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.
Those targets are pretty broad - personally I’ve always made sure I can wear aloha shirts to work, but lots of perfectly nice people have jobs that require suits. The people you’re after don’t actually have to commute anywhere if they don’t want to, If they feel endangered they’ll just work from safe places and make their lackeys cannon fodder. You can paint a nice morally perfect scenario where the well-meaning shooters “keep bystander casualties low enough,” but once they get frustrated and redefine “viable target” as whoever looks the part, people will die for the crime of not being able to afford getting fired. And like I said, in 20 years the world will look the same.
Yeah they’re broad because I’m not trying to do planning work for someone who wants to do this. But I spent a decade of my life fighting and training to fight insurgents. They aren’t going to let a little bit of travel stop them. And when the angry people with guns say to stop wearing suits, you stop wearing a suit.
