Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
Those non-violent protests shook them so bad they wanted to charge non-violent Quaker protestors with terrorism.
Is true.
That is why so soooo many headlines everywhere are preaching how this should have been done through voting & protests or whatever.
Iirc majority of Murikans want public healthcare for at least two decades now, yet nothing has changed (except living generations).
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."
But taxes!!!!!
Said anyone who doesn't know that minus $600/month that only covers the basics plus $300? in taxes that covers a lot more is a net savings.
Lol, "voting".
Peaceful protest, electoralism, those are spooks. If you want to stop something, try physical destruction.
Not opposing your comment at all, more of a rare occurrence fun fact: Even an actual (ie financially or personality effective) show of power is enough sometimes.
Eg unions in USA haven't killed any tycoons for the longest time. But they do get a loaf of bread per week more in wages when they stop working for a few days.
Not all revolutions need to be as complete as the French or Russian (tho that works, but also costs a few years of instability & political power struggles), 10% of the elite de-elited (eg losing their wealth bcs of direct demos actions) would send a big message in USAs case.
Even just for something as mundane as protected bike lanes, I've found through personal experience that just a couple instances of direct action against motorists who tried to park in them was infinitely more effective than years of begging peacefully for barriers.
What's that old JFK quote? Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable?
The state draws its legitimacy from the social contract. When people no longer feel like the social contract is beneficial to them or to society - ie as one might feel with a healthcare system that is 100+ years out of date and has received one (1) bandaid for normal folk in the past 50 years - the state can no longer expect individuals to uphold their end of the social contract (adherence to laws, norms, and peaceable conduct).
This doesn't mean "the overthrow of the government is coming tomorrow", but rather means that the social contract is beginning to fray, and a failure of those in power to recognize and accede to that fact (by making major concessions) will result in this sort of incident continually intensifying until... well, until the social contract is gone to a large swathe of people, and then at that point, the overthrow of the government will be imminent, for better or worse.
All interactions between state and citizen are implicitly negotiated. Negotiations require leverage. Violence has always been a form of leverage. But assassinations are far more powerful leverage than riots.
Even if you want a peaceful protest, the state security apparatus will turn into a riot when they need to discredit the protester, ie Floyd Protests is recent example.
Then older people start pearl clutching over "black youth" "looting" a corporate location! The horror!
Liberals will bring some generic race arguments etc
Now we got a proper circle jerk and discussion about police brutality is third order of operation.
its afraid.jpeg because we have not seen such class unity in modern history.
Good.
This last election made me into an anarchist for now. I do not believe there is any way to salvage this system we have in any meaningful way. I'm not a violent person so I can't see myself doing anything like Luigi, but Democrats aren't going to save anyone and are just one part of the problem.
I think Donald could be the death blow to our country as more and more of our social contract is upended, especially with talks of killing the ACA and other popular programs.
This is why peaceful protest is legal, it accomplishes nothing.
Then why do peaceful protestors get arrested and brutalised by cops all the time?
Target practice. Did you see the video where they shot the teenager standing still on a hill doing nothing? The shot him in the head with a rubber bullet, causing concussion and permanent damage. The officer high fives another officer right after.
The kid was literally just standing there doing nothing. A fucking child was used as target practice by adult civil servants.
Easy targets.
"we can shoot them?"
"yeah apparently you can just shoot them"
Individual, spontaneous acts alone are not sufficient either. This is adventurism, which is fun to celebrate but does not actually change the equation. The answer is neither peaceful organizing nor individual aggression, but mass, millitant organizing! Throughout all of history, there have been no successful changes in the status quo without a mass, organized movement. Read theory and get organized. If you need a place to start, I suggest my introductory Marxist reading list.
The answer is neither peaceful organizing nor individual aggression, but mass, millitant organizing!
This is true, but also extremely difficult, especially in an era of mass media induced paranoia and alienation. Mass militant organizing requires a large cohesive social class that has a center of gravity - a church house or a social club or a workhouse floor - that increasingly no longer exists.
Social media was supposed to be the new venue for mass mobilization, and we saw the beginnings of it in the early '00s. But media consolidation, saturation from automated marketing accounts, and counter-programming have largely washed it out.
Read theory and get organized.
One is significantly easier than the other.
That said... go look for local unions in your town or neighborhood. Look for chapters of the DSA or the PSL or other labor-friendly organizing groups. Go to your local PTA meetings and city council meetings when you can, and get to know the people who show up there regularly. Get out of the house and meet people where they are.
That's all good advice. But its also hard, exhausting work. And its done in the face of enormous headwinds. Don't mistake the failure of leftism as a simple failure of "human nature" or whatever. We're in an entrenched system and attempting a Herculean feat to change it.
As someone that was at the protest, at no point did I think it would result in the war stopping. It was still worthwhile, however. In retrospect, the war was so much worse than any of us knew at the time and also based on flimsy and/or no evidence of WMD. Business as usual in America. We'd do it all over again today, I have no doubt.
The protests were amazing, nothing like it before or since. The media suppressed coverage of them as best they could. They couldn't totally ignore them but gave almost 0 coverage. Masses and masses of people packing the streets. Wish we'd had drones back then to get some good aerial footage.
American problems require American solutions
It was also preceded by a violent act of terrorism that made people support whatever the president wanted to do in the middle east.
It was also preceded by a violent act of terrorism
Its so easy for people to forget the decades of violent acts committed in and around the Saudi Peninsula, and fixate instead on a handful of retaliatory strikes against US interests. The Battle of Mogadeshu, which involved Black Hawk helicopters obliterating Somali mosques with hellfire missiles. The brutal occupation of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, from 1992 to 2001 as a US-backed narco-state. The entire Iran-Iraq War, sponsored by US arms dealers and double-dealing diplomats, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab and Persian young people. The occupation of Saudi Arabia by a western-backed military dictatorship going back nearly a century. The violent overthrow of democracies from Indonesia to Egypt in pursuit of neoliberal international trade policy.
9/11 didn't happen in a vacuum any more than the Brian Thompson assassination or the aborted coup in South Korea. These have long historical tails that trace back to a geopolitical policy that's racked up a staggering death toll.
To quote Mark Twain:
There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
I was just recently informed of a podcast called "blowback" the other day on Lemmy and their first season actually goes into Iraq and the lead up to it. It's a very good podcast for anyone interested in the topic of American intervention in other countries. Very well produced for the subject matter.
Long story short there was nothing that was going to stop us from going after Iraq. "We" wanted that for a long time and it's not just a simple "cuz oil" thing.
And the gun was 3d printed. They will not stop at making 3d printing illegal.
honestly if you can 3d print something you can make something almost as strong out of wood, it just takes more effort
one could also easily make a disposable mold for a low-melting-point metal alloy, those are much stronger than 3d prints and many can be melted on a normal stove
I think the problem is more that information on how to make guns is now easily available, rather than the specific usefulness of 3d printing as a manufacturing technique
Shinzo Abe was assassinated.with a doohickey made out of a wood board and metal conduit pipes wrapped up in electrical tape
I remember huge student protests for weeks on end. Then, over spring break when all the students were off elsewhere - the bombs began to drop.
Note that the people who got into these wars are still running the country. They have political support from the older people and their base is boomers, esp more affluent. This is not a left/right issue, war happened because the system as whole willed it.
Owners gotten wealthier since then every critical industry now is operated by an oligopoly protected by the US law and regulatory regimes catered specifically to their needs.
Health insurance industry is merely top of iceberg, this is something every person who works for money has to endure at some point in their lives. If you have not seen it in work, your family did.
Since COVID they improved algos and assaulted us across all sectors via this new found pricing power along with FUD related to COVID.
Indeed and wait until Mango Fucking Mussolini decides to invade Iran. That will be one hell of a protest.
"largest worldwide non-violent protests in history"? I remember living through that time and don't remember that. Do you have a source? I myself was opposed the second Iraq war because Saddam had agreed to let in any inspectors the west wanted but we went "too late, we're coming in anyway" and I knew it was a scam invasion.
We were also just a couple of years into Afghanistan and it made no sense to be starting a second war on a second front when there was no immanent danger. Again, it made to sense.
Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_protests
Specific news articles about that day:
From Guinness World Records:
On February 15, 2003, anti-war rallies took place across the globe – the largest occurring in Rome, Italy, where a crowd of 3 million gathered to protest against the USA’s threat to invade Iraq. Police figures report that millions more demonstrated in nearly 600 cities worldwide: on the same day, 1.3 million rallied in Barcelona, Spain, 1 million participated in a peace march through the streets of London, UK, and 500,00 people in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, joined the biggest marches since the Vietnam War peace protests.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100326221254/http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=6067
The French political scientist Dominique Reynié has estimated that, between 3 January and 12 April 2003, some 36 million people took part in nearly 3,000 protests around the world against the Iraq war.
(It's worth noting here that I have been unable to find Dominique Reynié's paper that estimates this. I have searched and searched for a PDF with no luck. Lots of references to this work, but can't seem to find the actual document.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20190921125652/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2765215.stm
Between six and 10 million people are thought to have marched in up to 60 countries over the weekend - the largest demonstrations of their kind since the Vietnam War.
A key aspect of what made it so big was because it was happening worldwide, simultaneously, in multiple cities all over the world.
Just want to plug the movie and book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Also the book Rattling the Cages.
I called for a massive peaceful protest that, occasionally, takes a shot.
Yeah, the point of a peaceful protest is meant as a neutral option, just to show that a large group exists who has some demand, and if the demand is not met it will escalate, either via disruption to the economy with strikes or disruption to society with violence. It shouldn't be blamed on protesters if it ends up escalating that way, because the protest was meant as the warning. Most people wouldn't blame a country that has repeatedly warned a neighbor to stop annexing it's land for fighting a war with them. If the country never went farther than warnings then they would all be empty threats. Somehow protests are thought of differently though, and if one turns violent it's blamed on the protesters and not the government for basically completely ignoring every protest movement in recent memory.
There's two episodes in the podcast Cool People who did Cool Things that talks about basically that in regards to the violent wing of the nonviolent civil rights movement. You need both.
Partially because "peaceful" and the definition of what would or would not be accepted as valid protest became co-opted by the management/ ivy league class.
Compare the Seattle WTO protests to the 2003-2005 Iraq protests.