#doubt
Most people live comfortably enough that they won’t radicalize, we’re far from France before the revolution
Im hoping the nutjobs who become school shooters for attention realize they will get WAY more attention if they are a CEO shooter instead.
I’ve always wondered how this wasn’t always the case. You’re pissed off at ______ to the extent that you’re willing to commit murder and sacrifice your freedom over it, so you go and shoot up… a bunch of elementary school students? Dafuq? Why? Target the source of your problem, not some random kids…
I’ve thought about this and the only thing I can come up with is that school shooters are so pathetic that they only go after kids who can’t fight back.
Target the source of your problem
Has it occurred to you that a lot of school shooters are mobbing victims and the “random kids” are quite literally the source of their problem?
It’s because in the American zeitgeist, doing horrendous acts made you famous a la 70s murderer style.
Fame from killing evil has never been popular in the US (until now).
Look at the punisher character, if the US did romanticize killing evil, the character wouldn’t be used a lot by cops and authoritarian types.
It got snuffed, but it’s worth remembering that 13 years ago, Occupy Wall Street did happen. The path from self education to understanding the real villains has been roughly identical for most of recorded history, and right now if you still read books the truth is pretty much everywhere and undeniable.
Ever since OWS was unceremoniously snuffed without actual reform, I’ve been waiting for a nice blue shell thrower to show up. It’s been the only remaining path available the entire time. One person walks that road, and suddenly it becomes vastly easier for others to follow…
Yes the median income is something like 80k. The mode however is still firmly buried in the 35-40k segment. Fun fact, you only need 1% of the population for a region to conduct a viable insurgency. Less for highly concentrated places like NY and LA. You need 10% to provide material aid like money and shelter. Which is a different, lower level, of radicalization.
So NYC by traditional standards would need 82,000 people to be radicalized enough to commit violent acts. In reality because it’s so dense they could easily do it with a thousand, and several thousand supporters. And this is for big boy insurgency stuff where the police have to engage in extended firefights just to get into a neighborhood. For terrorism campaigns the numbers are even smaller. 2 people paralyzed the entire state of Maryland and Northern Virginia in 2002. A couple hundred dedicated people not trying to hold territory could easily shut down wall street until the NYPD turned it into the Baghdad Green Zone.
The rich haven’t even begun to find out yet. And they sent the working class for a 20 year premier education in asymmetric warfare. This is why some of us are so pissed at them. We’re going to be living in the next Afghanistan if they don’t take their boot off the neck of the working class.
About the mode, which you gave as $35-40k. I latched onto that because it doesn’t mean a lot.
For those who don’t know what a statistical “mode” is, it’s the most common data point in a sample. Mode is most useful when there are a small number of possibilities, like answers to multiple choice questions. Incomes from zero to billions have so many individual values, the single one that occurs most often is meaningless, so statisticians usually give a modal range. I couldn’t find data on the exact range $35-40k, but on statista only 10% of Americans are between $35k and $50k, so your range is more like 3% of the people. The point is, saying half of Americans make more than $80k and half make less seems a lot more significant than saying a small number are “buried” in a very narrow zone.
Anyway, I totally agree that the wealthy call the shots in America and it sucks. But really what’s the point of some exciting stuff that happened in Maryland and Northern Virginia in 2002 when it’s 22 years later and those place don’t look any different? People can fantasize about action-packed clashes with NYPD in the streets, but the long-term result (or lack of it) is what we should be thinking about. Most people are law-abiding and don’t want to live in the Wild West. When your radical heroes start shooting, the vast majority won’t be dodging bullets and cheering, they’ll hide indoors and call the police. Lasting change has to be done in an organized way. I don’t know how to make that happen either, but a bunch of badass video game characters ain’t gonna do it.
I saw it in BLS data. And it’s important because of the insurgency numbers I brought up too. 3 and 10 percent are high enough numbers. Plus everyone below that range as well.
I want to be very clear about something. I am not trying to recruit for the barricades. I would like to avoid this scenario very much. I agree that most people are going to stay indoors and call the authorities. That’s how these things go at the start. But humans are weird. The longer it goes on and authorities seem unable to keep order, the more support an insurgency gets, as long as they keep bystander casualties low enough and they stay on message. So doing things like abducting and killing police officers with a history of complaints would be productive to their cause. No matter how horrifying it is on it’s own. Things like blowing up the Stock Exchange are productive to their cause.
What happened in Maryland was a punitive campaign of terrorism. I bring it up, not because it changed anything, but to show how easy such things can be. If you can lock down an entire state, then you can certainly lock down the executive class in an area; make it deadly to commute to work in a suit, town car, or helicopter.
But these things never stay on track. Just like extremism, there’s always more, because it’s not a monolithic group. Even the Taliban was four large groups and hundreds of smaller ones. Especially when other radicals perceive it to be working. Groups like ELF are already established and may decide to join the violence instead of just targeting property. And that’s nothing to the KKK and Neo Nazi groups deciding it’s the race war they’ve been preparing for. All we need after that is any one of fifty Governors going full dictator to fight back with state sponsored terrorism and the descent into failed state will be complete.
These fucking idiotic rich people think they’re above consequences and they’re going to drag our country into a pit from which it cannot ever emerge intact. They’re going to blow the lid off all the extremism in our country because they just had to buy another trip to space.
That median is for a household, median per person is under 50k if I recall correctly
Can’t have kids. Can’t have property. Nothing to loose than a comfortable meaningless life.
Most people live comfortably enough
And this why kamala lost the elections
