May be phrasing it wrong, but I look at actions like Labor rights, Pride, Civil Rights, Black Panthers, etc. where actions of protesters felt much intense and made more of an impact in actually changing things vs now where there are protests but it feels like it constantly falls of deaf ears.
Have we just not hit that breaking point yet? Have we collectively been beat down so hard? Or have we forgotten how to truly fight for rights? Or… am I just completely off the mark and missing something else?
Your first 3 all seem to be on target to me.
It’s probably at least partially something adjacent to survivorship bias. The most remarkable actions of the past that “survive” to the present to be retold are the ones that were most impactful.
But all of the current protests you feel are not as impactful help build a foundation for the more impactful ones.
I think the the other issue is reporting of events is split into thousands of sources. Just like with media there is no longer a shared conversation between everyone. Back in the day. If Walter Cronkite talked about it everybody knew about it. But know everything is fractured into their own subcultures and to extent their own realities.
Another domain where big tech is not helping organise… They boost hatred not just for engagement and ads, but so masses don’t organise against those technothieves
The things people are protesting against now are pathetically trivial compared to the things those people protested, that’s why.
They’re more just a bunch of people don’t like something, or are against something that they think is happening when it actually isn’t (or is at least a 50/50 issue).
There’s also the fact that most of the protesters these days are just virtue signallers, or are rent-a-protest paid protesters who couldn’t care less.
Where do I get one of these paid protest jobs? Do I need to be on the Illuminati Newsletter?
Fifty Five Iron Penned
Just go sign up for any of the activist organisations that advertise it:
Did you really think that the protests that are 90% pensioners holding all the same print signs and chanting the same thing, often reading from their printouts they were given, were organic?
ROFL so instead of taking me directly to these supposed job postings, you link me random Internet garbage that says they exist with the same credibility that you have. Which is none.
Meanwhile friends of mine have protested and not gotten paid anything. But they are probably Illuminati.
Mount Rushmore was a cover up.
🤡
I’m intrigued, can you find any links to pages to sign up as a “protester” I looked around on those sites but couldn’t find any.
This is ridiculous. I have been at three protests this year so far. One for union rights, another for immigration rights, and the third for keeping the presidential powers in check. None of these are “trivial”. Maybe the real answer is that the privileged don’t feel the need to look at the bigger picture.
He’s a fascist.
Those US nation wide protests that happened a few weeks ago did nothing. People already forgot about them. You’d neeto do that all day every day until trump is gone, hut that ain’t going to happen.
They were successfully beaten down. More specifically, the ORGANIZATIONS were beaten down. The most successful protest movements weren’t people spontaneously showing up in the streets. They were the culmination of the efforts of community organizing. There was planning and they had people they could rely on and who relied on them. But things like unions and the Black Panthers were violently destroyed.
Now protesting is atomized like everything else. A protest that forms by posting to show up somewhere at some time on social media with signs is a collection of individuals rather than a group. If you’re just surrounded by strangers you don’t know, are you going to be able to take more radical actions?
That’s not to say none of the more serious/organized protests are happening though. There were those water protectors who tried to stop that pipeline. There were the rail worker and dockworker strikes. I don’t know how organized it was, but it was heartening to see the LA protests start out by actively protecting people being targeted by ICE. And perhaps there are more that just didn’t get any media attention. But in any case, you see how hard they try to crack down on those. But sometimes they can succeed.
People are organizing in their communities to patrol for ICE and respond to ICE raids, which is quite a bit like the Black Panthers “cop watch” and community patrols.
I know it’s not like when protesters burned down a police station in 2020, but things are happening.
It always takes time. Even when everyone knows that they would win if they just step up to the plate as one unified people.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tdIK3JFIWNI
If we all break “the rules” together, they can’t get all of us
But should it be extreme? I reckon it should be effective instead. Whether effective means awareness, resignations or something else is a conversation that varies a lot from context to context.
Yeah, better not disturbe anyone when you are doing your awareness “protests”…
I’d claim that it should not be about “anyone”. It should be targeted. If you are to “disturb” someone, better do this intentionally and with the clear idea what such disturbance is meant to achieve.
I’m not saying you should stand still. I’m saying that you should think before (and after) you act. Wouldn’t hurt too much, would it?
Of course, but the metric you choose for “effectiveness” is critical. In the current situation the metric must be “removal from office”.
The beauty of pluralism is that it allows for different means (and metrics) of achieving a goal.
And I’m saying this as someone coming from a post-communist country where totalitarianism is the powerful position.
A few things come to my mind on why.
- We aren’t fresh off of WW2 when a large portion of the planet was personally affected, extremely sensitive and aware of the impact government overreach can cause.
- We aren’t bored, we have all these highly refined dopamine injecting options, maybe not nefarious in nature but keeps many of us docile and complacent.
- Extremely effective propaganda to muddy the waters on what’s actually going on and what a united peoples opinion even is.
- Globalization of the money, I believe on the grand scheme, the money players are softly united behind the scenes and not backing one side or the other but playing the middle ground class war. So no big money to support a cause.
Because everything that’s happening is obviously bad to the majority.
The big, well reported protests were the result of decades, nay centuries, of protests.
Sit-in protests were common.
Rosa Parks was, by far, not the first Black person to be arrested for keeping her seat.
Hundreds of thousands of workers died or were hurt in preventable dangerous workplaces and labor protests.
It is hard and costly to go against the government.
They stormed capital hill lmao
That wasn’t a fucking protest. Give me a break. There’s a difference between a riot, an insurrection and a protest.
Really? Because it seems to me the only difference is what your preferred media decide to call it.
That was literally a right wing protest about an election result. Protests aren’t always good. All those words you used have broad overlap and generally things escalate from protest to riot to insurrection.
Your logic is misaligned in this comment itself. In your comment you state that “generally things escalate from” and then list three different things . . . A protest, a riot, and an insurrection. This is because they are all different and your logical brain knows it. Your illogical brain uses them as an excuse for the right wing extreme behavior that occured during the god-damned insurrection. How any true patriot could be okay with what happened on the 6th is beyond me. We are supposed to be bonded as Americans. We are supposed to understand that we might not agree on everything, but we are in this together. We are supposed to agree that voting is sacred and that the results are the results.
Protest - a statement or action expressing disapproval of or objection to something.
Riot - a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd.
Insurrection - a violent uprising against an authority or government.
The insurrectionists held an uprising against the government, stormed the capital, and threatened to take over and change the election results. This is fact neither born from one media outlet or another. It had witnesses and is a part of this countries history now.
Right. So using your definitions of protest, riot and insurrection and using your statement that protests, riots and insurrections are mutually exclusive; How would you describe a situation where a crowd is demonstrating their objection to the government with a violent uprising?
Every use of language is contextual and by forcing yourself into an absolutist understanding you’ll lose nuance in your interpretation.
That said. Idgaf loser keep coping
It’s the end product that I am giving a definition. By the way, what did I “lose”? How am I a loser for caring about my young family and my country that I care about? Why is this a competition for you? I am an American who is worried about where this country is heading in many aspects of it (Dem and Republican alike). I do not belong to a single party and I vote my conscience on issues. So, I ask you again . . . What did I “lose”? I am worried about a corporate America where working class people are duped by their government officials and are losing the ability to make a living. If that makes me a “loser” than I guess we’re all losers. And if you think that I am the enemy (a fellow American) then we are definitely all “losers”.
Coup attempts aren’t protests and neither are riots and all the gaslighting in the world won’t change that. That an event can change from one thing to another is meaningless to that fact.
Gaslighting isn’t real and you’re fucking crazy
The black panthers were constantly organizing within their communities, and bringing actual weapons and shows of force against the state. The state imprisoned many of their leaders, and killed Fred Hampton in his sleep. That’s why they were actually having an impact. Because they were willing to risk their LIVES over it, and they didn’t ever stop. I don’t really see that happening anywhere now.
I guess its up to us
Not yet, maybe.
The police have gotten very effective at quashing effective movements, and we’ve had decades of concerted effort to make it more difficult to organize and to get people to actually oppose the concept of effective resistance in their own favor.
People with power don’t want people threatening to destabilize that power. People who set media narratives need access to people with power, and so they don’t want to convey those destabilizing factors positively.
This makes people view them negatively, if they even see them at all.America has never had a culling of the rich and powerful. The closest we got was when we decided to exchange a rich and powerful person far away for a few closer to home.
As such, there’s no weight given to the morale of anyone who isn’t rich and powerful.
Reporters, politicians and businesses people have never had to put their heads in the scale when making choices.I think that part of it is that the authorities are confident that we can’t do much. In the 60’s, wide scale protest that was not a preamble to a riot was rare. In recent times, everyone expects things to go off peacefully and just come to an end at some point. This plays directly into their hands, and they are confident that we are toothless.
Peaceful protests will do fuck all when the white house rhetoric is that a large percentage of the population (anybody who doesn’t support Trump) are literally enemies of the state.
Liberals do not understand this for some reason, but peaceful protests only work with at least the THREAT of violence, unless you live in a country that actually cares about representing the people. Which America does not.
In the words of Anton LaVey, they are addicted to the “good guy badge”. They’d rather die feeling morally clean than get their hands dirty to save their country, neighbors, and values. The liberals I hear judging people for violent protest the most are the ones who are privileged enough to have not personally felt the consequences yet.
In my opinion, it is a grotesque cowardice to admonish people for fighting for their lives just because you don’t have to.
Exactly. I totally agree. It’s absolute bullshit.
“The revolution will not be televised”
It’s a phrase I hear a lot in leftist spaces. Effectively, you have to be aware that publicizing these things is a great way to get them shut down.
The work is being done locally, and quietly. Advertising these events in public spaces like this one will very likely lead to them not getting off the ground due to infiltration or oppression
There’s a second factor at work, which is that the institutions targeted by more “extreme” actions also don’t want those actions publicized.
Consider an action like the one depicted in “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.” If they don’t have a perpetrator in cuffs, the oil company and the cops would not want to admit the action happened at all, because it makes them look vulnerable.
