Comment by rfnslyr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rfnslyr | Hacker News Reader

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There's just no way to do it from the bottom. All these protests, all this (sl)activism, it doesn't do anything.

You either need to dedicate your life to politics and get into the club and start working from the inside, and pray some holy fucking deity that there are others like you, or nothing will change.

Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening.

There isn't enough time in the day to concern yourself with shit that matters. Nobody wants to come home after working 8 hours with a two hour commute to dip their head into politics, just to even begin to know what's happening.

Where do you go? The mainstream media? Where do you inform yourself?

The reality is people just want to go home, flick the TV on, spend some time with the kids, and maybe if they're lucky, devote a few extra hours to a hobby every week. This scenario occurs in the poor, it occurs in the rich.

It takes a very very special type of person to run a country. You need people who are basically insane. Who have no problem getting up every day and just doing that one thing they do, all day, every day. That isn't 99% of the population. If the top tier of our government is run by similar people at the bottom, we're screwed.

> Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening.

I always find this sentiment (or various forms of "wiping the slate clean") to be quite amusing. It is historically more likely for a society to be less free after violent revolution than the opposite. Radicals who believe in a cause strongly enough to engage in revolution also tend to be ideologues who, once in power, want to remake society in the mold of their own viewpoint.

The historically successful revolutions have been conservative ones. For example, the Glorious Revolution in which Parliament asserted its supremacy over the King of England. In another example, modern democratic Spain arose with the restoration of the monarchy!

World War I and II were settled over some whiskey and a game of poker right?

It's difficult to objectively say whether violent revolt works, because every single revolt has been in a very different context then the next.

The amount of people, artillery, the strength of the opposition, the cause, the location, the current government, the time.

You can't say whether a violent revolt is the way to go or whether it's not the way to go. It's not a black and white issue at all.

If my brothers and sisters see that giving up their lives for our country is a necessity, then I will dedicate my life and fight along side them.

It hasn't gotten bad yet, the moment it starts to really affect your day to day life, people will do something. Right now, to most people, if their instragrams and facebooks work they don't care.

> World War I and II were settled over some whiskey and a game of poker right?

It's interesting that you mention that, because at the meta level World War I and II were Germany's attempt to violently overthrow the status quo in Europe (which had long tried to maintain Germany as a divided non-power). The revolution failed and the status quo won.

> It's difficult to objectively say whether violent revolt works, because every single revolt has been in a very different context then the next.

Sure, but you can see patterns. From France to China to Russia to Afghanistan, etc, etc, violent internal revolutions are more likely to result in oppression than freedom.

Wiping the slate clean also means repeating the same mistakes. Actually I strongly prefer pragmatic and strong ideology free, realpolitik playing USA than the current state where the US is ... entangled in some mix of ideology and interest that ensure that anything will be done half assed.

> Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening.

Nor I, and God be thanked for it! The trouble with "severe violent revolt" is that it includes no guarantee that the people on the wrong end of the "severe violence" are the same ones whom you think should be. Indeed, there's not even a guarantee that the people on the wrong end of the "severe violence" won't include you. Escalation of commitment can be ugly enough as it applies to individuals and small groups; do you really want to see its effect on the national scale?

That said, you're not quite right to say "it doesn't do anything". Political activism, as it is currently conceived and undertaken in the United States, serves a useful social purpose as an in-group/out-group marker, and I gather that, given sufficient youth and sex appeal, it can be an excellent means of finding pleasant and willing bedmates. Either by itself would suffice as a reason for the young and energetic to involve themselves in what goes by the name of activism; both together make such involvement nigh irresistible.

If you want long-term results, the bottom is the place to do it from. Popular culture and social taboos are pretty much the only way to influence a power structure that's not interested in being influenced.

In 2014, there simply isn't any way a lawmaker or bureaucrat could start a program aimed at punching babies (for example). Legal or not, sensible or not, it would never pass because that's not something you do. Likewise: If people really valued liberty and there was social pressure to support it, there would never be mass spying even if in theory it were legal—because no one would propose it, no one would support it, and no one would associate with anyone who did.

> It takes a very very special type of person to run a country. You need people who are basically insane.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Bc1LAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA279&lpg=P...

"She [Thatcher] had no hobbies, no hinterland, and no close friends with 'an old shoe' quality of comfortable familiarity. Recharging her batteries was a practice she had never heard of."

How do you think that movements to legalize marijuana or the increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage work? These were bottom-up political movements.

Legalizing a plant versus fixing the political system are two completely different devils. Existing in the same "realm" hardly compares the two.

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