Complaining on social media is fine, but that won't solve the problem.
As a European, I'm shocked at how complacent the public has been. I've lived in France and people do global strikes and widespread civil unrest for a change of retirement law. Yet in the US a dictatorship emerges and you have small demonstrations here and there and spicy comments on social media. That won't change things.
People that only care about themselves or their racial group are a curse upon society.
It constantly astonishes me how blatantly racist some of the people in the U.S. are. How do they not get punched in the face?
Guns and pre-segregating their social circle.
Be careful about assuming that we are all tolerating and enabling their behavior. That's not true as a blanket statement.
This US slip into authoritarianism should cause us all to reconsider history too. This is the wealthiest country in the world, so economic trouble is clearly not required, and it gives lie to the notion that the US had some kind of unique structural defense against authoritarianism - maybe there is no defense, and this is inevitable.
See: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ See: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
One of the primary reasons Trump won the election is that the Democrats were hailing the high-level economic numbers as a big success, but the average person wasn't really feeling it. Being told that things are going great when they're suffering put many people off voting and caused others to vote against the incumbent party in hopes of a change.
Unfortunately for the masses, the Republican party has largely been responsible for the current wealth inequality through repeated tax cuts disproportionately affecting the wealthy and attacks on worker representation over the last half century. Though, to be fair, despite their rhetoric, the Democratic party has generally been complicit, as they are also owned and operated by moneyed interests. Citizens United was probably the final nail in the coffin containing any hope to turn things around.
That they (and you) don't believe this to be the case is important and interesting. But it's not true.
[1] Maybe not for that ←long once the Q2/Q3 results show up with the tariff impact and the layoff start
[2] Anyone with a broad enough sampling I guess. There are always tiny states with skewed statistics.
And I guess it does represent such a truth, but it's a great truth about universal delusion at the end of an empire, or something else. It's not about wealth. It's not.
Totally agree with you, don't know why so many downvotes. But important point is wealth is never absolute, but comparative. And that's where inequality comes into play. Almost all revolutions happen because of inequality.
I've met Silicon Valley multi-millionaires why cried they are poor and how those damn billionaires gentrifying them from their lovely neighborhoods.
I'm against forced equalization of incomes, but on the long run that's what keeps the system stable. Unless you are Norway, of course, where people strongly believe equalization is good, and post everyone's compensation on public (well, taxes, but it's easy to get comp from taxes).
UPDATE: so the metric we should look at is Gini index, not GDP or PPP.
I mean, think about it: there have always been phenomenally wealthy people. If every billionaire in the US had their net worth cut by 50%, instantly, that would fix the "Gini index" you think we should be looking at.
But would their lifestyles change? Would anyone but the billionaires even notice? If you stop a person on the street and ask "Is it fair that Bill Gates is worth $50B dollars?", they're going to say "no", right? That's way too much money. Except, of course, that Gates is worth twice that and the number is something that you argue should be "fair".
No, it's not numbers. It's irrational delusion fed by fear and anger and click-chasing from everywhere across the media landscape. But. It's. Wrong. And someone needs to start telling people that.
Because at this point our shared delusion is causing a trade war that is going to make all of us (literally, all of humanity) poorer.
When it comes to luxury goods, sure - things like TVs and computers are cheaper than they ever have been, both relative to wealth and even in absolute terms.
However, when you look at necessities like housing, healthcare, and I dare say education, you'll notice that all have far outpaced inflation and even wage growth.
See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
See: https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/
See: https://www.statista.com/statistics/631987/percent-of-income...
See: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/18/cost-of-coll...
See: https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-costs-over-tim...
See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/07/24/pric...
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As a personal anecdote - my father did much the same job I do, and yet while he was taking care of a full family of four, I can't say that I feel any better off despite being single and not regularly vacationing like I did growing up.
As far as I can tell - I'm not alone. If anything, I'm uniquely blessed relative to my peers due to my tech background. We have an entire generation putting off family building because stagnant wages coupled with high student loan debt and housing prices cause many to perceive they are hardly getting by. Nearly half of all adults live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Sure, the headlines try to imply it. Which is why you believe something wrong. But it's still wrong, and the data don't say what you think they say.
> As a personal anecdote - my father did much the same job I do, and yet while he was taking care of a full family of four
This part is actually true. White Men have fallen off the pace relative to what they expected to earn generations ago. But that's not society getting poorer, it's the disadvantaged finally being allowed to catch up.
He was elected to bring prices and inflation down; that’s what he campaigned on! He lied at that time and people trusted in his lies. He have no idea what he can do to bring prices and inflation down! Marketing could be his expertise, but when it comes to performing duties of the President, he’s super dumb.
"I voted for the Party because I supported their infrastructure plan, I had no idea where all of those trains would be going" kind of feel.
And the sad thing is, it will work because our entire framework of subjective truth and reality is built on the very technologies they already use to reprogram us and revise history. Trump was always an honest man. We were always at war with Canada. It was always about egg prices.
He put a fair bit of effort in telling people he wasn't going to do most of this stuff. It was always clear that he was lying, but lots of people believed him and are now very surprised.
There have been large, growing, and recurring protests.
> Yet in the US a dictatorship emerges and you have small demonstrations here and there
They aren't small. (They aren't well covered by the media, but the media is actively part of the problem.)
> that won't change things.
The social infrastructure and culture around which things like general strikes and more significant actions occur does not exist in the United States. The current and growing protest movement (and the networking and community building go on around and behind it) is how that infrastructure gets built. So, I disagree, the things you are saying won't change it are absolutely indispensable to building the capacity for the kind of things that can change it, assuming that it continues to develop in a way that cannot be constrained effectively by more regular political means such as the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections.
On the Maidan revolution of Ukraine:
The Maidan was a revolt against произвол (pronounced: preez-vol), an idea of arbitrariness tinged with tyranny, helplessness in the face of power, the feeling that the powers that be can do whatever they want to you, and you are helpless, that you are being treated as a plaything, as a thing and not as a human being, as an object and not as a subject, and the Maidan became a revolt against произвол, it became an insistence on being treated as a person and not as a thing, as a subject not as an object, and they began to call themselves on the Maidan the revolution of dignity. The Making of Modern Ukraine: Maidan and Self-Understanding, Guest Lecturer: Marci Shore -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg_CLI3xY58&list=PLh9mgdi4rN...
In November 2013 Ukraine was expected to sign a long-anticipated association agreement with the European Union. At the eleventh hour, on 21 November 2013, Yanukovych refused.
The disappointment was especially crushing for students, who felt as if their future had vanished; Europe would be closed to them. That evening a thirty-two-year-old Ukrainian journalist from Kabul named Mustafa Nayyem wrote in Russian on his Facebook page:
Come on, let’s get serious.
Who is ready to go out to the Maidan by midnight tonight? ‘Likes’ don’t count.
I showed up to the first protest of my entire life on April 5th. This Saturday, April 19th, everyone here should show up, too.
Upvotes don't count.
A couple of months later not just violence. I know someone who was at the Maidan helping the wounded. That guy is mostly neutral and not pro West or whatnot, he just talked about what he saw and that included a few protesters fatally shot by paid agents (I didn't know about that until I talked to him). Clearly even that didn't work when people are motivated enough.
I don't know whether that would work in America. The Vegas shooter killed 60 and injured several hundred people, to zero political effect. BLM riots incurred a lot of injuries but very few actual deaths. I suspect Amerimaidan would go very badly and be easily demonized in the media.
It was so traumatic for America's top military advisor that he made a major point to those under him that they swore an oath to the constitution and not a "wannabe dictator."
Many police departments have enacted various reforms, hard to tell if they have been enacted in good faith.
The Vegas shooter is business as usual and generally considered a societal problem. The BLM protests were different and seen as caused/provoked by the administration at the time.
As far as the grim part... Unfortunately that's the way power works. Power will not be challenged without putting up a fight.
If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny. Timothy Snyder - On Tyranny.