Usually for posts like these I assume they're talking about the unfortunately large group of milquetoast left-leaning Americans who think the system destroying their livelihoods can be reasoned with, as if the people stepping on our necks are just unaware of their actions, and would feel really bad if we wrote them a letter explaining the situation. They're certainly better than the neck-steppers themselves, but neither will ever actually fight to improve the situation we're in.
To be fair, back when I would have identified as a Liberal, I was exactly the type of person to say "If we just communicate that we're unhappy more effectively, they'll listen this time for sure!"
Spent nearly a decade doing data analysis for the corrections system. Just one small part, but we interfaced with many others in different parts of government, academics, and NGOs, spinning our wheels discussing how to implement progressive reform, reform we have had mountains of hard evidence corrects a lot of problems, especially reducing recidivism. The big hurdle wasn't corrupt politicians, or privatization of the prison system (not saying those weren't major problems, just different ones) the big issue was that the average person is vicious, and wants to sit in their house, seeing "bad" people on a screen, get destroyed by the system. A HUGE portion of the population have a vicarious blood lust for seeing people get punished, the harsher, the better. This allows for the punitive system we have, which makes it an open field for other predatory practices. Suggesting anything to the counter will not get anyone elected, and will stir backlash from throngs of morons asking why we should do anything less than just execute criminals on the spot.
Those who don't either are a minority that grew up differently, or had this unjust bloodlust targeted at them, or someone they care about.
I dunno man, there are some who ONLY operate under the Marxist definition of "Liberal". They don't believe language evolves and that maybe to most people "Liberal" is the term used to describe anyone with progressive ideals.
Because the Marxist version of liberals still call themselves liberals and have intentionally erased the semantic existence of all ideologies left of them so that they can pretend to be the left.
That's not how that works. That only makes sense if like liberal parties didn't exist. Saying Social Democrats or Socialists or Greens are more liberal than Liberals on some issues doesn't make any sense, it like implies that the Liberals are ontologically the most progressive.
The word "liberal" is useless because there is no consensus on what it means. Similarly useless are the words "left" and "right". "Marxist" is still useful because nobody can deny that it denotes adherence to the ideas of Karl Marx. Similarly, even though people TRY to erode its meaning, "Christian" must ultimately mean adherence to the philosophies espoused by Christ. So for example anyone who identifies as "Christian" but makes no attempt to follow the principles he espoused, is simply lying.
Liberals are centrists who maintain the status quo and at best ask for “reforms” without substantially wanting to change the underlying system.
They think improvements like ranked choice voting would make capitalism magically end poverty and inequality. That if a few more people benefit from social programs, that you can overlook the others still suffering because it’s “better”.
I am a leftist. I'm telling you they call everyone liberals. They even call Trump a liberal.
Liberals are moderate conservatives, a.k.a. Establishment Democrats. And then you have the GOP, which consists of extreme right Fascists, so far right they're practically the antisis of liberal. There is no dominant centrist or leftist party in the United States. The closest we have in office are AOC and Bernie, and even they're just barely to the left of center in my eyes.
Ranked choice voting won't solve everything, but it's a step in the right direction. It's worth giving it a chance.
Leftists often call them liberal because many of them use the term to define one who believes in Liberalism.
"Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law."
Thus anyone who is liberal believes in the right to private property. MAGA strongly believes in such. No leftist believes in such. Thus in their use, a leftist cannot be a liberal.
It's just a different usage of a term based on cultural differences.
Classical liberalism was an improvement over what came before it. Neoliberalism is when it morphed into anarcho-capitalist-esque "austerity for the poor; rights and subsidies for corporations"
Confidently wrong. There are different kinds of anarchism, and yours might be fundamentally oppositional to capitalism. But to deny the existence of anarcho-capitalists is counterproductive, because they exist, and they're a serious threat to be aware of.
The idea is that in an anarchist society, there's no governing body to regulate businesses, and so they get to do whatever they want. It results in a neofeudal corporate oligarchy, a la Curtis Yarvin. You can argue that it's not really anarchistic if it results in oppressive systems. They might argue that it's only anarchy if there's nothing stopping them from oppressing you.
The point is, anarchy is a big umbrella, and just because you might be anarcho-syndicalist or something else doesn't mean that your version of anarchy is the only version of anarchy.
Arguing over what constitutes "the true anarchy" is pointless. Critique anarcho-capitalism to your heart's desire, but to deny that it exists implies that there's nothing to critique.
Keep in mind, the property damage after the murder of George Floyd was started by a white supremacist, too. "Umbrella man" smashed windows on an auto zone and spray painted it "free shit zone," it would later be set on fire. Out of 20 people charged in Minnesota for rioting, only 4 were actually local to the state.
Hate to break it to you but the same is true in France. Media coverage here has focused almost exclusively on small shops being looted. The human brain has a much easier time focusing on individual tragedies rather than systemic issues, and the government and its cronies (and the local versions of fox news) are taking full advantage of that bias.
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.
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.
During the BLM demonstrations right wing provocatours deliberately caused damage to discredit the demonstrations. Two were caught and prosecuted in Cleveland where i live. Don't be a tool
To be fair, I've never met someone who doesn't either support or denounce violent protests in general - French or otherwise. This sounds like someone getting angry at the internet as a whole, without seeming to understand that it's made up of so many different people that it simultaneously holds all possible viewpoints at the same time.
I don't think the people saying "protest like the french" are the "liberals" OP is claiming "lost their mind" at BLM. This feels like strawman of strawman.
The people that "denounce violent protest" are people that have never been to a protest that wasn't a planned parade. Violence is an inevitable result of protests because the state itself uses violence to stop the protest. No matter how peaceful its initial intentions of protest are.
A "protest" that has a start and end date coordinated with the state is not a protest. It is a parade.
The majority of what people call "violence" is property damage. Property damage is not violence. But somehow we convince everyone that broken windows are worse than broken bones.
The same people that "denounce violent protest" also seem to have no problem with the use of chemical weapons on crowds of unarmed people. You go out to a protest, the first time your eyes are burning from tear gas you'll understand why any protest will fight back when violence is first placed on them by the state.
Steps to make people watching on TV "denounce violent protest"
(0) Society reaches a breaking point and protest form with the purpose to disrupt the ability of society to operate without acknowledging the injustice the protest is pointing towards.
(1) Protest are labeled "violent" because of property damage. Usually with less property damage than the aftermath of the average football match "celebration" results in. But these initially small acts of property damage are the focus of the media. Very little is said about why the protest started to begin with.
(2) Police use chemical weapons (banned in warfare) on their own citizens. Rubber bullets, flash bangs, hoses, etc. All acts of actual violence. Don't believe me? Take a rubber bullet to the head and tell me it's not violence.
(3) Protesters respond to violence with self defense measures. Kick back tear gas canisters, using leaf blowers, and becoming more defensive in body armor and gas masks to maintain the disruption the protest is meant to create. Yes. The goal of a protest is to disrupt society and inconvenience you. That's the whole point. Stop saying "it makes me not support them when they block the road". Dude, they are blocking the road because you weren't supporting them. Protest is the voice of the unheard.
(4) Police work to escalate violence through plain clothes officers working to increase property damage and get crowds of people to reach levels of property damage not intended by the protest. An individual act of violence of a single protestor or act of property damage can be used as justification to use violence on to a larger degree on the crowd. The police goal is not to keep the protest peaceful. The goal is to escalate the violence so they can justify their own levels of violence.
(5) Media covers the protest primarily on the property damage and violence of the protesters. The violence of the police is not spoken about. The violence of the police is treated as "keeping order" when it is doing the opposite. All the time we watch media people on the ground not "afraid of the violent protesters" but are literally running away from tear gas and flash bangs themselves. Next time you watch media coverage, watch how the media acts, it's far more telling than how the media speaks.
(6) The protest either dies out due to people not wanting to risk their lives as the violence is escalated by the police. OR the protests continue and are primarily maintained by those willing to use violence in self defense.
All of this time. The protestors would leave and allow the disruption to end if even a fraction of their demands are met. Paris protest started because of a failure in the education system. The government would rather spend their money on a militarized police force than on education. That should tell you a lot about the reason why protest became necessary to begin with.
TLDR: There are no "peaceful protest" that are capable of achieving the end results the protest itself is trying to achieve. The state will respond in violence to stop anything that actually has a chance of forcing change. There is no staying peaceful when chemical weapons and rubber bullets are introduced.
It's one of those things that is just heavily a part of the education system and media that no one really questions.
However, it's also a very easy thing to explain. When people realize that their governments and their media care more about property damage than the lives it's populations children; it's a very radicalizing moment for a lot of people.
The same tea-partyers that wanted to overthrow the government because Obama wore a tan suit, are also the people that openly call for the death of people that don't agree with them, while also talking a lot about the sanctity of life. Fucking psychopaths.
i support violent protests. light teslas on fire, raid a walmart, block amazon delivery trucks.
but i don't support, for example, people breaking in and robbing some independent shopkeeper's grocery store. like, those are working class people on your side...
Uh, the Internet is not the problem here. The problem is that liberals in real life work their asses off to make sure that their protests do nothing more disruptive than get people to honk horns. And even THAT is sometimes too disruptive for liberals.
That is a problem, for sure, but it's not the same problem as "Someone who isn't a liberal supported violent protest on the Internet, but then a liberal denounced it!? What's the deal?"
Like, yeah, people who think they can make change peacefully within the system that exists to exploit them are making it harder to actually make change, but they're not the ones crying out in support of French protests in the first place.
I wish people would realize that the ability to protest is directly tied to social safety net.
You get beaten by a cop, you will get free healthcare that is not directly tied to your job. In the US, if you do have healthcare, it is tied to your job and your job can fire you for protesting if they want (unlike France we have no protection for being fired for political opinion).
Not just that, but US police are extraordinarily different from police in most of the world. They trace their roots back to organizations first formed to hunt escaped slaves. They are heavily militarized, almost never face any consequences for abusing their power, and are usually encouraged to use violence against left-wing protestors.
At points during the BLM protests, Trump called in the National Guard, who proceeded shoot and kill both protestors and bystanders.
There is also the gun factor. Self defense is not generally accepted as a reason to own a gun in France, so there is no self defense carry. That automatically makes the cops less likely to react suddenly and violently.
the cops less likely to react suddenly and violently.
Truly spoken like someone who knows nothing of European policing. CRS resort to violence as the priority solution to all of their problems, the French just understand that fighting the cops is an inherent part of fighting for your rights.
Tell that to the entire American working-class movement of the early 1900s that gave us our right to unionize. They had those same problems but it didn't stop them. Why? Because they fucking organized their communities to provide that safety net for each other without relying on a third party entity to do it for them.
The problem with America these days is no one knows how or wants to be part of a community with each other. We are so fucking endeared to the capitalist system that people can't fucking imagine doing anything without it.
A century of dedicated propaganda and class division will do that. And our police are better armed now, and the federal government is very openly on their side.
The federal government has always openly been on their side. That's nothing new. The state has always been the enemy of the working class.
Them being armed isn't an excuse to not take action. It just means we have to take precautions and adapt our tactics to deal with it. They aren't invincible.
My problem with rioting is it often seems to be the working class shitting on their own doorstep.. surely the most effective rioting would be to target parliament buildings, political party offices, banks and the properties of the very wealthy? Just my twopenn'orth.
This is why riots without organization are just as ignorable as nonviolent protests without organization. Neither threaten the power of the state because there is no power in individual acts.
Americana’s will only do shit that doesn’t inconvenience them. Which pretty much rules out any and all meaningful protest. They’ll gather in streets, sure. But the moment it comes at a cost- they’re far too busy.
This happens because they slept. And it got worse because they refused to wake up.
Americana’s will only do shit that doesn’t inconvenience them.
For some, sure. For others I think a good part of it is the fear of doing shit that will negatively impact others like them.
I am in a position of privilege and can afford the inconveniences, but what effective act could I take that wouldn't result in making the lives of numerous other people tip out of balance and potentially cause them or their dependents to become unhoused or go without food or medicine?
For the average person, living has become more and more precarious. We have fewer and fewer safety nets and the rich are quick to make those they have power over feel the pain of resistance first. We have no guarantee of healthcare, less and less food assistance, unaffordable childcare, poor elder care. All purposely done by the capitalist class. This has created a human shield around them.
It's like the only options are indirectly accelerationist. Cause unavoidable collateral damage, blame those at the top, and hope it inspires those at the bottom to act instead of turn on you? I don't like that.
Americans are some of the most politically and historically ignorant people you’ll ever meet, and it’s mostly because they’re fed equal measures of treats and propaganda by their capitalist overlords.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I will never forget when the neighborhood Facebook was alight about the hoards that were going house by house through the suburbs. That was almost 10 miles of suburban sprall...my nerd brain can't fathom the logistics of that and where that force would have come from.
Yeah, all this talk of violent protests right before an important election will DEFINITELY not help the fascists declare martial law and stay in power. /s
I am not aware of a single "liberal" who got upset about that at all.
The problem might be that you either don't know what a liberal is, or that you don't know how people use the term in everyday life.
You saw a mildly critically post from a soccer mom. We get it, you think you're morally righteous and anyone with a slightly different opinion is an evil LiBeRaL
There you go, now you can be aware. This article includes quotes from Biden, Clyburn, Lightfoot, Wheeler, and Pelosi condemning property destruction. (Pelosi's quote is about the 2017 Berkeley protests though)
Here is a followup about Dems distancing themselves from the George Floyd protests more recently.
Seems to me if this was about politicians, the word Democrats would've been used. It never occurred to me at all that this was regarding politicians, since the party name is universally how they would be spoken about.
No it was really just to illustrate that if they heard that it was some random one off case which wasn't common. I was thinking of it as being some Facebook rando whose politics got assumed because of some signal that didn't necessarily mean anything
someone on another platform mentioned that thier french friends likened to american protests, if nothing is on fire, its not really a protest, its just virtue signalling.
But if the protests are supposed to go against the status quo why are they worried about whether those status quo liberals are angered by the protests that would be going on against them?
The BLM protests where unmarked vehicles dropped off pallets full of bricks repeatedly? The ones where mysterious masked men in body armor would show up and start breaking windows then leave? The protests where police would force the protestors onto bridges or into intersections then tell them to disperse while blocking all exits, then fired 'less than lethal' projectiles at them?
Yeah the BLM protestors were not violent whatsoever, despite the efforts to make them so and the media narrative.
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.
Most people don’t even want that, they just want to bitch and keep their daily routine. Which includes finding stuff to bitch about from behind a screen.
I'd be fine with burning down the government buildings and harassing politicians who're responsible for the problems. I don't see a point in destroying regular people's jobs or the places they're going to purchase the things they need. It's not going to get people on your side.
Would lighting up politicians offices and police stations not be a far quicker effect than waiting for damage done to uninvolved 3rd parties to trickle up?
I wouldn't call this meme wrong. It's definitely wrong but it's more revealing how much media controls the narrative.
People genuinely believe both that the riots were more violent than they were and that they were riots at all, because the media told them.
Most people's perspective of the US is through media, then they claim the same media is bullshit. Yet that's where they get their information from. It doesn't make sense.
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 consciousness 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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
I've seen this argument parroted 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.
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?
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
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.
I still remember when students at the local high school organized a BLM march from the school to the police station (a 30 minute walk) I saw so many posts from people in this town itching to shoot them if they even looked at their house weird.
Yes. Resources that are being restricted from their community through the oppressive system of private property ownership that is intrinsic to the capitalist system.
Fuck your "investments". Fuck the livelihood of the owning-class.
Then find a community and organize some mutual aid networks to replace those safety nets instead of selling your humanity to be an owning-class pig.
That capital you claim private ownership over does not rightfully belong to you to make profit off of, it belongs to the community to use as it sees fit and distribute to those in need of it.
What a dogshit ass take. Small business owners are hardly "selling their humanity to be a owning-class pig". Most people just try to get by in the system they're born into. Many small businesses aren't beholden to some franchise and are pivotal to bringing their small community together.
Like, what fucking system do you live in were you don't work and only provide for those around you? Are you farming your own produce to disperse among your community or do you work some bullshit ass job like the rest of the world so you can virtue signal on Lemmy to feel better about your situation? My bet is on the latter.
Their choice to become part of the system that is actively oppressing people just to save their own skin is so lacking in solidarity.
Find your class consciousness and stop making excuses for people who exploit others.
I don't care if that the system we all live in, the goal is to change that fucking system and break it, not give up and become part of it.
Also, yes, I do run a community garden and, yes, all of its produce I give away for free, no questions asked. Thanks for asking. It's called "mutual aid". You should look into it.
Lastly, those of us who work for a living are not the same as those who own the businesses that exploit our needs for profit, small business or otherwise. They are not pivotal to the community. What is pivotal are things like mutual aid programs and direct action initiatives that help people without profiting off of them.
Small business owners are not just fucking McDonalds franchises. Some are cafe owners, boardgame store owners, IT companies. These are not slave labor organizations but small teams of people working together in a system that demands capital to survive. They're absolutely pivotal because they often can provide services at better rates for their community, or are social hubs without needing to spend capital. They absolutely are pivotal because they can teach people trades while earning for a living. They absolutely are pivotal because they're not greedy corpos trying to extract every ounce of capital from their community, they're most regular ass people looking to just get by. They usually provide fair wages to their small teams so they can also survive. They provide direct alternatives to buying from big box corporations or ordering off Amazon, Temu, or whatever bullshit online megastore. Some source their product organically and some wholesale.
Do you not go to social gathers like boardgame groups or outings? Do you not travel at all? Your worldview is extremely narrow.
I never said they were just McDonald's franchises. I know they are also cafe owners and petite bourgeois leeches of the sort.
I give zero fucks. If you're a business owner who sees to profit off of your community: go fuck yourself you utter parasite.
All profit is theft. Period.
"People need to earn a living" is capitalist realism Bullshit. People only need to earn a living because the owning class forces the need to pay for what rightfully belongs to the community. If people stopped forcing that need and refused to exploit their community for profit, instead organizing to provide for each other freely and reading, then people wouldn't need to "earn a living" and can still pursue their passions to learn a trade or gain education.
And if it is a place if business that seeks profit there is always an obligation to spend money (not capital, capital is property, not currency). There isn't a business out there that lets people loiter without paying.
Small business owners are just as greedy and slimy as corporate entities.
And like fuck they provide fair wage.s small businesses are the absolute worst offenders of wage theft out there. Most of them make excuses after excuses to pay less because "oh we're a small business and can't afford it". Your high as fuck if you think small businesses pay fairly.
Stop glazing the petite bourgeois. Go support your local co-op and non-profit instead.
The person I replied to conflated personal property with private property. The person I have been arguing with is explicitly talking about small businesses, which is explicitly private property.
I feel like the most effective form of protest will make life miserable for the people causing the problems, rather than making life miserable for the people affected by the problem.
I'm not really thinking about the protests in France, though. I'm thinking about all the times in my area when highways have been shut down by people wanting police reform, and it feels like nothing has changed. Granted, when this was happening on a nationwide basis, we got body cams for most police departments, and that's created a lot of accountability.
The only kind of protest that works in US is a silent protest. A prime example is the railway workers protest. They "derailed" the economy by billions of dollars and Byron signed an executive order to force them back to work. So face jail time or get back to work. Don't want to? Well straight to jail. Then with the thirteenth amendment you'll be back to work with a national guard member watching over you. If you think that's not likely to happen, you're new when it comes to US politics. Read about the expansion of the Patriot act the beloved Obama signed, I voted for him and canvassed, and protested McCain, that turned out well.
It means the guy from the opposite side who throws the first stone as if he were on side he disagrees with.
The one who throws the first stone is the villain.
The reason why 60's era civil rights demonstrations were so successful is that no white person was able (or probably willing) to infiltrate the African American side to throw the first stone.
In a modern protest, plenty of people without any identifying group support any side, so someone just has to turn around throw a bottle onto their own side to start the violence.
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Makes me think of the UK:
Extinction Rebellion and just stop oil did a load of stunts that didn't do any real harm and the press treated like they burnt a city down.
Literal Nazis committed programs and riots in the streets and the press said they had "legitimate concerns".
They only have an issue with disruption when it's the left.
Always with the "liberals".
Yeah, exactly which liberals are we talking about? Maga? This shit is beyond moronic.
Philosophical liberals. Right to private property and engage in commerce, individualist, idealist, legalist ethics liberals.
maybe people who are really into Liberace?
Usually for posts like these I assume they're talking about the unfortunately large group of milquetoast left-leaning Americans who think the system destroying their livelihoods can be reasoned with, as if the people stepping on our necks are just unaware of their actions, and would feel really bad if we wrote them a letter explaining the situation. They're certainly better than the neck-steppers themselves, but neither will ever actually fight to improve the situation we're in.
Ah, the Liberal Surrogate ™️.
Insert the thing you want to use as a punching bag. The right, the left, the middle, doesn't matter. Choose your own adventure.
To be fair, back when I would have identified as a Liberal, I was exactly the type of person to say "If we just communicate that we're unhappy more effectively, they'll listen this time for sure!"
I mean, I miss those days.
Bright eyed and bushy tailed. Believing that most people are kind at heart...
Now I'm pretty sure my neighbors will call ICE on my other neighbors if they ever do anything even slightly annoying.
Spent nearly a decade doing data analysis for the corrections system. Just one small part, but we interfaced with many others in different parts of government, academics, and NGOs, spinning our wheels discussing how to implement progressive reform, reform we have had mountains of hard evidence corrects a lot of problems, especially reducing recidivism. The big hurdle wasn't corrupt politicians, or privatization of the prison system (not saying those weren't major problems, just different ones) the big issue was that the average person is vicious, and wants to sit in their house, seeing "bad" people on a screen, get destroyed by the system. A HUGE portion of the population have a vicarious blood lust for seeing people get punished, the harsher, the better. This allows for the punitive system we have, which makes it an open field for other predatory practices. Suggesting anything to the counter will not get anyone elected, and will stir backlash from throngs of morons asking why we should do anything less than just execute criminals on the spot.
Those who don't either are a minority that grew up differently, or had this unjust bloodlust targeted at them, or someone they care about.
They keep forgetting to put "neo" in front.
They don't learn that part during their tankie training
Where's that tankie factory anyways? They must come from somewhere
.ml mostly
I dunno man, there are some who ONLY operate under the Marxist definition of "Liberal". They don't believe language evolves and that maybe to most people "Liberal" is the term used to describe anyone with progressive ideals.
Because the Marxist version of liberals still call themselves liberals and have intentionally erased the semantic existence of all ideologies left of them so that they can pretend to be the left.
Sure. But the bucket of people that term encapsulates doesn't match that definition anymore.
That's not how that works. That only makes sense if like liberal parties didn't exist. Saying Social Democrats or Socialists or Greens are more liberal than Liberals on some issues doesn't make any sense, it like implies that the Liberals are ontologically the most progressive.
Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK)
Is it democratic? Is it a Republic? Names don't always represent their namesake.
There also is no party titled "Liberal" in the USA, which is what I'm specifically referencing since this post is about USA "liberals".
Like no, just no, stop trying to make "liberal" synonymous with progressive, they are different things.
The word "liberal" is useless because there is no consensus on what it means. Similarly useless are the words "left" and "right". "Marxist" is still useful because nobody can deny that it denotes adherence to the ideas of Karl Marx. Similarly, even though people TRY to erode its meaning, "Christian" must ultimately mean adherence to the philosophies espoused by Christ. So for example anyone who identifies as "Christian" but makes no attempt to follow the principles he espoused, is simply lying.
It's a Tankie thing. They call everyone a liberal.
Nah it’s a leftist thing.
Liberals are centrists who maintain the status quo and at best ask for “reforms” without substantially wanting to change the underlying system.
They think improvements like ranked choice voting would make capitalism magically end poverty and inequality. That if a few more people benefit from social programs, that you can overlook the others still suffering because it’s “better”.
I am a leftist. I'm telling you they call everyone liberals. They even call Trump a liberal.
Liberals are moderate conservatives, a.k.a. Establishment Democrats. And then you have the GOP, which consists of extreme right Fascists, so far right they're practically the antisis of liberal. There is no dominant centrist or leftist party in the United States. The closest we have in office are AOC and Bernie, and even they're just barely to the left of center in my eyes.
Ranked choice voting won't solve everything, but it's a step in the right direction. It's worth giving it a chance.
Leftists often call them liberal because many of them use the term to define one who believes in Liberalism.
"Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law."
Thus anyone who is liberal believes in the right to private property. MAGA strongly believes in such. No leftist believes in such. Thus in their use, a leftist cannot be a liberal.
It's just a different usage of a term based on cultural differences.
What kind of brainrot is this?
This worked in some places with social market economy and such.
Social democracies in the West also benefit from being imperialist.
"liberal" here, smash that storefront for me I have to go to work thanks 👍
classical liberals maybe
Are we talking about Martínez de la Rosa-era liberals? (that was on the 30's. The 1830's)
Classical liberalism was an improvement over what came before it. Neoliberalism is when it morphed into anarcho-capitalist-esque "austerity for the poor; rights and subsidies for corporations"
There is no such thing as "anarcho-capitalist"
Anarchism is fundamentally oppositional to capitalism.
These tend to be libertarians from Texas or something. You are right though
Confidently wrong. There are different kinds of anarchism, and yours might be fundamentally oppositional to capitalism. But to deny the existence of anarcho-capitalists is counterproductive, because they exist, and they're a serious threat to be aware of.
The idea is that in an anarchist society, there's no governing body to regulate businesses, and so they get to do whatever they want. It results in a neofeudal corporate oligarchy, a la Curtis Yarvin. You can argue that it's not really anarchistic if it results in oppressive systems. They might argue that it's only anarchy if there's nothing stopping them from oppressing you.
The point is, anarchy is a big umbrella, and just because you might be anarcho-syndicalist or something else doesn't mean that your version of anarchy is the only version of anarchy.
Arguing over what constitutes "the true anarchy" is pointless. Critique anarcho-capitalism to your heart's desire, but to deny that it exists implies that there's nothing to critique.
Yes, because it is neo-feudalism trying to wear the label of Anarchism. That doesn't mean it is Anarchism.
By your logic, "National Socialism" is a socialist philosophy because it calls itself socialism. Which is an utterly stupid thing to claim.
I never said what it calls itself is an accurate description, only that there are people who claim it
Keep in mind, the property damage after the murder of George Floyd was started by a white supremacist, too. "Umbrella man" smashed windows on an auto zone and spray painted it "free shit zone," it would later be set on fire. Out of 20 people charged in Minnesota for rioting, only 4 were actually local to the state.
and msm and fox was showing mostly the looting and not the protest itself.
it ain't the same guys saying both.
Goomba fallacy
Hate to break it to you but the same is true in France. Media coverage here has focused almost exclusively on small shops being looted. The human brain has a much easier time focusing on individual tragedies rather than systemic issues, and the government and its cronies (and the local versions of fox news) are taking full advantage of that bias.
Less a "human brain" focus than a main media focus
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.
During the BLM demonstrations right wing provocatours deliberately caused damage to discredit the demonstrations. Two were caught and prosecuted in Cleveland where i live. Don't be a tool
Yep. Pretty much all of the negative issues from the BLM protests were off duty cops or non-local white supremacists trying to provoke violence.
Remember the conveniently placed pallets of bricks?
Here we had The Umbrella man https://abcnews.com/amp/US/man-helped-ignite-george-floyd-riots-identified-white/story?id=72051536 And another guy who set fire to a parking lot attendants booth
Ahh yes how could we forget those government-provided taxpayers' bricks that mysteriously overnight appeared on city street corners.
Then after nobody used them to break windows or anything at all, the brick pallets mysteriously disappeared the next night.
To be fair, I've never met someone who doesn't either support or denounce violent protests in general - French or otherwise. This sounds like someone getting angry at the internet as a whole, without seeming to understand that it's made up of so many different people that it simultaneously holds all possible viewpoints at the same time.
I don't think the people saying "protest like the french" are the "liberals" OP is claiming "lost their mind" at BLM. This feels like strawman of strawman.
One sounds like leftists, the other sounds like right wingers.
Leftists would support BLM and not care about property damage. And no right winger is going to want America to revolt against Trump.
The people that "denounce violent protest" are people that have never been to a protest that wasn't a planned parade. Violence is an inevitable result of protests because the state itself uses violence to stop the protest. No matter how peaceful its initial intentions of protest are.
A "protest" that has a start and end date coordinated with the state is not a protest. It is a parade.
The majority of what people call "violence" is property damage. Property damage is not violence. But somehow we convince everyone that broken windows are worse than broken bones.
The same people that "denounce violent protest" also seem to have no problem with the use of chemical weapons on crowds of unarmed people. You go out to a protest, the first time your eyes are burning from tear gas you'll understand why any protest will fight back when violence is first placed on them by the state.
Steps to make people watching on TV "denounce violent protest"
(0) Society reaches a breaking point and protest form with the purpose to disrupt the ability of society to operate without acknowledging the injustice the protest is pointing towards. (1) Protest are labeled "violent" because of property damage. Usually with less property damage than the aftermath of the average football match "celebration" results in. But these initially small acts of property damage are the focus of the media. Very little is said about why the protest started to begin with. (2) Police use chemical weapons (banned in warfare) on their own citizens. Rubber bullets, flash bangs, hoses, etc. All acts of actual violence. Don't believe me? Take a rubber bullet to the head and tell me it's not violence. (3) Protesters respond to violence with self defense measures. Kick back tear gas canisters, using leaf blowers, and becoming more defensive in body armor and gas masks to maintain the disruption the protest is meant to create. Yes. The goal of a protest is to disrupt society and inconvenience you. That's the whole point. Stop saying "it makes me not support them when they block the road". Dude, they are blocking the road because you weren't supporting them. Protest is the voice of the unheard. (4) Police work to escalate violence through plain clothes officers working to increase property damage and get crowds of people to reach levels of property damage not intended by the protest. An individual act of violence of a single protestor or act of property damage can be used as justification to use violence on to a larger degree on the crowd. The police goal is not to keep the protest peaceful. The goal is to escalate the violence so they can justify their own levels of violence. (5) Media covers the protest primarily on the property damage and violence of the protesters. The violence of the police is not spoken about. The violence of the police is treated as "keeping order" when it is doing the opposite. All the time we watch media people on the ground not "afraid of the violent protesters" but are literally running away from tear gas and flash bangs themselves. Next time you watch media coverage, watch how the media acts, it's far more telling than how the media speaks. (6) The protest either dies out due to people not wanting to risk their lives as the violence is escalated by the police. OR the protests continue and are primarily maintained by those willing to use violence in self defense.
All of this time. The protestors would leave and allow the disruption to end if even a fraction of their demands are met. Paris protest started because of a failure in the education system. The government would rather spend their money on a militarized police force than on education. That should tell you a lot about the reason why protest became necessary to begin with.
TLDR: There are no "peaceful protest" that are capable of achieving the end results the protest itself is trying to achieve. The state will respond in violence to stop anything that actually has a chance of forcing change. There is no staying peaceful when chemical weapons and rubber bullets are introduced.
How MLK was viewed at the time
It's refreshing to see someone else explicitly state that property damage isn't violence.
It's capitalist and media propaganda to conflate the two to protect themselves.
It's one of those things that is just heavily a part of the education system and media that no one really questions.
However, it's also a very easy thing to explain. When people realize that their governments and their media care more about property damage than the lives it's populations children; it's a very radicalizing moment for a lot of people.
Thanks. My app always errors uploading images.
I’m going to print this out and post it next to all the No Kings posters. 😆
The same tea-partyers that wanted to overthrow the government because Obama wore a tan suit, are also the people that openly call for the death of people that don't agree with them, while also talking a lot about the sanctity of life. Fucking psychopaths.
i support violent protests. light teslas on fire, raid a walmart, block amazon delivery trucks.
but i don't support, for example, people breaking in and robbing some independent shopkeeper's grocery store. like, those are working class people on your side...
The petite bourgeois are not working class.
Uh, the Internet is not the problem here. The problem is that liberals in real life work their asses off to make sure that their protests do nothing more disruptive than get people to honk horns. And even THAT is sometimes too disruptive for liberals.
That is a problem, for sure, but it's not the same problem as "Someone who isn't a liberal supported violent protest on the Internet, but then a liberal denounced it!? What's the deal?"
Like, yeah, people who think they can make change peacefully within the system that exists to exploit them are making it harder to actually make change, but they're not the ones crying out in support of French protests in the first place.
I wish people would realize that the ability to protest is directly tied to social safety net.
You get beaten by a cop, you will get free healthcare that is not directly tied to your job. In the US, if you do have healthcare, it is tied to your job and your job can fire you for protesting if they want (unlike France we have no protection for being fired for political opinion).
Not just that, but US police are extraordinarily different from police in most of the world. They trace their roots back to organizations first formed to hunt escaped slaves. They are heavily militarized, almost never face any consequences for abusing their power, and are usually encouraged to use violence against left-wing protestors.
At points during the BLM protests, Trump called in the National Guard, who proceeded shoot and kill both protestors and bystanders.
they still do that. if they accuse you of drug abuse, and you are too poor to hire a lawyer you get sent to a forced labor camp (private prison)
There is also the gun factor. Self defense is not generally accepted as a reason to own a gun in France, so there is no self defense carry. That automatically makes the cops less likely to react suddenly and violently.
Truly spoken like someone who knows nothing of European policing. CRS resort to violence as the priority solution to all of their problems, the French just understand that fighting the cops is an inherent part of fighting for your rights.
Are they this quick to resort to lethal violence though?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/video-shows-chicago-teen-wasnt-holding-a-gun-when-shot-by-cop
French police trace their roots to sending Jews to Germany, just fyi
And drowning north Africans and such
Isn't that why some of you guys worship the 2nd amendment? in case you have to deal with a tyrannical government?
Tell that to the Nepalese.
So it is true. Americans can't protest like the French. You just interpreted it wrongly
Nationality isn't the issue, location is. You can't protest in America like you can in France.
Tell that to the entire American working-class movement of the early 1900s that gave us our right to unionize. They had those same problems but it didn't stop them. Why? Because they fucking organized their communities to provide that safety net for each other without relying on a third party entity to do it for them.
The problem with America these days is no one knows how or wants to be part of a community with each other. We are so fucking endeared to the capitalist system that people can't fucking imagine doing anything without it.
A century of dedicated propaganda and class division will do that. And our police are better armed now, and the federal government is very openly on their side.
The federal government has always openly been on their side. That's nothing new. The state has always been the enemy of the working class.
Them being armed isn't an excuse to not take action. It just means we have to take precautions and adapt our tactics to deal with it. They aren't invincible.
JK the French know how to protest
Because they're terrible at war, and that's sorta okay.
Oh no, not this trope again.
Education at its finest.
Relevant Stanhope
My problem with rioting is it often seems to be the working class shitting on their own doorstep.. surely the most effective rioting would be to target parliament buildings, political party offices, banks and the properties of the very wealthy? Just my twopenn'orth.
This is why riots without organization are just as ignorable as nonviolent protests without organization. Neither threaten the power of the state because there is no power in individual acts.
The french have riots and gillotines. Americans have the 2A.
The fact there isn't more Brian Thompsons is astounding. Crazy that some lib-cuck-fag (used ironically!) is America's biggest patriot.
We need more tractors with slurry wagons spraying the houses of politicians.
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????"
Americana’s will only do shit that doesn’t inconvenience them. Which pretty much rules out any and all meaningful protest. They’ll gather in streets, sure. But the moment it comes at a cost- they’re far too busy.
This happens because they slept. And it got worse because they refused to wake up.
For some, sure. For others I think a good part of it is the fear of doing shit that will negatively impact others like them.
I am in a position of privilege and can afford the inconveniences, but what effective act could I take that wouldn't result in making the lives of numerous other people tip out of balance and potentially cause them or their dependents to become unhoused or go without food or medicine?
For the average person, living has become more and more precarious. We have fewer and fewer safety nets and the rich are quick to make those they have power over feel the pain of resistance first. We have no guarantee of healthcare, less and less food assistance, unaffordable childcare, poor elder care. All purposely done by the capitalist class. This has created a human shield around them.
It's like the only options are indirectly accelerationist. Cause unavoidable collateral damage, blame those at the top, and hope it inspires those at the bottom to act instead of turn on you? I don't like that.
That happens because they are not low educated savages with open borders.
Americans are some of the most politically and historically ignorant people you’ll ever meet, and it’s mostly because they’re fed equal measures of treats and propaganda by their capitalist overlords.
Compared to who?
Not poking particularly at you, but there are a lot of people (including you) making pretty broad generalizations.
For one, compared to almost anyone in the global south who live the brutal reality of American politics.
Ok
Are the liberals in the room with us now
Yes, almost certainly
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.
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.
Temporarily IIRC. Didn't they quietly revert their changes later, denying just as many claims again?
And that change was the mass deployment of Flock cameras Nation-wide.
Exactly? People get a lot of shit here in europe too but you still do it. Thats exactly the point of a protest, to raise awareness
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 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.
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:
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.
"won't someone please think of the property values!"
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)
https://www.verisk.com/490445/siteassets/media/downloads/insuranceresultsreport2020fullyear.pdf
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I will never forget when the neighborhood Facebook was alight about the hoards that were going house by house through the suburbs. That was almost 10 miles of suburban sprall...my nerd brain can't fathom the logistics of that and where that force would have come from.
When the pearlclutching starts, that’s when you take it up a few notches. Not back down.
If we try to do a proper protest, we’ll get killed by subpar gun laws and a shot by some members of the official Kyle Rittenhouse fan club.
Yeah, all this talk of violent protests right before an important election will DEFINITELY not help the fascists declare martial law and stay in power. /s
I am not aware of a single "liberal" who got upset about that at all.
The problem might be that you either don't know what a liberal is, or that you don't know how people use the term in everyday life.
You saw a mildly critically post from a soccer mom. We get it, you think you're morally righteous and anyone with a slightly different opinion is an evil LiBeRaL
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/13/fact-check-democrats-have-condemned-violence-linked-protests/3317862001/
There you go, now you can be aware. This article includes quotes from Biden, Clyburn, Lightfoot, Wheeler, and Pelosi condemning property destruction. (Pelosi's quote is about the 2017 Berkeley protests though)
Here is a followup about Dems distancing themselves from the George Floyd protests more recently.
https://www.deccanherald.com/world/how-the-2020-george-floyd-protests-are-haunting-democrats-in-2025-3583363
Seems to me if this was about politicians, the word Democrats would've been used. It never occurred to me at all that this was regarding politicians, since the party name is universally how they would be spoken about.
Sorry, took your comment about the 'soccer mom' as an indication you wanted to hear about party officials over lay people
No it was really just to illustrate that if they heard that it was some random one off case which wasn't common. I was thinking of it as being some Facebook rando whose politics got assumed because of some signal that didn't necessarily mean anything
"Having a conversation" is a stall tactic.
someone on another platform mentioned that thier french friends likened to american protests, if nothing is on fire, its not really a protest, its just virtue signalling.
It's a flash mob
oh wow....
Knock off all this fascism! Seriously, don't make us slowly walk around downtown in a slowly circle again...
It is one of the more proven methods to onramp liberals to leftism, at any rate.
Return2ozma: posts accurate meme
Americans: (insert excuse or bad reaction here)
Always happens
But if the protests are supposed to go against the status quo why are they worried about whether those status quo liberals are angered by the protests that would be going on against them?
The BLM protests where unmarked vehicles dropped off pallets full of bricks repeatedly? The ones where mysterious masked men in body armor would show up and start breaking windows then leave? The protests where police would force the protestors onto bridges or into intersections then tell them to disperse while blocking all exits, then fired 'less than lethal' projectiles at them? Yeah the BLM protestors were not violent whatsoever, despite the efforts to make them so and the media narrative.
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.
Most people don’t even want that, they just want to bitch and keep their daily routine. Which includes finding stuff to bitch about from behind a screen.
I'd be fine with burning down the government buildings and harassing politicians who're responsible for the problems. I don't see a point in destroying regular people's jobs or the places they're going to purchase the things they need. It's not going to get people on your side.
If normal people can't work because of government decisions, hey just go vote.
If normal people can't work because of a protest about government decisions, oh no let's stop all of this!
What is the government doing that's preventing people from working?
Have you been living under a rock sir?
Wrecking the economy
And looting and burning businesses in your community is going to fix that?
You're going to hate this answer, but yes. Believe it or not, countries hate when civil unrest starts to manifest as damage to GDP.
Would lighting up politicians offices and police stations not be a far quicker effect than waiting for damage done to uninvolved 3rd parties to trickle up?
yeah this meme is being intentionally dishonest. nobody is upset about a fucking fast food chain burning down.
I wouldn't call this meme wrong. It's definitely wrong but it's more revealing how much media controls the narrative.
People genuinely believe both that the riots were more violent than they were and that they were riots at all, because the media told them.
Most people's perspective of the US is through media, then they claim the same media is bullshit. Yet that's where they get their information from. It doesn't make sense.
If it was one of the 3 that are close enough to my job to get lunch I'd be a little pissed.
New lines of division just dropped! I totally voting for Trump now! /s I'm such a dumb lib or liberal or whatever!
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 consciousness 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.
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.
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:
and a bit later in the same article:
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".
I've seen this argument parroted 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.
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?
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
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.
I still remember when students at the local high school organized a BLM march from the school to the police station (a 30 minute walk) I saw so many posts from people in this town itching to shoot them if they even looked at their house weird.
One day the world will come together and form an army of therapists and send you guys the humanitarian aid you deperatly need.
There's a difference between burning corporate Chipotle and small businesses and personal home property.
Petite bourgeois are still the bourgeois.
Lives matter more than your fucking property.
Demented tankie delusion
Demented centrist delusion to prioritize inanimate objects over the lives of real fucking people and their struggle.
Inanimate objects? You know these are real resources, investments and livelihoods of normal people?
Go play your video games and shut the fuck up little kid
Yes. Resources that are being restricted from their community through the oppressive system of private property ownership that is intrinsic to the capitalist system.
Fuck your "investments". Fuck the livelihood of the owning-class.
Due to the systematic erosion of any safety systems, I sort of need my property to live.
Then find a community and organize some mutual aid networks to replace those safety nets instead of selling your humanity to be an owning-class pig.
That capital you claim private ownership over does not rightfully belong to you to make profit off of, it belongs to the community to use as it sees fit and distribute to those in need of it.
What a dogshit ass take. Small business owners are hardly "selling their humanity to be a owning-class pig". Most people just try to get by in the system they're born into. Many small businesses aren't beholden to some franchise and are pivotal to bringing their small community together.
Like, what fucking system do you live in were you don't work and only provide for those around you? Are you farming your own produce to disperse among your community or do you work some bullshit ass job like the rest of the world so you can virtue signal on Lemmy to feel better about your situation? My bet is on the latter.
Get fucking real.
What utter horseshit.
Their choice to become part of the system that is actively oppressing people just to save their own skin is so lacking in solidarity.
Find your class consciousness and stop making excuses for people who exploit others.
I don't care if that the system we all live in, the goal is to change that fucking system and break it, not give up and become part of it.
Also, yes, I do run a community garden and, yes, all of its produce I give away for free, no questions asked. Thanks for asking. It's called "mutual aid". You should look into it.
Lastly, those of us who work for a living are not the same as those who own the businesses that exploit our needs for profit, small business or otherwise. They are not pivotal to the community. What is pivotal are things like mutual aid programs and direct action initiatives that help people without profiting off of them.
Small business owners are not just fucking McDonalds franchises. Some are cafe owners, boardgame store owners, IT companies. These are not slave labor organizations but small teams of people working together in a system that demands capital to survive. They're absolutely pivotal because they often can provide services at better rates for their community, or are social hubs without needing to spend capital. They absolutely are pivotal because they can teach people trades while earning for a living. They absolutely are pivotal because they're not greedy corpos trying to extract every ounce of capital from their community, they're most regular ass people looking to just get by. They usually provide fair wages to their small teams so they can also survive. They provide direct alternatives to buying from big box corporations or ordering off Amazon, Temu, or whatever bullshit online megastore. Some source their product organically and some wholesale.
Do you not go to social gathers like boardgame groups or outings? Do you not travel at all? Your worldview is extremely narrow.
I never said they were just McDonald's franchises. I know they are also cafe owners and petite bourgeois leeches of the sort.
I give zero fucks. If you're a business owner who sees to profit off of your community: go fuck yourself you utter parasite.
All profit is theft. Period.
"People need to earn a living" is capitalist realism Bullshit. People only need to earn a living because the owning class forces the need to pay for what rightfully belongs to the community. If people stopped forcing that need and refused to exploit their community for profit, instead organizing to provide for each other freely and reading, then people wouldn't need to "earn a living" and can still pursue their passions to learn a trade or gain education.
And if it is a place if business that seeks profit there is always an obligation to spend money (not capital, capital is property, not currency). There isn't a business out there that lets people loiter without paying.
Small business owners are just as greedy and slimy as corporate entities.
And like fuck they provide fair wage.s small businesses are the absolute worst offenders of wage theft out there. Most of them make excuses after excuses to pay less because "oh we're a small business and can't afford it". Your high as fuck if you think small businesses pay fairly.
Stop glazing the petite bourgeois. Go support your local co-op and non-profit instead.
You seem to think a lot of people who own a single home are using it to profit...
You are targeting your fellow working class man instead of the people you are angry at.
You seem to not know the difference between personal property and private property.
If you own a single home which you live in that isn't private property, that is personal property.
Doubling down eh?
Why are you dogging on this guy if you think he's talking about his personal property?
The person I replied to conflated personal property with private property. The person I have been arguing with is explicitly talking about small businesses, which is explicitly private property.
I feel like the most effective form of protest will make life miserable for the people causing the problems, rather than making life miserable for the people affected by the problem.
I'm not really thinking about the protests in France, though. I'm thinking about all the times in my area when highways have been shut down by people wanting police reform, and it feels like nothing has changed. Granted, when this was happening on a nationwide basis, we got body cams for most police departments, and that's created a lot of accountability.
The only kind of protest that works in US is a silent protest. A prime example is the railway workers protest. They "derailed" the economy by billions of dollars and Byron signed an executive order to force them back to work. So face jail time or get back to work. Don't want to? Well straight to jail. Then with the thirteenth amendment you'll be back to work with a national guard member watching over you. If you think that's not likely to happen, you're new when it comes to US politics. Read about the expansion of the Patriot act the beloved Obama signed, I voted for him and canvassed, and protested McCain, that turned out well.
Protest that doesn't disrupt is barely protest
GuYs dOn't bReAk mY TaRgEt
So there's this concept "agent provocateur".
It means the guy from the opposite side who throws the first stone as if he were on side he disagrees with.
The one who throws the first stone is the villain.
The reason why 60's era civil rights demonstrations were so successful is that no white person was able (or probably willing) to infiltrate the African American side to throw the first stone.
In a modern protest, plenty of people without any identifying group support any side, so someone just has to turn around throw a bottle onto their own side to start the violence.
If a chipotle is destroyed how would we ever replace it?!?!!
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?
gUiS gUiS iT's Da LiBbErUls!!!1!!1!!