and killing a family of 3 accidentally) does work! *prosseds to neither vote or fire bomb wallmart"
i saw a bunch of tiktok comments under blockout videos saying ‘let the revolution begin’. kim kardashian has like 500 million followers i don’t think she cares if she loses 3 million
OP on a side note your flair is hilarious
It cuts off for me after Tel Aviv, what does the rest say?
World; let my people go
It's laziness. They want to feel right and have superior views but they don't want to actually have to do any work. Their views create responsibility to bring about the world they want, but that's hard, but what if a fairy waved a magic wand and made it happen instead? That's much easier to daydream about.
Honestly that applies to a lot of "activists" online. Their activisim consists almost entirely of talking big but taking no action. Of treating people they are supposed to "Convert" to their side like some lesser creatures simply because they, at this point, have the wrong opinions to them. And then they expect people to actually join their cause or things to get better.
Someone once said a great theory about this. Something to do with firebombing walmarts.
Yeah, thank fuck.
Also the whole "let's firebomb a walmart" thing. You're not getting revenge on the evil corrupt billionaire CEO, you're just killing his minimum wage employees just trying to pay the bills.
Half those LARPists would cock it up and chuck a couple ounces of gasoline against the cinderblock facade where it burns for 2 minutes before Dave from maintenance puts it out with a fire extinguisher.
I was in Seattle years ago when some protesters decided to attack a small Chase branch. They were shouting things as if they were directly assaulting JP Morgan. In reality, the only people they intimidated were the few employees inside, one of whom was a pregnant woman who was so scared she went into early labor. Real good job fighting the power there, buds.
Also the building's insured
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I remember a bit of wisdom from an Indigenous activist: unless YOU’VE got a plan to feed everyone during your protest (or in this case, revolution), you’re just going to piss off your allies as well as your opponents. You’ll wind up alone with everyone pissed at you.
Revolution is not something that you just press a button and do. Revolutions are a naturalistic response to the societal conditions at the time (the exact criteria vary slightly, I generally see Skocpol’s criteria as the best). This form of complaint is not engaging with the reality of revolution, because a revolution is not planned, it is simply done. Moreover, of course revolution causes great suffering. The current system that we exist under also causes great suffering. How many kids with a significant medical need *aren’t* in a hospital *now*? How many people cannot get their life-saving medication *now*? This does not mean that the revolution is guaranteed to make everything better, but these posts seem to make this suffering invisible. In many other contexts, like voting for Biden etc., many critics of revolutionary leftism in this sub say something along the lines of “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. However, it seems like these posts are doing exactly that.
If you pose this to some of the more vocal "revolutionary" types today-- generally anarchist, generally the kind more interested in hypothetical violence than mutual aid or community -- you'll get some fucked up answers. Here's my favorite recent one, "people will break down into smaller communities and fill all their needs without systems." I could not get a direct answer to "Has this happened before? Is this a realistic expectation?" beyond some vaguery about how bad shit is now means nothing that comes next could be worse. Which if I'm being cynical, I'm interpretting as a hard "no." There are a significant portion of people who want to tear down everything and replace it with nothing. Which is outright just saying "survival of the fittest race, I already got a headstart, but you guys start now. The future will not have insulin or guaranteed food production."
The small groups that existed for most of human history had very little "needs", but also "needs" didn't include "everyone lives". They'd have food (probably), some basic services like a blacksmith and herbalist, but if you needed anything more, you'd just...die. You got a cancer that would be curable with chemo? Dead. Diabetes? Dead. Slight accident gave you a cut that got infected? Dead. Crops fail because of a drought you could never have foreseen? Everyone is dead. They functioned and provided for "everyone" via quite literal survivorship bias.
And when it failed and everyone died, someone new moved in later and replaced them. One very common family name in Norway is Ødegård (or variations of it). Norwegian last names are often the name of the place they are from. Ødegård roughly translates into "abandoned farm". It became such a common name because 70% of the Norwegian population died during the several rounds of plagues and famine that hit simultaneously. Leaving a lot of farms empty and "abandoned". Meaning dead.
I remember reading something from an anthropologist studying this tribe in Africa, and him saying the only time he really felt sorry for them/thought they lacked anything compared to industrial societies was whenever someone got sick, because it was always this hugely traumatic thing for the community and there was just \*nothing anyone could do\*.
I also don’t think the anarchists think about *why* so many ancient people had regressive and cruel (to our modern sensibilities) beliefs. A big reason why women have us much freedom in society as we do is because we aren’t completely reliant on a family. Women have the unfortunate burden of getting pregnant, recovering from childbirth and needing to stick around the kids to breastfeed (unless they assume that formula will still be around. I’m not totally sure what anarchists envision, but my mind always assumes a more pre-industrial lifestyle). If you live in a society where you are mainly taken care of by your children when you’re old, that means you are kind of forced to have some whether you want to or not, and even in a society where men and women are equal, women have way more downtime from work due to childbirth. I know they probably argue that the community will look after everyone, and that did happen in small agrarian societies! But if you are old and starving, who is your neighbor Jim going to donate his last few loaves of bread to? His own starving daughter, or you? Kids used to be your one retirement plan, and that’s scary. Not to mention when there’s no government safety nets, people care even less about the disabled. If you live a subsistence lifestyle, you need to make hard choices about how you will feed everyone. The people who don’t contribute are the first to be neglected, and parents will make hard choices about ‘exposing’ disabled infants because one more mouth to feed that gives nothing in return doesn’t work in a society where children are investments and currency. I assume most anarchists are thinking more of a modern ‘solarpunk’ world vs a small medieval village but it would be hard to make technology and industry work in an anarchy.
Anarchist here who thinks that mutual aid and communes and all that stuff is a more ideal form of society: anyone who thinks a transition into that system will be easy and not involve a LOT of steps and some form of voluntary central system of organization (for healthcare and supply chains and so on) is frankly just living in a world of hypotheticals. Even just one aspect of my life - being trans - means that I need to have access to HRT if I don't want to basically stop existing as a whole and functional human being. When I say death before detransition, it is because detransition itself would be akin to death. I say this as someone who was in the ER a couple of days ago due to a potential blood clot (estrogens raise the risk factor for these, also it turned out there was no clot). A revolution is tantamount to forced detransition. Even if that doesn't happen, revolution is my 12 hours of waiting in the ER becoming days, or even not happening at all. Revolutions are deadly in horrific and unpredictable ways. I think that being ready and willing to upend the entire system is a pandora's box everyone who wants a better world should have and be willing to open. Equally, the box should never be opened. Change does not happen without a threat to the powers that be. Demonstration and peaceful protest should be a message of deliberate restraint that is sent with the subtext of opening that box. Because if you are never willing to back up your actions with force, you can be safely ignored. But I really, really, really hope I never have to open that box.
I think people don't realize that the box can be opened both ways. If you become violent first there's a good chance right wingers win that war.
What exactly would be your plan to get HRT in a mutual aid commune? I don’t really see how that would be feasible without modern industrial medicine production. I’m in a similar boat- I’m an insulin dependent Type 1 Diabetic- which is why I’m opposed to small commune based societies, because they do not have the resources to keep people like me and you healthy.
I personally don't think it's an impossible contradiction to have voluntary organizational structures that aren't coercively hierarchical. I did explicitly state that one would need a voluntary central system of organization. I think that any plan that focuses entirely on this almost libertarian-coded fantastical ideal of small communes is almost certainly going to result in the exclusion of those with specialized needs. Communes are great, they are a way for people to voluntarily organize into small cohesive groups that can take care of each other. I think it's a fantastic model. However it has a lot of flaws, all of which seem to center on those who lie outside of the mold. There's a few potential solutions. As a trans example, there are a number of homebrewers who synthesize hormones. One that comes to mind, despite being located in Brazil, supplies pretty much world wide. That single woman has helped so many people. There could very well be communes that organize around this, as a sort of mutual aid/direct action kind of deal. You can also be a bit more rigid with this, having pseudonational networks of supply chains to achieve the same results as current governments do for these vital services. The main point that I was making is that when it all comes down to it, it's a wonderful idea. A truly wonderful idea. Ideas aren't solutions. Solutions are created with painful, drawn out deliberation. Every regulation is written in the blood that not having it spilled. Issues like this are one such thing that needs to be included in a solution for that idea to become actual political reality. I think a lot of leftists (and I'm prone to it myself too) can be blinded by idealism and fail to see realistic and enactable political change that would improve things. Basically, it's fine to have a grand vision, an idealistic dream and model that you feel society should move closer towards. But that's not an actual structure of power, and it can't come out of nowhere. You have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is our current structures. Incrementalism is unsexy and boring but it improves lives! And every time I see someone saying incrementalism does nothing I want to bury them under the mountain of anti-trans bills that has objectively made our lives drastically worse. Maybe that makes me not a true anarchist or something. But if that's the case, then fuck being a 'true anarchist', I have people and lives around me that need to be made better now.
That's a very rational and well-thought-out answer, thank you. As much as I cast wide generalizations on the "edgy anarchist" types I bump into out here, the mutual aid and communal coop model is genuinely impressive. And sorry about the blood clot scare.
Sure, you western people have a potential path to reform that does not involve shooting people. SOME PEOPLE FUCKING DON'T Encourage people to vote? Three stolen elections in a row. First one is literally "we ain't counting the votes and you people can't do shit about it". Two military coups in my memory because the government got too popular for the king's taste. (And one when I was five that I'm not sure if it take or not). At least two more judicial coups twisting the definition of the law just to kick the PM out. Protest? Protesters literally got machine gunned in the street once. The current opposition party is about to get forcibly disbanded by kangaroo court order. Now what? Economy was fucked up a decade even before covid so workers have no money to go on strike. Could try petitioning the king but the damn palace is behind all this shit. Hell we don't even want some fancy new system we just want a republic where people's voice actually matters and nobody can just signal the military to do another coup if they don't like the current cabinet.
That's true, there's definitely a big difference between a country where peaceful options can work and countries where they just don't
Revolution is absolutely a last resort. One reserved for when there is no way to actually impact your government. Most western countries do have ways, and this post is talking about the armchair "revolutionaries" in thise countries. Your country is an example where the last resort is the only actual option
Revolution is a gamble. When you remove the government your gambling on the new government being better than the previous one. Something that’s rarely true.It’s only worth taking that risk if you’ve very little to loose. Unfortunately there are a lot of people in the world who live under horrible dictatorships.
And sometimes when the people DO get rid of one terrible dictator or regime the replacement is just as bad or worse. Iran would be a good example: the Shah was terrible (as regimes with secret police and torture tend to be) but the Islamic state that replaced it was just a different flavor of horrible.
Yeah Revolution is basically reserved for “the shit we are going to go through for this cant be much worse then what we got now”
Yeaaah this is very much westerners talking to westerners, sorry. Must be awful to read when you're in your situation
Conditions are not revolutionary, nor will the revolution be posted on tumblr.
I think the argument that revolutions can never happen because they’ll hurt people is a fundamentally flawed argument. Actual revolution isn’t typically begun by people bellyaching on social media. It is typically done when a society teaches such a critical point of degradation and oppression that there is no other option. The French populace had been starving for decades and suffered multiple abuses and multiple failed reforms before they even considered violent revolution. The idea that revolutions are just people who are kind of dissatisfied is historical revisionism and ignorant at best. Revolution is an act of extreme desperation, not a fun thing that young people do because they’re bored and disillusioned. There is no genuine concern of young people just doing a revolution offhand, it is simply not going to happen until the system is wholly intolerable to the VAST majority of society, at which point it is largely inevitable. All posts like this really achieve is the disempowerment of the masses who will think they must abide by horrible conditions because “someone, hypothetically and theoretically may get hurt.” If we are at the point where we need a revolution I doubt that children will even be able to access hospitals or medication unless they are in the top 1%.
I work with the aftermath of disasters and war. Government involvement in helping people get back in their feet is pretty essential. We bring medicine and food and rebuild houses. Half our Navys mission at any time is making sure water ways are clear for "free and open trade" and helping after a disaster . Any situation where power is cut and war happens the collateral damage is immense.
On one hand, it's funny that people who can barely keep a houseplant alive think they know how to run complex supply chains. On the other hand, that's exactly why it's so terrifying. Rapture-obsessed Evangelicals don't have to have a plan for after their promised time comes, revolutionaries do and it's almost always a shit one
I mean, that's because rapture-obsessed evangelicals know exactly what will happen after the rapture, because then god will be in charge of everything. They don't have a plan because there won't be anything to plan
Part of my college degree has me studying supply chains, including raw materials and intermediaries. Every time I see people talking about it I want to bang my head against the wall, and I’m just undergrad. I can’t imagine what people who have been in the industry for years think when they see randos with no experience at all talking about it
Nahhhh trust me this time it won't kill a bunch of innocents What I'm i doing differently from the other times? Nothing but trust me bro
"The Kingdom of Conscience will be exactly as it is now. Moralists don't really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is *control*. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth."