[MikeTaylor]

> When peaceful Occupie Wall Street protestors were brutalized at scale, I think the whole world noticed, and this kind of peaceful mass protest is probably what the world elites fear the most.

Yes, it was great how that incident ushered in a new age of shared economic prosperity and political rationality.

[mark_l_watson]

Mike, sarcasm aside, I really think that it helped. Have we seen as progress as we want? Of course not, but that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t try. Agree?

[Synaesthesia]

Absolutely. Being passive is exactly what people in power want us to do. It's not going to be an easy struggle.

[secondaryacct]

You simplify the problem. You're in power, they're in money. You dont want power that you already have, what you want is to win, and you'll do whatever it takes, even pretending you want to build a new world where "everyone" is equal, especially you.

Im not targeting you, mind you, but this idea that there are mysterious others in situation of power robbing us of our due.

There are no rule to life, nor any meaning. You go where you want and do what you want. Dont kid yourself into believing your ideal is shared in absolute by most people.

I just say that because you sound a bit like an idealist drinking his own koolaid :p

[jjj123]

Let’s also not kid ourselves that belief in the status quo is shared across a majority of people.

70% of people in the US support Medicare For All across all political lines [1], but leadership across both parties essentially ignored the proposal as some kind of radical pipe dream. Why is that? It’s simple, M4A costs money and would decimate the health insurance industry. Donors to both parties don’t want to pay more in taxes or see their investments drop, so it’s off the table. If we had something resembling democracy, we would have single payer healthcare by now.

What we have now is a minority of powerful (moneyed) people who are making decisions for everyone based on their own incentives. What people like myself want is a more democratic distribution of this power.

So it’s not necessarily that activists want to force some communist utopia on everyone, but we want to change the system so that we (the people) can actually decide for ourselves what we want.

[1] https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/494602-pol...

[babyblueblanket]

My understanding is that this is significantly more controversial if it involves removing private or employer-provided healthcare. A "public option" is something the current president, Biden, supported. And he's the president, so obviously not a pipe dream.

[indigochill]

I think the question behind the sarcasm is really "Did Occupy Wall Street actually do anything?" Sure, it made the news, but was there any actual lasting progress from it at all? Admittedly I didn't follow it closely so I don't feel qualified to answer that.

For my part, I don't believe protests (in the US) accomplish anything. They could if it was possible to apply pressure on our politicians, but the question there is is politics the actual determining factor for whether a politician gets elects? Some would argue it's really money (my personal argument is it's name recognition achieved primarily through clever media usage, as seen with FDR on radio, Kennedy on TV, Obama on social media, and Trump on outrage media, but money's always a key component of that). If that's the case, then politics doesn't actually matter, it's all about amassing enough money to get your preferred politician into office.