[mc32]

Most people will not want social unrest. Social unrest leads to chaos and unpredictability.

A better alternative is the less sexy but more productive political action obviously with buy in from the power brokers.

Unrest is what happens in Venezuela or Yemen, etc. it doesn’t always have to be like that as those are extreme; never the less unrest is a medicine that is in most instances worse than the disease.

[crispyambulance]

> A better alternative is the less sexy but more productive political action obviously with buy in from the power brokers.

That's the first thing that will be tried, but to be truly successful the "buy in" needs to happen equally as much from the people that are on the verge of picking up pitchforks. It also needs to be an authentic political action. Unfortunately our politics in the USA has gone into profound dysfunction. Something ugly is going to happen, I think. I don't know when, but it's been on the way for quite some time. That guy in the oval office is just a symptom of a really deep problem.

> Unrest is what happens in Venezuela or Yemen, etc

Not necessarily!

There are a number of really bad things that precede unrest, usually a collapse of systems that people rely on. The folks in Venezuela didn't want unrest either, but when your currency becomes worthless within a span of a couple years... bad things are going to happen.

[_bxg1]

Yes, this exactly. These problems are absolutely possible to solve through political action. But our leaders have had ample opportunities, spread out over more than a decade, to do so. And they've sent a clear signal that they simply won't.

[DethNinja]

Actually I believe they sent a clear message that they want problems to get even worse. It is not even keeping the status quo at same level, at the face of this pandemic almost all world governments decisively pursued enriching the 1%.

I only hope more people woke up to this fact and form a critical mass but I doubt it.

[mc32]

You can read if that way. What I see is them propping up business so that there are actual jobs to go back to once things stabilize.

It does little good to send people thousands of dollars if when that dries up, and it would, there are no above board jobs to go back to.

[lotsofpulp]

How nice of the governments to help businesses afford to eat instead of people.

There is no reason assistance to people has to go through business. The reason governments do that is because leaders own equity in the current hierarchy and definitely don’t want to disturb that by giving the lower classes leverage to demand better terms.

[tekknik]

Do you not understand that if there are not jobs to go back to there will be no eating tomorrow either? If businesses start to go under, and this cascades as it usually does, we could be seeing serious recession, or even economic failure? What do we do about food then? Also what happened to the economic stimulus checks and unemployment system? The systems are definitely taxed but that only shows you how big we’re getting hit atm.

[mc32]

If businesses employed robots you’d have a point. But most today provide people gainful employment. No businesses left means no one to hire you.

[jazzyk]

By buying up junk bonds the government props up irresponsible, mismanaged companies, which possibly spent money on stock buybacks and bonuses for executives, instead of product/service development.

The way to go is to protect workers during transition from one job to another by providing them with decent unemployment benefits, training, etc., not bail out lousy executives over and over.

[jessaustin]

When people die, they're dead. When businesses die, their assets are sold to better businesses and their former employees are hired by better businesses.

I swear I have yet to meet a capitalist who actually believes in "capitalism"...

[_bxg1]

I see that motion as the status quo. The velocity, maybe even the acceleration, towards enriching the 1% is the status quo. This is how things will continue to go if people leave the system alone, pandemic or not.

[base698]

Unrest starts when people had and lost. The people who were able to afford a BMW last year find themselves homeless this year.

True Believer has lots of insight into the circumstances than lead to unrest.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer

[mc32]

I think it starts when people have nothing left to lose. There’s no hope to lose, there’s no illusion left.

On the other hand, some societies can descend quite a bit and be okay with going into more or less survival mode: witness Russia.

[munificent]

Not "nothing less", but just less to lose than to gain. People are willing to gamble on a roll of the dice when the upside is larger than the downside.

[mc32]

But the risks for that upside can be pretty large. You cannot predict how things turn out: Mensheviks vs bolsheviks.

[int_19h]

Russia had a lot of political unrest back in the 90s, when it was at the bottom of its descent. It elected extremist parties to parliament - commies had the majority for how long? - and street politics was also... messy at times. I remember growing up in that period, and back then it would have been entirely unsurprising to wake up one day to see ballet on TV where news are supposed to be.

So I wouldn't call it a good example of being okay. It made it through that political unrest without blowing up as a whole (but with plenty of local crises, like Chechnya)... but it was not smooth sailing at all.

[asdff]

Not even 3 decades ago all it took was a jury verdict for anarchy and looting to sweep across LA, requiring the national guard to put down the unrest. People were breaking into stores to steal diapers. What will be the breaking point this time around?

[ancientworldnow]

This intentionally ignores 100 years of oppression and institutional racism that was the actual powder keg. The verdict was just the striking of the tinder.

The exploding inequality and continuous safety net collapse in the united states could very well be a similar powder keg waiting for a match.

[asdff]

Exactly. That powder keg never went away after Rodney King. It's always been here, institutional racism exists to this day. Systemic inequality can only be tolerated so long, and patience runs thin when money runs out.

[mc32]

We’ve had those flare ups before. Watts riots, early 1900s labor riots and repression.

They’ve had them in France, they’ve had them elsewhere. That’s a kind of unrest but not the kind I think we’re talking about.

I think what we’re talking about is the kind that results in overturning of the power structure. I don’t think we’re near that. I think 99.9% of the people do not want that outside of people on the extreme left and extreme right, interestingly for quite different reasons.

[jessaustin]

Unrest is what happens in Venezuela or Yemen, etc.

As Thucydides wrote, the tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. "Unrest" in Latin America is caused by USA's off-the-leash unsupervised services. Venezuela's government is taking better care of its citizens than our government is taking of us, in this current health emergency. This despite the crippling sanctions and attempted coups d'état we've perpetrated against them. Don't believe the war media; I recommend The Grayzone. [0]

Although, of course, for the last year or so not even the war media attempts to defend what we're doing in Yemen.

[0] https://thegrayzone.com/

[_iyig]

>Venezuela's government is taking better care of its citizens than our government is taking of us, in this current health emergency.

I've seen nothing to corroborate this.

>Don't believe the war media; I recommend The Grayzone.

Here's a video from last year of Grayzone founder Max Blumenthal cheerfully receiving honors from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has ruled that country by violence and decree since 2015:

https://twitter.com/NicolasMaduro/status/1156588153945427970

I do trust The Grayzone to have an anti-U.S. editorial position. I do not trust them to be objective.

[jessaustin]

Venezuela is the watched pot: it should have boiled by now! Venezuelans haven't violently overthrown Maduro because they mostly consent to the results of two somewhat-democratic elections. He lets his supposed "rival" Juan Guaido prance about the country unmolested so all Venezuelans can laugh at the impotence of CIA. With continued sanctions and the price of oil at long-time lows, "natural" pressure on Maduro should be running hot. Instead, that same low price obliterates CIA's theoretical incentive to install a subservient petrostate. They've redeployed their ratfuckers to Nicaragua.

If a USA president had been subject to massive bias from nearly every news media corporation, he might be tempted to honor an independent news outlet that attempted to report with objectivity. Oh, wait... that actually happened this year, at the "State of the Union" speech.

When we fall into the trap of running to wikipedia every time we're confused by world events, we can't be surprised that the war media continues to lead us around by the nose. If we step back and see the pattern, we begin to discount every story that leads us closer to yet another stupid war. Every day this month, it has been obvious to non-Americans how deficient our system is. Every other nation on earth has responded more reasonably and more effectively to this virus. Venezuela is among those nations.

[_iyig]

>Venezuela is the watched pot: it should have boiled by now!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_refugee_crisis

[q92z8oeif]

> Unrest is what happens in Venezuela or Yemen, etc

Usually unrest is not decided so naively like that.

For example, you can organize and take political action just fine, but your larger encumbered opponent might want to start unrest for you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair#May_Day_parad...

[_iyig]

>A better alternative is the less sexy but more productive political action obviously with buy in from the power brokers.

This has been tried for many years with little result. People in my social circles have grown fed-up and tired with the U.S. political system, especially those who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 only to watch entrenched power-brokers deny him the candidacy. Some allege similar interference in 2020 (see podcast with former Bernie staffers):

https://soundcloud.com/seeking-derangements/sd7-the-bernie-p...

>unrest is a medicine that is in most instances worse than the disease.

Millions of increasingly desperate and frustrated Americans may not be able to agree with you. People are never purely rational actors, and beat-down emotional people are among the least rational. The LA Riot's immediate outcome was arguably worse than its proximate cause, but nevertheless people rioted.