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That’s assuming a French Revolution style uprising, which is probably unrealistic. What is very realistic, however, is an increase in “lone wolf” terrorist atta

That’s assuming a French Revolution style uprising, which is probably unrealistic. What is very realistic, however, is an increase in “lone wolf” terrorist attacks targeted at rich and/or powerful people. You don’t need a thousand people rolling a guillotine down the street when one person with an off-the-shelf drone could inflict just as much damage. Sure the police would find them quick, but one thing the American military is really bad at is fighting an enemy that doesn’t dress in military gear and shoot back with military weapons in military formation. We’ve seen it recently, where a single man shut down CNN and I think some other news stations just mailing poorly-made bombs to the media and politicians. We’ve seen it decades ago with Oklahoma City. Could a Western population stand up against their government in a real fight? No. Could they inflect the same amount of damage without actually having to stand and fight? We’ve seen it before.

dsfyu404ed 6y ago
Nobody ever won a war of occupation without local support. I have no doubt the US population could stand up to it's government but with the current levels of polarization I don't think that's a realistic scenario.
magicsmoke 6y ago
Individual assassinations don't change the system. How many rich people do you think have to be assassinated for the economic system that allows accumulated wealth inequality of this scale to change? Would killing Bill Gates or Warren Buffet somehow magically reconfigure how American society works? It's much harder to kill a system than it is to kill individual people. Like you hinted at, the American military has had a grand old time trying to kill off radical islam.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  How many rich people need to be assassinated to change the balance? Looks like it's about 3: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/11/08/billionaires-compared-rest-us-numbers/844720001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/11/08/billionaires... In any case, assassination is probably not the most effective means of wealth redistribution.
  - mcv 6y ago
    Just reverting the tax cuts for the wealthy would already do a lot of good. I also think a steep inheritance tax for inheritances over a certain amount (1 million? 10 million?, 100 million?) to preventing these concentrations of wealth from creating a new aristocracy. But 3 billionaires owning more than the bottom half of the country doesn't have to mean if the bottom half owns nothing: >> "Their $264.1 billion in holdings outstrips the combined net worth of an estimated 160 million people" Simply redistributing that would mean that everybody in the bottom half gets $1600. That's not going to fix poverty. It only underscores just how little that bottom half really has.
    - jusssi 6y ago
      The problem with high inheritance tax is that it only hurts the rich when it catches them off guard. In otherwise free economy there are so many legal ways to circumvent inheritance tax for the lowest rate tax that is available.
      - mcv 6y ago
        That's true. My point is just that inheriting massive fortunes is a problem because it keeps wealth concentrated across generations. But there are so many loopholes around inheritance that it's not trivial to address this.
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      Hypothetically, if assassinating Gates, Buffett, and Bezos were a viable method of wealth redistribution, I don't think the idea would be to give everyone $1600. It would probably be more like "we're going to look at the median and top everybody up to that level."
      - mcv 6y ago
        I'm just looking at what the bottom half of the population gets. There's on average $1600 per person available. And that's apparently also what the average person in the bottom half already has, since together they apparently own as much as these three billionaires. So that means if you completely equalize the wealth of the bottom 50% of the population after redistributing the wealth of these billionaires, the average person in that bottom half will still only have $3200. So maybe they can get their car fixed, but they still can't send their kids to college.
- eanzenberg 6y ago
  First, the military did eventually do quite well vs. isis, once proper resources were directed. Second, look at history to tell you what will happen if the rich get disappeared. This happened in many communist nations. Doctors, lawyers, professors, bankers, wealthy landowners were mostly murdered and their wealth stolen from them. Did it work well for those nations? Are they thriving today?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    France did quite well after killing the aristocracy. Most 'communist' nations on the other hand did a lot more than kill the rich and take their wealth. Compared to the vast economic, social and political changes that happened in Soviet Russia or China etc., it seems that the part about what happened to the rich is unlikely to be very consequential in its impact.
    - TomMarius 6y ago
      Huh? How can you just write off the unrealized potential like this?
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  > Individual assassinations don't change the system. Franz Ferdinand’s assassination changed a whole lot of systems.
  - mcv 6y ago
    It was the spark that ignited the fire, but the kindling was already there. It probably still would have happened without his assassination, though possible a few years later.
    - lithos 6y ago
      There's also plenty of kindling in the world today. Plenty of current top players and upcoming top players butting heads(China and Turkey being the most news worthy to Americans), plenty of players that are sour about past/present conditions (Britain with Brexit, Germany/France over their influence in the EU), and players that are seeking allies to become an upcoming top player (India being the easiest to point out).
      - mcv 6y ago
        Plenty of friction indeed, but the big difference is that (almost) nobody wants to go to war. Just before WW1, everybody was itching for another war. China definitely does not want war with the US; they want to expand economically. Nobody in the EU wants war over anything. The US has always been the most eager to go to war, but even they seem to have learned that wars are expensive and have little benefit. Russia wants to control (pieces of) their neighbours, but again without an actual war the EU or NATO. Turkey is primarily interested in crushing anything that might start to look like a Kurdish state, but also doesn't want a war with a big player. Wars today are mostly cold or proxy, and rarely direct.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    WW1 was going to happen anyway, it was just the first good excuse.
Natsu 6y ago
> We’ve seen it recently, where a single man shut down CNN and I think some other news stations just mailing poorly-made bombs to the media and politicians. That case always struck me as really odd. That guy was under surveillance the whole time and was caught in a sting operation. I think they even helped him build the devices. For what reason did they actually let him mail them? Surely, given that they were in on the entire plot, they could have simply arrested him before the devices were actually mailed. He only has to take some material step forward in terms of the plot to get arrested for conspiracy as far as the law goes. Letting those reach the mailbox seems like a major failure on their part.
- crucialfelix 6y ago
  They were rewarded with promotions, published news items celebrating the arrest and increased budgets.
tomatotomato37 6y ago
Don't forget this is also the country where multiple right-wing militias came out of the woodworks and engaged in a standoff against rangers for multiple days over a herd of fucking cattle. And then proceeded to do the whole thing over again in a month long siege over some cabin in a national park. My point being in any destabiliztion event these groups are certainly going to be active, and being that they also have the exact opposite political ethos to the average gulliotine advocate, I'm willing to bet any uprising is not going to be so simple. Think less French Revolution, and more Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia
godzillabrennus 6y ago
History repeats itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_bombing

dsfyu404ed 6y ago

Nobody ever won a war of occupation without local support. I have no doubt the US population could stand up to it's government but with the current levels of polarization I don't think that's a realistic scenario.

magicsmoke 6y ago

Individual assassinations don't change the system. How many rich people do you think have to be assassinated for the economic system that allows accumulated wealth inequality of this scale to change? Would killing Bill Gates or Warren Buffet somehow magically reconfigure how American society works? It's much harder to kill a system than it is to kill individual people. Like you hinted at, the American military has had a grand old time trying to kill off radical islam.

pmiller2 6y ago
How many rich people need to be assassinated to change the balance? Looks like it's about 3: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/11/08/billionaires-compared-rest-us-numbers/844720001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/11/08/billionaires... In any case, assassination is probably not the most effective means of wealth redistribution.
- mcv 6y ago
  Just reverting the tax cuts for the wealthy would already do a lot of good. I also think a steep inheritance tax for inheritances over a certain amount (1 million? 10 million?, 100 million?) to preventing these concentrations of wealth from creating a new aristocracy. But 3 billionaires owning more than the bottom half of the country doesn't have to mean if the bottom half owns nothing: >> "Their $264.1 billion in holdings outstrips the combined net worth of an estimated 160 million people" Simply redistributing that would mean that everybody in the bottom half gets $1600. That's not going to fix poverty. It only underscores just how little that bottom half really has.
  - jusssi 6y ago
    The problem with high inheritance tax is that it only hurts the rich when it catches them off guard. In otherwise free economy there are so many legal ways to circumvent inheritance tax for the lowest rate tax that is available.
    - mcv 6y ago
      That's true. My point is just that inheriting massive fortunes is a problem because it keeps wealth concentrated across generations. But there are so many loopholes around inheritance that it's not trivial to address this.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Hypothetically, if assassinating Gates, Buffett, and Bezos were a viable method of wealth redistribution, I don't think the idea would be to give everyone $1600. It would probably be more like "we're going to look at the median and top everybody up to that level."
    - mcv 6y ago
      I'm just looking at what the bottom half of the population gets. There's on average $1600 per person available. And that's apparently also what the average person in the bottom half already has, since together they apparently own as much as these three billionaires. So that means if you completely equalize the wealth of the bottom 50% of the population after redistributing the wealth of these billionaires, the average person in that bottom half will still only have $3200. So maybe they can get their car fixed, but they still can't send their kids to college.
eanzenberg 6y ago
First, the military did eventually do quite well vs. isis, once proper resources were directed. Second, look at history to tell you what will happen if the rich get disappeared. This happened in many communist nations. Doctors, lawyers, professors, bankers, wealthy landowners were mostly murdered and their wealth stolen from them. Did it work well for those nations? Are they thriving today?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  France did quite well after killing the aristocracy. Most 'communist' nations on the other hand did a lot more than kill the rich and take their wealth. Compared to the vast economic, social and political changes that happened in Soviet Russia or China etc., it seems that the part about what happened to the rich is unlikely to be very consequential in its impact.
  - TomMarius 6y ago
    Huh? How can you just write off the unrealized potential like this?
alasdair_ 6y ago
> Individual assassinations don't change the system. Franz Ferdinand’s assassination changed a whole lot of systems.
- mcv 6y ago
  It was the spark that ignited the fire, but the kindling was already there. It probably still would have happened without his assassination, though possible a few years later.
  - lithos 6y ago
    There's also plenty of kindling in the world today. Plenty of current top players and upcoming top players butting heads(China and Turkey being the most news worthy to Americans), plenty of players that are sour about past/present conditions (Britain with Brexit, Germany/France over their influence in the EU), and players that are seeking allies to become an upcoming top player (India being the easiest to point out).
    - mcv 6y ago
      Plenty of friction indeed, but the big difference is that (almost) nobody wants to go to war. Just before WW1, everybody was itching for another war. China definitely does not want war with the US; they want to expand economically. Nobody in the EU wants war over anything. The US has always been the most eager to go to war, but even they seem to have learned that wars are expensive and have little benefit. Russia wants to control (pieces of) their neighbours, but again without an actual war the EU or NATO. Turkey is primarily interested in crushing anything that might start to look like a Kurdish state, but also doesn't want a war with a big player. Wars today are mostly cold or proxy, and rarely direct.
- ajuc 6y ago
  WW1 was going to happen anyway, it was just the first good excuse.

Natsu 6y ago

> We’ve seen it recently, where a single man shut down CNN and I think some other news stations just mailing poorly-made bombs to the media and politicians. That case always struck me as really odd. That guy was under surveillance the whole time and was caught in a sting operation. I think they even helped him build the devices. For what reason did they actually let him mail them? Surely, given that they were in on the entire plot, they could have simply arrested him before the devices were actually mailed. He only has to take some material step forward in terms of the plot to get arrested for conspiracy as far as the law goes. Letting those reach the mailbox seems like a major failure on their part.

crucialfelix 6y ago
They were rewarded with promotions, published news items celebrating the arrest and increased budgets.

tomatotomato37 6y ago

Don't forget this is also the country where multiple right-wing militias came out of the woodworks and engaged in a standoff against rangers for multiple days over a herd of fucking cattle. And then proceeded to do the whole thing over again in a month long siege over some cabin in a national park. My point being in any destabiliztion event these groups are certainly going to be active, and being that they also have the exact opposite political ethos to the average gulliotine advocate, I'm willing to bet any uprising is not going to be so simple. Think less French Revolution, and more Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia

godzillabrennus 6y ago

History repeats itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_bombing