No Stupid Questions

Historically speaking, the riots start when the bread runs out.

If anything is done it's done offline. The best way to fight back is to build community and solidarity. Meet your neighbors, volunteer, get out there off the computer.

I know I'll get downvoted for this, but...Lemmy and related are an "echo-chamber" of sorts. You'll find that a vast amount of people "in the real world" don't share this sort of imminently apocalyptic mentality. I really mean no offense in my phrasing and I'm not trying to shit on anyone here. It's just the way things are.

I remember being almost surprised at how "normal" life was when I first moved to a place that had polar opposite political views than me. Life went on...in mostly the same way it did when I was surrounded by people who mostly shared my ideologies. Life goes on...especially in the western world. Even in different parts of the US, it's a far cry from some place like Somalia or Iran or Israel/Palestine or North Korea.

Idk. Sorry I got a bit rambly. Suffice to say that I don't think you're ever going to find what you seek.

Don't look on the internet, you won't find the community you're looking for here. Find the coolest candidate running in your local area and volunteer for their campaign. Even if they kinda suck, show up for their events. You aren't there to meet the candidate, you're there to meet other people who care about their community. Talk to the other volunteers. You'll be surprised at who you meet.

Rioting is illegal and usually it's poor people smashing the windows of other poor people's shops.

The word you're looking for is "uprising" or "revolution"

I was ready in February 2025. But after 12 months of being surrounded by people who don’t know/don’t care, and the growing threat of illegal detention of my legal immigrant spouse, I packed my family up and left.

until it’s 100 degrees F in the Artic

that was 6 years ago:
https://www.livescience.com/un-confirms-arctic-hottest-temperature

Smallscale you want a laugh?

10 odd yrs ago we and a friend were exploring and abandoned building......had 13 squaddies and a chopper on us....had reportd we were stealing lead (we werent....obv) yet when our forests burn our gov cant send a chopper with water......shits been burning over a week now.

Priorities!?!?!?

https://generalstrikeus.com/

We need a general strike to start. It has to be big enough that is disrupts the ongoing social order, then revolution. Unfortunately many people are appeased by their treats and unwilling to commit to opposing the status quo in any effective way.

Too late

It's literally already too late.

... not that billionaires should see no consequence, but... what consequence are you going to make them see?? They've ALREADY ruined the planet.

Are you guys fucking nuts?

You can't even utilize the tools giving to you to muster a solid defense online. You're all just showing up everyday giving up/down votes and reading your daily alloted news article about Trump in your over moderate hug box.

You probably had to review multiple rules just to post this message in case you pissed off some almost homeless 18 year old moderator. I know the instinct is to say fuck me over this stuff. But think how moderation is actually a tool to destroy creativity, originality and effort. Moderation is a tool created by corporations to sanitize the internet so it could be sold piecemeal to advertisers. But what this also does is prevent us from keeping events in the forefront. If i have a political content community that only allows one type of content, that is fucking boring and stifling. When we separate our politics into [discussion], [political memes] [news] it may look nice but you kill free form thought and how people actually communicate. This is what feels different from the internet back in the day and the internet today. We have moderation sanitize our efforts. Compare this to MAGA or the right whose spaces are more creative. They combine multiple types of media into a menagerie that keeps things alive and interesting.

The left has been boxed in on purpose. We are in a snuff box. MAGA seized every platform that's full of kindling and energy while we placed ourselves into a snuff box. Until we fix some core problems and understand how the internet works to engage people then nobody should be encouraging any kind of revolution. If you cannot fight in an online digital space and get measurable victories in a low effort maximum impact environment then a revolution is just going to get people killed and laws that push us towards more authoritarian state.

https://youtu.be/0YFdwfNh5vs

The issue is that the powers that be did learn their lesson and they learned it well. If you keep the masses JUST sufficient enough that they still have something "to lose" they'll be to busy chasing that to be able to mount any kind of resistance to their exploitation. It's the splash and dash mentality. It's also why they are so against abortion. they frame it as a moral issue, but it's really about ensuring a good crop of fresh people to exploit when the current crop wears out. It's a common fascist tactic: Concentration Camps were usually billed as "work" camps where people would be set to menial or meaningless tasks, so they would waste away on purpose, and the deaths could be logged as "by natural causes" and not murder. (only what the regime defined as "undesirables" were sent to be euthanized.)

Competing Lords owned the land and extracted labor from the peasants, and this was feudalism. Then peasants overthrew the lords so they could seek ownership of those lands, but that only benefited those who already had the means to fill the vacuum left by the lords. Capitalism only shuffles the deck of Feudalism. it doesn't solve the underlying flaw in the game, namely that there will always be someone with more means than you extracting value from people whose only asset to sell is their labor and time. Eventually a group of gentrified individuals will emerge that fill the rolls that the old lords did, and given that nepotism is rampant in industry, it's not even really that different at all from feudalism. The idea that a CEO should be president of a democracy is such a perversion of the idea of public rule that it is anathema to it. Extreme wealth should be disenfranchising in of itself, as if you are that wealthy, you no longer need the protections of a popular government, but rather, you are what that kind of governance is supposed to be protecting against.

Its when people have nothing to lose.

No one REALLY feels the threat posed by the polycrisis. It's all complex, intellectual worries about things that FEEL like they're still just a little ways out, not quite here. People are mostly focused on the here and now and the very near future. The riots happen when people literally can't feed their kids in the here and now. As long as it's just difficult, and not impossible, people will struggle on with their nose to the grindstone. Watch for rises in unemployment. CoViD showed what can happen when millions if people find themselves with mountains of free time to use on political action. When enough people are hungry and have no job to distract them, the fires will come.

I tell people all of the time

"I won't throw the first brick, but when the bricks start flying give me a call"

The thing that broke me wasn't data centers or hot weather, it was when I had to pay $7 for hot dog buns

The business men who put a $7 price tag on hot dog buns during the 4th of July are not nearly as afraid of the public as they should be.

It's fucking bread. Bread!

When stealing bread to feed your family is almost a felony... burn it down.

We couldn't organize enough people to go stand in a line for 20 minutes and scribble in a few little pencil bubbles to prevent the hell upon earth that is currently happening.

Unfortunately there will be no revolution or uprising or meaningful riots until things are far, far, far worse than where they are now.

Our citizens couldn't sacrifice 20 minutes out of their lives to prevent what appears to be the beginning of the end of the USA; they're certainly not going to give up their homes and livelihoods and freedom anytime soon.

Universal basic income would be a huge way to facilitate this. When we have a bit of a safety net, we can afford to take a few weeks off for a general strike. We can leave that evil corporate job, or educate ourselves on issues that need our attention. Studies have shown that with a little more time each week, people tend to invest more in the community or mutual aid. Not to mention, we could compel billionaires to join and facilitate the greatest redistribution of wealth in history. There's a foundation (ITSA) attempting to start it's own UBI with an app called comingle if you are interested in getting started at the grass roots level.

Looking at Gen-Z protests around the world, it's kinda already started, though the success rate/level in each case may be an issue. But yeah, for the US specifically I've been amazed things haven't really escalated to the same level yet outside of maybe Jan 6 and even that was running in the wrong direction

I don't have an answer for you other than, I don't know why it hasn't happened already.

Yesterday was the best time. Now IS the best time we have left. Later might be too late.

How can we as a group choose to suffer more than we already have? The majority of people have NOTHING if they don't have a paycheck in the next 3 weeks. We starve and we die. And it's not pretty.

The militias whose sole existence should be to combat the tyranny of government are the ones putting a boot on the necks of the people they should be marching into ICE held territory and saying this is not happening and I'm willing to fight for it.

That's only in amerikkka though, which as long been the too big to fail state that has absolutely failed everyone.

That the epstein pedophile ring hasn't been brought to clean and swift justice is a mockery of all that anyone has believed in as far as governments are willing to operate in anything resembling justice.

It's fucking bleak. What can anyone do?

Hey OP here's a song that matches this post. (seriously it's so fucking hardcore everyone needs to give it a listen)

Beast - Devil

If the sun vaporized one day And the moon just faded away Would we still, keep going on At this pit of the mining pace

Should the birds fall to the ground And the fish die of thirst Would we still keep on living The way it's always been

Now if the air could burn my lungs And the earth were only rocks Would it make us stop and realize That we rot, that we can't go on like this

Devil, oh, devil Why don't you tell me why I'm a slave in these desperate times

In this time that we could almost choose The color of our children's eyes Can we still, keep going on living When the monster turns on us

Before the sun doesn't rise one day, huh And the moon just dies away There is one thing (What?) One thing what, uh That we'll never change Is that we're only learning to survive You might also like Microcyte Beast (CAN) Mr. Hurricane Beast (CAN) Total Eclipse of the Heart Bonnie Tyler Devil, oh, devil Why don't you tell me why I'm a slave in these desperate times

If the sun vaporized one day And the moon just faded away Would we still, keep going on At this pit of the mining pace

Should the birds fall to the ground And the fish die of thirst And the earth were only rocks Would we still keep on living The way it's always been

Now if the air could burn my lungs And the earth were only rocks Would it make us stop and realize That we can't go on like this

Devil, oh, devil Why don't you tell me why I'm a slave in these desperate times

Devil, oh, devil Why don't you tell me why I'm a slave in these desperate times

You're asking people mostly disconnected from global affairs, buried under poor working conditions, trying to stay afloat and distracted from their own foibales, to take part in something that will take the pathetic and worse existence they are living now into a direction that is SIGNIFICANTLY worse.

Riot and revolution are always downgrades from the status quo in the hope the suffering leads to something better. The jury is out on whether not that always happens.

For now we get a very boring five phase empire collapse and its never a drastic change to bad until multiple systems fail.

It depends where you live.

I honestly feel bad for the doomers in these kinds of comment sections who feel confused and aimless, like nothing is happening. I live in Oakland, California, and it's clear to me that my community is not waiting around.

If you're feeling adrift, let me know where you live and I'll make suggestions. This sense of idleness is situational, and you can get involved in planning a revolution is you know where to look.

Part of the problem is that there's a thing called "Co-opting the Revolution" that's been figured out, that you can neatly repackage dissent as a product to sell.

Like how you get Che Gueverra as merch now.

And it's done an incredible job at making people feel like they're doing something, whilst actually doing nothing.

I've done my part! I wear a ACAB pin that I purchased from Hot Topic

Or

I've done my part! I participated in the Reddit Blackout, and then bought the memorabilia

And the sad thing is, IT FUCKING WORKS

Psychologically, for many people, it silences the parts of the brain that are like "FIX THIS! DO SOMETHING!" for quite a lot of people

Some of your neighbors still think it’s fine. Global warming is bullshit because we still have super cold winters sometimes.

Start by changing their minds. All the rioting in the world will just make them dig their heels in. But if they understood the issue then maybe rioting wouldn’t be necessary.