What did you guys not learn about civil disobedience?
It’s non-violence, but it breaks the laws “designed to keep things civil.” It’s meant to disrupt, it’s means to obstruct, it’s meant to annoy the shit out of the people you are protesting.
I haven’t seen any civil disobedience. Which is weird because the boomers did it all the time.
A protest isn’t civil disobedience. Boycotts aren’t civil disobedience.
A crowd of hundreds blocking a bridge is. People blocking entrances to government buildings is. People surrounding bases is. People flooding the capitol or disrupting the discourse of policy is. The reason they use the military and ICE is because they are terrified that people will remember that even 1% of the US doing this far outnumbers them.
A crowd of hundreds blocking a bridge is. People blocking entrances to government buildings is. People surrounding bases is. People flooding the capitol or disrupting the discourse of policy is. The reason they use the military and ICE is because they are terrified that people will remember that even 1% of the US doing this far outnumbers them.
The absolute whining from people when they are moderately inconvenienced is depressing. “Sure, death camps are bad but did they have to block the bridge? I’m going to be late for my brunch!” Well, the person in a camp is going to be late for stuff, too.
I’ve seen someone on this platform, call out people who block bridges as having a “lack of empathy because you’ve never had to be somewhere on time”
You’re so right, how dare I make someone late for their dentist appointment. Let the genocide continue, by all means.
On a more practical level, it can be counter productive to the protester’s cause though. I used to work at a busy convenience store in a city where I would talk to many people throughout the day about what was going on in town, including one day when a small group of protesters shut down the major freeway in the area. It only turned the majority opinion against them and increased support for police. Literally no one so much as even mentioned what they were protesting about, let alone gaining support
One misconception I had about civil disobedience from what I’d learned in school is that it’s a reliable means of drawing attention to your cause: your willingness to expose yourself to legal consequences will communicate to the public how critical you consider the issue to be.
What I learned from witnessing it first-hand is that officials and the media will invent their own narratives about your actions out of whole cloth, and the statement the public thinks you’re making is subject to arbitrary filtering and distortion.
they never taught people “civil disobedience” but refer to them as “protests, or deadly demostrations” its all whitewashed.
they did teach use about checks and balances, in order to placate the masses, so they dont anything that threatens the status quo. more or less its, just “dont ruffle the feathers, keep your head down” kind of rhetoric.
Oh for fuck’s sake, if you want to start a revolt then fucking start it already. Fascism is here right now, so you need to fight it right now. You’re doing no good by sitting around and saying “I would have totally joined the Revolution if one had spontaneously formed around me.”
If a violent resistance isn’t feasible in the here-and-now (and it isn’t) then you need to find other ways to resist.
Ok I go do a revolution now, thanks for the pep talk.
We will join if we hear about it
yep, I need to polish my rifle before I go out, wouldn’t want it to jam when its hero time. Will be right behind you. Actually I need to buy that rifle then polish it. Actually I need to decide which rifle. AR15 right? I heard they are heavy though? and probably do some mandatory classes and paperwork, license fees. Practice at the range. Etc. The point is, I am right behind you… We all are.
seriously though, why are we all so sedate about fascism and losing our rights? I think its because we dont imagine ourselves to be in imminent danger yet? Its all still very abstract. And yes, I am white and male, and have enough resources to be OK on a day to day basis. the price of eggs being higher and the news sucking every day, and our country’s participating in war crimes are each unbearable, but on a day to day basis, its still mostly just expensive eggs. I can always worry about the rest… later.
We are getting to a point of no return… or at least a return that would be very, very difficult to achieve. But it’s all done in a very calculated way to make you feel like everything is going fine if you’re not directly affected. It’s fine if the Supreme Court approves of these power grabs, right? And, how can I pay attention when there’s so much going on, right? But Trump is demonizing groups of people as enemies, defying constitutional rights, and making power grabs never before seen from the executive branch in this country. It’s only been a few months and it keeps getting worse.
We’re in very deep shit. Sign a strike card! https://generalstrikeus.com/
Its sad because if we were smart we would act now before a single bit of blood is shed… and all you would have to do is not go to work.
School is indoctrination. I’m surprised so many of my peers don’t realize it.
When I was in China (country of birth), they did national anthem like either weekly or daily. I think it was every week, they would also do a flag raising ceremony. They then did a weird ceremony where first graders did wore little red scarfs, which I as an adult looked it up and its apparantly called the Young Pioneers program where they attempt to brainwash children into their “communist” ideology. (“communist” in quotes because it wasn’t even real communism). So yea I always get weirded out by these weird rituals.
Then when I immigrated to the US, they do the “pledge of allegience” and the national anthem of the US, of course, being a foreign national at the time, I didn’t do the pledge, but just stood up to sort of fit in, but I remained silent. I thought these rituals, national anthem, pledge of allegience, making kids wear red scarfs, was normal, just part of every country.
Then I grew older and went online and apparantly Europeans tell me the flah of allegience wasn’t considered normal.
I eventually got US citizenship derived from my mother’s naturalization. I did eventually get attached to the concept of the constitution and rule of law, checks and balances (I did NOT have any attachments to the US administrations or congress btw, that’s a whole differe t thing). But there was always something very uncanny about the way they teach things.
They keep saying “freedom” “freedom” all over everything they teach, and when they teach civics, teachers say that “police cannot do X if they don’t have probable cause” “you have rights” “innocent until proven guilty”, but we know for a fact that these things do happen, but of course, they are brushed off as “mistakes”, and yet cops don’t seem to get held accountable.
So again, I slowly see the same pattern all over again, different country, similar indoctrination.
And to top it all off, while the US (pre 2025) was considered “democratic”, schools are anything but. Schools admin and teachers always have a lot of draconian rules and some doesn’t even make sense.
Like wtf is school uniform, teaching conformity and just “obey” the rules, no questions asked? Also, you aren’t allowed to wear any outerwear even if its winter and you’re cold unless you purchase the school’s sweaters, wtf? This is a liberal city btw. So much for freedom. Freedom to get a fucking cold.
Security cameras everywhere in school, they had fucking security patrolling inside the school, like wtf its K-12.
The fucking police the bathrooms so much. They sometimes LOCK THE FUCKING BATHROOM because “drugs”. LOL FUCK YOU. I’M GONNA PISS ON THE FUCKING FLOOR. (sry for caps).
Its just, when you’ve seen so much shit from schools in 2 different nationalistic countries, and also have to deal with your abusive parents’ bullshit, you quickly develop the pattern recognition to recognize authoritarianism.
Public school is indoctrination. (And private school would be much worse, especially religious ones). Sad that people don’t recognize this.
There was actually a pretty good comment here once about how MLK and Gandhi only really succeeded with progress when a visible and difficult threat to the system was perceived.
Civil rights stagnated until the ramp up with the march to Washington and widespread riots from groups like the black panthers were damaging public society.
Similarly, Gandhi had trouble convincing the British to even consider independence until widespread communal violence swept the nation in the aftermath of WWII.
Both figures were touted as succeeding in history books due to their non violent movements, but in reality they simply became the center of attention for media at the time which solidified them as icons of their respective movements.
Ironically, both were assassinated which means their opposition definitely viewed them as a a powerful political threat, and not just some supporters for peace.
Gandhi had trouble convincing the British to even consider independence until widespread communal violence swept the nation in the aftermath of WWII.
What are you talking about?
Gandhi was the peaceful alternative that gave Britain a place at the table.
Where do you get that from? All the violent resistance like Subhash Chandra Bose and revolutionary movement were not big enough to be a major concern. Civil disobedience was more concerning given how widespread it was.
Civil Disobedience was the peaceful alternative; it is a show of force that only works if it carries the implication of a more violent alternative. Nobody ever won their freedom by appealing to the morality of the oppressor.
Nope, nope, nope. It is not a show of force, it’s making the society ungovernable, like not paying taxes, growing/making/selling anything to anyone etc. There was no implication of anything more violent. It is not appealing to the morality of the oppressor.
If that was true, the British would have had their puppets shoot and starve them until they were governable.
And they tried. Look at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the salt raids, the mass imprisonments. But the point wasn’t to wait for mercy, it was to make the cost of control so high, through sheer non-cooperation, that ruling became practically impossible. The system depends on participation. Remove that, and power collapses under its own weight. It’s not about violence, nor about moral appeals. It’s about leverage. When millions stop obeying, even bullets can’t fix the math.
checks and balances is not a lie it just does not work when folks don’t do their job. its like they did the patriot act because bush jr. didn’t do his job. No system can work when a significant amount of the components are bad actors.
I read: “checks and balances do not work”
They arent working. Att least the checks and balances we have now.
Yeah you can’t be taught about future failures of a system. The only way for it not be able to not be working is for humans to not be in the equation of government. Which is one of the reasons ai taking over does not scare me. Either they kill us all. Win for the planet. Or they run things properly. Win for everybody.
They dont teach future failures but they do teach the robustness of our checks and balances.
Which turns our to be not very.
Its incredibly robust. Its lasted over two hundred years through several constitutional crises. Its possible it might even survive this. Whats happening now required complacency of a majority of both houses of congress, a large swath of the judiciary, plus the executive. Thats pretty damn robust. Its like saying a bridge is not robust even though its stayed up when some of its supports got destroyed but once over half of them were taken out it finally started to crack.
sure but there are holes in our entire constitutional process that you can drive a truck through. They work in certain cases, but in others they may as well not exist. Like ,impeachment barely works. And god knows a lot of our presidents should have been impeached. And the will of the people is not implemented by our government and hasn’t been for a long time, if ever.
Mlk jr got cameras.
Malcolm X got results.
Their combination got results. You think they’re ever going to give Malcolm what he demanded? Fuck no. They give it to King and then shoot the both of em for good measure. King made the movement to sympathetic to just start shooting.
and that’s cool, just don’t stand in the way of the people who push Malcolm X, so we can have both
Thiiis. The insiders need to laud the goals of protesters and the protesters need to ease off on the “complicit” insiders a bit. We are on the same team, and the combination of approaches is more powerful. Disagreeing on methods is fine, you pull, we push, momentum baby.
