• ReverendIrreverence@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    Essentially (but sadly) this is a useless charade. Using one of your days off work to march and shout slogans is not hitting (or hurting) anyone who is propping up this fascist regime. Do this sort of thing during the week. Shut cities down. Make people in the C-level suites notice an actual change to their bottom line or this is all nothing but theater preaching to the converted.

    • valtia@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      If you/we can’t even bother to attend a protest on a day off for a few hours, how the hell are we going to do it during the week, to shut cities down?

    • BonkTheAnnoyed@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      21 hours ago

      There’s an interesting kind of poster that I’ve only seen here on Lemmy, the “why bother, it’s not going to work” poster.

      Why vote? It doesn’t matter.

      Why write or call your rep, they’re in the pocket of blah blah anyway?

      Why put a bumper sticker in your car? Performative BS, maaaan.

      Etm etm…

      How do you feel when you see Trump stickers everywhere?

      How do you feel when you’re in a neighborhood with pride flags everywhere? Is that different and better?

      What about when you see Wellstone! sticker in deep red Midwest? A little hope that there are other people who haven’t given up?

      Show up! Speak out! Be visible! Live into the small moments of joy where resistance lives!

      • feddylemmy@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        It really does feel like there’s an uptick in doomer/not enough posts on the fediverse lately.

        • topherclay@lemmy.world
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          10 hours ago

          “Etm” is used the same way as “etc.” It stands for “et merde” instead of “et cetera” which would mean “and shit” instead of “and others.”

          Maybe read it more as “and more other shit like this” when you see it at the end of a list of a bunch of shit.

        • monotremata@lemmy.ca
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          17 hours ago

          Doing it on a weekday means it can be more disruptive to the status quo, but that also means more divisive. Doing it on the weekend means it’s easier for more people to participate and it can come across as more of a statement of unity.

          I don’t think one is strictly better than the other. I do think this one will have an impact.

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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            7 hours ago

            Doing it on a weekend helps build steam and commitment. Protests like this normalize dissent, gather resistance together, and provide an onramp to resistance. Going out and breaking a few windows day 1 is what an agent provocateur would say to do, it just gets the committed arrested and turns moderates against them

              • Sightline@lemmy.world
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                14 hours ago

                Problems can be identified by anyone. Immediately dismissing any sort of reasonable constructive criticism will destroy the movement from the inside out.

                But please, continue shutting people down, you seem to know that’s best.

        • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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          21 hours ago

          I find more people on lemmy of the “stop saying thing you never said” type these days. Its like they want to catch you out on a thing they think is being said, almost as if they are pushing a narrative…

      • Sightline@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        Showing up exactly where they expect you to and getting shot with pepperballs isnt making things better. As far as I can tell these protests are just outrage relief.

        • oatscoop@midwest.social
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          14 hours ago

          Getting shot with pepperballs for peacefully assembling in public tends to radicalize people, their friends, and their family. Pissed off people tend to be far more motivated in putting in the work to make things better. Experiencing or seeing police brutality first hand is a fantastic motivator when it comes time to boycott, strike, recall elected officials, etc.

          You’d probably know that if you learned the history of any social revolution in the USA … but they really gloss over those movements in schools for some reason.

        • webadict@lemmy.world
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          12 hours ago

          Hey little bro, mom says you gotta do a 250 word essay on the civil rights movement.

    • TipRing@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      For something so pointless Mike Johnson and the usual stooges seem to be spending a lot of time talking about the upcoming protests using inflammatory rhetoric. One would think they might not bother if what you say were true.

    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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      21 hours ago

      Yeah, I don’t think the Americans who opposes what’s happening understand that they’re beyond the point where they can lawfully protest their way out of it. So long as stock market lines keep going up , the administration can just ignore these protests. Hell the media is complicit and won’t report how vast these protests are anyways.

      If you want to put your conspiracy hat on, this is controlled opposition in that it acts as a pressure release valve for their opposition to exert themselves and feel like they’ve done something, without doing anything of real consequence.

      Are there protests a necessary part of resistance? Perhaps. It keeps many people engaged than would otherwise be. But they are not even close to being sufficient. Remember , were like 8 months into this.

        • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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          15 hours ago

          Yeah dude the only one who thinks this is pointless is JD himself. Go shout your heart out tomorrow. I look forward to the fall of the evil empire by tomorrow afternoon.

        • Sightline@lemmy.world
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          14 hours ago

          Get your head out of your ass. PR stunts and “protests” where you get your ass beat by cops isn’t going to save our country. Especially when you show up exactly where they expect you to.

          nova_ad_vitum is spot on about it being a pressure relief valve.

      • ReverendIrreverence@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        The info I have read says, historically, nothing will come of these protests until 3.5% of the people take part and even then doing it for one day, on a weekend, is much less effective than days or even a weeks long shutdown

        • Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com
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          6 hours ago

          This comes from a bullshit study done by an idealist without looking at material conditions and cherrypicking examples. There have been mass protests bigger than that leading to nothing all over Europe in the past 15 years.

          Protest, by all means, but more importantly organize. Join an active and radical union, join a communist or anarchist organization and do activism through that, do mutual aid, support worker struggles, do civil disobedience and organize against evictions in your area… There’s so much you can do, and a Democrat-organized protest is just the tiniest step.

  • BotsRuinedEverything@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    I wonder how many people at that protest didn’t vote in the last election. These protests are useless. Hold rallies for voter registration. Educate people about the impact of local government. Do anything but dress in a frog costume.

    • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      Some of these people may well also have voted for Trump and regret it.

      Do anything but dress in a frog costume.

      That’s only to discredit the accusation that Portland is a lawless city when ICE and national guards were sent. If they are sent to No Kings protest because of claim that protestors are violent, then why not dress up as Kermit?

    • mrdown@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Why would people who think voting is useless would go to a protest that you said is useless?

    • pageflight@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      The Boston rally on Oct 18th says they’ll have a bunch of local organizations with tables, so I think they are / one can take a “both” approach.

    • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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      21 hours ago

      Oh yeah, that will teach them. I am sure the other side of the broken two party system will totally fix things. This time, for sure.

      Just stop pretending the us is a democracy, do something about your broken nation or just collapse already. This is just sad at this point.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    23 hours ago

    Yeah, just like the previous one which did diddly squat

    Make it matter this time. Stop the country until the fascists are all gone or something, but make it worth while. Just another three second blip on the news won’t do shit

    • witten@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      The purpose of a mass expressive protest is threefold: 1. Demonstrate to the fascists that we are many, we are organized, and we will not stand by silently as they try to steamroll our rights, 2. Demonstrate to other anti-fascists or just those with doubts about the regime that they are not alone, and 3. Get casual protestors involved in more direct resistance activities. There are often tables with resistance organizations handing out flyers with ways to join up.

      These big protests are just one piece of a healthy resistance movement.

      • TipRing@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        Exactly. I think what I see on lemmy is a great deal of misunderstanding regarding where the American population is at right now. Lemmy has, on average, a far higher level of political engagement than the average American and there is a greater representation of activists on this platform. The American public is simply not at the ‘let’s improvise a mass work-stoppage’ stage. We just aren’t where we need to be to topple a fascist regime.

        A primary benefit to these large protests is to drive political engagement and remove perceived barriers to activism. That is how we move things from ‘useless protests’ to ‘impactful resistance’. You have to get more of the public to where we are already at, even if it is frustrating to wait for all these people to catch up.

        • witten@lemmy.world
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          16 hours ago

          While I agree on all points, I think many folks on Lemmy are pretty uneducated on how activism and non-violent resistance is work and takes time—leading to an expectation that if something unjust is happening, we should all just riot and engage in armed rebellion or whatever. It’s like they’re impatient with the slow progress, which honestly I am too. The difference is that I recognize that slow progress is really the only viable path right now.

          For our part, I think we need to do better at surfacing progress so that it’s clear that real resistance wins are happening even if the media generally prefers not to report on it.

          (I expect there to be some serious progress surfacing going on at No Kings tomorrow.)

      • EightBitBlood@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        This is the second No Kings rally. Isn’t that reoccurring? I get what you mean, but Trumps only been president for 10 months. In that time, all US media has been gobbled up by fascist conservatives who are fighting tooth and nail to make every American at these protests seem like a terrorist extremist.

        The protests WILL increase. And they WILL keep reoccurring. There’s clear momentum gathering.

        Just that momentum needs to be slow, and silly, to effectively disrupt the false narrative being broadcast on almost every single news network in the US right now.

        Trump won because people here fully believe whatever bullshit the TV tells them. Batboy and Bigfoot are basically real to these people, and there’s literally no convincing them otherwise because it’s now on every channel they watch.

        We need those people to see how the TV is wrong before they can even begin to understand how wrong our country now is.

        If protests were every week the moment Trump took office, then it would just become white noise to these people.

        Letting Trump dig his own grave by constantly altering the narrative is more effective than giving him the same material to work from that got him into position in the first place.

        Hardcore Republicans are finally seeing how dangerous the rhetoric is becoming because Fox News is telling them people in Frog Costumes are Terrorists. Now that it’s obvious they aren’t, maybe more of what Fox News has been saying isn’t true as well.

        Slow and steady resilience to a Fascist whose going senile is a far better way to defeat that fascist than becoming the terrorists he wants his opposition to be.

      • rozodru@piefed.social
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        20 hours ago

        Can’t have that in America. they need to be scheduled preferably on a weekend within a short commute.

        As long as it’s on a weekend the drive isn’t too long, any other day? it’s a long drive + work + my healthcare is tied to my work + i still believe I’ll have work in a years time at this rate.

    • MeekerThanBeaker@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Whenever protests get bigger, the movement grows.

      Nothing will happen? Why is the government trying to denounce it as Antifa all over the news? Why are they suddenly doing missile tests off the coast of Los Angeles the day of the protest? Because they are afraid. Because if they can’t inflict fear, they lose power.

      Sorry if we’re trying to avoid another civil war. Now go kick some rocks.

      • klammeraffe@lemmy.cafe
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        21 hours ago

        You are the one who thinks killing billionaires is “eugenics.” So, I’m not surprised that you’re siding with conservatives

        • chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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          17 hours ago

          Hey. Killing kids cause of their “blood” is fucking eugenics. Dehumanize them however you like, doesn’t change that fact.

          • klammeraffe@lemmy.cafe
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            17 hours ago

            If you kill the billionaire…. And their money goes to the children…. You still have a billionaire.

            If you kill a billionaire—and take the money, their (now poor) kids aren’t going to be like “oh yeah cool dude was a douche and I hate money,” they’ll get revenge. That’s not going to be a long term solution.

            The reason you’re clutching your pearls is because you’re a center-at-best shill for the oligarch. 🤷‍♂️

            • chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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              12 hours ago

              Dude. Go touch fucking grass. Please. You clearly have no grounding in reality any more and have made yourself so mad that you think only the most violent responses are reasonable.

              • klammeraffe@lemmy.cafe
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                12 hours ago

                I think you have the idea that you will one day be a billionaire or, be worth anything more than you are now. Unfortunately, things are only going to be getting worse… And that is not worse before better that’s just worse and forever. Enjoy sucking the dicks a billionaires, they are not going to help you.

    • Skiluros@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      While I too am skeptical of the true commitment of large section of the US population to freedom (in the real sense not in the American “I support free speech!” sense), I would not underestimate the fundamental unpredictability of history.

      Not a fan of Lenin, but the notion that “there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen" is a powerful observation of human history and behaviour.

      Not saying this is going to be a inflection point, but there are always steps to reach a given inflection point.

        • Skiluros@sh.itjust.works
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          23 hours ago

          When I was living in the US I didn’t find local polemics about free speech to be convincing.

          It honestly felt more like a theatrical way to highlight one’s alleged “independent” mindset and virtues. It just didn’t seem genuine.

          Recent development have largely proven my thinking on this issue. Many Americans who claim to support “freedom of speech” don’t understand the concept and don’t really care about it (beyond theatrical repetition of phrases that they’ve heard other locals use).

            • Skiluros@sh.itjust.works
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              7 hours ago

              That’s of course a free speech issue. But the contrast between the alleged deep commitment to free speech claimed by many Americans and the fact that this issue wasn’t that much of a deal-breaker in support for the current US administrator suggests that theatrics and ostentatiousness are a significant driver of free speech polemics.