Why do you think the cops have tanks now
I was gonna say, we get shot for protesting now…probably gotta change that part first.
People got shot before too. Lots of people. The fight for worker’s rights was long and bloody.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_United_States
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_States
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/theminewars-labor-wars-us/
I misspoke…er…typed, we get shot and have no real way to defend ourselves being wildly outgunned by police. Thanks for that PBS article btw. I hadn’t heard of a lot of these happenings, and I’m still reading through it.
You think we are outgunned? Really? That’s awful silly of you.
What makes you think we’re not outgunned?
Even in the US where you can own firearms, your 5.56 rounds aren’t going to do shit against an armored vehicle, or handle drone strikes or national guard elements. Yet liberals are frothing at the mouth to take guns away from the working class, when personal firearms are already woefully inadequate for fighting against a tyrannical government.
Sure, if the civilian population of the US had to actively repel an invading army with their own organized militia, it’d be completely one-sided.
But if the US military were engaged in a war against its own civilian population, it wouldn’t be a remotely straightforward fight. They’d be dealing with a local population and the emotional impact of fighting their own population at the same time. Guerilla warfare in the United States would be a mess to try to deal with. We have a lot of wilderness, and the division within the military would likely be significant enough to have a major impact on any attempted operations.
The US military is really good at organizing its troops to fight for the US. Fighting against the US is a whole other can of worms. And by my count, most older vets wouldn’t be on the side of using the military against our own civilians, whether they’re otherwise more on the conservative side of politics or not.
I don’t think there’s anything like the kind of support or organization to see something like that happen, but I think it could get a whole lot uglier and more complicated than just the numbers suggest.
We are trying to stop people gunning down children. I don’t give a fuck about your gun you target shoot with.
Bruh, there’s no way you can take on the greatest military machine in history.
You forget that every part of that machine is a person. No soldier is going to attack his fellow citizens. The cops are not people, but we outnumber and outgun them by orders of magnitude. Either way I am willing to die trying. You can stand with us if the time comes or you can enjoy that boot you’re currently deep throating. The choice is yours.
💀
Tell that to the viet cong and the taliban
Was?
Is.
Now? The pinkertons never left, and they started ages ago. Protesters got shot then too.
Strikers were bombed back in the day by aircrafts. Unionization was won through enduring warfare yet we just gave it away. Shows how powerful unionization is that the elites are completely terrified of it, and that they have surpressed the history of it so few will know how much blood was shed to get it.
I feel like it’s the working class who forgot.
The rich are well aware, which is why they put so much energy into making us think that isn’t an option.
I wonder if them gunning down union protesters would be suddenly legal if needed.
It already is with regular protesters.
They just gotta kill one. They don’t want to kill their entire work force. They just want to subjugate them.
“Governments don’t want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.”
― George CarlinHe was really wrong about voting though. If it didn’t matter, the fascist GOP wouldn’t be fighting so hard to prevent people from voting.
He wasn’t wrong. During this time the parties although different and Republicans being shitter, were much closer together. They were both pro corporate with differences on social issues.
Today… The Republicans have gone full batshit trying to overthrow democracy. I guarantee you, if George was alive he’d be saying VOTE and vote for Democrats until we’ve gotten rid of the dangerous fascists.
Working from inside a system that has been corrupt from the beginning doesn’t work
Many parts of the system were designed to disenfranchise various groups. One of the most effective of those parts is the message that your vote doesn’t matter.
Refuse to be disenfranchised. GO VOTE.
And that they’re all the same.
They’re not.
Voting is like taking public transportation, it’s not going to take you to your exact destination but you get on the bus that gets you closer.
Not getting on the bus because it doesn’t go exactly where you want to, or you don’t like the bus driver is allowing others to take you in the exact opposite direction.
Voting alone might not but it’s an important part of the process. You should agitate and organize, but also go vote and get your friends to go with you.
Soap, ballot, ammo. Gotta go through the boxes in order.
They got wise to that and called in the police and military to help them.
Nah, too unreliable - the worst of the lot hired private armies to assault and murder strikers.
The Pinkertons literally became the FBI and CIA.
They also still exist
Hope you dont spoil those magic cards
They did that back in the day too.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” over the bodies of tyrants
But thats the thing. Those who sit at the shade, will grow spoiled, fat and greedy and will enslave others to plant more trees from which they themselves will benefit from. “Hard times create great men. Great men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men creat hard times.”.
I love this sentiment but I hope we can keep lemmy a nice place.
Like I’m sure we all agree that a good billionaire lynching would be awesome, but I also don’t want to crow on about it day after day. Escalate or bust.
Escalation takes build up. The French revolution was all murmurs and bitching until it wasn’t
Not just build up, but actual conflict.
Revolutionaries aren’t spontaneous creations. It takes decades of conflict between the population and the state to harden the people into what eventually becomes the revolutionary army.
Almost everybody here with their soft bodies and their soft minds is not capable of taking part in 6-48 months of revolutionary civil war tomorrow. You have to look at the conflicts of France over the last 10 years between its population and the state to understand what prolonged build up of radicals and radical forces looks like. Decades of a population actively doing battle with its state over various national things before ever reaching the point of “fuck it we ball”.
It feels that at this point, the ruling class has gotten so good at giving us just enough to keep us from outright revolution. It’s little bonuses here and there, it’s providing just enough to keep us afloat long enough to get through the next election, it’s information manipulation to have us arguing with each other rather than focusing our anger on them.
It’s going to be extremely difficult to break that control.
Don’t forget the endless money spent on propaganda, convincing people that companies are good and everyone fighting for workers’ rights are evil, painting the latter as greedy and corrupt assholes with subversive intents
Yeah this is the case for any revolution. I’ve been reading “The Constitution and other writings of the founding fathers” and it’s interesting to see all the rhetoric and mental preparation they took before firing even the first shot. The tension was palpable and the colonists were already resolved to fight a war they knew would not end quickly. Most notably over things we just bend over and take nowadays.
The average citizen today does not have the same sense of responsibility and duty to preserving freedom and democracy like they did back then. Sometimes I wonder if people in the west are too soft in resolve and dedication to really revolt in any meaningful capacity, beyond a few days of protesting. No matter what the issue/ideology at hand is.
I’m sure we all agree that a good billionaire lynching would be awesome
Now that’s a bold assumption
too much?
Not enough
They’re not the only ones who forgot. It’s crazy how many people I know who shun the idea of any form of action beyond general protest in the face of corruption. I always ask them how they think change is going to happen when we have protest after protest and nothing to show for them, but they never have an answer. Things are going to get a lot worse before people realize we need to fight for our rights, and being angry on the internet - or even in person with a sign - is no longer enough to make a change.
People who think you can solve all problems by stating that you are in the moral right, instead of fighting for what you believe in, really show their true colors of being woefully ignorant to how history has always worked. This end of history neoliberal narrative has truly rotted peoples brains and made them unable to intellectually understand how to stand up for themselves.
When violence is used to maintain the status quo, announcing up front that you’re unwilling to use violence in response tells those in power that they need not listen to you.
The sad thing is that we don’t even need to use violence. We have the power to bring this country to a halt with nothing more than a well organized revolt.
Just stay home and play board games for a week, don’t spend any money.
Things would change quick fast and in a hurry if a hundred million people all just took the end of July off.
That’s not possible for a lot of people unless they’re fine with starving. Additionally, prisoner’s dilemma or some variant of that basically makes it impossible to do something like that, herding cats would be easier. World peace would be achieved if all soldiers refused to fight and yet that will never happen for a whole host of reasons.
That’s not possible for a lot of people unless they’re fine with starving.
This is why a network of support and organization during a protest is vital. Because you’re going to have a lot of people in this position, so having some sort of place for donations and distribution of food/funds and a team to coordinate so the protests can continue uninterrupted is important. How to organize such a support network is a problem for people other than me who aren’t introverts.
So what are we supposed to do? Take up arms and start shooting?
There is no alternative to peaceful protest.
As a really great character once said: Get angry. Angry gets shit done.
Peaceful protests are pointless.
As the original post states, peaceful protests were originally a warning - they were the last opportunity for nonviolent communication before the violence started. Their function relies on that being the next step - one that the organization wants to avoid.
Look up why the christmas bonus became a thing.
“Here’s your once-a-year appeasement sum. Don’t spend all of that Bed Bath and Beyond coupon in one place.”
I just got a subscription to the jelly of the month club. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
What gets me is:
If people have more money to spend, they buy more things.
The more things they buy, the more money goes into the pockets of corporations and the CEOs.
It’s literally a win win situation that doesn’t end in the Uber Rich being chased down by hungry angry mobs.
People already have too much money to spend, that’s the issue.
Maybe in your imagination, but in reality a huge chunk of the population lives paycheck to paycheck.
And yet they have too much money to spend.
I love how the tankies are going to get all these instances shut down.
The tankies have been on lemmy longer than anyone else (and helped develop it I guess?) And they are still around. The normal instances have defederated from them and no one has to interact with them, but they still exist.
Whether you consider it a pro or a con, there are no advertisers terrified of negative brand association here, and the only way an instance gets shut down is if it gets caught hosting explicitly criminal content.
Lastly this isn’t a tankie. Tankies are insanely pro-military, obsessed with nationalism (for places like china or russia usually), and one of their favorite pastimes is denying the negative history of their favorite “communists”.
This is just a dark joke about the history of how workers rights were originally fought for, in america and elsewhere. Look up the coal wars.
It’s eerie how little opposition this kind of murder/violence fantasies get here
It took a lot of blood and violence to get to the point where we all think blood and violence isn’t required in some situations. Millions and millions of people struggle every single day while the rich look for ways to take away their rights. It’s literally human nature to want to fight back against that.
It isn’t a fantasy, it’s history. It is how our comfortable world was built, and if you think it is eerie then you should reevaluate how you feel about the benefits it has brought you.
What do you suggest? Only the state can have monopoly on violence? Only the government which is controlled by rich people can use violence?
It’s funny, I think they are all bark and no bite. When push comes to shove we often see their fantasies amount to nothing more than materialistic looting. They will never live out their dreams of lynching billionaires.
I agree. Its really weird. They have such a bloodlust
I think the poor need a reminder about arenas…
Aww baby needs attention so he found a place to troll in… Everybody look at this guy, see how edgy he is?!
The Waltons are a family. Just saying.
