The equity market is not the economy and a lot of the financial websites make money on hyping up the latest quarterly numbers. Are there concerns here? Yes, there always are - is the world about to end from this? Absolutely not.

That is an insane takeaway from the clip you shared. No reasonable person would listen to those words and take it as a direct threat to bomb insurrectionists. I think you are a troll.

Give me a break, we’ve been through much worse. Let’s stop with the FUD please.

High inflation and raising rates going into a recession is not going to trigger a civil war or even really unrest in any major way.

>Give me a break, we’ve been through much worse. Let’s stop with the FUD please.

political polarization in the usa has never been so bad except for ...

Americans don’t even want to give up their private healthcare, and y’all talking about civil war.

I dont see civil war as an inevitability. Civil unrest seems inevitable. Then again not exactly much of a prediction there given ongoing civil unrest.

Also I don't believe civil war is rational as you project it to be.

Imagine republicans take over in midterms. Speaker of the house becomes Trump. They then impeach and remove biden and harris making Trump president again. What happens?

Imagine democrats clean sweep the election and they were boarding up windows again. Blue wave... what happens?

The GOP needs a 2/3 senate-majority to remove Biden, which won't happen. Best they can do is impeach, but not remove.

What happens in these cases? More of the same bullshit. Yes, there will probably be some form of civil unrest. But not war.

I agree with you that civil war isn't rational, but it does require enough people being onboard with it. I think when push comes to shove, most people realize that they want nothing to do with it. Just like the riots and protests we saw, most people dip out when shit hits the fan. The people that stay are the extremists.

My personal opinion is that what we are seeing is the extremists of both parties. The vast majority of people might have leanings one way or another, but they do not subscribe to most of the ideas pushed by the extreme ends of their parties. They are mostly just tired of the bickering and ineffectiveness of our government.

American’s financial situations are actually quite good right now. Everybody is just anxious as fuck, for many reasons.

Think about what a civil war would entail. It is literally war between neighbors. You really think Americans are ready to kill each other en masse and give up everything they have, for what?

It’s easy to make proclamations about some abstract idea of “civil war” but the reality is that most Americans are doing relatively well and would not stake their lives on something that doesn’t even promise a better outcome.

All the insane stuff that's happening and will happen is the hangover of not having a depression in 2008 and delaying it by printing money and propping up banks.

But you can't delay the inevitable.

People are not doing that well right now, and there's a lot of anger between the people who are doing the worst, and the people who are doing fine and saying "America's financial situations are actually quite good right now."

I'm not saying everybody is doing great. I'm saying that if you look at the stats of average American's personal finances, they are in pretty good shape. That doesn't mean there isn't a decent chunk of the population that is struggling. That doesn't mean there isn't a housing crisis across the country. That doesn't mean inflation isn't hitting these lower-income groups harder.

These issues are very real and are a major part of what is making everyone anxious. But in the context of the conversation, people are not getting ready to war with each other.

Like what happened with the Great Depression? I saw no mention of food shortages in the article.

My sense is that civil wars are when states/governments fight, not hungry people. You could have stopped at civil unrest.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-russia-bread-food-pr...

https://medium.com/something-about-everything/food-riots-and...

>My sense is that civil wars are when states/governments fight, not hungry people. You could have stopped at civil unrest.

What happens when food is scarce and people are starving for possibly the first time in their life? Anxiety, depression, etc is well established.

Then people are going to want to know why they are starving.

I think any issues we have will be people not having their first option of food, not going hungry.

I had a solid weeklong period here where no store within 15 miles had any fresh dairy products, meats, produce other than herbs, or bulk grains (flour, rice, pasta, etc).

Just to flesh out my experience. In the UK we defiantly had some things missing from shelves, but it would be running out of strawberry cereal bars and having to have raspberry ones instead. Aside from some short term (about 2 weeks) issues with everyone buying all the loo roll, there wasn't anything that couldn't be replaced.

I drove about 35 miles to my parents' neighborhood and everything looked picked-over, but there was plenty of food. For example, I wanted pasta and sauce. I found pasta and sauce, but had to get a weird pasta shape and a more unusual/fancy sauce to find something in stock. That trip, I found some version of everything I needed, except that rice and flour could not be had. I wanted some produce, and I found some. Lettuce was gone, so were bananas and oranges, but I was able to get enough things that I felt comfortable I would still eat. Meat was a bigger challenge -- the regular market had only hamburger and bacon left (but the Costco in my parents' neighborhood still had plenty of all of the expensive meats and were only out-of-stock on the affordable stuff. If you wanted $20+/lb prime ribeye steaks, for example, they had plenty. Not huge mountains like usual, but plenty)

And restaurants (that didn't close) were fine at that time even in my neighborhood (they ran low at a different time, when local markets were fine). My local pizza place did a bigger business selling ziploc bags of flour, plastic beverage cups of milk and cream, and to-go containers full of eggs and butter than they did pizza delivery for a solid two months. (and commercial tissues and TP by the roll). These ingredients were all readily obtainable in commercial-sized units from commercial suppliers.

Still, I produced some (really bad) footage of completely empty markets, and, as a pretty rich guy in a pretty rich area, felt worried about whether I would be able to keep eating for the first time in my life. (I'll never again not keep at least a few shelves' worth of food in the house at all times)

Leave it at civil unrest.

This is one of those things that works perfectly in principle but does not seem to work in practice. I've lived in solidly red or blue districts all my life and in only one election did the party representation switch to a different team. That was only because blue team had two top-tier names splitting the vote which allowed a red team representative to win the special election. They were defeated in the next general election by a landslide.

Furthermore, I also see Congress as having a single digit to low teen approval rating as evidence that being unhappy with one's government does not correlate with actually getting "a different government". Without getting into a long drawn out discussion of why this is the case, I nevertheless think that voting is not the solution it is touted to be.

Edit: I still vote regularly and I encourage others to do so as well. It's not a totally hopeless situation but people should have realistic expectations and expect to be disappointed.

The US also has a lot of gerrymandering of Congressional districts, and far too few of them (don't get me started on the ridiculous Senate.) Plus it has lots of minority veto points like the filibuster requiring 60 votes, the electoral college, and the Supreme Court. Some of these exist "by design" and can be beneficial, but they also present the possibility of legitimacy concerns.

How much food rotted at the Texas border after Governor Abbott's PR stunt held it up? Estimated to be over $4Billion.

First, I'm skeptical about $4 billion. That's a lot of food.

Second, what is with the need to bring up something or someone irrelevant as a rebuttal every time there's even a tangential criticism of the current powers-that-be?

https://medium.com/the-haven/texas-gov-abbotts-racist-border...

This article says $240 million and he reversed the policy? So it's not an ongoing issue?

Also if food is 'rotting' because he is sitting in a truck for perhaps a day longer? Perhaps it was rotting before?

Not saying civil unrest isn’t a possibility, but I’m not sure economic uncertainty could do any worse than airborne-once-in-a-lifetime pandemic

Where was this? I had a few trips to the grocery where specific items were out of stock or rationed (i.e. limit 2 per customer), but never saw a shortage of processed meats.

From what I see of human nature, most people are willing to accept a good deal of change and discomfort before they are willing to jeopardise their relatively stable & comfortable lives (relative compared to countries where you actually see armed uprisings, revolutions & civil war).

It’s part of our founding mythos and reinvents itself in all sorts of contexts.

Doesn’t mean it is at all realistic for our present circumstances. I don’t happen to think so. An increase in stochastic violence? Sure. Actual, organized civil war? No chance.

With a paralyzed legislative body, tensions are likely to grow in the future as the government fails to deliver reforms that either side wants while simultaneously beating the drums on issues that both sides refuses to compromise on.

Throughout much of 2020, both the dominant media narratives and political leaders of the Democrats were very supportive of violence during the BLM movement. Riots and looting were legitimized as "the voice of the unheard", threats of more violence if key court decisions didn't go the desired way were made by prominent leaders and were tolerated or encouraged by the mainstream media, corporate America essentially "gave in to the terrorists" and did anything necessary to avoid being targeted.

And then Jan 6th happened, and all of us on the left suddenly realized that the other side might start using violence to achieve their goals too. It was a scary wake-up call that maybe we should focus on peaceful progress within the existing democratic framework instead of the "boots on the street making demands" approach we had found so successful.

Without the encouragement and approval of violent means from senators and CNN anchors for months during the racial justice protests, there's no Jan 6th event. As long as the leaders go to a "no violence" messaging instead of a "violence is necessary and acceptable when these groups do it" I think we'll have a peaceful 2024.

Ive stepped on a hornets nest in my comment quite negatively voted.

I too am a non-US perspective and 'boogaloo boys' aren't going to be a major factor at all.

>From what I see of human nature, most people are willing to accept a good deal of change and discomfort before they are willing to jeopardise their relatively stable & comfortable lives (relative compared to countries where you actually see armed uprisings, revolutions & civil war).

Never in my life have I seen polarization so bad. According to what I read the only ever time it was this bad was the first civil war.

You know what's weird. I predicted there would be self-immolations similar to arab spring and we are getting it. Black, incel, and environmentalist self-immolations in the USA. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/us/activist-s-self-immolation...

I even imagine as well. Lets say midterms happen and there's a clean sweep by the democrats. What happens?

How about the republicans sweep the election?

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35...

In any case, it is far more logically that a core of highly motivated protestors causes sudden political revolution because they represent the unrealized/unstated preferences of a popular majority. I don’t believe this is likely in this situation as that cohort’s displeasure is largely due to mass culture (and associated forms of economic, social influence) moving further and further away from them.

In terms of farmers retiring with a non-zero reduction of food produced but also farmers in north america getting more $ to ship their food overseas. In addition to food inflation pushing food prices up to unaffordable levels.

I agree with biden, food shortages will be happening.

Non paywall link to that article: https://archive.ph/Rbnv4

It's a very real issue that lots of people beyond Biden have commented on.

Ukraine does produce significant food/calories. This is almost certainly going to be bad for europe.

I made the obvious case about what might happen soon. I am happy to believe Psaki is the one who is wrong. Which is not really difficult to believe given trackrecord.

https://i.imgur.com/DqKpRbU.gif

Do immigrants always bring violence? Why did their states fail anyway? Could we have had a hand in that, bear some responsibility?

Whatever the specifics of the answers you see to these questions your comment sucks. It's using racist fears to stoke xenophobic resentment.