MLK was brilliant at activism, but not all his actions were created equal. Notably it seems despite his protests, the stall-in never happened. Perhaps everyone realized it was a terrible idea. Then the Civil Rights Act passed without it. How do we know there’s not an alternate history where it did happen, pissed off a bunch of voters, and caused the Civil Rights Act to become too politically toxic to pass?
I do think blockading oil terminals would be much more sympathetic. But it’s hard to blockade enough to have a serious effect on oil usage, hence the lack of attention. A better example is the protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline, which included blocking construction. Public opinion eventually turned against the pipeline.
Instead of intentionally pissing people off at climate protesters, put effort towards educating people on the myriad of ways we actually subsidize fossil fuels and the corrupt relationships that keep that going, so people instead get pissed off at the fossil fuel industry, lobbyists, and corrupt politicians.
Of course some people do work on this already, Climate Town being a good example. We should be talking about those efforts instead of these.
Yeah but what are they saying when they’re talking? Most people are saying “look at these crazy climate people, something is clearly wrong with them”. Maybe the protesters should do something that makes people say “maybe we should care more about climate change” instead.
This is a common problem I see with modern protests. Protesters of a certain other cause I won’t name spray-painted my neighborhood. I try to be a logical person, and logically I’d like to think my perspective on the issue they were spraypainting about is unaffected. But I can’t help but notice that on an emotional level, I really do not want to be on the same side as the people who disrespected me and my neighbors by spraypainting our neighborhood. To the point where if someone says they find that cause important, I actually feel a slight uncontrollable pang of disdain for them.
I don’t think most people try to be as aware of how their emotions affects their thinking as I do.
This is invalid civil disobedience. The point of civil disobedience is to disobey unjust laws (see: Rosa Parks disobeying bus segregation). So unless they think laws against throwing soup at paintings are unjust, their point is lost.
This is pretty much a summary of a lot of already public data. Could be valuable as an appendix of ways to attack Vance but otherwise not much new here.
My takeaway is the Trump campaign was too sycophantic to Trump to notice Vance’s actual problems. They have records of his weird views on domestic violence and other strange views but they’re buried in mountains of data about everything he’s said about Trump. And his obsession with childless women isn’t in the document anywhere as far as I can tell.
I mean wikipedia managed to do it. It just requires honest people to retain control long enough. I think it was allowed to happen in wikipedia’s case because the wealthiest/greediest people hadn’t caught on to the potential yet.
There’s probably an alternate timeline where wikipedia is a social network with paid verification by corporate interests who write articles about their own companies and state-funded accounts spreading conspiracy theories.
Democrats generally favor ending the electoral college, if nothing else because it would tend to make them win elections more due to the packing effect of NY and California and the tendency of rural states to get more votes per capita. In fact several states, pretty much all the solid blue states in the last couple of elections, have passed a compact to give all electoral votes to the popular vote winner.
And this guy is from Louisiana, supposedly.
“If they made a bad deal it would’ve been much better. They would’ve given up a little bit and everybody would be living and every building would be built and every tower would be aging for another 2,000 years.”
Just a little appeasement, what would go wrong. Of course I can believe he’s fully unaware that Ukraine tried that twice already in the Minsk agreements.
Well if you’re lucid, can’t you just like fly out of there or something?
I like the terminal because:
Yes, which is why it’s bad to go where Republicans (legislators or judges) have all the power. Go to the media, hollywood, whatever. Why isn’t there a movie about the first Trump administration’s crimes yet? Go straight to the people.
“Hallucinations” is the wrong word. To the LLM there’s no difference between reality and “hallucinations”, because it has no concept of reality or what’s true and false. All it knows it what word maybe should come next. The “hallucination” only exists in the mind of the reader. The LLM did exactly what it was supposed to.
Maybe instead of resorting to exaggerated dismissals and suggesting I lack sanity, think about it for a minute because I think once you do, it’s pretty obvious.
What they should do about it is use it to win and keep Trump out of the White House. If they turn it into a criminal law issue it’ll confuse the matter and turn what should be an argument about right vs. wrong into legal vs. illegal. There exists a realm of behavior, quite a large realm in fact, of things that are deplorable but not illegal. Such as waving an ISIS flag, or walking around in a Hitler moustache and armband. That’s where Trump’s behavior fits.
This is why when a Nazi gets criticized, the first thing they do is cry “free speech”. Because by making it a legal matter, they’re picking the best hill for them to fight on. They skip the question of whether their behavior is reprehensible, and fight a battle they can win - whether it’s legal.
So if you want to do Trump the biggest favor imaginable, decide to fight this in the courts. Make the question “Is it legal to be racist” because we all know the answer is yes, and even if it wasn’t the courts (especially in red Ohio) are heavily in Trump’s favor and have repeatedly shown willingness to help him out. That way we can have a dismissal and headlines “Trump wins again” and pictures of him with a big smile on his face. See: Just about every past time Trump has been brought to court, or charged with impeachment.
Leave it to democrats to take a question about basic decency that massively works in their favor, and turn it into a dubious question of whether a criminal law was violated beyond a reasonable doubt.
Probably will be decided by Gen Alpha. Once interest rates come down maybe Skibidi Toilet will start a social network and that will get lots of quick attention followed by VC funding and eventually we’ll all be yes-yessing each other’s dum dums.
was
a beautifulan example
I’m just making an appeal to evidence. We can’t go back and know what changed minds, obviously many factors are at play. But what we can say for certain is that, because the stall-in didn’t happen:
I’m guessing most historians would say it wouldn’t have made a difference. But even if it were 99% likely to make no difference, if we had a time machine there’s utterly no reason we’d go back and risk that 1%. Point being, even in the best case scenario, the stall in logically cannot be evidence of such tactics being successful.
Speaking of riots, I think a more clear example is the protests following the killing of George Floyd, which sometimes descended into riots, with every last bit of chaos being lapped up by Republican media and used as an argument against reform. Ultimately that tactic succeeded and very little actual police reform has passed following a shift in the mood. It got so bad that Congress, with many Democrats signing on, took the rare and extreme step of overruling a DC local criminal code reform in 2022 that was actually quite ordinary, but was very dishonestly portrayed in the media as radical decriminalization. As someone who followed that closely, I definitely think the perception of criminal justice reformers being a brainwashed radical mob, helped along by the riots, was a necessary part of killing that reform. That reform effort also was started in 2016, before the Floyd protests - so it seems that the actual effect of these protests was to set back criminal reform efforts rather than advance them.
You also refer to suffragettes vandalizing museums, which is more similar to this action. It seems this was primarily a British thing, and as this article explains, art vandalism occurred in the sprint of 1914, while suffrage wasn’t granted 1918 for some women, and 1928 for all women. Notably, between 1914 and 1918 there was a world war. So it’s hard to imagine that in 1918 or in 1928, that the public was still thinking about the vandalism years before. And maybe that’s why it was able to pass.
I think we should recognize that these tactics persist for reasons other than their effectiveness. Mainly they’re a great way to get attention, even donations. But that attention is pretty much always the wrong kind, and those donations might be coming from the people who aren’t truly interested in the cause (see how Russia has donated to more angry/violent protest groups on all sides). In essence they’re good for protest leaders, bad for the movements.