daltotron

MLK, fred hampton, and malcolm X getting assassinated definitely set back their movements, and it set it back to this day. The civil rights movement after that point basically got disassembled and driven underground. What's the classic MLK quote, something I'm paraphrasing from the end of his life, it was something like. They've given us voting and ended segregation, and that can all be done for free, but now they're going to have to spend money to actuallt change things. And he was talking about reparations, iirc.

So his point was that it would get much harder after that. After they died, hell, even while they were marching, we got desegregation, but we also still had segregation in everything but name. White flight, redlining, the mass shutting down of public utilities like pools, huge amounts of homes getting demolished and split up under the guise of "blight removal" and the federal highway program, and now we're seeing gentrification and the massive suburbanization of poverty as poles shift slightly. The progress wasn't over, but after huge government crackdowns, the civil rights leaders either getting gunned down, bought out, co-opted and turned towards an islamic cult, or turned towards more illegal activities with the formation of more extreme inner city gangs, which is basically what the black panthers were contemperarily referred to as, those movements were then all gimped and made incapable of dealing with the problems and reframing that inevitably followed.

Your movement can be dealt with anyways, is my point. The state will use violence against you regardless of whether you're "polite" or not, as we've seen historically. It's also insane to ask people who have been writhing under the boot to be "polite", and to be concerned with "optics" like that's some sort of reasonable concern over the actual shit they're protesting. The idea that every interval of every political term, you know, every four years, the voters are the ones that are solely responsible for leverage and change is insane.

You perform a protest, usually in a city, but sometimes that city basically is the entirety of the state's GDP as oftentimes is the case in america. You perform a protest in that city because it causes a large amount of economic threat. to the city, state, and maybe the country. This can be in the form of direct property damage and cops calling in sick days uselessly and in the form of actual expenditures on police, it can less effectively come in the form of various shutdowns for days on end of particular corridors and maybe services.

You perform a protest near to some piece of legislation, near to its passing, its signing, because the city then knows that if they decide to stick to their guns and treat this as usual then there will inevitably be more protests and more property damage and economic cost to them doing so, which makes donors unhappy, it makes people sitting in the nosebleeds unhappy even if they're the stereotypical scared white suburban voter, it makes everyone discontented, it threatens power, and it guarantees a kind of escalation unless the protest succeeds.

But the point is that protests aren't for playing to the nosebleeds and playing to the scared white suburban voter that's going to see like one city block of a walmart and some big box store going up in smoke, and then they're gonna freak out. in the 60's you would get black and white newspaper pictures of people getting hosed down and bitten by dogs and then thr papers would call those people horrible extremists. It doesn't matter what you do, how polite you are, they're going to show those pictures to those people and they won't care. They might even send in a plant to go in and do violencr or act more extreme just so they can incite meaningless violence and get more pictures and more footage.

The protest isn't for those people watching the news, the protest isn't aimed at them, so it doesn't need to be "polite". In these instances a protest is actually hampered by being overly polite because then it's not actually disruptive, and if it's not disruptive then nobody gives a shit and it's useless.

america, home of the crybully industrial complex

No, I think the main point in contention is mostly just that the experience of the American GIs are always centered in these tellings of the stories to american audiences, and obviously that's going to whitewash a lot of the history and context of a conflict and just transform it into "I got stationed in a random place I hated for a couple years and then I had to kill a bunch of people for reasons I didn't understand while they tried to kill all my friends and then I got back home and got jack shit for it". And then on top of that, those movies are going to be a lot about the psychological trauma that's inflicting on those particular american GIs, and often, again, without a broader context of what system they're placed into, it's just sort of like, turned into sanitized hollywood melodrama, much like how they'll sanitize any historical fiction into being oscar bait.

Obviously that's not gonna really be the same experience as, say, some random guerilla fighter somewhere, or some random person who just lives in one of these places. About the only movies I can think of that actually attempted to expand on that particular perspective was good morning vietnam, where that's touched on, but not explored, and maybe the breadwinner, which is a pretty good movie but also more just adjacent to what I'm talking about rather than directly in dialogue with it. I might be wrong on that one though, it's been a while since I've seen it even though that movie is fucking good and you should watch it.

That's my recommendation. Go watch "the breadwinner".

I've seen a couple images of it, as of now, with the world's most obvious plant chuds holding up, like, isis flags, which doesn't make any sense, as well as a flag burning and the replica liberty bell being drawn on with various graffiti, some of which was like, actual antisemitic shit. People give leftists shit for purity testing too much, but that's cause whenever you don't do that you end up with this shit, where very obvious plants will get perpetuated by the media endlessly even if you don't do anything.

I dunno how people haven't been turned onto this shit yet. You can repetitively see footage of like, at every single pro-palestinian demonstration, even the "jews for israel" ones, you'll see some brainbroken zionist in a t-shirt that says "jew" on it in badly written marker trying to stir shit so they can get blown up and then call people antisemitic. You saw this same shit with very obvious cop-phenotype hog "off-duty" cops in the BLM protests that were also trying to stir shit, or like, how it would always be some white kid nobody knew that would be the one trying to burn some random storefront or whatever. Or it would just be people freaking out over the walmart burning down, but I don't think it's controversial to think the waltons should fucking burn along with their big box stores. Nobody's burning down the Aldis, from what I've seen.

I won't deny that there are some relative extremists and people who would like to enact violence or property damage in a kind of escalation and mutual arms race in which basically everyone loses, but they are very few and far between, and what you actually end up seeing a lot of the time are going to be plants. Praxis can look like that stuff, but obviously taking your chance to do so in the middle of a random protest, where the cops can easily just start blasting fucking anyone they want and arresting whomever they want, is not the greatest opsec, you're only going to end up using your ideological allies, presumably, as cover for your own adventurism. It'd be better to do whatever shit you wanna do like that on your own so nobody else can get involved or taken down for it. Everyone knows this, it's not big news, it's why that violence specifically doesn't happen. But in most instances, if you are watching the news snippets, you are seeing the like, two city blocks worth of protests that are going to be the most extreme by far so they can scare white suburban voters into doing whatever they want.

MLK got killed and was constantly mocked by his colleagues because of his overly idealistic positioning doing nothing to materially impact the movement at large, I'm like 60% sure JFK got killed for being too friendly to him, and ganhdi also got killed lated on and in general was also not a nice person, iirc. It doesn't matter how nonviolent you are in your protest, the news will still frame it as violence on your part for throwing soup on the glass that protects the mona lisa while in the same breath condoning your subsequent arrest and/or total beatdown by cops. If you shut down traffic, if you stand in front of a store, somebody will tell you that you're causing economic violence in this hour and in this moment, and oh, what if someone needs to use this road or this space for some sort of sudden emergency, and oh, you're the one causing violence, right before they bring out the hoses and the attack dogs and the rubber bullets and the tear gas, and then they'll stand by and do fucking nothing while either the state or just private entities in a mob come in and drop a fucking bomb on your neighborhood.

There's not really a "nonviolent" form of protest. The state always brings the violence. A "nonviolent" protest can hardly be called a protest, even, I'd say, that's more just like a march, a demonstration, or a parade. Still maybe valuable, but they're not really disruptive in any way. They tend to be coordinated with local city councils so they can hand out permits, and they tend to not really impact much as a result. That's the ideal modern "protest", the only socially acceptable protest, so neutered as to be totally ineffectual. Anything else would be rude, if you're protesting, even if it's about how you're starving, how the police are killing people, how your country is funding a genocide overseas,, you have to be polite.

Gen Z is about to have their Obama moment like how millenials did, I'm taking bets for it now. Everything has happened before, time is a flat circle, I'm willing to bet.

If everybody acts collectively in their own interest, we all win.

I mean this is only really true so long as everyone is allowed to vote, which is inevitably never the case. We always have certain subsects of the population which aren't really given access to democracy. It's very easy to, even in a "total democracy", still have a ton of xenophobia and imperialism, because obviously, people who aren't citizens can't vote. That's a very large top-down example, right, but this creation of subsects happens at every level. Famous more american examples are gerrymandering and the electoral college.

I’m guessing we agree on #1 and disagree on the premise of #2. I see #2 as a systemic pattern that really launched after the 2008 primaries when Obama disrupted the plan to place Hillary in the White House. It came to a head in 2016 and has been rippling ever since.

THANK YOU. It's fucking insane seeing people claim "well uhhh nobody ever complained about this before! maybe you should've complained about this before, maybe then things would've changed!" just because republicans decided to adopt it as a talking point since they're scrambling to come up with a new strategy and their plans have gone to shit. It's partisan brainworms of the highest order. I guess it's not surprising that they haven't heard these complaints or noticed these trends when they all only become fixated on keeping the pendulum republican candidate out for 6 months out of every four years at most and then completely go back to sleep for the rest of the time.

The goal wasn’t to cover every single wall, just to poison the discourse.

They've successfully done that anyways even if all their bots get called out, because then they will have successfully gotten everyone to think everyone else is a bot, and that the solution and way to figure out if they're bots is to basically just post spam at them. Luckily, people on the internet have been doing this for the past 20 years anyways, so it probably doesn't matter and they've really done nothing.

because a good portion of them are gay? is this still an own?