Cross-posted from "Nina going off today" by @[email protected] in [email protected]
Something i have brought up before as an example is when i was in elementary school and high school, i was bullied very very badly. They would say horrific things and beat me up. This happened for almost 10 years. Everyone always told me "ignore them. Be the bigger person.", "if you hit them, you are just as bad.", "if you ignore them, they will stop.", "have you asked them to stop bullying you?".
Teachers would constantly make excuses and ignore the bullies. Because if they said something about it, the whole class would lie and say i did something to deserve it. I never did anything because i was terrified.
One day i got jumped again after school by one of them and i snapped. I beat the everliving fuck out of him. The last punch was straight to the throat and he struggled to breath.
Not a single person in the class bullied me ever again. Not a single word was said to me from that day on.
My point is that asking bullies and fascists nicely to stop, does not work. They are not playing according to the rules. We are currently "fighting" them with the assumption they have morals and will stop if we firmly tell them to. Did the protest annoy trump? 100%. Probably spend the entire night annoyed. Is he rethinking his fascist plans? Absolutely not.
I do think the protests are beautiful to see. So much solidarity and love. Its amazing to see with our own eyes that our side is MASSIVE. and that the right does not have nearly as much people as they pretend they do.
But i also know it won't change but. Trump is not going to leave. He will not stop advancing his fascist plans. ICE continues their gestapo bullshit. LGBT and womens rights continue to be taken away.
It's a beautiful morale boost. But sadly that is all it is.
Sorry for the rant. I do love seeing the protests and i really have so much respect for the people out on the streets. But i don't think much, if anything, will change.
But in condemning violence it would be an act of irresponsibility not to be as strong in condemning the conditions in our society that cause people to feel so angry that they have no alternative but to engage in riots. What we must see is that a riot is the language of the unheard.
What is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last 10 or 12 years. It's failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. It has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity.
Peaceful protest or "sitting it out" is when you have hope to last longer than the current crisis.
The current crisis, at least in the US, is not going to vanish that quickly. The real crisis is the dropping wages, and that's not gonna revert much. Socialism or barbarism!
The moment the inconvenience of jail or ending up dying during an insurrection is better than the actual situation, shit is gonna spiral. People will riot violently, government is gonna fuck with the lives of folks who didn't, more will join, more will get fucked, and repeat until Donnie is no more.
well fucking said.
i never thought it would be so hard for libs to understand you can't vote fascism away. i never thought they would be rolling over to fascism so quickly.
what the fuck makes them not collaborators of this regime if they want to stop any sort of actual resistance.
The lib politicians did not roll over to facism, they rolled over for money ... for loosely regulated and barely looked at Super PAC donations and withdrawals. They rolled over for legalized corruption. Fascism is just the gift wrap that they had to take those presents in.
This lady is kind of right. We are not likely to vote our way out of this.
you mostly described how fascism made them roll over.
The only police reform we have seen in 15 years has been as the result of BLM violent protests.
Violent protest got you every single right you have.
It's historically the only way slaves and the poor have ever improved their lives.
Shut the fuck up
Well yeah. It's possible for peaceful protests to work, but let's look at history. In reality, the pigs are going to get violent regardless of what anyone does, the national guard will be called out and they're going to use tear gas because their bosses want them to, and despite the fear of injury or death, large groups of people will keep working to make things better.
This is guaranteed to occur. For good or bad, whatever, it will happen. So let's stop worrying about certain outcomes and move our focus to the uncertain things.
Absolutely right. Even Gavin Newsome is doing nothing but threatening to file a lawsuit. Buncha goddamn pussies. There is only ONE way to deal with Nazis and it isnt bEiNg pEaCeFuL
What do you mean "even"? Gruesome Newsom is the shittiest lib of them all
I had this exact convo with a friend recently. Peaceful protest can work against a government with a ~~conscious~~ conscience. The US gov’t has consistently shown to not have a ~~conscious~~ conscience. My local organizers don’t really seem to get this, which just means they, and many of the general citizens they direct, will be underprepared for the conflict that will almost inevitably arise.
Fight before your not able to
For the few ppl advocating pacifism below, seems like a good time to read this:
Educate me. I mean this with no hostility, and I'll be honest about the fact that I'm not an American and am seeing this from the outside. I'm not attacking anyone and I'm not defending any one stance, because I'd like to be educated and I'm not confident my news is giving me the whole picture.
Educate me.
Here's what I hear.
Please spell it out for the rest of us. And how can I help?
Isn't this exactly what Trump would want? I may be missing the point here, and as an ally I don't mean to take anyone's energy away from far more important efforts.
Please educate me (if you can). Please fight for your rights!
When people are having members of their community kidnapped at graduation ceremonies, hearing stories of secret police trying to enter elementary schools to abduct 1st graders, that affects you. Masked agents of the state who hide their identities are routinely disappearing people, and when communities respond to protect each other from abduction, or protest these monstrous actions, the police show up to disperse them so the kidnappers can do what they came to do. They routinely attack people unprovoked.
If you have never been to a protest where the cops decided to escalate, you cannot know how crystal clear the barbarity becomes. These cops have been pelting peaceful people with pepper balls, tear gas, concussion grenades, and baton rounds. According to a study, those "less lethal" rubber rounds permanently injure ~15% of the people hit by them. 3% are killed, eventually dying to injuries sustained.
Here's a video of someone being shot with one point blank for asking an officer to identify himself, who refuses to do so. Here's a police horse being used to trample a man that is already subdued and surrounded.
The other thing to understand is that while the outrageously ghoulish shit ICE and other state bodies have been getting up to, this situation with the police has been the status quo for a very long time. The same forces have been doing this shit to virtually every form of protest for ages. These are the same people that are responsible for the highest incarceration rate in the world, with a for-profit prison industry, and contracts to exploit incarcerated labour.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the situation is already incredibly violent, that violence has just been normalized, and people are literally trying to protect their neighbors from being kidnapped by the state. Communities have been experiencing relentless institutional and systemic oppression for generations. Appealing to the conscience of people brutalizing and kidnapping targeted groups on behalf of the state is a fool's errand, they clearly have none.
Asking people to remain completely peaceful is to ask them to sit back and watch their neighbors disappear. It's to ask them to passively watch as more people get subjected to greater levels of violence, to show up and be beaten themselves for daring to resist the expansion of fascism. Burnt Waymos and shattered glass can be replaced, rebuilt. Objects are not people, and it's overwhelmingly cops that have been damaging people.
I am not advocating for violence, but I think every person understands the innate urge to rebel against oppression. Whatever shape that takes, people that are not putting their bodies on the line do not get to tell those that are what to do.
There are also people who have no choice in the matter, their bodies are on the line either way because state agents have orders to take control of them in some way or other. Before you think to tell people what they should or should not do, take a moment to ask yourself how it would sound if it was you and yours in that position.
Beyond that, expecting that years of passivity will somehow pay off is absurd. If it worked, the situation would be getting better over time, not worse. This regime is going to escalate no matter what, it's already deporting dissidents and shipping innocent people off to foreign concentration camps. They're already actively trying to revoke citizenship from all sorts, unilaterally criminalizing completely law-abiding people overnight.
We know where this road leads. Whatever actions people take to shut it down, history will be on their side.
Let me break it down very simply:
Did you ever get bullied in school or see a bully terrorize other kids?
Was the bully stopped by appeals for him to act nicely? Was the bully stopped by the administration? Did the bully stop beating a kid when the kid didn't fight back?
Yes the bully will beat another kid and then cry wolf when the kid defends itself. However the administration full well knows who the bully is and decides to side with him anyways.
If you fight back you might loose. If you don't fight back you will definitely loose.
Not OP but for your second bullet, the idea is that we're getting the insurrection act or martial law pretty much no matter what because trump wants it and is looking for any excuse.
So, if it's going to happen anyway, why not do it on our terms?
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