It doesn't have the same edge now that I won't get a 3 day suspension for it
Are they still called upvotes here? I was hoping we would come up with a more fun name. Upzooting or something
We should have three votes, Uncritical Support, Critical Support, and Denounce
I cannot put into words how fucking shocked I am over the fact that the dems (and Republicans, duh) will do absolutely nothing to curb this threat. Like, I imagined the smallest possible concession
Fucking hell world
Look the best I can offer you is a pension cut and welfare gutting. Final offer.
this reminds me more of 1789, tbh. it's a massive debt crisis at the "center of the world" and an extremely preventable sequence of events that's brought this ball rolling downhill to this "let them eat cake" moment. we're in for a truly wild couple of years.
Who are the landlords going to rent to after they evict everybody?
Part of it is just to drive people to the brink and make them pay rent instead of eat.
A bunch of people is called a revolutionary firing squad.
I've been saying the biggest thing to happen this year hadn't happened yet. It's probably gonna be this.
What do you think of this?
Republicans and corporate Democrats move forward with evictions, which will bring about riots all around the country. Then Trump declares martial law and postpones elections indefinitely. Realistic?
I think the already-brewing state vs federal power struggle will escalate to the point it needs some sort of resolution before the eviction crisis really gets moving.
I don't think it'll be an issue at all in R states and it seems like the testing ground in Oregon is not putting up much opposition to this unilateral intervention.
So I think they'll just swallow the boot and get in line once the time comes. But I'm just spitballing here, so what do I know.There's already a thing going on in Washington where Trump says he's sending troops and Inslee says he can't. And I don't think Inslee is cool enough to keep pushing back on that under pressure, but something has to come of it, and that makes prediction timelines really complicated. (And, as I said elsewhere in this thread, I don't think the eviction crisis is going to really take off for another few months, so there's time to make it even more complicated.)
You can stop the trolley at any time, but doing so would disrupt the trolley service and cause the owning company to lose money
I'm intimately aware that my partner and I are still indoors based solely on a wing and a prayer. The level of stress we feel on a daily basis is going to kill us years earlier than if we lived in, say, a compassionate country that didn't revel in wholesale displacing people they consider undesirable.
I'm bordering on optimistic in that this may cause America to actually do fucking anything about homelessness. Even if 1/4 renters lose their houses there will have to be a response from the government. Hellworld, i know, but still
The people whose response to a pandemic was subsidising COBRA would 100% try that section 8 housing shit. Matt, on the podcast, shouting headlong into the ether over and over again how there was simply no pro-labor alternative to the status quo in power in the US. There was simply grotesque right-ward movement and more socially acceptable stalling.
The government response is just gonna be murdering poor people. It's not gonna do something good, lol
the government response will be nil. some individual states will delay this realizing it's really fucking bad but even that isn't close to enough. the federal government will put a bandage over this amputation and call it a day, leaving the discarded limb for the wolves.
it's the stupidest fucking thing a government can do. enough cities are already in revolt to make this obviously. this will kick off the revolution and the continued existence of the american state over the next two years is not even close to guaranteed.
that doesn't mean we win - reactionaries and liberals might carry the ensuing struggle. but it does mean it's 1789 in america and our ruling class manages to be dumber, crueler, and more obviously evil than the fucking french aristocracy so buckle in for the ride.
I had a closer look at the numbers. Of the 43 million rental households in the US, 17.5 million households are estimated to owe a combined $22 billions in outstanding rent leading to an average debt of about $1260 per at risk household.
this is extra mind-blowingly funny because it means with 22 billion dollars they could avoid the rev but they're so stupid and our institutions are so decayed that they can't get together <1% of the federal budget.
I mean, even being the greediest possible bastards would suffice. but that involves seeing the end of the empire fast approaching them and their own ideology has blinded them to the possibility. so rather than spend a little money today so they can continue to extract, extract, extract, they'll try and continue their neoliberal BS right up until the second it dawns on them that they've gone too far - whether that's before the only option left for them is to flee or face the wall, that remains to be seen.
You can say bastard now :smiling face with sunglasses:
This is what I want to know too. I can't seem to find any concise answers anywhere though.
I think the number was higher than you would expect even before covid.
Eviction takes a while, and most people will move to increasingly substandard housing instead of becoming homeless, so it'll take a while to boil over. Since it's slow and will happen to different people on different schedules, it'll end up simmering until there's some sort of inciting incident that lets everyone start at the same time. Then a new wave of mass protests, which will be larger than usual for that type of incident, because it's partly acting as a proxy for the eviction unrest.
Since the inciting incident doesn't exactly have to be tied to eviction, and it'll sway the character of the protests, it's really hard to predict exactly what form they'll take. It's like asking "What's the first newsworthy awful thing that'll happen in October?" (Which is about the timeline I'd guess, so they kind of have the same answer.) I'd say the most likely is some awful health crisis at an illegal flophouse, but by "most likely" I mean like 5% in a vast see of possibilities.
Yes. Specifically, an incident that'd normally result in a small protest or general hand-wringing will turn into a much larger deal. It'll wait until there's an incident that's vaguely connected to the eviction crisis, but it doesn't have to be a very good match. And the nature of the struggle will be influenced by the nature of the incident.
About a year ago someone murdered 3 homeless people in my city, and pretty much no one cared. If something like that happens in a few months after millions of people have just become newly homeless, I could see huge riots against whoever the perceived enemy is, maybe cops or landlords
I think we'll see things ramp up through August and September as the evictions start, kids and teachers get sick and die in schools, etc.. but yeah, we're headed for a full-blown crisis of confidence in the state by October and it's going to be funny to listen to the libs yell about the election while a revolutionary movement battles the police in virtually every city.
what we're seeing now in Portland is what a lot of major cities will look like by the end of next month as the feds crack down in anticipation of this surge - kidnappings by what look to be feds just got recorded today in NYC. or said another way, the dip in energy and surge in energy that you expect to follow sustained protests like this is happening now, not over the next several months.
so by October, we're not looking at anything like what we're seeing now, or even what we briefly saw for a week in our May Days. Portland has learned that it's fight back against the state or go down meek in the face of repression - they've chosen to fight and won very real battles.
the election is page 3 news but its proximity to what's happening matters in one serious way: trump will be desperate to look like a strong commander by the time October rolls around. that event that provokes an outsized response you're talking about - there's a decent chance it's a massacre or other serious act of police repression, ordered by the man himself in a bid to save a campaign he can feel slipping away from him.
regardless of what actually sets it off, though, there will be a fresh escalation in the conflict in October and whether the state immediately offers concessions, delaying its collapse for a few years, or whether it quadruples down on its mistakes and forces a fight right there and then - those are the real stakes over the next couple of months. events are converging and while possibilities are endless for the specific sequence of events between here and there, those are the only two real possibilities for what happens over the next several months.
Yeah, roughly agree. I do think it's possible for the state to lurch along for a while without real concessions. Things accelerate very fast, but the distances are very large. Like space I guess. It's entirely possible that we stumble our way through election season, Biden somehow wins, and everything stalls out for months as people sit around desperately hoping he'll fix things.
It's hard to predict things concretely with all of these overlapping events that'll also cause new events. But this thread did get me thinking about what the predictable factors are, so here's what I have:
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Escalating vertical tension between protesters, cities, states, and the country. Expect new crazy shit in August.
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Coronavirus continues unchecked. Some sort of awful tipping point in September.
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Eviction crisis. Probably around October.
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Stock market crash. Shortly after the election, regardless of result. Even faster if there's a non-electoral leadership change.
And note that my predictions are this concrete because that makes it easier for me to evaluate my accuracy later, not because I'm actually that certain. Also note that the more details I throw onto a timeline like this, the more it sounds like I must be right because I have a lot of details, but in reality every detail is a new opportunity to be wrong. This is called the conjunctive fallacy and it's one of the biggest cognitive biases.
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Hate to be that guy, but the people on the streets will be an extremely insignificant portion of those evicted. The US does a good job of conditioning people such that they never threaten the status quo and/or rise up to face injustice
Yeah I guess I can't speak on this topic much because I live in a small town in the rust belt
I've been seeing new homeless people in my town since like March
that's true when the numbers are small. but a small percentage of a huge number of people joining the protests is visibly large. and that initial wave will draw in others who see that they're not alone in their anger. when the numbers are small, this is easy to miss and nothing happens. but 40% of renters is staggering - we're talking about 50-80MM people. how many of them will stay home when 1. there are already protests going and 2. more people join them and the lines of solidarity become more established? enough to keep the state afloat? that's a hard bet.
All 55 of our counties went to Bernie in 2016. There's definitely a seed planted here. I am gonna have to move back to my parents at the end of August it looks like. Laid off, no signs of getting called back in anytime soon, and that extra 600 was still a hair less than I was making at work. If I take a shit minimum wage job or get stuck with the proposed 200 instead of the 600, I'm done for. Car repairs took all my savings up. This West Virginian will happily lend his rifle to the revolution.
that's an average of 39.64% nationwide. Multiply that by the 109,000,000 renters in the US, you have 43.2 million people who can't make rent and may end up homeless.
43.2M/328M= 13% of the populationDespite making up only 13% of the population, the newly homeless account for 100% of burning court houses and police precincts to the ground
13% of the population makes up 100% of the evictions
Doing a proportional sizing image with squares is even more trash than doing it with circles. Wow.
But I am not surprised. People can't just scrounge up money from nowhere, though.
I think this is vaguely trying to be in the shape of the US for some reason
Idk why they didn't just do an actual map of the US
It looks so bad lmao, even a spreadsheet would be more coherent.
