As Trump mobilizes the marines to quell an “insurrection” in LA, it’s essential to be clear about how the protests started and what actually happened.
TBH we should be rioting in front of big news headquarters.
In front of Facebook. Twitter. Google. They’re not too far from LA. Employees should feel scared about enabling all this.
None of this shit matters if algos ignore it, deliberately. Trump can do whatever TF he wants because the media ecosystem built around him is so profitable and engaging, and covering it milquetoast (or worse) is so profitable, not because absolutely everyone obeys him for no reason.
We should make that unprofitable.
Anyone who thinks this wasn’t the LAPD ramping things up with their gestapo tactics modeled after Trump, who most of them probably voted for, has not been paying attention for the last 50 years. The LAPD has a long long long history of this kind of behavior.
Quite frankly it boggles my mind why the entire force has not been fired and replaced by now.
YouTube is convinced that the only thing I want to watch is police bodycams, and because I click them I suppose I’m not disabusing it of that idea.
There’s a world of police bodycam videos and if I see one that indicates the LAPD is involved, I know, with absolute certainty, I’m about to witness some of the worst policing known to man.
And the thing is it’s not that they are super abusive of their police powers in these bodycams, at least not intentionally, it’s that they seem to lack any kind of competence. Their reactions to situations are astounding in the amount of resources they will use to run around in a chaotic mess. I have to imagine their training manual is attempting to get criminals to give up through sheer cringe of watching them flail around.
If I were to ever encounter the LAPD I would immediately comply, because I would worry that if I at all failed to follow their instructions, 20 trainees would show up shooting each other with 40mm foam rounds until someone gets injured and I’d be on the hook for attempted murder somehow.
I’m about to witness some of the worst policing known to man.
Police and sheriff departments all across Florida would like a moment of your time.
Anyone alive and here to represent Chicago 1964?
Happy cake day
Like with Florida Man a lot of that is simply due to Florida’s more lax reporting standards. It’s less that Florida law enforcement are exceptionally worse and more that they’re the sample that is most transparently on display.
Which is worrisome.
The idiot governor of Florida just ok’d running people over with a car using the excuse “they were a protester”.
So, yeah. It’s not just the reporting, Florida is a fuck show.
They don’t even use rioter or terrorist anymore.
Wyoming thinks it’s cool to for armed citizens to oversee state senate votes.
It can be both.
Why would they be fired? They’re doing exactly what they’ve been hired to do.
Finally, Media framing it the way it should be.
The article is scathing, brutal and relentless. My god I am so relieved to see it. I’d never heard of this publisher before
Damn good article.
The penultimate paragraph sums it up well
The government has failed to protect us; the government is actively oppressing us; the government has rendered itself the enemy. Not all forms of resistance are advisable, but at this point they are understandable. The regime wants to shatter the social contract? Very well. But that decision cuts both ways.
Here’s the question no one seems to be willing to answer: At what point IS violence acceptable? Surely if folks were going directly into gas chambers it would be. So at what point before? And why will that inevitable line be after it’s SO MUCH HARDER to come back from? Seems like the old adage “a stitch in time saves nine” is very apropos in this moment.
Whether or not violence is morally acceptable isn’t the most interesting thing in my opinion, but rather “what strategy is most likely to win”. It’s not a subject I’m well versed in, but the first analysis I found showed that non violent protest movements tend to win, see https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/are-peaceful-protests-more-successful-than-violent-ones (I know I know, correlation is not causation, so digging in deeper is needed). If you read this article, you can already see that a little bit of violence is enough to help turn people against you. The more restraint, the easier it appears to be to let people join your cause (or at least not turn against you). That doesn’t mean being meek, you can still be incredibly obstructionist while being non violent. In Europe, a huge amount of rhe progress we made was because elites feared the masses. Because of the potential of violence, maybe, but not because of actual violence. Most of all because of huge union movements who could grind whole industries or even the country to a halt. What works in one place doesn’t necessarily work on another one, of course.
rather “what strategy is most likely to win”.
Financial.
The government deals in violence and knows how to handle groups of protestors, whether they originate as peaceful or violent. Don’t play to their strengths by engaging them on that level and giving them a confrontation that they can escalate.
Non-participation, boycotts, malicious compliance, quiet quitting, anticonsumption, and birthstriking are more my style. It’s not glamorous or quick, but governments are notoriously inept at dealing with situations that they can’t just beat or shoot at. They don’t know what to do when a hammer is an ineffective tool for the job.
Here’s the thing about violence, the state has an absolute monopoly on it. This might be the most important defining characteristic of a state, it’s the thing that’s allowed to do violence.
There will never come a time when the state says “our monopoly is over, you can do violence now.” They would march people into gas chambers and claim it was an important victory for law and order.
The state depends upon this social contract, we all agree to not be violent, they get to wield violence in the common interest. That’s sorta the deal.
If the question is “when will the average citizen be ok with violence against the state?” The answer is that for some it’s ok now, it’s been ok for a while. For some it will never be ok.
I think we are not yet at the point where a large portion of the population thinks it’s legitimate. But I don’t know how long that holds out. A lot of people will be unhappy or outraged with ICE but if they were truly targeting gang members or taking people in prison and deporting them, people aren’t likely to take up arms.
The quotas they are pursuing now are running headlong into reality. They can’t find 3000 people a day to disappear that are sufficiently marred by criminality that people will accept it. You tell a bunch of ICE agents and local cops they gotta start finding bodies, once they run out of the small number of people accused of crime in the immigrant population, they will start just looking for anyone to meet their quota. That’s why we are now seeing them raiding fields, and Home Depot parking lots.
People are a lot less accepting of this, community defense starts sounding very reasonable when it’s the nice guy that helped you build your deck and not a person rotting away in prison already.
Fascism’s great weakness is that it does not care about solving problems. The goal is to manufacture a convenient scape goat to blame problems on, then capture power by pledging to destroy that scape goat. Fascism does often achieve its aims, it destroys the scape goat, but since that had nothing to do with the original problem the problem persists. The bluff must continue though, so new scape goats are selected in an ever widening ring of state violence. The “worst of the worst” has already become “the guy willing to pick our food at slave wages.”
The question becomes, will the population become comfortable with the violence necessary to dismantle fascism before fascism destroys enough people that they can’t mount a sufficient resistance.
Now
There is no general hard line, as everyone’s hard line differs. Rather than a hard line, the point of no return is likely defined by how many people consider their hard line crossed, and how many act on it.
It is quite simple. Proportionate responsive violence is appropriate. Key is that the escalation by the government needs to be met with escalation by the people, not for people to escalate first.
Note that civil disobedience isnt violence. Disobeying curfew? You are not harming anyone, except the governments authoritarian authority.
Government goons beat up people? Beat up the government goons.
Government goons start shooting? Shoot back.
We have been conditioned by decades of propaganda, that only they get to use violence and responding to their violence would be wrong. But it is not.
Trump is good (only?) at “fixing” problems that he himself created by… stopping the thing that he did to create the problem. That’s the TACO way. Enough backlash and he’ll let go and claim he “brought peace to LA”.
The problem is that “clamping down on immigration” is actually too popular (or not unpopular enough). The backlash Trump needs is about getting him to look bad, not shooting on the police and compacting the fuckers who already think they are on the right side. Peaceful resistance might actually be more powerful and effective in showing exactly who the bad guy is.
On the other hand I don’t live in the US and I am aware how easy it is for me to say this from a safe distance…
Trying to differentiate between a gas chamber and a life sentence in El Salvador, is really tiptoeing the line.
I get your point, but in theory mine is reversible right now.
Blow em up, guy
It’s all good in my book. Has been for a bit. But I’m just some dude hoping this govt gets what it deserves.
Best time to take action was yesterday. Next best time is today. I hate sitting around waiting for the inevitable that WE ALL KNOW is going to happen - strike before they’ve fortified their positions!
I’m in California but I’m near Tahoe about 7 hours from the action. But this thing is getting bigger and I’m fuckin ready to go believe me. I even taught my daughter today how to spot the ice trucks and what to do if she does. I can’t do much in my current position but I will absolutely throw down as soon as I get the chance. I take business trips to La every month and my next one is in 2 weeks. I’ll be using company funds to do whatever I can while there. Fuck the meetings.
I’m not your boss, but if someone who worked for me said “Sorry boss, couldn’t make it in because I was kicking the shit out of some ICE nazis”, I’d consider that absence excused in a heartbeat.
Don’t give a fuck off they do or don’t honestly. This shit has got to happen now or it’ll never stop. I’ll be damned if I let my daughter grow up in tyranny.
As someone who grew up under tyranny, very much this. Fortunately I haven’t suffered the horrors unique to fascism so I can’t speak much to those, but the “keep your head down and watch out for government informants so the secret police doesn’t get you” talk is not a pleasant affair for either party.
this is a question I often want to ask the pearl clutchers.
I think some of them don’t have an answer because they actually support the regime, and they’re going hard on “non violence” because they don’t want people to fight back
Some probably haven’t thought it through, and don’t have an answer.
Some probably have an answer that’s a variation of “too late”. You know, after they came for the unionists, the jews, the catholics, the mexicans, and there’s no one left to stand with them.
I probably fall into that third camp to a degree. I don’t necessarily think it’s too late NOW, but will be in short order.
There is no clear cut point.
These sort of things have a life of their own and it only becomes clear in retrospective.
In Ukraine that point was when the government started killing protesters during Maidan (Feb 2014), that’s when many people (who were generally strongly opposed to violence) started to believe that protestors fighting back was justified.
My guess is once a police mob mentality takes hold and they start unloading on protestors because one racist cop gets itchy is when it will be that point for many. The ICE raids with police/nat guard/military support in LA are a testing ground for Trump to see how much pushback he’ll get from mobilizing multiple levels of state and federal armed forces. I would be surprised if it doesn’t balloon to other states. My bigger question is what nat guard / troops will do in what is clearly an attempt to illegally consolidate executive power.
with seeing the Homeland Secretary floating using military force to overthrow the CA government and arresting a CA senator for asking questions, all in the same “news brief”
A very good question indeed, when is it truly justified to punch back? Because we look back in time and say they should have done something…why not know?
My family says not to do anything overt right now, like join the protests…so we dont get on any lists and can join a more covert resistance when it all blows up.
I’m an old guy who never thought he’d see this far… get me a few more and let’s do this… one old tired and weak is just gonna be chalked up as crazy…
Imo, when the feds/police start attacking without provocation, fight back.
I think the reason they shot those two women was because they gauged that no one around would do anything about it. If people begin to threaten harm to these cowards, I’d hope they think twice about it. There’s more of us than them, and they’ll eventually push people to the point where they feel they have nothing left to lose.
If people begin to threaten harm to these cowards, I’d hope they think twice about it
That’s exactly what Trump is saying about you.
Is it working?
That’s been happening for decades, so
Even though you’re painted as the bad guy? (I agree with you, but want to flesh it out).
They can paint a giant dick all over me for all I care, and they can still go fuck themselves.
Anymore, all discourse is plagued with disinformation and dishonesty. It seems like anyone with a microphone is trying to spin every possible situation to gain followers or attract people to their side of the conversation, and at some point we need to ignore the chatter and start looking at the world with our own eyes, not through a phone screen.
Speaking of which, I strongly recommend this short watch for anyone seriously thinking about what they should do next. It’s not pushing any agenda, just providing food for thought.
If the police did their jobs protecting the public from kidnappers blatantly rolling down the streets, they would’ve earned so much community good will
Sounds dangerous. There is a reason they didn’t sign up to be firefighters or teachers.
Or pizza delivery. Which is a much much more dangerous job.
The fuckin nerve of that orange shit-for-brains using the term “insurrection” for something he’s not a participant of. Republicans are TRASH, every last one of them. Be nice to kick them to the curb.
He’s trying to get the media to echo the term, to get it into public discourse to describe these protests, so that when he tries to invoke the insurrection act, everyone is primed for it already.
That’s exactly what’s happening, this is all just so he can invoke the insurrection act and mobilize MAGA as the militia
Times like this I really hate Biden for not dropping the fucking hammer on Trump. Classic case of Dems giving up the easy win.
Or for not keeping his word about not trying for a second term.
Yeah that pissed me the fuck off too.
Laura Jadeed wrote this, and I gotta say, Laura Jadeed fucks.
And yet, the anti-protester framing is relentless, even from otherwise balanced sources.
It’s not just anti-protestor framing. It’s nearly everything of importance.
Regarding the thumbnail, I figured procedure would be to remove your sidearms while on riot detail, being as you’re getting within melee distance with multiple people at once, thereby risking it being snatched. It’s more of a liability in that context, prison wardens do the same thing.
I guess asking a beat cop to give up his emotional support pistol is a nonstarter.
If they give up their sidearms they can’t use “he reached for my gun” as justification for their deadly response.
Especially since inside of 21 feet, I think the number is, between one person with a gun and one with a knife, the knife wins.
How does that work? I can shoot holes faster than I can poke them.
The idea that cops were just reacting to protester provocation is absurd.
Everyone still glad we dodged that Harris bullet? I mean… Imagine how much worse this would have been, right?
/s
Glad your wing of the party moved to the right and picked up zero votes for it?
Both sides! Amirite?
Thought terminating cliche! Amirite?
I didn’t fucking say “both sides.” Though it’s clear that’s centrists’ fucking goal: two nazi parties in a pretend democracy.
I didn’t fucking say “both sides.”
Goes on to say “both sides”
Hilarious!
centrists aren’t the entirety of the democratic party. Just the ones pulling it to the right, where they want it.
They’re not the same, but centrists want them to be. I hope they do nothing but fail for the rest of time.
It would, indeed, have been much worse had Trump (or worse—some other fascist) been elected in 2028 instead of 2024. He’d have had more time to prepare and soften up the government in preparation for the inevitable (and yes, it was inevitable) takeover.
Way to cope, buddy.
