Quote:

The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict’s paper on Nonviolent Resistance and Prevention of Mass Killings looked at 308 popular uprisings up to 2013. It found that “nonviolent uprisings are almost three times less likely than violent rebellions to encounter mass killings,” which faced such brutal repression nearly 68% of the time.

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GenesisCorrupted said:

I really love the sentiment that we can move past it. Something I do believe in, but we have to try harder to distance ourselves from our violent impulses.

I think they’ll always be there, but we can continue to distance ourselves from it and be less prone to act out on them.

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Calm_A_Llama_Down said:

I don't think violence will ever disappear, but militarized violence is an aberration. It is not natural, to fly around in fighter jets blowing up buildings with missiles.

A lot of society, the economy, and traditional masculinity, are designed specifically to grease the wheels of that aberration.

For a long time, people thought a 50% mortality rate for infants was just natural, and never going to change. Just part of life, etc etc.

But eventually people started to wash their nasty fucking hands, and clean off their primitive medical tools, and the issue started to improve.

So who knows, maybe new ideas, new perspectives, new priorities, could have a similar effect on the presence of militarized violence in human life.

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Calm_A_Llama_Down said:

Well I take your point.

I still feel that violence, even though it is a part of history, still deserves to be examined by a critical lense.

Like the idea that it is a mandatory part of life forever, is not above re-examination. We can deconstruct that idea.

If we point to the crimes of the past, to justify the crimes of the present, we will never get to see a future.

Just the same cycle over and over.

If we can learn to make radioactive suitcase bombs, mini nukes, and exploding pagers, I bet we could also learn to get along with each other. At least, a lot better than we do now.

Some people are motivated not to let that happen.

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QuantumZ00 said:

I have no doubt given the backward steps we've taken with the publics understanding of how effective vaccines are and the massive anti-intellectual movement against consensus science like manmade climate change and Evolution, that in a few more decades you may seriously have far right lunatics arguing it's fake news that they need to wash their hands to get rid of germs.

I'm not so sure progress is a straight line at many points in history. While technology is certainly accelerating, humanity's moral and ethical degeneracy is NOT decelerating.

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Bigbadwooof said:

I think you are misunderstanding what those things are. People are losing faith in our governing institutions, for good reason. Look what happened in 2008. The banks committed horrible crimes against the people. People lost their homes, and their retirement savings... and the government bailed out the big banks, and left the middle class in shambles.

What they should have done is broken up the banks, and bailed out the middle class. Nowadays, People are struggling, and they are angry, and for damn good reason. Wages remain stagnant, the cost of living is going up in every direction, millennial are a lost generation who will never get a firm footing in the world, and they are blamed for it.

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QuantumZ00 said:

Bigbadwooof said:

I think you are misunderstanding what those things are. People are losing faith in our governing institutions, for good reason. Look what happened in 2008. The banks committed horrible crimes against the people. People lost their homes, and their retirement savings... and the government bailed out the big banks, and left the middle class in shambles.

What they should have done is broken up the banks, and bailed out the middle class. Nowadays, People are struggling, and they are angry, and for damn good reason. Wages remain stagnant, the cost of living is going up in every direction, millennial are a lost generation who will never get a firm footing in the world, and they are blamed for it.

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Where in my comment did you interpret I don't know what those things are or are misunderstanding them?

Every generation thinks the problems it's facing are the worst, and that they shouldn't have faith in their country. The Depression, both of them - the one in the 1930s and the one in the 1890s - had people losing faith in their government. Marie Antoinette and her doddering king husband let french people to be deeply disillusioned by their government .

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ballsalsa said:

Just stop eating avocado toast!

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Bigbadwooof said:

That's what people are doing.

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mushboy said:

Bigbadwooof said:

That's what people are doing.

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replacing one bottle for another?

you kno, the housing market isnt that bad. if i could buy a house i feel like anyone could.

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mushboy said:

i bought a house in one of the most expensive states to buy a house. taxes out the ass.

i put nothing down. like literally zero. govt programs can be wonderful if people research them instead of complain that things are harder than the last generation. at least imo

hell we have somethings astronomically better. like clean food and water.

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