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Comment by hummusoiler | Hacker News Reader

"willingly" is a bit of a stretch considering the difficulty of doing so, and gives off a different connontation.

Of course it’s difficult, but we all have the means to build social movements, companies or sue if we feel that there’s something terrible going on. But we all like our flights, our cars, our cheaper and cheaper phones, stable policy in the West and perceived security. It’s hard but you can go against it. Just always saying ‘it’s the elite’ and then sitting it out seems really easy to me. Everyone has a conception of injustice, it just depends on how badly you crave that justice.

There is a tremendous amount of intertia that needs to be overcome when starting a competing company or a movement to replace any of those.

A lot of the competing companies have a large vertical integration in their field, and can refuse your supply for any of it

Of course, that’s the whole point. But you can build inertia. Take a look at Europe where there’s tremendous protesting going on regarding Climate Change, and we slowly see some change in for one, public opinion and two in policy making. It’s slow and painful and frustrating but you gotta work and not always blame the ‘global elite’. I know it’s hard to build inertia, I failed in court, I failed at building companies. But we all have to try and not put the blame on someone without doing anything.

You can try and build inertia whilst blaming the global elite too. They also did not hint about their activity in any way.

It can also in many ways to be literally impossible to compete for example due to some direct-or-not regulation.

I think it's not fair to roll the fault on the commenter either, even if it's easier to not think about it that way

Unfortunately, Europe is moving quite westward in terms of politics and ignorance. (I'll just be direct and use the word, karma be damned).

So what has happened in the US is happening elsewhere, on a delay. Fortunately, what is not on a delay is the age of the people doing the self-serving, future-burning deeds. Those people will all die within 15 years of each other. Hopefully those who are left will have a bit more sanity.

How much more apocalyptic can you get? Do you think painting an apocalyptic picture and then blaming some parts of the population on the bad parts of your picture will do anything good?

You build momentum to overcome inertia. Inertia is the tendency of things that are at rest to stay put.

Indeed. This expanded version of your previous comment is accurate. As long as people are still comfortable enough, there will be no change. Unfortunately, it takes great discomfort to motivate people to actually fight for change. (I'm like everyone, so I'm not fighting... yet?)

I do believe the internet and global communication does speed up the process, at least when people get near the tipping point. Knowing that you are not alone in your frustration does help steel people and enable connection and shared-effort. So yes, it's fucked right now, but I think it will improve measurably in the next 20 years. (It does indeed help that many of the most powerful people will die of old age within those 20 years).

Thank you. Apparently everyone on HN loves a contrarian until they see one in the wild.

You should get to work, there’s a lot of stuff to do. Of course we need to protect our precious peace and prosperity, but we also need public opinion to reflect on certain issues. And we need policy makers to implement solutions on said certain issues. We’ll get there but it’ll be really damn tiring and exhausting.

we all have the means to build social movements, companies or sue if we feel that there’s something terrible going on

That's nonsensical. We all have the potential to do such things at some point in our lives, but that is not at all the same as having the means.

Just always saying ‘it’s the elite’ and then sitting it out seems really easy to me.

So there are some people trying to build an anti-elite social movement of the sort you just said anyone had the means to build, yet you're saying they don't crave justice badly enough. I'm getting the impression that you're just saying you don't want to get onboard with anything unless it's already at the threshold of success.

Look I’m trying to build alternatives and help struggling social movements. I just don’t agree that the analysis of “it’s the elite, dumbass” is sufficiently clear eyed.

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