“Safe” protests won’t accomplish a damn thing.
I love the No Kings protests in Portland… congratulations, you’re protesting for an audience who already 99% agrees with you.
But that’s protests in Portland in general, BLM, Occupy Wall Street, etc. etc.
Want to make a real difference? Take that shit to D.C. and shut the city down for a month. That might move the needle.
Preaching to the pre-converted? Pointless.
Burn one billionaire or politician and you’ll see some movement.
Look at Luigi Maggione.
Like I think Protests like No Kings and 50501 were great protests to get over the first hump of organization. Still is I suppose for those late to the party. However when they didn’t evolve to armed protestors, then evolve further when people like Pretti made the news dying in broad daylight, documented from multiple angles. It ultimately became a resting place that misdirected our energy into pointless busy work.
It was a great first couple of steps, but everybody started getting comfortable staying there even as the government, and namely The Republicans and ICE kept escalating. Always fearing their escalation, that inevitably kept happening even without The Insurrection Act.
Our due process was the social contract that stopped us from just taking power from them, letting them represent our country, earn a salary, without the need for citizen violence to enforce order. They broke that contract. And they keep breaking it everyday. They are no longer protected by the contract. They do not deserve to benefit from the same contract they wipe their ass with.
To put it bluntly, people should have already organized and prepped already. What happens as midterms head towards election day, and the aftermath is likely to be violent either way. I really do not see Republicans giving up power willingly. Though I hope to be wrong, and everything just gets better without the need for bloody violence. I just don’t see it happening currently. Even if The Dems win, there will be violence.
We don’t have a central figure or identity that can pull that kind of movement together. Single-day marches? Sure. Moving hundreds of thousands of people two thousand miles and then feeding them for a month? That’s military logistics.
Yup, which is why nobody has done it since 1/6. 😉
i mean they only charged 1.5k-ish people. i was watching from california, there were obviously more but nowhere near 100k. i think official counts were somewhere closer to 5k.
It is usually local people harmed by property damage when the people who are the problem point fingers from afar at strawmen. It seems no matter what you do, tribalism will overcome any change.
straw man fallacy?
I mean it does generalize and probably isn’t true upon close exam, but they are not wrong about how easy it was for “liberals” to suddenly have a problem with protest the second it got messy.
Though NIMBYs gonna NIMBY.
Well yeah liberals value property more than human life. That’s been true for all of liberalism. I’d say it’s the core tenet of liberalism. For liberalism private property is the most sacred belief they have.
Don’t forget order. Order is the other guiding principle of liberalism. Although I guess you could say that order exists to protect property. So maybe it’s a 1B kind of thing.
As a liberal, I’m gonna need these rules in a paper copy if you don’t mind. Because I’m all for killing authoritarianism and budgening oppressors… And I care little about my own private property in my pursuit to do those things.
Property can be replaced. Murdering your oppressors is forever.
I’m assuming you aren’t a liberal? Or left of anything? On a scale of one to ten, how much do you love boots?
What private property do you have? Do you have like a factory or a own a forest or a mine or something? You sure you’re not talking about personal property?
My house? My acres of farmland? My acres of forest I own? That property?
Yes, I do own part of a forest on my property.
Also for the record I’m not American. Your definition may vary wildly from mine.
Well your house is personal property, but as for the rest sure. I was wrong. You are a capitalist. Congrats on that I guess.
You’re throwing a lot of words around without knowing the meaning of any of them. How is the government deciding where my property line starts and ends, how the county taxes my property where it starts and ends, makes me a capitalist because I pay into taxes that help people in my community, I don’t commercialize my land, I keep my woodlands open for public hunting every year, and let people camp on my property as long as they let me know they’re there?
Are you sure you are a liberal? Cuz it sounds to me that you’re way to the left of liberals. I could be wrong though. Maybe you are a liberal. Maybe you’re one of that group of people that every single time it comes to supporting the the workers or supporting fascism you’ll support fascism. Cuz that’s what liberals do.
Liberals will always turn against the working class. We have 300 years of human history that backs this lesson up and I have no sympathy for people who have refused to learn from it.
There is an enormous amount of evidence to disprove the idea that liberals will always support fascism. Fascism explicitly rejected liberal democracy, individual rights, and political pluralism. Liberals were among those persecuted by fascist regimes, and liberal democracies were instrumental in defeating said fascist regimes.
Never understood the lengths some Lemmy users go to describe liberalism in these ways. It’s just as bad when people do the same thing towards ideologies such as communism
Liberal has a completely different meaning in the US and has for about the last century. Wikipedia article on social liberalism in general and here’s one on modern liberalism in the US, but if you don’t want to read all that, here’s an excerpt:
Modern liberalism in the United States emerged with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and is the prevailing version of liberalism in the country. It is most synonymous with the ideology known as social liberalism in much of the world, combining in the U.S. version elements of cultural liberalism, American progressivism, civil liberty and social equality with support for social justice and a mixed economy
and a bit later in the same article:
Economically, modern liberalism embraces a role for government to protect against market failures, ensure competition and prevent corporate monopolies, and supports labor rights through the strengthening of public- and private-sector labor unions, collective bargaining, unemployment insurance and minimum wage laws.
So I think perhaps you can see how the term means something completely different there. It’s really closer to socdem than classical liberal.
And as a kicker, the US “conservative” party is economically liberal, whereas much of the “liberal” party is not (unfortunately much of the old guard there are more liberal rather than liberal).
TL;DR: Yes, the economic term “liberalism” means “let corpos do whatever the fuck”. In the modern meaning of the word politically, it’s more “all people are created equal and all deserve to be free”.
Ah the great lie of American politics. That Liberals are somehow different in America than the rest of the world. But it’s funny. When you look at the things that American liberals vote for and support it sure seems like the exact same fucking things they do in the rest of the world doesn’t it?
I’ve seen this argument paired a few times online. Unfortunately it just does not hold water whatsoever. We have 50, or closer to 60 now, years of liberal policy in America that flies in the face of this argument 100%. We have decades of anti labor, anti-regulation, Pro corporate, pro Wall Street, anti civil liberties and all around liberal policies to show us otherwise.
It’s no coincidence that we are where we are. Because as you alluded to it’s not just one party. Republicans are absolutely liberal, or they were before the last 10 years at least. As were Democrats. That’s the history of American politics basically since the beginning. Two liberal parties. One leaning slightly more conservative and one leaning slightly more Progressive. Or some might put it, the party of the grand bourgeoisie and the party of the petite bourgeoisie. But both fundamentally liberal. America was the first great liberal Revolution and it is something that gas guided us ever since. But it has not changed.
You mentioned the Old Guard of the Democratic party being “classical liberal” instead of your supposed new definition. However that Old Guard has been just the guard for a very long time. I would argue always. It’s not a remnant. It’s a feature. With the new arising of the new Democrats in the '80s. Clinton and Gore and their ilk. What did their rise to power bring about? Massive deregulation. The gutting of Labor. With their Republican allies they instituted an extremely liberal policy that tore apart any Progressive advances that had been made in the previous decades. Though it’s not like Jimmy Carter didn’t put his stamp on it either. Was Obama old guard? I wouldn’t argue so certainly, yet there’s a very good reason why when he tried to implement his liberal free trade policies he had all of the Republicans and about half the Democrats behind him. Certainly his expansion of their surveillance state and protecting big Banks like Wells Fargo were extremely liberal policies of a classical nature.
We could go on and on. The point is It doesn’t hold up. This concept of a new definition of liberal just doesn’t coincide with reality. Because the reality of what the Liberals in America vote for what they support what they legislate is the exact same definition of what liberals world over do. So when people tell you that liberalism is a different word in America understand that that’s a psyop. Because liberals and conservatives in America would love you to think that liberalism is as far left as you can go. They would love you not to have a actual Progressive Party. Which is what the Democratic party pretends to be but it’s actually a liberal party with a few progressives chained up in the bowels of the boat.
Liberals didn’t lose their minds.
However, the media are owned and controlled by the billionaires. This allows them a lot of control of the narrative and your perception of events.
This is like Orwell shit. The party was never at war with East Asia. We never denounced the George Floyd protests. We were always anti-billionaire.
What else? The Democrats never supported Israel? I’ve heard that one recently.
I think your conflating Democrats with liberals.
Democrats are centrist, at best. This is also why it’s so silly when democrats are referred to as being radically left.
Bruh, I live in a place where the liberal party is called the Liberal Party and they’re functionally identical to the Democrats just without the same responsibilities of being the #1 state sponsor of war.
Bruh, it sounds like your “Liberal party” and the Democrats serve the same function, which is to be just left enough of the conservative party to capture the votes of liberals, while never affecting (or even advocating for) any actual progressive, liberal societal change.
Liberals aren’t left wing, this is like B-tier trolling.
The most effective form of protest workers have against owners requires no violence at all: It’s strikes, ideally a general strike. The economic damages from even one week of half of the country’s workers refusing to work would force the wealthiest permille to make concessions.
The principal problem people in the USA have is that your hyperindividualism prevents you from developing a class conscience with your fellow workers. Most of you are not joining unions to make them strong for collective bargaining, not standing in local elections against establishment candidates, not joining/creating local mutual self-help groups, and so on.
Of you just look at history at when the American system has reacted to protests with violence its always when it threatens the bottom line. So you would imagine this is the most impactful way to make a statement. Or just end up in the worst prison imaginable.
Oil pipelines, logistic networks, strikes. We have instilled dictactors and killed civilians in other countries to make sure we keep getting bananas because they had a strike. The only people who ever actually do anything are eco terrorists who threaten things like oil pipelines and there’s a reason you never hear about them.
So you can poke the bear where it hurts but you have to be on a very special position to get away with it.
The 2020 BLM protests were hardly some small, isolated incident involving a little property damage. The unrest caused more than $2 billion in insured property losses across the United States, making it the costliest civil-disorder event in U.S. insurance history at the time. The unrest spread across more than 20 states and affected communities nationwide. Whatever your political position, pretending the damage was trivial or that this was some minor, localized event is simply ignoring the facts. That doesn’t mean every protester was violent or that every demonstration was destructive, but the scale and financial cost of the unrest were substantial.
Despite the scale of the 2020 BLM protests, the long-term results were mixed at best. They generated enormous public attention and prompted some policy changes, but they did not fundamentally transform the American political system or eliminate the racial inequalities that motivated the movement. In many respects, the country remains deeply divided, and racial hostility has become increasingly visible in our political discourse. Under the current administration, rhetoric surrounding race and immigration has only intensified those divisions. For all the protests, all the disruption, and all the money lost to property damage, the question remains: how much has actually changed for the better?
This is exactly why memes like this are counterproductive. Rather than encourage an honest discussion about what happened, what it cost, and what the consequences were, they reduce complicated events to simplistic narratives designed to provoke anger and deepen divisions. Presenting misleading information to reinforce an existing political bias is propaganda, regardless of which side does it. It is the same kind of divisive political messaging that the current administration routinely uses to mobilize its supporters and discredit its opponents. When we substitute outrage and misinformation for facts, we make meaningful discussion impossible. That is a significant part of how we arrived at our current political climate, and continuing to circulate this material without questioning its accuracy only makes the problem worse.
Thank you and spot on. There was zero change, hell its honestly worse now than it was because Republicans regained power.
What did we get? Hundreds if not thousands of wounded, and frankly tortured people from police brutality and zero change for the better.
The media and politicians are bought by billionaires and prevent any real change no matter how much you protest.
Vote them out.
Measuring BLM in terms of insured property damage is probably a poor way to approach a movement addressing systemic bias and social awareness. It at least runs afoul of something to:
reduce complicated events to simplistic narratives
The impacts of BLM have been met with counteraction, which is neither new or unexpected, and no meme is going to be able to fully address a complicated anything.
I love how there are multiple comments downplaying the $2 billion number.
It just goes to show how brainwashed people really are when it comes to numbers like $2 billion.
Of course, compare that number to Elon Musk’s wealth, and $2 billion doesn’t seem like all that much. Compare it to what I have, however, and the difference is almost incomprehensible. I make $80,000 a year. Even if I saved every single dollar I earned, it would take me 25,000 years to accumulate $2 billion. Let that sink in for a moment.
$2 billion in insured property damage is an absolutely massive amount of damage caused by the BLM riots. However, that still doesn’t change the point I’m making, which is that the meme is misinformation.
Your argument is that memes don’t tell the whole story and never can. That’s a completely different argument, and it doesn’t address my point.
My point is that the meme is deliberately presenting a misleading picture of what happened. The fact that the damage amounted to $2 billion is directly relevant to that discussion.
The meme implies that the BLM riots caused relatively little property damage. They did not. The estimated insured property damage was approximately $2 billion.
Downplaying that figure to make the damage appear insignificant is textbook misinformation, particularly when it’s being used to push a very specific political narrative.
And let’s be clear about something: my personal opinions on BLM and the riots are probably very different from what most people here assume. In fact, the person I originally responded to would probably disagree with a good deal of what I have to say about both BLM and the riots themselves.
But that’s beside the point.
I am specifically and intentionally calling out the propaganda and misinformation presented in this meme. Nothing more, nothing less.
You don’t have to agree with my opinions about BLM to acknowledge that a meme misrepresenting the scale of property damage is misleading. Those are two entirely separate issues, and conflating them is exactly how political misinformation gets a free pass.
It’s a $32 trillion economy, so I wouldn’t consider it a stretch to say that BLM caused the slightest amount of property damage in a meme. The $2 billion figure doesn’t seem significant or as relevant.
You’re comparing a $2 billion insurance loss to the entire American GDP?
Jesus. Way to lose all context.
Yes, of course. What’s $2 billion compared to $32 TRILLION-ILLION-ILLION? Are you kidding me?!
What exactly were you expecting from the protests? For people to scoop up the entire country and toss it in the fucking bin?
I even made a point of comparing that $2 billion to Elon Musk’s net worth. Compared to that, it’s a tiny loss.
But comparing a $2 billion loss from the BLM protests to the entire American economy is a completely useless comparison. It’s like saying the distance to the Sun is tiny compared to the distance to the next galaxy. Technically true, but utterly meaningless without context.
The American economy generates trillions of dollars in economic activity every year. Of course $2 billion is going to look insignificant when you compare it to a number that massive. That doesn’t tell us anything meaningful about the actual scale of the losses.
Christ. Calling a $2 billion loss negligible because it’s a tiny fraction of America’s GDP doesn’t prove your point. It just demonstrates that you know how to divide two numbers without understanding what the comparison actually tells you.
Context matters. Scale matters. And a loss doesn’t stop being significant just because you can find a bigger number to compare it to.
The context being: insured property damage is probably not a good way to measure the influence of BLM protests when emotionally reacting to a meme.
It is actually and you don’t understand the context. It’s the largest loss in insurance history. How do you find that to be a meaningless metric.
And again. The point of my response was to illustrate the misinformation. As much as you want to downplay it 2 billion is a noteworthy and significant loss.
Insured property damage just wasn’t the purpose or intent of BLM. Illustrating it as such works just as much towards misinformation as the offending meme, if not more.
Two billion across the whole country isn’t all that much, especially considering how bonkers property evaluations are.
Compared to anual damages caused by climate change 2 billion is relatively small too. And the gap will widen every passing year, but that doesn’t bother the majority.
I think other replies describe why this is a terrible approach to looking at a movement, but you mentioned insured property loses and I couldnt help but wonder if the protests actually did any damage to insurance companies (unfortunately they didnt take even a dime).
Private U.S. property/casualty insurers’ made more in 2020 than 2019 in net underwriting gains (difference between net premiums and any claims and other insurance-related expenses)
$5.1 billion of net underwriting gains in 2020 compare to $3.7 billion of net underwriting gains a year earlier
https://www.verisk.com/490445/siteassets/media/downloads/insuranceresultsreport2020fullyear.pdf
“won’t someone please think of the property values!”
In my twenties I held this belief some what. I was a big peaceful protest guy. To be fair my justification back then was I didn’t like how it seemed to be the reasoning why cops are militarizing. Many of the protests at the time just seemed to devolve once when alt right figures infiltrated and turned it into a riot, and many of these protests where set up on Facebook groups by people not even in our country. Many of them organized events right next to eachother at the same time. Just none of it seemed productive.
Either things have changed or my opinions matured because I feel like we should be in the streets over every little issue. And I wana see cop cars flipped over and on fire these days. The country feels slightly more unified then it used to, so I have slightly more faith that things would turn out more productive. There’s core issues like flock that reach across the isle and people firmly established they don’t like it, and has resulted in minor change.
sorry but that’s an amazing photo. i hope it’s a photo, i ain’t look too close
I’m pretty sure I remember that actually happening, because my shithead dad was angry about it.
They should make him eat there
I see the problem. You heard something from leftists, and then brought up something said by liberals.
Easy mistake in the bullshit US discourse
Yeah the monolithing OP is doing is honestly impressive. Here, let me try another:
“Americans say trans rights are human rights, but then they also say trans people should be banned from public restrooms. Wtf lol???”
Removed by mod
When the pearlclutching starts, that’s when you take it up a few notches. Not back down.
Um, all BLM has to do is wear merch and hold up a sign and the police start lobbing CS grenades.
The point of protest isn’t to riot, but to get the state to over-respond, brutally. Its why the entire world knows about and sympathizes with the BLM cause.
At least that’s the game, according to COIN. Hearts and minds. Though in the Civil Rights movement, we added lawsuits.
And Trump and the red states are quick with their riot squads. Left wing movements just have to represent and make booga-booga faces to trigger anti-riot shooting civilians with rubber bullets. (They’re plastic and steel, actually.)
And then two years later, the victims are awarded millions from the districts or the US treasury, depending on the department of the officer who decided it was time to bust heads.
Law enforcement in the US has already lost its legitimacy in the public eye, worldwide. We know they’re just thugs of the state, and their response to protest, especially minority protest, especially black protest, figures largely into that paradigm shift.
So, just because protesters in the US still carry signs instead of molotovs, doesn’t mean the protests are weak. It means the state’s responsers are incredibly easily trolled into initiating violence while camers are watching.
The point of protesting is not to provoke the state to kill you so that people will watch it.
There are many points to protesting. Provoking the opposition is one of them. We see this in civil disobedience protests and noncooperation actions.
Provocation of state responders is one of the effects of protest, regardless of whether it is intended. But it’s so consistent, especially in authoritarian regimes, that it is absolutely figured into the calculations of organizers. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, staged actions expecting casualties, but knowing they would ultimately further the cause by orders of magnitude.
It’s unlikely you (a specific person) will get killed at a protest, but we see casualties at protests all the time, and they are often honored, such as the Kent State victims, who have a folk song written about them. It also sparked a student strike four million strong, and helped to speed the end of the war.
Not all antagonistic responses have to be lethal or even injurious to to create a backlash in support of the cause. The No Kings Snapchat account shutdown by Meta is already resulting in backlash against the Trump regime, against Zuckerberg, and against the tech bro coalition in general.
But again, all a state really needs to do is manage a protest with grace. Authoritarian regimes just jave a tendency to take visible dissent personally (or any criticism, really), and then more liberal states often fail to instill in their law enforcement a predisposition of deescalation. I suspect right-wingers just enjoy the notion of cracking dissenter heads so much they can’t help themselves.
All these people saying that Americans can’t protest forget that we literally host hometown hero Luigi. Arguably the best way to get the message across. Needs more consistency, but It’s certainly effective.
a lot of people somehow missed the fact that luigi’s actions worked to force change immediately.
“somehow” as in the media kept that part quiet as best they could.
And that change was the mass deployment of Flock cameras Nation-wide.
I’ve said it before.
People are alive today that wouldnt be alive if someone hadnt shot that UHC CEO.
The entire insurance industry got so scared and so panicked that they stopped denying coverage for curable issues for like… the next year. Hundreds, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people are alive today, and are in better health today, because one vile piece of shit got shot and died.
Thats an easy trade to make any day of the week.
Is it possible the “Americans can’t protest like the French” and “I don’t like disruptive protests” camps are two entirely different groups of people?
