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Comment by thingswecantsay | Hacker News Reader

To respond to both you and the parent at once.

1. While dragonwriter's point is not entirely wrong, I also wouldn't say I agree either. Czar Nicholas was "prosecuted" quite rapidly after the russian revolution.

2. The problem, ithkuil, is if the population does not see any other way to effectively fix things. (System capture, pareto distributions, disenfranchisement, etc.)

As an aside, I created a new account for this vs. my normal because I've wanted to speak more openly than I can on a work-associated profile for a while now, I will be keeping this account lest anyone thinks it's astroturfing.

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I understand the _impulse_ of wanting to destroy the status quo. But it's immature reaction and it's very common in teenagers and young adults.

Most positive progress has been done via hard work, sacrifice and time; most basic rights that we all give for granted now have been achieved that way and not by violence and destructions.

Yes, there are occasional counterexamples when people had to get rid of dictators via violence, but that worked because gradual, grinding, collaborative progress under such rulers was not allowed.

What we're witnessing today is not that: we don't have a strong system that systematically represses people who have a different opinion and discuss new ideas; we have a system where people are increasingly immature and want results fast because their attention span is limited, take huge achievements for granted and are willing to burn everything down because they think it's a game and they have never lived under a civil war

Yes, murder is easy after collapse. But murder is not a fix.

That response disregards the thrust of my point, as well as the parallel to the famous quote "war is the continuation of politics by other means."

If a population does not believe they have more productive options, that is what will be left. This is often compounded when the existing powers have an easy time with murder BEFORE collapse, such that any moral prohibition would be hypocritical and self-defeating.

Let me be clear as well: I do not think Nicholas's murder "fixed" russia. I was precise in my wording, it was a form of prosecution previously unavailable to them. My point being that if things get bad enough, people care less about a long-term fix, and more about some semblance of recompense, and in some cases it may truly be the only option available to them to realize any concrete impact.

You responded to

     'It's astonishing how many people really seem to think that total collapse / destruction of a system can be an effective way for fixing things'

with

     'Czar Nicholas was "prosecuted" quite rapidly after the russian revolution.'

as the only tangible you gave. Then this spiel on the people and desire for violence.

The current system works better than any previous system for redress. In fac the regime is having to bypass the system/break the system in order to get away with what they are getting away with. Destroying the system will not put them in their place. Breaking the system in fact gives them more of what they want. More power. More ability to abuse the current environment.

Taking us back to the previous system, and putting in the hard and mundane work of keeping it working is the much better solution if people want redress, not continuous 'we just need to break it a little more because feelz/it's simpler/our political class (that we could, you know, work to get voted out) suck (and all we do is whine about it)'.

"Taking us back to the previous system, and putting in the hard and mundane work of keeping it working is the much better solution if people want redress, not continuous 'we just need to break it a little more because feelz/it's simpler/our political class (that we could, you know, work to get voted out) suck (and all we do is whine about it)'."

What, this actual system, where (even ignorign the deep violence it metes out to folks in other places) every fucking week I get to hear about how someone has been murdered by it?

It's rich to hear folks talk about "wannabe murders" out of one side of their face while ignoring long-term, violence that this system does every day.

I feel like you're not reading my whole comment vs. picking pieces, or are conflating my responses.

I explicitly said I was responding to both parents, and enumerated my response to each. (To be evenhanded, I could also have been unclear that my responses were distinct)

My response to the post you quoted was '2. The problem, ithkuil, is if the population does not see any other way to effectively fix things. (System capture, pareto distributions, disenfranchisement, etc.)'

The comment you are focusing on, regarding prosecution, was in response to Dragonwriter's earlier post regarding feasibility of prosecution after collapse.

Your final statement implies that you took my statement directed entirely at the US system vs. at a generalized statement (Warning?) on when people see revolution as a legitimate option.

I chewed over and decided to not touch too much more on the US aspect because I think it distracts from the original point I was trying to make, but I will say statements such as: 'The current system works better than any previous system for redress' are apt to my initial warning, as the US is clearly in a period of local retreat, (both as I think you touch on elsewhere in your comment, and not for the first time in history, to be clear) especially if the redress you seek is against political or white-collar crimes, and addressing that requires urgency, awareness, and action, including Voting, as you say, that I worry I don't see with the proactivity that is needed.

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