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> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working. What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort t

• yardie 8mo ago
  You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. The Founders were just being giant assholes (j/k). While the French Revolution just a few decades later was more status quo. A lot of starvation and poverty just pushed the population over the edge.
  • t-3 8mo ago
    The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes. The poor are often indifferent to politics because they're focused on survival. The middle classes, who own things they don't want to lose and have free time to aspire for more, are the ones who start revolutions. The poor only came in after being whipped up by the interested parties, and don't necessarily join the revolutionary side.
    • thephyber 8mo ago
      Three critical differences the American Revolution had: (1) the middle class had some extremely well educated people, (2) the communication technology among the colonies was pretty fast whereas the comms between the colonies and the British rule across the Atlantic was slow, and (3) the empire tried to clamp down on the colonies ability to export to any market other than the mother country, killing lots of profit which previously made those markets strong.
      • throwaway85825 8mo ago
        (4) the British navy was busy raiding the carribean for prize money and abandoned the army in america. I recommend the book "The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire"
    • Kuinox 8mo ago
      > The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes. I don't know about the american revolution, but that's wrong for the french revolution. I'll link to french wikipédia pages since they are far better on the subject. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tats_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9raux_de_1789 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tats_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9raux_... Here we can see the first National Assembly was half nobility and clergy. The third estate was the other half. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiers_%C3%A9tat https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiers_%C3%A9tat > Par ailleurs, les députés du tiers état aux états généraux représentaient essentiellement la bourgeoisie[2]. Which indicate that the majority of the third estate representative were bourgeois.
      • t-3 8mo ago
        > Which indicate that the majority of the third estate representative were bourgeois. The bourgeois are the middle class.
        • Kuinox 8mo ago
          Were the middle class, but what people think of middle class today, doesn't apply to what it was back then. > The bourgeoisie are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a " middle class" between the peasantry and aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted with the proletariat by their wealth, political power, and education, as well as their access to and control of cultural, social, and financial capital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie Today the meaning of bourgeoisie, still applies to "business owners, merchants and wealthy people", but is now seen as upper class.
          • t-3 8mo ago
            Yes, the proletariat has been brainwashed and convinced that they're the middle class, while the middle classes have become the new aristocracy. The disappearance of hereditary nobility and rise of liberalism (which brings along separation of church and state, which removes the power of the clergy) made the old distinctions less useful, so we have the modern lower (proletariat), middle (skilled workers), and upper (bourgeois) classes.
  • jacquesm 8mo ago
    > You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. These are no longer impossibles.
    • Waterluvian 8mo ago
      Boy is he trying on the latter. Quite impressive just how resilient it seems to be.
      • jacquesm 8mo ago
        Yes, tbh I would not have thought that you could take a sledgehammer to the economy as if you're say Elon Musk buying a communications platform and yet, here we are, 1 year in and we're still hanging on. But I wouldn't bet on another three of these.
        • dpc050505 8mo ago
          It will pop just in time to put the blame on the liberal that wants to slightly tax the rich and improve the quality of life of working people.
      • edoceo 8mo ago
        It's like when management does something stupid and then engineering works overtime to keeps the system working. Of course management learns nothing and all outside observers don't even notice something went wrong.
        • jacquesm 8mo ago
          There is a limit to how much engineers working overtime can do to offset management stupidity and when you reach the limit the bottom falls out. Of course then everybody blames the engineers...
      • autoexec 8mo ago
        It's being heavily supported a bubble. We'll see how resilient it is when that pops. As it is, the average person's finances and future prospects are getting worse all the time regardless of whatever the stock market is doing.
  • thewebguyd 8mo ago
    > until food runs low and the economy stalls. Well one of those is already on the fast tracking to happening (economy stalling). Unfortunately, I don't have much faith that people will turn against the administration during any kind of major depression/food scarcity. I foresee people turning against each other for survival instead.
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
  • ryandrake 8mo ago
    I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    • hirako2000 8mo ago
      Could also say that over half the population finding such ridiculous mandates justifiable: lockdowns and demands that employers enforce vaccination compliance for all employees, ordoned non democratically by a senile; in a country with constitutional rights likely meant we would not see activists engaging in vandalism anytime soon.
      • UltraSane 8mo ago
        [flagged]
      • jibal 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        • hirako2000 8mo ago
          I was probably one of "you". My comment is simply calling out the liberticide episode we attended rather quietly.
          • deleted 8mo ago
            [deleted]
          • johnnyanmac 8mo ago
            After 2025, I don't think y'all get to say it's libertcide to wear a mask, sorry.
    • 8mo ago
  • mikestorrent 8mo ago
    > The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_Rebellion Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.
    • nathan_compton 8mo ago
      Not really a secret. The slogan was "No taxation without representation" not "no taxation." The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.
      • autoexec 8mo ago
        Even if the needs of the American people weren't being ignored over the wishes of corporations and the ultra-wealthy in terms of numbers alone we have less representation than ever before because the number of people who are supposed to represent us hasn't kept up with the growing population.
        • throwaway85825 8mo ago
          America ended in 1861 when the era of political bargains transitioned to the era of the government and the subjects.
          • fuzzfactor 8mo ago
            with 20/20 hindsight it would have been a whole lot better to throw a Constitutional Convention rather than have a civil war. It had already intentionally been forgotten how well that worked the first time.
            • throwaway85825 8mo ago
  • wutwutwat 8mo ago
    "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy." - Alfred Henry Lewis
• kbrisso 8mo ago
  I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.
  • dylan604 8mo ago
    > The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil. Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.
  • aenis 8mo ago
    America is an authoritarian country for decades now. It first dawned on me when i visited NYC some 30 years ago. I stepped over some arbitrary yellow line I wasn't supposed to - the uniformed cop that noticed that went from 0 to 100 in 0.1 second and behaved as if I just pulled a gun. Zero time to reflect and assume I might have made a legitimate mistake. Since then I've visited U.S. >150 times, and in my experience it was always thus in the U.S. - the law enforcement is on hair trigger and the populace has seemingly grown used to it and considers this behaviour normal. Geez. (Go live in any northern european country for comparison. Any interaction with law enforcement is almost certainly going to be pleasant, cordial, and uniformed police typically does not rely on threats of violance for authority).
    • cobbzilla 8mo ago
      America is not NYC. NYC is proud of its police-state apparatus. Most of the rest of the country is very different.
      • butterbomb 8mo ago
        NYC police seem insane lmao. For some reason various precinct accounts have made it into my social media feed, and the last time I saw the they were bragging about stealing some old ladies less lethal defense weapon.
• wrs 8mo ago
  What confuses me is that no revolution is required. All we had to do to avoid this was to vote. Voting would still (probably) work.
  • unclad5968 8mo ago
    Who can I vote for that will stop flock cameras from being installed?
    • gamerdonkey 8mo ago
      In many cases, the decision to install Flock cameras have been made by city councils and sheriffs' offices. So it very much depends on local candidates. On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
    • cdrnsf 8mo ago
      We turned over seats on our city council for the first time in decades and the new, "liberal" council members voted with the rest, unanimously, to install more Flock cameras.
    • mywittyname 8mo ago
      The local government officials in charge of allowing these to be installed. It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in. We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).
      • runarberg 8mo ago
        Seattle voted for Katie Wilson as mayor partly because she seemed to oppose surveillance cameras. She now seems to have changed her mind is is speaking in favor of them.
• KittenInABox 8mo ago
  On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter. But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
  • taurath 8mo ago
    Let’s be clear though - it’s not that Americans are clinging to some deep stability that brings them comfort or relaxation, it’s that they’re on the edge already. The vast vast majority of people are barely able to afford the basics of life, while we’re bombarded with an ever more shameless wealthy elite’s privileges. Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.
    • fc417fc802 8mo ago
      Is that really the case? It seems to me that the vast majority in the US can fairly easily afford a fair bit of material luxury, mostly because material luxuries have become incredibly cheap (by historical standards). The trouble is at least in the high population areas (AFAICT) a huge swath of "average" people seem to be stuck living life on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, renting, no prospect of property ownership, minimal to zero retirement savings, no realistic way to afford children, etc. Not abnormal by historic or global standards but very abnormal when compared to the past ~150 years of US history.
      • mv4 8mo ago
        "Among the 37 percent of adults who would not have covered a $400 expense completely with cash or its equivalent, most would pay some other way, although some said that they would be unable to pay the expense at all. For those who could cover the expenses another way, the most common approach was to use a credit card and then carry a balance, and many indicated they would use multiple approaches. However, 13 percent of all adults said they would be unable to pay the expense by any means (table 21), unchanged from 2022 and 2023 but up from 11 percent in 2021" https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2024-savings-and-investments.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
• kingkawn 8mo ago
  Get out there and be the change you want to see, king
  • nielsbot 8mo ago
    I don't get the sarcasm here.. Instead of sniping with snark (see HN rules, please) post your better take.
    • kingkawn 8mo ago
      Is it not literally true that he is calling for action from the populace without doing it? You all can only lift a finger to downvote a literal call to action lmao
• mywittyname 8mo ago
  > What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.
  • cucumber3732842 8mo ago
    That's not how the political reality of exacting mostly voluntary compliance from the masses works.
  • everforward 8mo ago
    That would be an incredibly risky escalation, and it would be a stupid ultimatum to issue. The people, or even states, could escalate in response. The worst case is escalating to violence; ICE isn’t trained, equipped, or numerous to deal with deploying into a violently hostile area. The army could, but then we’re in full blown civil war. A more realistic middle ground is that it pushes people or states into nonviolent non-compliance by eg refusing to pay federal taxes. Frankly if California and New York alone stopped paying federal taxes the system would probably crumble.
    • wolvoleo 8mo ago
      ICE isn't trained for anything, they're just proud boys in tacticool gear. But the point of them is not to be effective, it's to cause headlines.
  • bcrosby95 8mo ago
    Yeah because that works out really well in history!
• jeffrallen 8mo ago
  General strike! Close the ports, close the airports, steal dozers and park them on railroad tracks, teachers on the streets in front of their schools to protect their students, blockade the grocery distribution centers, so that the shelves go bare, just stop everything, everywhere. When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th. It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
  • JuniperMesos 8mo ago
    Disrupting basic functions of the economy will hurt ordinary people a lot more than it will hurt billionaires. Also under these conditions of food distribution and transportation being actively disrupted, why would anyone be at school? Huge numbers of American schools are unsafe and unpleasant places for kids to be in ordinary times, and a massive disruption to ordinary life is not going to make that situation any better.
• kilohotel 8mo ago
  Who is the arbiter of "necessarily trouble"? You? Only people that politically agree with you?
  • john_strinlai 8mo ago
    >You? Only people that politically agree with you? the next sentence after they mention "necessary trouble" is literally: "But that only goes as far as to be my opinion." they are just stating their opinion. everyone decides when the time for "necessary trouble" is individually, based on their accumulated experience, opinion, etc. no arbiter required, just a critical mass of people with aligning opinions.
  • krapp 8mo ago
    Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for gay rights? Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for civil rights? Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for womens' rights? Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for the rights of handicapped people? Indigenous people? Immigrants? American society was created for the benefit of straight white Christian men alone. Every right held by any other group, every ounce of political power, every bit of basic human dignity, has had to be taken by force of "necessary trouble." There is no "arbiter." How could there be? An arbiter presupposes an objective moral ideal and a just society, neither of which we have. In the end, America can only be trusted to live up to its principles at the point of a gun.
• Induane 8mo ago
  The other day in Kansas City some lady set fire to a warehouse that was being sought for purchase by ICE. They are on video and quite nonchalant.
• wartywhoa23 8mo ago
  > I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. To put things in perspective, the whole humankind, as in 99.99% of population, is utterly underreacting.
• zamadatix 8mo ago
  I can only hope what people will decide make trouble about is also what I consider necessary. If we could all agreed what was necessary to make trouble about there wouldn't be nearly as much to be making trouble over. It's a very double edged sword which does not necessarily do a very good job at bringing any more clarity of what the moral path was to the country.
• freeplay 8mo ago
  Mass unemployment would/will be the catalyst to mass uprising. All of the fuel is in place (ICE, Epstein, rising costs of everything, unaffordable housing, general lack of hope and faith in the government, etc.) High unemployment numbers will be the spark that sets it all ablaze.
• sanex 8mo ago
  Right? The French know how to riot.
• xnx 8mo ago
  You're fortunate if you live in a community where cameras in public spaces is in the top 20 concerns.