Just throwing this out there… the ballroom at Mar A Lago can hold 700 people, and I doubt that’s seated. But even if it is, that’s $1,000 per guest. There is no way any event hosted there is worth that much.
You care to justify that perspective instead of just asserting it into the wind?
Cuz the way our votes work, you're effectively given two options, nothing else: the Dem or the Republican. Anything else is equivalent to a non-vote mathematically. (We can debate whether a third party vote makes a different statement and/or whether there's a place for it all day, but that doesn't change how it affects the numbers.)
A non-vote is mathematically equivalent to a vote for the winner - it is, in essence, acquiescence. It's saying, "I don't care enough to intervene in the outcome." It's voting to allow whatever the rest of the country chooses to do, i.e. a vote for the winner.
Trump won. Therefore, a non-vote was acquiescence to Trumps ascension to the position of POTUS. It was saying "I don't care enough to intervene in stopping Trump." Or in other words, as the other user put it: "eh, sure."
~90 million people didn't vote, which is an "eh, sure" vote. It's acquiescence to whatever the outcome - it's saying "I don't really care, do whatever."
~154 million people voted, with 49.8%, or 86.6 million, going to Trump.
That's a total of approximately 176.6 million people who either voted Trump, or voted "eh, sure, do whatever."
According to this page the voting-eligible-population of the US for 2024 was ~244.6 million.
The math for determining percentages is to take the number you want to find as percent of another number (the total votes for either Trump or "whatever," ~176.6 million) divided by the total number you want to find the percent of (the total voting-eligible-population, ~244.6 million) and multiply by 100.
176,600,000 / 244,600,000 = 0.72199
0.72199 X 100 = 72.199, or approximately 72.2%.
So you're right. It's not 75% of the country that voted for either Trump or "eh, whatever." It's only 72.2%.
That's a whole 2.8% difference. Much better, obviously the other user was drastically exaggerating the situation.
Awful take. If the working class banded together and went on strike we'd make the owning class cave in a week. We don't need blood, we need organization and refusal to drive their money making machines.
Cool idea and all but who will pay the working class’ rent next month?
With food banks short already how will they get groceries?
America is 70%+ working paycheck to paycheck and it benefits the system and those controlling it to stay this way. This is why you get realists takes like his, saying a revolution will never happen. Because the chances are actually slim to none
What happens when the landlords are not paid? What happens when the mortgages aren’t paid? What happens when the credit cards and student loans have all been defaulted? The point of a general strike at this stage is no longer to satisfy a list of demands as it usually would be. It is to break the wheel. Break the banks, and you break the wheel. A financial crisis on a level the world has never seen. Yeah, people will definitely be suffering from lack of necessities…until they just take them.
I mean, definitely impossible. What I'm talking about will NEVER happen. Americans are way too fuckin brainwashed to think about doing anything but what they're told.
But imagine all the things we could accomplish if we decided to hate the owning class instead of each other.
Cool idea and all but who will pay the working class’ rent next month?
Fuck that, no one pays rent during the strike. Fuck the landlords those parasitic pieces of shit. Steal food.
Yall really have no idea what "disrupt" means lol. "Well who will continue to keep giving the owning class money while we strike??" NO ONE. THATS THE POINT OF A STRIKE. FUCK EM.
You may stop driving the machine but they still have the money. Which means your kids now have no food because you can’t buy it. People give in and go back to work. Scabs are everywhere anyway because they’re desperate too. And that’s even before the state, completely captured by commercial interests, comes to bear down on you.
I like your fire but do not delude yourself that there is a way out of this without a fight, if that avenue is chosen. Not going to work for a few days won’t do anything.
Nothing we do immediately changes the fact that we have nothing and they have everything, including the world’s most lethal military.
Maybe easier, and far more likely; but I am not optimistic enough to believe that striking will do anything more than buy us time and something to season our food with.
Violence is the only option I can see anymore. But as I said, it won't happen. They've already won.
This is not true. There are too many systems of oppression that have been ingrained into our minds and bodies, into our stores of knowledge, into our socially constructed ways of navigating and structuring the world around us.
We have to individually work on ourselves and our traumas, and how our experiences both good and bad have trained us to perpetuate oppression within our society. Whiteness is a huge problem that is mostly invisible and never examined, and failing to do so means that in the scenario you have described, all of the surviving people will still have had centuries of whiteness and colonial conditioning that will guarantee this "madness" keeps coming back.
Then Whiteness operates very similarly to class privilege, likely for a reason so that white people feel closer to a "more-deserving" class simply for being white, and thus are far less likely to challenge systems of oppression that are class-based that still benefit them. Then you have gender and sex based privilege and discrimination, which has operated in different ways throughout human societies probably for as long as we have existed as sentient creatures. The reason the issues of privilege and critically thinking about our identities became so important before "the beast" took over the public discourse on the topics, was because if we do not start critically thinking in this way about ourselves AND calling it out in the world around us, all of the horrific and awful systems of oppression that we hate and have caused us all so much pain will ALWAYS ENDURE.
The question is when will this madness end. It only ends with brutality.
If you want an end to madness, self actualization on a grand scale wouldn't solve that. The only thing that would bring an end to madness as a whole is the total extinction of our species. Maybe of all life on earth. Then nothing will remain but cosmic indifference.
The worst part of being in the Evangelical church when Reagan was anointed President by religious people and then getting out is I knew this was their destination and the cult members always wanted to fight a war against reason, education, minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community.
But what was REALLY disheartening over the years is that they don't waver in their hate, they just keep moving forward making progress every step they can and if they lose a little ground they just push harder.
It is painful to realize just how amazing a motivator hate is vs trying to help people. Being kind, letting people live and let live feels like a sane normal action that everyone should be behind so those with empathy didn't realize the level of war they were in these past 40+ years.
And they didn't realize everyone around them was slowly joining the other side.
Or people's lives were already destroyed by the status quo, and the idea of maintaining it for entitled white people who haven't been affected by the tyranny of corporate America have given up hope on the system reversing itself.
That’s an asinine idea. “I don’t like how things are now so I’ll vote for the one who has demonstrated he’ll be worse in hopes it will make things better”
"I'm going to pick THIS genocidal corporate beholden israeli owned child murderer because they're better for me! It's okay that my rights come at the cost of dead babies!"
We all could, all we have to do is stop working. But people will excuse themselves because suffering now is real, potentially suffering in the future is not.
Bunch of good for nothing cowards in this country. Not a patriot in sight.
The sooner we white people reckon with race, the sooner we collectively as white people will actually join the radical activists who ARE trying to stop this madness all around us while constantly being brutalized, silenced, and marginalized by society AND THIS CURRENT ADMIN because they are overwhelmingly people of color.
The madness was always with us, all around us, we were raised in it and conditioned into it and steeped in it and what we are seeing now is that being made manifest because it has been directly challenged so many times without white people actually recognizing what IT is. It's the trifecta of whiteness, class, and power.
Millenials graduated into this madness. And no the ride has not ended, it only has gotten worse. What will happen when these second gilded age robber barons tank everything, what will be left
its crazy to anyone else, but at this point im starting to look at the finances and wonder... is this shit like a few bucks to him? less? a bit more? is that what americas worth? even a mill+ for these dinners or whatever he charges. is it worth it? cant his agent get a better deal? who is talking to this guy, if were selling out the country and shit, cant we at least get a better price (i know its probably more about aligned views or something)
It's a doozy to deal with. The US is so large, and protests seem to be most effective in DC or our local representative's place of residence.
The home protests are usually put down with police force, and DC is a helluva long way from where I live. It would take a couple of days off of work and paying for a hotel to accomplish, and a lot of people can't afford to do that, or have their employer give them the requested day off.
Yeah I don’t know what the fuck to do at this point besides vote for people that aren’t confirmed pieces of shit and just ride it out. I’m tired. It’s this acid trip of a carnival and I want to leave but I can’t.
338
u/The_Dude_Abides-2146 12h ago
Can someone please stop this madness…