Most European millennials would join "a large-scale uprising"

[zathras]

@SemTeK

Thank you. You’re doing what websites reporting on studies like these should do in the first place.

It took me all of two minutes to find it. But maybe that’s because I knew beforehand what the EBU is and just looked for their website. Hard not to know, really, I’m European and it’s Song Contest Week.

@SemTeK

I am surprised about the 32% of people who said they could be happy without the right to vote.

I wouldn’t read too much into this, it’s just a bad question. People can be happy in lots of circumstances. I’ve heard there are happy people in North Korea. Could I be happy without the right to vote? As long as my friends and family are OK, definitely! I might join the uprising, though.

@Mister44

But the point stands - good luck with a “large upscale uprising” with little means to push back. Hopefully the powers that be will cave. Hopefully.

@robertmckenna

Bombs, booby traps, missiles, mines, “improvised explosive devices” are the actual weapons that effectively counter state violence.

I’m not sure if you guys are thinking of the right kind of uprising. Guns are useless, as has been pointed out. Bombs, booby traps, etc. are weapons that are useful for a minority to destroy a state. They are useless for a majority that rises up to improve a state.

@Mister44

That’s the thing, I don’t see a large scale uprising in most of Europe or the US. Period. Protests, sure. I don’t think it is bad enough for civil outrage to change the government on the broad scale. They COULD vote in change, but too many people are entrenched in the status quo, voting against the other part, not daring to think beyond the two choices. Or they are so entrenched in their thinking, ANYONE not “them” is the enemy. And the systems in place are there to make any sweeping reforms hard to enact and cumbersome, because you can’t get all the cats in the room to stay in one place, much less agree to face a certain way.

The local results in Austria are 60-40 against, and I don’t think those 40% really mean it. It’s more hypothetical - if somebody came up with a way to improve things, and there was an uprising, and everyone else joined in (“large-scale”), then I might support that as well.
But I’m not sure how “not daring to think beyond the two choices” even applies to European politics. We often have more than two choices. It’s only that coming up with actual solutions to problems is hard. While the election campaigns are often about us-vs-them, we’ve got plenty of examples of opposition politicians getting into power and then finding out that their simple solutions just don’t work. And some examples of positive change happening, either because one of those simple solutions turned out to be workable, or because ideas got copied by well-meaning people in power.

And of course the systems in place are there to make sweeping reforms hard to enact. That’s a good thing. It’s how you get a stable and prosperous political system where you don’t have to live in fear that the parts of the system you rely on for yourself will get reformed away without prior notice because “the enemy” got in power.