i find the No Kings protests offputting primarily for their rejection of “Do Not Split”. people around me attend them and i’m glad to see those people engaging in things, but they go on to say things like “at one point a group of 4 people in black bloc (one with a “medic” patch) tried to join the march but we walled them off”.

previous large scale protests i’ve been a part of had a natural flow to them: signs and chanting during the day, then as people start to head home it gets rowdier & some time well after dark it turns physical; repeat the next day.

i’m a daytime protestor. but i never felt like my protests were being “taken over”, or that those different groups were fighting for something incompatible with my own aims. there was space enough for me to find a place i was comfortable, and likewise for anyone with different tactics. you can’t have a “mass” movement without having space for all those different masses.

just heads up if you’re getting captchas on YT you’ll probably start getting those on other Google services over time too.

it snowballs like this: YouTube decides you’re a bot => you use less YouTube => Google/Alphabet gets less information/fingerprints of you => Google Search decides you’re a bot => you switch to a different search engine => Google Maps decides you’re a robot …

if you’re arguing that violence is a poor way by which to shape a society, preach that to the police. it’s literally what they do for a living.