YSK: There's a protest today at noon at your state capitol.
YSK: There's a protest today at noon at your state capitol.
Posts on various social media platforms called for demonstrators to show up at all 50 U.S. state capitols.
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Jesus Christ I don't think I've ever seen a posts comments so full of reasons this won't work.
You guys don't even need your media to dissuade you, you just convince each other not to do anything.
The thing is if everyone said "fantastic! This will be huge" and the actual protests are underwhelming, well that serves to confirm the false narrative that a very small minority of people are upset.
Declaring high expectations and delivering low is a path to undermine your cause. Waiting until after the fact to explain why sounds like making excuses rather.
The protest in my region was like maybe 50 people. I don't think this is because people are broadly happy, it's because as many many people pointed out, this was poor planning. The optics of pulling off a huge protest in only a week would have been amazing, but just impossible in the real world.
as many many people pointed out, this was poor planning.
So fucking organize it better then.
Jesus this American shoulder-shrug-why-do-anything-if-it-isn't-perfect is so frustrating to watch.
The thing is if everyone said “fantastic! This will be huge” and the actual protests are underwhelming, well that serves to confirm the false narrative that a very small minority of people are upset.
But nobody did, they just said "this day this time go protest in your capitol".
The optics of pulling off a huge protest in only a week would have been amazing, but just impossible in the real world.
It was a protest across the entire country, and it can be done again, and again, and again.
Seriously do you guys even need opponents? You just give up and convince each other to not do anything unless it's perfect and then sit back and watch your neighbours get put in camps, declaring that you sure don't agree with those actions.
Even if it was a huge protest, the psychopaths in charge will walk over their backs and casually walk into the capitol.
Protests don't do shit because you cannot convince people who don't feel emotion to suddenly care about your situation. They only care about self-enrichment, power, and self-preservation. Do you have enough political capital or leverage to influence a politician?
Maybe if you threaten their sense of self-preservation, you might cause them to notice.
Maybe if you threaten their sense of self-preservation, you might cause them to notice.
I think that's really the unstated point of large protests. You get hundreds of thousands of people being present and obviously angry, but "peaceful", you have to be doing the calculation of how many of those are on the brink of something more if their voices are not heard and things proceed or even accelerate.
Of course, on the other hand we are dealing with an administration that thinks an ethnic cleanse of Palestinians to set up a resort city sounds like a safe idea, so not sure there's anyone really thinking about the risks.
Haha, that happened in 2011 with the Wisconsin Act 10 protests. It was literally the most peaceful thing you ever saw in your life: singing, chanting, mutual aid stations, pizza, people on their goddamn hands and knees cleaning salt and sand off of the floor of the Capitol in the evenings.
And the Republicans were cowering in pants-shitting terror! (I mean, more than their usual.) The governor would enter the Capitol through the utility tunnel from a nearby state building. One legislator was terrorized by scratches on their car, and got the State Patrol to investigate the attack. (The SP concluded that the perpetrator was a stone kicked up by the wheels.) I know people who got arrested for having cameras in the Assembly chamber.
Bunch of craven idiots, the lot.
I wonder why a bunch of people might be jumping onto social media, spreading pessimism and suspicion about protests and discouraging people from attending.
Edit: I asked every single person who said that their protest-aware friends told them this was a "false flag" or something, what protest their friends would recommend attending instead. I'm curious to see what the responses are.
Edit: One of the accounts which is expressing well-intentioned nail-biting concern that something really bad might happen to the people who go to these protests, and urging people to stay safe if they do decide to go... is the same account that has been telling me about how Ukraine is the bad guys, and the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans, and other interesting things.
I expect you'll he hearing a lot of crickets.
Some of them are downvoting me for asking them the question.
The Women's March on January 21, 2017 was one of the biggest protests in US History. It did jack all. The US gov't has been taken over by anti-Consititutional, anti-American, anti-law Republicans at all 3 branches. Going to a protest has about the same impact as typing outrage on Lemmy. It's not pessimism, it's reality. Until masses are seriously prepared to get violent, we are fucked. Personally I'm just getting the fuck out and watch it implode into Gilead.
Interesting how you skipped over the BLM protests, which were literally 100 times larger than the Women's March, and resulted in significant changes to the exact thing they were protesting, which had previously been a basically unchangeable fact of American government and society.
There's also Euromaidan, which toppled a corrupt government, with about 4 times the attendance of the Women's March.
There were hundreds of BLM protests over the course of several months. This needs to be a sustained effort or it's going to die on the vine
100% agreed. That’s why I was lecturing the person who was depressing support for them, and saying that protesting in general wasn’t effective.
It's going to take sustained effort over time, so... don't start? I'm struggling to find the logic here.
Who said not to start? Not me, that's for sure. I said not to stop.
I didn't realize police stopped shooting black people. Also, the media's fucked up coverage on the BLM protests had a big impact on ignorant troglodytes supporting fuckhead trump this time around.
I didn’t realize police stopped shooting black people.
Dude that's totally disingenuous and you know it. Protests/strikes aren't fucking fairy magic. They show people in power what the people in general think of something. The more people do these things the more it's clear to those in power what will play out and what won't.
If americans, say, went out en masse and started protesting, striking, blocking day-to-day life from happening, in response to putting people in concentration camps, capitalists would put a lot of pressure on the fascists to step the fuck back. Then people could, I dunno, realise they can't passive-resistence their way out of this and started fighting the fascists, this would be over extremely quickly.
Fascism requires you do one of two things: Help them, or don't resist them. If you resist it becomes too hard for such a small number of people to succeed against a massive amount of people constantly defying them.
Interesting how you skipped over the BLM protests, which were literally 100 times larger than the Women’s March, and resulted in significant changes to the exact thing they were protesting
^ that was what I was responding to. Context matters.
The police have been shooting about 1,000 people per year, of which a plurality have been white. Same as every year before, during, and after BLM.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/
(I would take that graph with a grain of salt BTW. The underlying data sources are pretty incomplete. I highly suspect that the sudden steady increase starting in 2020 is due to better data gathering by the FBI, after years and years of pretty much the same incomplete picture being shown every year.)
In any case, the question is, how many of those shootings were justified? That there is no way to know simply from the data. I know that in 2020, there were enough shootings that were so totally disgustingly unjustified that it caused a mini-civil-war which engulfed the country and in which several people died, and I can think of one time since then that it happened (Tyre Nichols), and as far as I know the officers involved are not doing well in court, and the unit they were part of was disbanded almost immediately. There was absolutely none of this "oh well these things happen" reaction like for Breonna Taylor.
I would call that a positive change. Wouldn't you? Or no? There have been various "reforms" of varying degrees of intensity and staying power, but to me the larger issue has been the change in the culture of policing. Something changed between 2020 and the years that came after that caused the change in the number of highly-publicized killings. Right? Or no?
That's a long way to say not much has changed. BLM may have improved things, or maybe just the reporting changed. Or maybe something else. I don't know. There are so many foundational level problems in this country, and I hear nobody talking about them. Social sicknesses that lead to so many symptoms, including, but certainly not limited to, both police violence and magat voters. I've been voting for progressives in primaries, walking precincts, engaging with conservatives (back when they existed) for several decades now, and I've just watched shit get worse and worse. My time is over, I'm leaving my gloves in the ring, and turning into a full-time spectator now. Good luck.
That’s a long way to say not much has changed.
Okay, so four hugely publicized totally bullshit killings in one single year, after a consistent drumbeat of regular police killings every single year where any level of scrutiny would show that it was totally unnecessary brutality, followed by four years with a lot more scrutiny (in the form of activists, pretty much universal bodycams now, and media) exposing one total bullshit killing in the entire country. That to you is "not much"?
You can disagree with me obviously. But you sound like you just totally ignored what I said, and wanted to repeat what you said again, as if I hadn't said it, and then expand on it.
I’ve just watched shit get worse and worse
Most of it, yes. Police reform is one big type of reform that actually happened. Of course, if you don't care about what happened and simply want to insist that you know everything is getting worse and worse, because it is, that's your right to do, I guess.
The Women’s March on January 21, 2017 was one of the biggest protests in US History.
I didn't say protest, I said strike. They are not the same thing. Protests require Centrists and 'moderates' to care enough to join them. Strikes are meant to directly impact Capitalism. Going to marches every night for a week doesn't hurt business owners, but a week of strikes loses them money in a big way. With sympathy strikes you can get the capitalists fighting each other. With a General Strike all of the lines-go-downward and they'll freak out.
Until masses are seriously prepared to get violent, we are fucked.
Guess which step precedes that?
Get the fuck out in the streets, prevent cars from getting places, block entrances, cause consumers to avoid places, then they'll start paying attention.
God it's so fucking frustrating watching your older brother whining there's nothing they can do when there are provable things they've done in the fucking past that have worked.
Look at the Pullman Strike. Seventy people were killed by cops/military, the strikers still won and it was a massive, historical win for American labour laws.
I didn’t say protest, I said strike.
Well, you didn't, and the post is about a protest. But your point is a good one.
Apologies I made another comment in a virtually identical exchange where I mentioned strikes.
To be clear: Protests -> Strikes -> Sympathy Strikes -> General Strikes.
That's how you beat fascism. As soon as people push back at their money base they crumble. If people let them do what they want they keep pushing for more and more until stopped.