Some of them look pretty dangerous, true dat.
But even Chrysophrase the troll wouldn’t go on a witch hunt on that occasion. Granny Weatherwax would certainly give those milennienniennals a stern talking to if they started some uprising, and most surely would tell them how to do a proper revolution, and remind them to tidy up neatly.
Was there a follow-up question along the lines of “what do you think a large-scale uprising entails”?
Most European millennials would join "a large-scale uprising"
No.
Most European millennials say they would join “a large-scale uprising”.
At that age I said a lot of things. Especially when I wanted to be, you know, cool.
Millennials of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your earbuds.
That’s a hell of a big number! It must hinge on a pretty wide definition of guard. I’m pretty sure it’s a lot lower everywhere in Europe, even the UK.
Do you have any more details?
Thank you. You’re doing what websites reporting on studies like these should do in the first place.
The research in my country seems to have been done by one of the more liberal public broadcasting organisations, but the results don’t seem too skewed compared to what recent elections have shown.
I am surprised about the 32% of people who said they could be happy without the right to vote.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This article on Samuel Bowles (worth reading in its entirety) discusses the figure:
Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.
The job descriptions of guard labor range from “imposing work discipline”—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.
The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.
I couldn’t see anything on that page about it but that seems to be because it wouldn’t advance beyond the second page of five. Something wrong with my browser?
There is an article by Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev on the New York Times with a chart showing the numbers for various countries that is quite astonishing: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/one-nation-under-guard/.
Samuel Bowles’ and Arjun Jayadev’s essay on the subject is here: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1068&context=econ_workingpaper, the background for this paper is here: http://repec.umb.edu/RePEc/files/jayadev-egl.pdf.
Well I just saw the last few minutes of the EBU’s annual extensive polling of Europe and the results are in: congratulations to Portugal on winning the Eurovision.
Indeed, why fight for your country if you have no roots or national identity. These people have little to fight for as they’ve been raised in comfort of facebook and twitter, patted for consumerism and brainwashed by the media. Europe is weak and that’s why it’s getting overran by Islam.
And that is exactly the right question. I think a lot of the respondents are probably picturing some sort of protest march, where they find themselves marching next to an attractive member of the opposite sex, and with whom they later have a romantic dinner followed possibly by some fornication.
They are attracted to the idea of being a dashing member of the resistance. Audrey Hepburn was in the resistance, riding her bike through Nazi checkpoints while wearing modest yet fashionable outfits, a microfilm concealed in a baguette in her bike basket.
I sort of think they are thinking more about being Audrey Hepburn, and less about what someone who has been burned to death smells like after a couple of weeks.
Nice (not nice, and largely inaccurate, I’d bet) infantalization. Reminds me of when people did that with young people who voted for Sanders, though this is even worse.
Anyone who would want to join “a large scale uprising”, except as a last resort, probably deserves to be treated like a child.
Because anyone who has any experience with or knowledge of what such an uprising is like, would not want to join another one, unless they were insane.
So I am giving them the doubt, and assuming that they are just romanticizing the idea, instead of actually being enthusiastic about a bunch of death, which would likely include their own.
The question itself is pretty vague. I think it’s likely that a lot of people dont have the same vivid, ultraviolent images come to mind that you do. Many probably think in terms of say, the massive protests against the Iraq War (for all the good that those did).
Ambiguity is the Devil’s volleyball.
It might be interesting to see the actual text of the survey, in the original languages that were used.
Ooooooh spooky islam. They want to rape and kill us all!
TOO MUCH ISLAM WHAT SHALL WE DO
