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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.

Honestly, the internet has made folks so lazy. It's very ironic that the most "revolutionary" act taken recently (January 6) was actually done by the far-right. Yeah: if you believe in something, you need to actually get out of the basement, grab a gun, and storm the Capitol. And if you take it all the way, a lot of people are going to die. That's how revolution works. Unless we're all LARPing?

But Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution, so for people that are, or have been, actual dissidents (think Arab Spring, or IRA, or ETA, or whatever), this is all just a big meme.

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If everyone is so comfortable, what do we need a revolution for? Wasn't that the goal of civilization? If someone doesn't like civilization, why try to bring it down? There's plenty of places on earth you can go to live without it.

It sounds like you don’t know what it means to have your ancestors fighting to death for freedom and rights, being enslaved in work camps…

The fight is to never get to this situation again and to keep the rights people died for you to have.

You act like things are binary “comfort” vs “horrible life”. It’s not like Fascism grows slowly and then suddenly you are locked.

I agree we should all be fighting to keep what we have, which is pretty good. But that sounds like the opposite of a revolution to me.

Most people are comfortable, but not everyone. At least, comfortable in the sense that they are not willing to die for their country/people at the moment, and aren't personally affected by most of the bad things their government does. In the US at least, things like high food/gas prices or unemployment/healthcare issues are just one of many other issues, and aren't causing most people so much pain that they are willing to pick up a weapon and give up their lives. Or even peacefully protest.

People that had enough money that they weren't paying attention to the price of groceries before Trump, probably still don't care all that much now. I might eat out less, but that's not worth abandoning my family or dying over to me.

It takes 3.5% of the population to effect change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule

The kind of problems you're describing certainly don't sound like things you should "pick up a weapon and give up your life" for, so this doesn't seem to add an argument in favour of "revolution".

Right, and unless enough people are personally affected, I don't see there being one.

I think this was an inevitable outcome of western culture's individualism being inherently selfish.

> Honestly, the internet has made folks so lazy.

Or maybe people realize that revolutions, and the civil war that almost always ensue, are a very high price to pay, for a very uncertain reward.

Talking about the Arab spring, look what it lead to:

- Egypt and Tunisia are again being lead by a dictator, it's just a younger one.

- Libya is destroyed, lacks leadership and conflict could resume any day should Haftar decide he doesn't like the result of the upcoming (but long postponed) elections.

- Syria has suffered the worst civil war of the decade and the situation is still very brittle. It looks like Jolani could bring redemption to Syria, but with the Israeli playing around with fire it could also collapse any day. And that's assuming Jolani doesn't turn into a dictator himself: we're not talking about someone with a good track record of honoring his promises (which is a good thing when the promise is made to ISIS or Al Qaeda, but still).

Jan 6, didn't work, not entirely sure why you bring this up as a blueprint for anyone. It was an actual LARP and as Bruno Macaes wrote resembled a bunch of people making it to the end of a videogame, then running around confused in costumes and going for a drink.

What did work for them was pouring money into the election system and party apparatus, media, the courts and then taking control over politics

What worked was getting people stirred up to the point that some would turn to violence. Even now a majority of their party believe they were justified.

That helped them take control of politics. And so that tactic will surely turn people to violence again. The violence itself may not be effective but the level of outrage is.

> Jan 6, didn't work, not entirely sure why you bring this up as a blueprint for anyone.

Might want to let the Democrats know that. According to them the government was >this< close to being overthrown. Which is funny, because if anyone truly believes that, we don't stand a chance against pretty much any country on earth.

bro if 2k people broke into work looking for you, it would probably be something you think about a whole lot

> ~~2k~~ 250 unarmed people ~~broke into work~~ mysteriously allowed in are looking for you, while dozens of trained armed police officers surround you, it would probably be something you think about a whole lot

FTFY

What happened to Brian Sicknick?

Officer Sicknick did not die from being hit by a fire extinguisher because that never happened <https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brian-sicknick-fire-exting...>. He died of a stroke which the autopsy found no connection with the riot <https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/19/brian-sickn...>.

The one person who died violently was one of the rioters, an unarmed woman who was shot by Capitol Police. Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.

> Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.

At that rate, how many can even be left by now?

An unarmed woman climbing through a smashed window with a capital police officer on the other side, sidearm drawn, warning her not to advance, in the middle of a crowd storming the capitol building while a gallows stood outside, waiting for the crowd to bring out a member of congress or the Vice President.

> * U.S. representative Markwayne Mullin [currently head of DHS], a witness to Babbitt's attempted breach, said that Byrd "didn't have a choice" but to shoot, and that his action "saved people's lives".* [0]

The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ashli_Babbitt

>The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.

I do not disagree with this at all. I only mentioned her death as contrast to the usual rhetoric of how the mob at the Capitol "killed" Officer Sicknick and others (who are always mysteriously unnamed).

It's hard to reconcile a conspiracy theory that protestors were allowed to storm the Capitol with the fact that Ashli Babbitt was shot on video for refusing calls to stop breaching a barricade.

Police and security trying to manage a dynamic situation with minimum loss of life by not immediately gunning down quasi-violent crowd is a more reasonable conclusion.

Regardless, 100% of which is Trump's fault for incitement.

alright but the point still stands? people were yelling out names carrying zipties... they broke windows hit police officers and a woman was killed while crawling through a broken window?

if that happened to me at work it would be something I talked about all the time, there are a thousand ways it could have gotten even worse

I don't know a single prominent Democrat who thought they had a chance of succeeding, just that they even tried was enough for them to be unpatriotic cultists

Ya'll don't realize what the actual plan was. It wasn't to use the mob to overthrow the government, it was to use the mob to delay the certification of the vote. Which they did, but it wasn't for long enough. They were going to overthrow the Constitution by just deciding for themselves they won despite the votes. And they're in power again, so they're very likely going to do exactly that next time.

The whole plan after the judicial effort failed (using the courts to overturn the vote outcome) and the individual shakedowns failed (calling up governors and demanding they change the vote outcome) was to pressure senators to throw out the state certificates, kick them back to the states, and have the states decide that Trump won instead. They had a whole slate of fraudulent shadow certificates with Trump as the winner ready for Senators to certify. That 10000% would have worked because there are more red states than blue, so they would have just picked Trump over Biden.

But Pence refused to go along with the plan. So the mob was the last ditch effort to convince the senators. Its purpose was not to kill the senators but to delay the vote to give more time to affect the influence campaign. So that plan was also very very close to working because they did delay the vote. It only didn't work because Mitch McConnell refused to end the session and kept everyone around to complete the certification of the vote on January 7. But the fact that it happened on January 7 means that the plan very nearly worked.

You need to look at J6 as a buffer overflow attack. There are no instructions for what to do if the J6 vote is disrupted by a mob, the hope was that but putting the country in that illegal state would allow for arbitrary instructions to be executed.

Then you weren't paying attention. Watch the videos of the mob inside the building. If they hadn't been led away from the senate chambers by capitol police [1], we'd be having a very different conversation right now. Did you think the American History X extras leading the pack were just there to see the sights? Come on, man.

[1] https://lawandcrime.com/2020-election/absolute-hero-capitol-...

What conversation do you think we would be having? Would we be debating the laws that January 6 attendees are passing in the chambers? What alternate outcome do you think was likely, or even possible?

Perform your own trivial extrapolation and cut out the sealioning nonsense.

The only people capable of overthrowing the government like that are white conservatives. Anyone else would have been gunned down on the approach.

Jan 6 didn't work, but it could have worked. Many similar events have worked before. Jan 6 was the only time people tried, that was the point.

I would argue Jan 6 was as larpin as it gets, but I also know how being teargassed feels

Jan 6 was an attempt to convince the American public that the 2020 election was stolen, and to keep Trump in power. Today, more people believe the 2020 election was stolen than on January 7th, Trump is in power despite causing an insurrection, and all the J6 insurrectionists have been pardoned. They’re even setting up to pay them “restitution” out of your pocket.

You can be the judge as to whether it succeeded or victory was deferred, but violence definitely won in the end.

It depends on what you count as "revolutionary". There have been at least two high-profile politically motivated murders in the US after that.

> the only option is to cave

Or sue, or organize and protest, or win the next election. Not every government problem warrants revolution, and not needing to revolt is not a failing of the people.

> Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution

A better read is that the situation for most Americans and "Westerners" whatever that means, is that things are good enough that the people do not see value in revolution, or they are able to adjust the government's course enough through elections, redress, courts and other political feedback mechanisms.

> you need to actually get out of the basement, grab a gun, and storm the Capitol.

This is not what happened on J6, and is specifically why it was not an insurrection.

They were terrorists. Every single participant in J6 was a terrorist and deserves the full fury of the United States of America to treat them as such. They were also attempting to assassinate the VP. 1500+ terrorist and failed assassination attempts.

It's a shame we went so light on them. Care bear punishment. Sweetheart deals, and then pardoned by a man that literally, factually, supports terrorism against the USA and supporting the attempted assassination of his VP.

Geronimo.

"I broke everything like a child and now everything is worse" is not a revolution. It's being a useful idiot

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