“Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.”
― George Carlin
Many parts of the system were designed to disenfranchise various groups. One of the most effective of those parts is the message that your vote doesn’t matter.
Voting is like taking public transportation, it’s not going to take you to your exact destination but you get on the bus that gets you closer.
Not getting on the bus because it doesn’t go exactly where you want to, or you don’t like the bus driver is allowing others to take you in the exact opposite direction.
Voting alone might not but it's an important part of the process. You should agitate and organize, but also go vote and get your friends to go with you.
I love that there’s always someone who brings this one thing up…
Nobody’s right 100% of the time. But he was right far more often than not, and far more correct than most anyone else running their mouths about the same subjects.
He wasn’t wrong. During this time the parties although different and Republicans being shitter, were much closer together. They were both pro corporate with differences on social issues.
Today… The Republicans have gone full batshit trying to overthrow democracy. I guarantee you, if George was alive he’d be saying VOTE and vote for Democrats until we’ve gotten rid of the dangerous fascists.
They’re not the only ones who forgot. It’s crazy how many people I know who shun the idea of any form of action beyond general protest in the face of corruption. I always ask them how they think change is going to happen when we have protest after protest and nothing to show for them, but they never have an answer. Things are going to get a lot worse before people realize we need to fight for our rights, and being angry on the internet - or even in person with a sign - is no longer enough to make a change.
When violence is used to maintain the status quo, announcing up front that you’re unwilling to use violence in response tells those in power that they need not listen to you.
MLK was not the entirety of the civil rights movement and his legacy was whitewashed by Reagan to distort history. MLK also understood that, “riots are the language of the unheard.” Riots occurred because civil rights were not given when they asked nicely.
Perhaps the whitewashed, watered down MLK would beg to differ. He’s been reduced to like three quotes for people to slap on their Facebook profiles; for companies to paste on their messaging in February; to be trotted out once a year like Weekend at Bernie’s so people can feel the warm fuzzies inside and ignore actual, real-world racism and violence that is happening right now.
It’s like anytime someone mentions anything above a megaphone and a cardboard sign there’s always one of you that comes out of the woodwork and is like “MLK… Checkmate 😎”. As another commenter said, MLK was not the civil rights movement of his time. The reason he is the poster child for that movement in that era is specifically because his personal convictions about non-violent protest are safe for the system as it is.
Slavery can still exist, albeit in a different form. (Not chattel slavery) Racism can still exist, albeit in different forms. People who are victims of these systems are dismissed out-of-pocket because that’s the goal: the system never wanted to change, and by making MLK the summation of “the civil rights movement” in the eye of the public, they infused passivity into the discourse. They tell you to make your signs, and get your megaphones, and write your blog posts because that’s what is safe for the system to continue on as it has always been.
I 100% agree with your position, but I just want to correct a long-standing whitewashing that still tricks folks on the left; his nonviolence theory was a political strategy, not a moral position
The sad thing is that we don’t even need to use violence. We have the power to bring this country to a halt with nothing more than a well organized revolt.
That’s not possible for a lot of people unless they’re fine with starving. Additionally, prisoner’s dilemma or some variant of that basically makes it impossible to do something like that, herding cats would be easier. World peace would be achieved if all soldiers refused to fight and yet that will never happen for a whole host of reasons.
That’s not possible for a lot of people unless they’re fine with starving.
This is why a network of support and organization during a protest is vital. Because you’re going to have a lot of people in this position, so having some sort of place for donations and distribution of food/funds and a team to coordinate so the protests can continue uninterrupted is important. How to organize such a support network is a problem for people other than me who aren’t introverts.
As the original post states, peaceful protests were originally a warning - they were the last opportunity for nonviolent communication before the violence started. Their function relies on that being the next step - one that the organization wants to avoid.
People who think you can solve all problems by stating that you are in the moral right, instead of fighting for what you believe in, really show their true colors of being woefully ignorant to how history has always worked. This end of history neoliberal narrative has truly rotted peoples brains and made them unable to intellectually understand how to stand up for themselves.
Shit France is already leading the way this century and showing us weak Americans how protests are supposed to be done. No one protests like the French protest.
But that means more people have a chance to get wealthy (provided taxes aren’t raised to match). Why pay people more and have more wealthy people when you can pay less and have all the money?
Because all those CEOs will never think further than the next ten minutes. In short term that means only less money for them since for any extra unit of money they give to their worker it is not garantied they buy something from the own company. They only ever see what money they don’t get right now, and not what they could get potentially in long term.
“Redress” is typically used when referring to correcting or remedying a wrong or injustice. It implies a sense of compensation or restitution for something that has gone awry. For example, if a customer receives a faulty product from a company, they may seek redress by asking for a refund or replacement.
“Address,” on the other hand, is a more general term that refers to dealing with or attending to a particular matter. It can be used in a variety of contexts, from addressing a letter to addressing a problem. It doesn’t necessarily imply any wrongdoing or injustice.
It took a lot of blood and violence to get to the point where we all think blood and violence isn’t required in some situations. Millions and millions of people struggle every single day while the rich look for ways to take away their rights. It’s literally human nature to want to fight back against that.
It isn’t a fantasy, it’s history. It is how our comfortable world was built, and if you think it is eerie then you should reevaluate how you feel about the benefits it has brought you.
It’s funny, I think they are all bark and no bite. When push comes to shove we often see their fantasies amount to nothing more than materialistic looting. They will never live out their dreams of lynching billionaires.
I misspoke…er…typed, we get shot and have no real way to defend ourselves being wildly outgunned by police. Thanks for that PBS article btw. I hadn’t heard of a lot of these happenings, and I’m still reading through it.
Even in the US where you can own firearms, your 5.56 rounds aren’t going to do shit against an armored vehicle, or handle drone strikes or national guard elements. Yet liberals are frothing at the mouth to take guns away from the working class, when personal firearms are already woefully inadequate for fighting against a tyrannical government.
Sure, if the civilian population of the US had to actively repel an invading army with their own organized militia, it’d be completely one-sided.
But if the US military were engaged in a war against its own civilian population, it wouldn’t be a remotely straightforward fight. They’d be dealing with a local population and the emotional impact of fighting their own population at the same time. Guerilla warfare in the United States would be a mess to try to deal with. We have a lot of wilderness, and the division within the military would likely be significant enough to have a major impact on any attempted operations.
The US military is really good at organizing its troops to fight for the US. Fighting against the US is a whole other can of worms. And by my count, most older vets wouldn’t be on the side of using the military against our own civilians, whether they’re otherwise more on the conservative side of politics or not.
I don’t think there’s anything like the kind of support or organization to see something like that happen, but I think it could get a whole lot uglier and more complicated than just the numbers suggest.
You forget that every part of that machine is a person. No soldier is going to attack his fellow citizens. The cops are not people, but we outnumber and outgun them by orders of magnitude. Either way I am willing to die trying. You can stand with us if the time comes or you can enjoy that boot you’re currently deep throating. The choice is yours.
Strikers were bombed back in the day by aircrafts. Unionization was won through enduring warfare yet we just gave it away. Shows how powerful unionization is that the elites are completely terrified of it, and that they have surpressed the history of it so few will know how much blood was shed to get it.
I keep blocking work reform pages but more keep popping up from different instances. Is there a way to globally block any instance that contains a specific word or phrase?
I mean, each to their own, but do you have a greivance with workers collectively backing themselves and their colleagues?
(In answer to your question, as far as I know you have to block communities one by one. The only other alternative would be to view only your subscribed communities)
I have no grievance with them, I just don’t care for the grievances they share with their employers. It was easy on reddit since it was just one sub I had to filter but here they keep popping up.
The tankies have been on lemmy longer than anyone else (and helped develop it I guess?) And they are still around. The normal instances have defederated from them and no one has to interact with them, but they still exist.
Whether you consider it a pro or a con, there are no advertisers terrified of negative brand association here, and the only way an instance gets shut down is if it gets caught hosting explicitly criminal content.
Lastly this isn’t a tankie. Tankies are insanely pro-military, obsessed with nationalism (for places like china or russia usually), and one of their favorite pastimes is denying the negative history of their favorite “communists”.
This is just a dark joke about the history of how workers rights were originally fought for, in america and elsewhere. Look up the coal wars.
But thats the thing. Those who sit at the shade, will grow spoiled, fat and greedy and will enslave others to plant more trees from which they themselves will benefit from. “Hard times create great men. Great men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men creat hard times.”.
Yup. The police have always existed to beat on the downtrodden. Whether it is slaves trying to escape to freedom or workers who are peacefully protesting just a bit too loud.
