there is a cure for political illiteracy

They’d have to cure their normal illiteracy first, and that’s kind of a tall ask I think

me when I love solipsism

well when you say it like that, it makes me think that’s cool as long as I’m part of the half that doesn’t get exterminated

Extermination and jailing people aren’t really equivalent.

You have plenty of out and about fascists who would vote for trump, actual groypers and nazis and shit. As a kind of, probe question, right, do you think it would be pertinent to go and actually kill those motherfuckers, given the kind of, borrowed time on which we’re living right now, the lack of resources, right, lack of popular support from a mainstream political system and their ability to so clearly co-opt it in this moment, and impending climate change which means we can’t waste time on them really more than is necessary. Those are some of the justifications that somebody might give for exterminating out and about fascists, right, even if they can’t guarantee that those people are actual fascists, in their heart of hearts, and that it would’ve taken too many resources to convert them, or too much time. That’s all normal shit, right, normal death sentence justification, which I usually don’t agree with, maybe greased up a little bit since you can have the apologia of a kind of wartime or desperation, right. You get what I’m saying?

I agree with you also, that there are plenty (I would even say, a majority) of supporters that legitimately just don’t realize how bad he is, and how bad things are in general, lots of them because they’re coked up on denial and lack of imagination, lots of them because they stand to benefit from these systems as they currently operate. They might not be “racist”, but they might still be perpetuating racism, they might not be fascists, but they might still be perpetuating fascism, through their ignorance and incompetence. Those people, right, sure, doesn’t make much sense to kill them.

But then, how do you propose to change their minds? A staunch communist might propose that we change the system, and then the majority will more naturally come to like, normal conclusions, right, and then you can just round up the rest that are sort of very staunch in their misinformed support, and then you can perhaps “re-educate” those people, right.

This is a process most people have problems with, but I dunno, what’s your take, what’s your alternative? If you’re dealing with those people, and you’re still giving them the freedom to attain power, control the economy and other people’s lives, even as misguided as they are, just sort of, for the sake of not having them in jail, right, then I dunno if that’s really going to work long term. It locks you into an untenable position, especially as many of these people will be actively dedicated to your dissolution, even if they’re just fooled, which dooms your movement from the start. You have to remove them from power, and if you want to remove them from power and ownership, while also not expatriating them from your country, an act which is usually viewed as genocide and for which you will constantly hear bitching from gusanos in the miami herald about, then you need to put them in some sort of reeducation camp, basically, and that camp is going to constitute jail.

So I dunno, hit me with your argument against that kind of jailing.

I don’t really think there’s any level of like, very natural reform that you’re going to engage in, or slow convincing over time to get people to give up their own power, that’s going to improve things, or that’s going to improve things at nearly the rate that we need right now considering what’s on the horizon. I might be wrong on that, but my basis for that belief is that people are in the positions of power that they’re in because they are naturally groomed and ensured to be the ones who have the beliefs and attitudes most suited to retain that power. If you have a business size of like, hundreds, and you’re promoting people in your business to positions of power, promoting people to become CEO by the board of directors, then naturally the system is going to start appointing people which reinforce the system. Asskissers who will do anything to get promoted, are usually the ones to get promoted, we know this. This doesn’t even need to be a universal tendency, this just needs to be a tendency more of the time than not, for it to be really problematic, for the majority of people in power to be assholes. The board of directors doesn’t want to start appointing CEOs that turn their companies into co-ops, that take the power out of their hands, there’s a natural incentive structure there. The same is mostly true of political systems which are mostly autocratic.

So, I dunno if there’s really much of an alternative, if we’re taking a sort of, step back look down at that idea of jailing your opposition. Maybe you have one, I dunno.

I am saying that you are originating from the wrong thing, here, your cause and effect is wrong. The black panthers and other black power movements were pushing for a different thing afterwards, after the civil rights movements, and that’s precisely why it escalated. It wasn’t up to them to simply be nicer, and then they would’ve won out. Being nicer wouldn’t have gotten them reparations or larger amounts of power in the political or financial systems, i.e., things they had to attain, and engaging in reformism wouldn’t have, either. Well, I can’t say it wouldn’t, because I’m not a guru, but I can say I do think that would be incredibly unlikely, because I don’t really think there’s going to be a reality in which you get a country with a vast amount of white people in it to voluntarily give up a systemic advantage that, in the first place, they can hardly even be convinced that they even fucking have. In fact there were a bunch of people engaging in reformism at the time in a very clear chain up until now, right, and again, they’re just going to have limited political power. Redlining dovetails nicely with gerrymandering, a war on drugs dovetails nicely with being able to arrest every dissident you want under trumped up charges. Reformism, if you’re correct, gets us about as far as we’ve gotten since civil rights, which is not very far at all.

Even throwing that out, right, reformism, I don’t think it’s generally in the interests of the powerful to give up their power. I think the reason they were willing to go along with civil rights wasn’t because civil rights was nicer, it was because civil rights both had a slightly larger amount of support as a result of being a more mainstream political idea than black power, but more importantly, I think it was because people in power could get away with handing them civil rights and then, as remains for all time, still continuing to run the system almost exactly the same way it’s always been run. Like how they instituted sharecropping after slavery, effectively just forcing them into slavery again, or how they implemented voting tests do the same thing, or how, right now, they make it harder to vote in those particular districts by putting the voting booths super far away and making sure they do the bare minimum so lines are going around the block.

Gentle, loving black people were crushed under the bootheel, I don’t know what to tell you about that, they were. They were the ones who also suffered from redlining and all of those practices I described in the wake of that movement’s unraveling. You are putting the responsibility to not commit violence entirely on the protestor and not on the huge state force. One of these is the driving force in these engagements, one of these is causing the vast majority of the violence.

You don’t need a majority of people to be on your side in order to leverage against power, or else no revolutionary movement would ever succeed, and no reform would ever succeed outside of the most socially acceptable centrist styles of reform, which even then is looking increasingly unlikely as the overton window splits in half. We infamously live in a system in which a minority of people have a vast amount of political power, whether that be politicians, newscasters, business moguls engaging in lobbying, or even if I were to just point out the like, seven or however many suburbs in america that are the designated gerrymandered tipping point for their particular districts or local city positions. That’s not a majority of people, making those decisions. To seize or leverage such a system, it’s, as you say, also not necessary to get support from the mass of the people who can hardly even be convinced to care about any politics at all to begin with.

Again, the point of the protests also isn’t to play to the nosebleeds or to convert people with a mass demonstration, because the news is just going to show like two walmarts that have been lit up by some white suburban idiot kid, some undercover cop, or some groyper that decided to start shit, the suburban voters are going to turn their heads and clutch their pearls, and that’s pretty much gonna be it.

I dunno, I might just leave you with the link to cointelpro, which I think is interesting, and hit you with that, and then have my piece. I think at the end of the day you seem like you’re a reformist that believes voting matters and shit, and I really wish that’s something I believed at all, but I think our worldviews are just very divergent. Unless I actually want to get into citing shit and throwing a bunch of historical text around, which I don’t wanna do because it takes too long and nobody ever gives a shit about it anyways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO here, have that. Maybe also go read my other comment in this post, I dunno, you might get a sense more for what my positions are.

https://lemmy.world/post/16709798

It’s weirder than that, even

MLK, fred hampton, and malcolm X getting assassinated definitely set back their movements, and it set it back to this day. The civil rights movement after that point basically got disassembled and driven underground. What’s the classic MLK quote, something I’m paraphrasing from the end of his life, it was something like. They’ve given us voting and ended segregation, and that can all be done for free, but now they’re going to have to spend money to actuallt change things. And he was talking about reparations, iirc.

So his point was that it would get much harder after that. After they died, hell, even while they were marching, we got desegregation, but we also still had segregation in everything but name. White flight, redlining, the mass shutting down of public utilities like pools, huge amounts of homes getting demolished and split up under the guise of “blight removal” and the federal highway program, and now we’re seeing gentrification and the massive suburbanization of poverty as poles shift slightly. The progress wasn’t over, but after huge government crackdowns, the civil rights leaders either getting gunned down, bought out, co-opted and turned towards an islamic cult, or turned towards more illegal activities with the formation of more extreme inner city gangs, which is basically what the black panthers were contemperarily referred to as, those movements were then all gimped and made incapable of dealing with the problems and reframing that inevitably followed.

Your movement can be dealt with anyways, is my point. The state will use violence against you regardless of whether you’re “polite” or not, as we’ve seen historically. It’s also insane to ask people who have been writhing under the boot to be “polite”, and to be concerned with “optics” like that’s some sort of reasonable concern over the actual shit they’re protesting. The idea that every interval of every political term, you know, every four years, the voters are the ones that are solely responsible for leverage and change is insane.

You perform a protest, usually in a city, but sometimes that city basically is the entirety of the state’s GDP as oftentimes is the case in america. You perform a protest in that city because it causes a large amount of economic threat. to the city, state, and maybe the country. This can be in the form of direct property damage and cops calling in sick days uselessly and in the form of actual expenditures on police, it can less effectively come in the form of various shutdowns for days on end of particular corridors and maybe services.

You perform a protest near to some piece of legislation, near to its passing, its signing, because the city then knows that if they decide to stick to their guns and treat this as usual then there will inevitably be more protests and more property damage and economic cost to them doing so, which makes donors unhappy, it makes people sitting in the nosebleeds unhappy even if they’re the stereotypical scared white suburban voter, it makes everyone discontented, it threatens power, and it guarantees a kind of escalation unless the protest succeeds.

But the point is that protests aren’t for playing to the nosebleeds and playing to the scared white suburban voter that’s going to see like one city block of a walmart and some big box store going up in smoke, and then they’re gonna freak out. in the 60’s you would get black and white newspaper pictures of people getting hosed down and bitten by dogs and then thr papers would call those people horrible extremists. It doesn’t matter what you do, how polite you are, they’re going to show those pictures to those people and they won’t care. They might even send in a plant to go in and do violencr or act more extreme just so they can incite meaningless violence and get more pictures and more footage.

The protest isn’t for those people watching the news, the protest isn’t aimed at them, so it doesn’t need to be “polite”. In these instances a protest is actually hampered by being overly polite because then it’s not actually disruptive, and if it’s not disruptive then nobody gives a shit and it’s useless.

I’ve seen a couple images of it, as of now, with the world’s most obvious plant chuds holding up, like, isis flags, which doesn’t make any sense, as well as a flag burning and the replica liberty bell being drawn on with various graffiti, some of which was like, actual antisemitic shit. People give leftists shit for purity testing too much, but that’s cause whenever you don’t do that you end up with this shit, where very obvious plants will get perpetuated by the media endlessly even if you don’t do anything.

I dunno how people haven’t been turned onto this shit yet. You can repetitively see footage of like, at every single pro-palestinian demonstration, even the “jews for israel” ones, you’ll see some brainbroken zionist in a t-shirt that says “jew” on it in badly written marker trying to stir shit so they can get blown up and then call people antisemitic. You saw this same shit with very obvious cop-phenotype hog “off-duty” cops in the BLM protests that were also trying to stir shit, or like, how it would always be some white kid nobody knew that would be the one trying to burn some random storefront or whatever. Or it would just be people freaking out over the walmart burning down, but I don’t think it’s controversial to think the waltons should fucking burn along with their big box stores. Nobody’s burning down the Aldis, from what I’ve seen.

I won’t deny that there are some relative extremists and people who would like to enact violence or property damage in a kind of escalation and mutual arms race in which basically everyone loses, but they are very few and far between, and what you actually end up seeing a lot of the time are going to be plants. Praxis can look like that stuff, but obviously taking your chance to do so in the middle of a random protest, where the cops can easily just start blasting fucking anyone they want and arresting whomever they want, is not the greatest opsec, you’re only going to end up using your ideological allies, presumably, as cover for your own adventurism. It’d be better to do whatever shit you wanna do like that on your own so nobody else can get involved or taken down for it. Everyone knows this, it’s not big news, it’s why that violence specifically doesn’t happen. But in most instances, if you are watching the news snippets, you are seeing the like, two city blocks worth of protests that are going to be the most extreme by far so they can scare white suburban voters into doing whatever they want.

MLK got killed and was constantly mocked by his colleagues because of his overly idealistic positioning doing nothing to materially impact the movement at large, I’m like 60% sure JFK got killed for being too friendly to him, and ganhdi also got killed lated on and in general was also not a nice person, iirc. It doesn’t matter how nonviolent you are in your protest, the news will still frame it as violence on your part for throwing soup on the glass that protects the mona lisa while in the same breath condoning your subsequent arrest and/or total beatdown by cops. If you shut down traffic, if you stand in front of a store, somebody will tell you that you’re causing economic violence in this hour and in this moment, and oh, what if someone needs to use this road or this space for some sort of sudden emergency, and oh, you’re the one causing violence, right before they bring out the hoses and the attack dogs and the rubber bullets and the tear gas, and then they’ll stand by and do fucking nothing while either the state or just private entities in a mob come in and drop a fucking bomb on your neighborhood.

There’s not really a “nonviolent” form of protest. The state always brings the violence. A “nonviolent” protest can hardly be called a protest, even, I’d say, that’s more just like a march, a demonstration, or a parade. Still maybe valuable, but they’re not really disruptive in any way. They tend to be coordinated with local city councils so they can hand out permits, and they tend to not really impact much as a result. That’s the ideal modern “protest”, the only socially acceptable protest, so neutered as to be totally ineffectual. Anything else would be rude, if you’re protesting, even if it’s about how you’re starving, how the police are killing people, how your country is funding a genocide overseas, you have to be polite.

Gen Z is about to have their Obama moment like how millenials did, I’m taking bets for it now. Everything has happened before, time is a flat circle, I’m willing to bet.

I’m guessing we agree on #1 and disagree on the premise of #2. I see #2 as a systemic pattern that really launched after the 2008 primaries when Obama disrupted the plan to place Hillary in the White House. It came to a head in 2016 and has been rippling ever since.

THANK YOU. It’s fucking insane seeing people claim “well uhhh nobody ever complained about this before! maybe you should’ve complained about this before, maybe then things would’ve changed!” just because republicans decided to adopt it as a talking point since they’re scrambling to come up with a new strategy and their plans have gone to shit. It’s partisan brainworms of the highest order. I guess it’s not surprising that they haven’t heard these complaints or noticed these trends when they all only become fixated on keeping the pendulum republican candidate out for 6 months out of every four years at most and then completely go back to sleep for the rest of the time.

because a good portion of them are gay? is this still an own?

We love our supermarket shelves, don’t we folks? The biggest and the fullest in the world, mao zedong, stalin, they all love our supermarket shelves. 30 different flavors of oreos, all in one aisle. can’t have that in russia, folks, can’t have that, horrible country, horrible country. You can only have pizza hutt in russia, folks, believe me, or, as I call it, pizza butt, and that’s only because of our favorite supreme leader gorbachev. You couldn’t even choose your healthcare plan in the USSR, folks, can you believe it? They only had one plan, horrible, horrible healthcare. I’m going to go make out with supreme leader Kim, folks, but I’m going to hate every second of it, believe me.

nope, he’s too bald. can’t be havin that

throwing kyle under the bus is a classic Tenacious D bit, though

I mean that’s kinda like, 50% antifa by way of fa hating fa, I guess.

I mean, shrapnel can also ricochet, but I’m not sure what would’ve caused that in the immediate area around him really since there wasn’t really much behind him. The world may never know.

With enough time you can saw through most of the commercially available ones.

This is technically true but with the amount of time and effort it takes to get through a good portion of the safes I’ve seen, it would honestly be easier to go and steal one from some schmuck with a truck gun or whatever that’s insecurely, uhhh, secured.

This kid was 20 though. He might have had psychosis. Last presidential assassination attempt was Hinkley. This is around the age things like schizophrenia start to present themselves IIRC.

This is highly true and not something I’ve seen anyone bring up until now. It’s a good point and I think it actually might be pretty likely. Good job.

I think the biggest thing is just that I have seen amongst most of the zoomers a kind of instantaneous reaction when presented with a glut of information. They either reject it out of hand with some thought terminating cliche almost instantly, or they will voraciously try to find more, it’s kind of a split between two extremes, and there’s rarely a kind of casual lust that I think has maybe been the case more in the past. I think it’s partially the internet, I think it’s partially the fact that society is slowly rotting and all of the formalities are also rotting away, but yeah.

So I think that this casual do-gooder vote blue no matter who kind of mentality is not really appealing to most people I interface with. They’re going to have more questions than that like 50% of the time, and then 50% of the rest of the time when they’re on like, tiktok, or twitter, or some other echo chamber where they understand that it is all pure optics and neoreligious brainrot and there is no genuineness to be had, they just will out of hand be like “just put the fries in the bag, bro”, kind of a deal. But yeah, I don’t think the casual political engagement plays well.