• sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
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    9 hours ago

    The Women’s March on January 21, 2017 was one of the biggest protests in US History. It did jack all. The US gov’t has been taken over by anti-Consititutional, anti-American, anti-law Republicans at all 3 branches. Going to a protest has about the same impact as typing outrage on Lemmy. It’s not pessimism, it’s reality. Until masses are seriously prepared to get violent, we are fucked. Personally I’m just getting the fuck out and watch it implode into Gilead.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
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      9 hours ago

      Interesting how you skipped over the BLM protests, which were literally 100 times larger than the Women’s March, and resulted in significant changes to the exact thing they were protesting, which had previously been a basically unchangeable fact of American government and society.

      There’s also Euromaidan, which toppled a corrupt government, with about 4 times the attendance of the Women’s March.

      • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
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        8 hours ago

        I didn’t realize police stopped shooting black people. Also, the media’s fucked up coverage on the BLM protests had a big impact on ignorant troglodytes supporting fuckhead trump this time around.

        • gift_of_gab@lemmy.world
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          17 minutes ago

          I didn’t realize police stopped shooting black people.

          Dude that’s totally disingenuous and you know it. Protests/strikes aren’t fucking fairy magic. They show people in power what the people in general think of something. The more people do these things the more it’s clear to those in power what will play out and what won’t.

          If americans, say, went out en masse and started protesting, striking, blocking day-to-day life from happening, in response to putting people in concentration camps, capitalists would put a lot of pressure on the fascists to step the fuck back. Then people could, I dunno, realise they can’t passive-resistence their way out of this and started fighting the fascists, this would be over extremely quickly.

          Fascism requires you do one of two things: Help them, or don’t resist them. If you resist it becomes too hard for such a small number of people to succeed against a massive amount of people constantly defying them.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
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          8 hours ago

          The police have been shooting about 1,000 people per year, of which a plurality have been white. Same as every year before, during, and after BLM.

          https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/

          (I would take that graph with a grain of salt BTW. The underlying data sources are pretty incomplete. I highly suspect that the sudden steady increase starting in 2020 is due to better data gathering by the FBI, after years and years of pretty much the same incomplete picture being shown every year.)

          In any case, the question is, how many of those shootings were justified? That there is no way to know simply from the data. I know that in 2020, there were enough shootings that were so totally disgustingly unjustified that it caused a mini-civil-war which engulfed the country and in which several people died, and I can think of one time since then that it happened (Tyre Nichols), and as far as I know the officers involved are not doing well in court, and the unit they were part of was disbanded almost immediately. There was absolutely none of this “oh well these things happen” reaction like for Breonna Taylor.

          I would call that a positive change. Wouldn’t you? Or no? There have been various “reforms” of varying degrees of intensity and staying power, but to me the larger issue has been the change in the culture of policing. Something changed between 2020 and the years that came after that caused the change in the number of highly-publicized killings. Right? Or no?

          • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
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            6 hours ago

            That’s a long way to say not much has changed. BLM may have improved things, or maybe just the reporting changed. Or maybe something else. I don’t know. There are so many foundational level problems in this country, and I hear nobody talking about them. Social sicknesses that lead to so many symptoms, including, but certainly not limited to, both police violence and magat voters. I’ve been voting for progressives in primaries, walking precincts, engaging with conservatives (back when they existed) for several decades now, and I’ve just watched shit get worse and worse. My time is over, I’m leaving my gloves in the ring, and turning into a full-time spectator now. Good luck.

            • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
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              6 hours ago

              That’s a long way to say not much has changed.

              Okay, so four hugely publicized totally bullshit killings in one single year, after a consistent drumbeat of regular police killings every single year where any level of scrutiny would show that it was totally unnecessary brutality, followed by four years with a lot more scrutiny (in the form of activists, pretty much universal bodycams now, and media) exposing one total bullshit killing in the entire country. That to you is “not much”?

              You can disagree with me obviously. But you sound like you just totally ignored what I said, and wanted to repeat what you said again, as if I hadn’t said it, and then expand on it.

              I’ve just watched shit get worse and worse

              Most of it, yes. Police reform is one big type of reform that actually happened. Of course, if you don’t care about what happened and simply want to insist that you know everything is getting worse and worse, because it is, that’s your right to do, I guess.

    • gift_of_gab@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      The Women’s March on January 21, 2017 was one of the biggest protests in US History.

      I didn’t say protest, I said strike. They are not the same thing. Protests require Centrists and ‘moderates’ to care enough to join them. Strikes are meant to directly impact Capitalism. Going to marches every night for a week doesn’t hurt business owners, but a week of strikes loses them money in a big way. With sympathy strikes you can get the capitalists fighting each other. With a General Strike all of the lines-go-downward and they’ll freak out.

      Until masses are seriously prepared to get violent, we are fucked.

      Guess which step precedes that?

      Get the fuck out in the streets, prevent cars from getting places, block entrances, cause consumers to avoid places, then they’ll start paying attention.

      God it’s so fucking frustrating watching your older brother whining there’s nothing they can do when there are provable things they’ve done in the fucking past that have worked.

      Look at the Pullman Strike. Seventy people were killed by cops/military, the strikers still won and it was a massive, historical win for American labour laws.

        • gift_of_gab@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          Apologies I made another comment in a virtually identical exchange where I mentioned strikes.

          To be clear: Protests -> Strikes -> Sympathy Strikes -> General Strikes.

          That’s how you beat fascism. As soon as people push back at their money base they crumble. If people let them do what they want they keep pushing for more and more until stopped.