[ramesh31]

>So when will the music stop? Seems like it should've been "yesterday," but what's the argument for it to continue playing for the foreseeable future? The great wealth transfer? AI efficiency/productivity gains (without the vast elimination of jobs)? Something else?

They seem to have figured out that you can just simply stop caring about the needs of 90% of your population if you systematically withhold any wealth from them and concentrate it to the 10%. The plan it seems is that the economy will increasingly be driven entirely by the upper middle class and above (who are all doing better now than they ever have in history), while the rest of us are left to rot and serve their drinks and clean their homes. The future for the average North American is starting to look a lot like our southern counterparts, where the wealthy elites in the cities rule over an underclass of destitute poverty everywhere else.

[JohnFen]

Historically, this has ultimately led to revolutions.

[watwut]

Historically, it did not. What actually does lead to revolution is regime becoming weak and unable to organize. You can keep people in horrible conditions and there will be no revolution, because dissenters will get stopped long before they anywhere near organizing themselves.

It is when the powerful become the weak that revolution can happen. And it takes more then one round of it till reasonable government emerges again.

[ramesh31]

>Historically, this has ultimately led to revolutions.

Which is why they've spent the last 50 years pitting the lower classes against themselves with meaningless culture wars. In a world with F-16s, Apache helicopters, and panopticon digital surveillance, there will never be armed revolution again (nor would anyone actually want that); the only option is nonviolent resistance. But it'll never happen in the US since we have zero class solidarity, and are all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

[achierius]

Haha, funnily enough they said the same thing before 1918. They also said a bunch of Vietnamese farmers could never beat a world class military. Have faith in your fellow workers and hold on to the hope that a better world is possible.

[alephnerd]

As someone who knows people who fought that war on the other side, the vast majority were professionally trained soldiers, not Huy the illiterate rice paddy farmer who took an AK-47 and took pot shots at Americans.

There's a reason much of the older generation of Viet military and political leadership studied in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, BSSR, and RSFSR and why both the Vietnamese Army and the MPS still send their officers and leadership track personnel to train in Belarus and Russia to this day.

Heck, Russian is still an fairly popular language choice for Viet students targeting civil service or police careers.

Furthermore, a ragtag army of farmers would not have been able to fight against the PLA in 1979 or overthrow the PRC's lackeys and backed by the US in Cambodia and Laos in the 1980s-1990s.

It's also why you find so many Vietnamese in Prague, Warsaw, East Germany, Minsk, and Moscow to this day.

The fiction of "illiterate paddy farmers pushed American soldiers out" is just a salve around the reality that the US abandoned South Vietnam in order to seal the US-China deal in the early 70s that helped contain the USSR in the late 20th century.

[achierius]

Do you not think the same thing would apply in the US? If we were having serious domestic conflict there would be veterans on both sides, not to mention that other countries would certainly train officers to help their preferred side. The real point is that "technical superiority" (air power, artillery, mechanized equipment) is not on its own sufficient to win a war when the populace is opposed to the occupying military presence, and that military is not willing to totally butcher that populace.

[esseph]

Now do Afghanistan and Iraq.

[s1artibartfast]

There are similar biases there about the technological sophistication of what the Americans were up against. The image of a Taliban soldier rarely includes an engineer with a spectrum analyzer on his back to probe US jamming signals, or plasma cannon IEDs, but they were a big part of that conflict.

[estimator7292]

Sure, but this time it's not different. The play has always and forever will be to try and force most of the population into a peasant caste be removing education and welfare, as well as setting up nice circular infighting.

It will inevitably end up as it always does. Or we'll all die horribly. You know, either way.

[Freedom2]

Who is trying to remove education and welfare and how are they accomplishing it? I have high doubts people actually want those things removed, especially in a country as great as the US.

[watwut]

Conservative evangelicals want to remove public schooling and move everyone to homeschooling as much as possible.

That sort of society fits their ideological and social goals in more ways then one.

[hn_acc1]

Did you not see them firing thousands of people from the department of education and trying to fully close it (at the federal level)? They put Linda (*@&#$ McMahon (yes, from WWE wrestling) in charge of it..

[lurk2]

> be removing education and welfare

Both of these are historical anomalies; the middle class developed prior to their ever having been implemented.

[tehjoker]

As the Palestinian resistance has shown, the vietnamese, the cubans, etc it is very difficult to defeat a population that doesn't want to give in even if you have fancy toys and a huge kill ratio.

[ants_everywhere]

The Vietnamese and Cubans were funded by the Soviets trying to expand their empire. They were proxy war fighters for a nuclear power. Sure they were kind of rag tag but only because the Soviets considered all soldiers to be disposable.

[potato3732842]

The out of work tradesman going into the Fairfax VA or Berkley CA Whole Foods (IDK if either of these places have Whole Foods, but they seem like they could) in the year 2030 and dusting the avocados with anthrax won't care whether the anthrax is funded by China or Russia, just that it winds up in the lungs of the people who've run his country into the ground.

[mindslight]

With the way the FDA is going, anthrax is just going to be stocked in that middle aisle at Whole Foods.

[ants_everywhere]

While I think terrorists should care who is using them and why, that wasn't my point.

My point was that the parent comment's examples weren't of a difficult to defeat determined population. They were warlords helping imperialists establish nuclear bases so the Soviets could project power. Everything else is just a fairy tale.

They tell all sorts of fairy tales to get soldiers to march into certain death and have throughout history.

[esseph]

You drastically underestimate the damage an insurgency can do, and a reduction in force of anymore than 30% would make most units combat ineffective.

You also drastically underestimate the number of combat veterans created since 2001.

[surgical_fire]

My understanding is that historically, popular uprisings only succeed when part of the established power allows it to happen or tags along for their own reasons. This includes the military.

I would be happy to be pointed at some exception to this.

[grafmax]

I think as people get further squeezed there is only one way to go and that is mass strikes. It’s likely things have to get worse before people are forced into the only realistic option.

[Tistron]

There's been some development in crowd control, no? AI and robots will make this even better.

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