#like if you HAVE to have a peaceful vs violent protest debate then you need to put your money where your mouth is

[constantvariations]

It kinda sucks we never see why Blake turns against the White Fang besides "but the crew members :("

Like, she feels so strongly that peaceful protest is better than violent but... why? Who introduced her to it? What happened that cemented this ideology? Did a mission go too far and get too many people killed? Is she uncomfortable with the scorched earth aftermath? It's clear that she has no problem getting her hands dirty so long as it's Faunus blood, so what finally compelled her to leave the Fang and run away to a school?

For fuck's sake, she can't even give a real reason for why violent protest is bad!

This lack of thought into her motivation and methods, as well as her constant chastisement of the Faunus while cowering before blatant racists, makes her seem like she's catering to the oppressor class. She's written to be palatable to people with privilege, to never force them to question their own in/actions, and definitely never shatter the illusion of docile catgirl spankbank by having strong, consistent morals or a personality

Fucking disappointing

[thechekhov]

sorry if the question seems stupid, but my family keeps on saying it's the protesters that started the fights and that it's wrong of them to use violence against police and steal from stores. they completly ignore police brutality and tell me that i can't say all cops are racist and violent. but wasn't it the police that turned peaceful protests into riots? i read that on social media, but i have no evidence and idk where to look. i want to explain the situation properly so they understand.

I’ll preface this with saying that if you expect to change anyone’s opinion, you must first lower your expectations.

Unfortunately, direct debate RARELY changes anyone’s mind. RARELY. Most of the time, it just gets people to dig their heels in more and refuse to listen and stick to their guns. The truth is, human beings HATE to lose face and look like they were wrong. This natural phobia often prevents even level-headed, intelligent individuals from coming to logical conclusions. 

So what you need to do first is just take a step back, breathe deep, and form a strategy. 

First of all, your goal is not to change your parents’ minds - the first step is EXPOSURE. You just need to get them to at least CONSIDER other avenues - get them to look at other sources. 

I can’t believe you’ve got me quoting My Big Fat Greek Wedding but there’s a lot of truth in the tactic of ‘you’ve gotta make it seem like it’s their own idea’. People are a lot more likely to change if they do it on their own, so you have to just give them the information and take your time and ask leading questions

Let’s start gentle:

THIS THREAD has a TON of examples and videos of police using violence and directly attacking media - who have every right to be at the protests! If you want to change the framing, you can make it easier for your parents - slide into their narrative! Ask questions instead of forcing your own opinions. ‘Wow, I think the tensions are making them act quite irrationally. Don’t they WANT the media to see what a good job they’re doing? Why would they hurt media reporters?’ 

Now, if you want to go further, here is a full list of some direct videos related to the brutality - and links to them!

Warning - some of these are more graphic than others. I’ve tried to provide descriptions as much as I remember the content. If you reblog, please tag appropriately!

. . .

A family trying to protect their store was attempting to flag down a police car driving by to get their help - the police turned around, came back.... and arrested them instead. 

This one just speaks for itself really.

Protesters kneeling and chanting DON’T SHOOT - and the subsequent firing on them immediately afterwards. 

Video of a side by side comparison of the full clip of police vehicles accelerating into unarmed civilians vs the one aired on television that decidedly CUTS that clip short to paint the police in a better light.

More general videos of police being completely unable to tolerate it when people are protesting without instigation - and immediately breaking the crowd violently and swinging at unarmed civilians. 

This is the couple that were recorded being violently pulled from their car. They were returning home and were right behind another car with a white couple - which was ignored by the 5+ officers who instead surrounded the couple’s car and began screaming at them to get out all the while clocking them inside the car. They tazed them several times before bodily dragging them from the car with no provocation.

Yes another example of excessive force - man approaches the line - immediately gets maced. He turns AWAY from the police, does not instigate and immediately gets a tear gas canister fired short-range at his HEAD. 

There are several videos of this but the clearest one is the virds-eye view where the protestors are once again NOT instigating - just holding the line. Police begin to suddenly fire tear gas canisters into the crowd.

Police have been targeting medical treatment areas and places where people stockpile water- and destroying water bottles! 

Not explicit violence but this is one of the MANY examples of police trapping people with no way to escape BEFORE curfew even takes effect and then effectively waiting until curfew hits and then doing mass arrests. 

People were protesting on the highway, not obstructing traffic, when police came at them and without warning or demands to disperse began to fire tear gas and flash bangs. They trapped them against a fence and continued to fire despite there being absolutely no way for the protesters to escape. 

Recent video that was on the news - the boy standing in the top right corner is a 16 year old. He is standing with his hands in his pockets not moving, and suddenly is shot by 3 different police officers unprompted.

Old video, time-stampted about 2 years ago, but nonetheless important - police taze and drag a disabled man from his vehicle even after he clearly offers himself to be cuffed and states clearly several times that he cannot get out because he’s paralyzed. 

Police fake kneeling for protestors, so the protestors approach and start clapping - and using this to their advantage, the police fire tear gas.

And as a dessert, THIS ENTIRE THREAD! It’s a compilation of police violence and excessive force from this week alone. 

[faelapis]

@babybeetlebongos asked me whether i thought more “forgiving media” like SU will not be looked fondly upon by history because it’s not as “violent” as your spops or your gravity falls, and i had a lot of thoughts about that. tw for discussion of real-life politics, hopefully with enough sensitivity to explain where i’m coming from without being extremely tacky. i’ll probably fail, and i’m very open to criticism here, but i’ll try.

many people conflate healing with violence, and change with punishment. i don’t think they’re right about that, i think some people mischaracterize where SU would fall within “the politics of the moment” in the short term, even though SU takes the much more long-term, “cultures actually need to change over time, and there’s reasons people are the way they are that are bigger than the individual, and nobody will change if you don’t give them reasons to think that the future includes them rather than punishes them for sociological phenomenon outside any individual’s control”.

because the thing is, systemic change and “punishing the bad guys” aren’t actually the same thing. they’re sometimes related, but they don’t have to be. i think the “peaceful vs violent protest” debate has obscured another debate altogether - which is individualism vs structuralism.

individualism posits that, infamously, there’s “no such thing as society”, we are all individuals and we are all accountable for our actions. we have perfectly free will, so therefore, anything we do can and should be used against us. 

structuralism posits that actually, we Do live in a society, and what we can and cannot do is extremely limited to our environments. everyone are shaped by their upbringings, socioeconomic status, culture, social norms, et cetera, and therefore, it’s more important to change society than to punish/reward individuals. our responsibility is collective, not just to ourselves. the point isn’t who is “bad”, the point is that society is the reason why many internalize bad beliefs, and that’s what we need to work on - it’s a collective failing that we haven’t, and we all need to take responsibility for *each other*.

and i think a lot of people who pretend to be for systemic change would settle for punishing their abusers, when it should really be the other way around. i really hate “individualistic leftism”, as a structural leftist myself.

to take the current political example, which, yes, i know is tacky and not the point, but it was what prompted the discussion so i think i have no choice but to address what the discussion actually became - defund the police is more important, imo, than punishing individual officers. one is transformational change on a large scale that actually makes life better for people. the other... is really just venting / individualizing things, as if it would fix anything. to me, the fix is not about punishing the bad guys, it’s changing the system as a whole.

i understand the idea of "why not both", i'm not against that, but i try to be consistently against individualistic framing. thinking punishing individuals fixes systems is equally a shitty liberal mindset as thinking that things will go “back to normal” once trump is out of office. it just has an edgier, more violent spin. 

and that’s what bothers me about the framing of media like spop or gravity falls as the “good, revolutionary” media to SU’s “bad, reformist :(” media lens. it’s really reductive, and it makes that key prioritization that “punishment > change”, which is a very conservative mindset. 

SU actually changes the system. the diamonds are no longer in power, and there is no hierarchy. everyone are slowly changing to find themselves in a world where everyone equally has the chance to do so. gravity falls and spop gets rid of the bad guy on top and thinks that fixes everything. to those latter shows, the status quo was actually fine, we just needed to get rid of the bad people. to SU, it’s the opposite - we can’t expect getting rid of the “bad guys” to “fix everything” (that’s what rose tried to do w/pink), because the sociological cultural norms of gemkind means that they’re taught to love the diamonds. so if you just kill them, you become their bad guys (the way everyone reacted to “killing” pink). you have to have the compassion to understand that to these people, this idolization is normal, and dismantle that normal without condemning the people as a whole. 

but that’s not as sexy as “valid to kill anyone who does The Bad Things. having revenge fantasies about punishing your abusers = good leftist praxis. we fix things by punishing individuals for social issues beyond their control”.

and what’s sad about that mindset is that it often, actually, doesn’t think things can truly get better. nothing that happened in spop stops more shadow weavers from popping up, because the sociological conditions that lead to abuse haven’t been dealt with. it doesn’t seem to think it CAN be proactively prevented, only punished once the children are already scarred.

SU is a lot more... hopeful yet deterministic, in a way? as in, it thinks about (and cares about) how we are influenced by each other. it wants to achieve social equality so that those power relationships don’t exist to influence us in negative ways anymore. with the understanding that nobody is above those influences (not even the “good” privileged people like steven*). whereas spop - and gravity falls - are very much not that. they are individualistic. you kill the bad guys on top and that solves eeeeverything. no cultures need to change. they just need to be intimidated into knowing the “good” people are on top now and obeying them.

(*future is basically saying there’s no good diamond to replace the bad ones, and nobody should be "on top”. it hurts everyone - the same way the expectations of patriarchy hurts everyone. we’ve molded the ones on top into thinking they must and should take responsibility for everything, when that is neither good nor realistic. we’re all, collectively, responsible for healing the traumatized & creating equal relationships. and we can’t do that by individual reward & punishment. as much as that would validate some people’s anger.)

and those people? they’re ultimately just venting their feelings. which is fine. many have been told that their personal anger is something to be demonized, so they vent by engaging in these validation circle-jerks about how good and important it is to be angry. and then many think they’re woke leftists FOR being angry, rather than anger being a personal emotion without inherent good or evil.

many of them have people who’ve hurt them personally that they want to hurt back, or they just wanna make sure to condemn the Bad People so nobody will think they side with or excuse the bad people. the idea is that somebody needs to hurt. so we just gotta make sure it’s the “right” people.

maybe one day, they will realize that actually, social issues are bigger than individuals - and this goes both ways. it can’t just mean “and so we can’t blame the poor, disadvantaged for not being A+ students”, it must also mean “and so dismantling cishet privilege is more important than punishing individual, ignorant cishet people”. that’s the only way to be consistently sociological in your framing.

we don’t decide our upbringings, social norms, who are demonized/deified by society, or who has unjust amounts of power. we’re shaped by our environments, and so, it’s more important to change those environments (and undo those power structures) than to kill individuals we consider particularly heinous. punishing those individuals will not lead to social change. it never has. people generally don’t think they have to change because others were made “examples” of. they revel in being in a “battle”. people like having a fixed bad guy to fight. cops like the power & sympathy it gives them.

the current protests... aren’t even “violent”, in the spop or gravity falls sense. they’re just... property damage and collective direct action, which is much more targeted at dismantling the system than to punish individuals. they’re not really violent. people aren’t killing individual cops, they’re demanding that THE SYSTEM AS A WHOLE change. its cop culture that’s bad, it doesn’t matter if the individual cop is good or bad. ACAB because the system sucks. even if you try to be a “good” cop, you’re likely to be fired for speaking up, because the whole culture is awful.

this is kinda similar to something SU is saying - changing the system is more important than figuring out who “the bad people” are and killing them. people think they’re doing the right thing, but ultimately, the structures around them are making them think the hierarchies they’re in are just. it’s the whole of cop culture that needs to change, and maybe the idea of cops in general is a bad one. the system is the problem, and it’s bigger than any individual... which in turn means, or SHOULD mean, that the system can be destroyed and the individuals within it can change, because they’re not really “the problem”. the idea of putting the individual responsible offers behind bars is a fine one, but... it’s more symbolic than truly transformational. the true transformation would be to defund the police. 

i know these media comparisons are inherently tacky. they are. anyone who thinks that is more important than what’s going on irl is being shitty about it. you should be donating, protesting, doing a million more important irl things.

but these tacky comparisons ARE happening, and some people do think “liking the right media” is praxis, so... if you really wanna fit gravity falls or spop into this, the analogy would be more akin to like. defeating the biggest, scariest cop, and thinking that’s somehow gonna change policing as an institution. or thinking that someone killing trump will make all the police & right-wingers go away.

basically, it’s conflating your vengeance with true change. it’s spitting on the leftist value of universal compassion in the face of the sociological nature of reality, in which Everyone are influenced by their privileges and lack thereof in ways that are bigger than individual circumstances (and thus can’t be undone by individual punishment), and so we’re all responsible. but you’d rather not be - because you’d rather see the right people burn than focus your anger at the world and at challenging yourself and your own privileges. 

[gingerautie]

XR tube disruptions

Today a man protesting government inaction on the climate crisis was dragged off the top of a tube train and beaten by what I can’t honestly describe as anything other than an angry mob. I felt physically ill watching the video. Yesterday, as I discussed the upcoming action with my partner, he expressed concern that anyone disrupting the tube would be “torn limb from limb”. I thought he was being a bit dramatic, but I don’t do rush hour commutes.The man in question (who I have, for the record, heard is okay) could very easily have been seriously injured. It doesn’t take much for someone on the ground being kicked by a furious crowd be be eg. kicked in the head hard enough to get brain damage or life threatening injury. I think this was a predictable outcome of this action, and we need to be more careful in future to make sure that people who risk their freedom for XR are protected, regardless of whether we agree with their specific action.

I was polled (as a member of XR) about the action before it happened. I (like 70% of the XR London people polled) didn’t support it. That probably should have been a red flag for the people organising. Members of XR are a self selecting group who are both worried about climate change and supportive of disruptive actions. Less than 30% support among that group should have been a giant flashing sign saying “bad idea”. It was never going to play well with the general public. We don’t need people to like us, we just need them to hear us and our message, but what’s happened today is that conversation has moved away from the helpful discussion on unlawful police actions towards debating the tube action. There’s a certain level of inertia that happens when an action is planned, people have signed up, and in this case, signed up to take an action that will get them sent to prison. Information and polls were put out less than 48 hours in advance, I think to keep the police from being aware too far in advance. This means that people who were committed, had planned an action and were seriously contemplating prison time would have had to re-route themselves mentally within a single day. XR needs to re-think this process, especially where there might be violence in response to our actions.

We need de-escalators present at every single part of every single action to prevent this happening again. Our NVDA training covers peaceful arrest by the police - not violent arrest (as has been happening during the rebellion) or staying non-violent while being beaten by a mob. If we’re facing those things then we need to be trained in doing so, even if it’s only a few people who feel able, then they can be moved to the front if violence is likely. There are groups who have done this before (the US civil rights movement springs to mind) and we should make an effort to learn from them.

The group taking action on the tube network had (looking at the briefings I’ve seen) thought really carefully about minimising some kinds of impact. This was a tube action, but you’ll notice in the videos that all the stations are above ground, unlike the stations in the city centre. This was so that no one would be trapped either in an underground station or in a train between stations, because the people doing this wanted to avoid that awful situation. I haven’t confirmed, but I think they were only disrupting trains going into london, towards the tunnels, so no one was backed up and trapped behind the disruptions. A lot of thought went into minimising the effects on the general public. And as a result the stations were further out, and more likely to be full of working class people. This was the result of efforts to protect the public. I don’t think it worked very well, but that’s where it came from.

I think it’s important to remember that everyone’s actions in this situation came from fear. For the protesters, fear of the climate crisis and catastrophic impacts on human society, and for at least some of the people at the station, I think their anger came from fear of losing their jobs. I don’t know, maybe some of them just wanted an excuse to kick someone’s head in. But I think the mood in that station was probably driven by the precarious economic situations most people now live in as much as anger at XR.

Just like with the DLR action in April, the action was not protesting the tube. The protesters were causing disruption to pressure the government. XR targets both perpetrators of the climate crisis (banks, government departments, companies etc.) and causes general disruption to pressure the government. I think these two things need to be clearly separated - it’s genuinely confusing for the public when we’re outside an oil company one day and glued to the greenest mode of transport in london the next. A banner clarifying whether this is targeted or general disruption at every action maybe?

This brings me on to misconceptions about XR generally. XR is not telling people what to do or demanding people make individual lifestyle changes. Seriously. I know that when people here “environmentalism” they jump to “people are telling me I should recycle/fly less/not use a straw”, but this isn’t the message or goal of XR. Yes, lots of us do do things like going vegan or not owning a car, but it’s not actually what we’re about. We’re about government action on climate change. This will probably result in people having to make lifestyle changes, but XR doesn’t believe that we should be deciding what those should be. One of the XR demands is for a citizens assembly (basically parliament if people were chosen randomly like jury duty) in which XR would have no voice, to decide what the changes should be and what people should be prioritising. I think we need to be clearer that we aren’t demanding people make lifestyle changes - we’re not putting roadblocks up in westminster to tell people not to use plastic straws.

I’ve seen this misconception about behaviour change vs. government action from  commentators and journalists I generally think of as well informed. This is also the underlying assumption of a lot of the accusations of hypocrisy from tabloids, piers morgan and randos on twitter. It’s an assumption underlying a lot of XR action that isn’t at all clear to the public, and it’s a problem. “why are you protesting people making the the changes you’re demanding they make?” is one I’ve seen a lot today.

XR causes disruption because all the environmental movements which haven’t have failed. It is an emergency, and we are pushing for change in the fastest way possible, with non-violent, but illegal action. XR is not top-down organised. Any group of people who take any action can do it under the XR banner as long as they follow the action consensus (https://rebellion.earth/act-now/action-consensus/). Levels of fear about the future, willingness to disrupt the public, concern about the impact of disruption, and willingness and ability to face arrest and imprisonment vary within XR. Some people will be taking steps others disagree with. This is a fundamental part of the de-centralized organisation of XR. On the other hand, actions like Heathrow pause became, due to the strong disapproval of many XR members, especially XR youth, non-XR actions. Maybe that was the right choice here. I don’t know.

I do know that we need to make sure that the XR protesters arrested for the tube action need to feel supported. What they did was incredibly brave, and they have made a huge sacrifice for all of us, and we shouldn’t let disagreement with the specifics of the action get in the way of that. We need to support each other, especially people who had misgivings about this action. We also need to reach out to people, especially in marginalised communities who feel we don’t understand the reality of their lives. We need to clarify our message and make it clear that we’re not making demands of the general public, we’re demanding things from the government.

[orbemnews]

On the frontline with Britain's new feminists, fighting for women's rights “Did women get the vote by waiting for it to be granted to them?” activist Steph Pike bellowed into a loudspeaker. “No! they fought for it,” she said. “We’ll come back time and time again to fight for our rights. And,” she roared towards lawmakers across the road, “you can’t stop us!” As the crowd cheered, I thought of how lonely Fawcett’s statue seems on calmer days in Westminster, facing down the UK’s still largely male-dominated seat of democracy across the road. The monument to the leading women’s suffragist carries a banner emblazoned with one of her most famous quotes: “Courage calls to courage everywhere.” Until Fawcett’s statue was unveiled here three years ago by, among others, Britain’s second female Prime Minister Theresa May, the green patch outside Parliament had only commemorated men. Yet on a windswept Monday in March, despite Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, this traditional protest site was filled with hundreds of women clutching signs and slogans under Fawcett’s protective gaze. “We demand the proper funding of services that women need and women rely upon every day,” shouted Helen O’Connor, a representative of the UK’s GMB union. “The government has spent billions on this pandemic. My members are health workers and mostly women. Where is the pay rise they deserve — and need — during this pandemic?” she asked. Expectations vs. reality Readers outside Great Britain may wonder where this upswell of resentment has come from in a nation normally known for its mild manners and modern values. As a major world economy, the UK often makes interventions with other countries on human rights, including for women. Women here have had the right to vote for a century, while equal pay legislation has been around for half of that time. Even the UK’s head of state — the Queen — is herself a woman. However, what many British women — of which I am one — will privately concede is that there remains a big difference between the liberties they are awarded in principle and what they can expect in practice in many aspects of their lives — from the right to feel safe on the UK’s streets to the right to expect equal treatment in the workplace. Igniting a national debate This issue came to a head last month after the disappearance of 33-year-old Sarah Everard while walking home from a friend’s house in the peaceful south London suburb of Clapham. The suspect charged with her killing is a serving officer of the UK’s largest police force — London’s Metropolitan Police. Everard’s death prompted an outpouring of grief, culminating in a vigil around a local park bandstand — which the same police force then aggressively broke up, ostensibly because it posed a danger to public health. A review ordered by the Home Secretary vindicated the Met’s handling of the vigil. But to those of us who were there that night, the response, given the occasion, felt decidedly uncomfortable. When scuffles broke out as women were handcuffed a few meters away, my all-female film crew was asked to show credentials five times and urged to move on, almost disrupting our ability to document the events unfolding. It was amid these scenes that Pike and O’Connor met at the vigil. Also there was Alia Butt, a psychotherapist for the UK’s National Health Service. What they all saw prompted them to form a pressure group called “Women Will Not Be Silenced,” under whose banner they spoke at the protest days later next to Fawcett’s statue. “It just ignited a deep-seated anger, which I think we all recognized,” said Pike, speaking in an interview with CNN in April. “This violent culture against women in the UK isn’t new to women, but it’s come on top of years of austerity that has disproportionally affected women,” she said. “I see it in my job as a welfare rights adviser: women who are single mothers may need access to services more, yet those services they need are often the ones being cut.” Butt told CNN she witnesses the effect of this trend every day as well. She’s seeing more and more patients who are younger and younger suffering from the effects of psychological or sexual violence, perpetrated either in person or online. She has even had to change her job to focus solely on minors due to the increased caseload of teenage girls presenting with mental health problems caused by violence against women. “There are so many different forms of violence,” Butt says. “It can also be institutional and economic. The threat of that can have a huge effect on people’s mental health.” For O’Connor, who suffered abuse while growing up in her native Ireland, this is about standing in solidarity with other women who have shared similar experiences, advocating for what they are entitled to. ‘Rape culture’ Since Everard’s death, women across the country have come forward with their stories of daily sexual harassment and mishandled cases of serious sexual assault. There has even been a debate about a pervasive ‘rape culture’ in some of the most elite schools and universities. Women took to the streets again over the Easter weekend to protest police brutality and the need to “police themselves” by avoiding the streets and public transport after dark. At those marches I met Daphne Burt, wearing the pinkest outfit she could find in her wardrobe. Burt claimed she had survived rape, reported it, and never seen the case pursued. Another woman, who did not wish to be named, carried a sign saying she could get more years in jail for protesting during the pandemic than her rapist got for what he did to her. Also among the crowd, thousands strong, was photographer Lily-Rose Butterfield, who said her sexual assault experience had prompted her to tattoo parts of her body to demarcate her “physical boundaries.” She showed me some of them, including a Venus de Milo on her leg. Crime bill What had brought these women together was not the hope of being able to secure more of a say in their country, as Fawcett and her fellow suffragists had done, but a fear they were losing their voice. Everard’s death occurred just as a controversial policing and crime bill began to pass through Parliament — legislation which critics say would curb Britons’ ability to protest and hand more powers to police at a time when they should be facing tougher scrutiny. Covid restrictions mean fines of up to around $14,000 for those found to be organizing or participating in large gatherings, even if the UK courts have ruled that people’s right to protest should be protected. That risk has pushed some of Britain’s more radical feminists underground. “D” would only go by her first initial when we met via video call. An activist for the group called “Sisters Uncut,” which campaigns for the rights of women and non-binary people to live in safety, she is among some of its organizers who now feel compelled to hide their identity. Wearing a mask, hood and glasses, she also sat so far away from the camera it was impossible to tell who she was. “We’ve had to go online to keep our movement going,” she said. “There are real risks to our members for being identified. The fine is a lot of money and we are conscious of the risks of being documented as organizing a protest one maybe two years down the line.” Sisters Uncut have drafted a 10-point “feministo” demanding an overhaul of the UK’s domestic violence services, of its immigration and family courts systems and campaign for more welfare funding to be made available to women and the LGBTQ community. Statues vs. sex offenses The UK’s new crime legislation also contains a clause introducing a maximum 10-year sentence for those who deface a statue. Critics note that, in comparison, the average sentence for rape is just under 10 years. “What message does this send to victims?” Bell Ribeiro-Addy, a Labour Member of Parliament for the South London suburb of Streatham, told CNN in an interview in Clapham after coming to pay her respects to a makeshift floral tribute in memory of Everard. “What example does it set of us as a country?” It was while contemplating the irony of Fawcett’s stone likeness being potentially awarded better protections than her flesh and blood sisters, that I noticed something all too familiar. She has been interrupted. Her quote — “Courage calls to courage everywhere” — should also read, “and its voice cannot be denied.” CNN’s Lauren Kent and Li-Lian Ahlskog Hou contributed to this report. Source link Orbem News #Britains #feminists #fighting #Frontline #Rights #womens

[gtunesmiff]

If you are paid $25.00 an hour to show up to a rally to 'counter' the other party using physical force and violence, you are not a 'counter protester.'  You are a mercenary. There is no need for further debate on this. You were paid to attack someone you don't know for reasons that you couldn't care enough about to go there for free. You did your 'job' and collected your check and your reimbursement of expenses.  You're a mercenary. Not a Patriot. Not a Social Justice Warrior. Not a Defender of Freedom or Liberty. Not an upholder of Truth or Justice. None of those things you claim to be.   You are a mercenary. And mercenaries are not lawful combatants and deserve whatever comes their way at the hands of the people they are attacking. You have no First Amendment rights when you're a mercenary. Doesn't matter what side you're on. Doesn't matter what cause you're showing up to disrupt.   If you can't express yourself peacefully through diplomatic means, then you better be prepared to meet your maker at the hands of someone who is only barely keeping their own violent tendencies at bay through a massive exercise of self-control. I know it sounds romantic to attend these rallies and get s### started with the other side. And when you're young and passionate, it's really easy to get whipped up into a frenzy of raw emotions. There is a reason why young people are preferred when it comes to warfare. They are easy to manipulate and control and set off. But I'm telling you all this right now.  You've got no idea what road you are starting down.  Romance and idealism wears off really fast when you're laying in a pool of your own blood trying to stuff your intestines back into your torn abdomen. I've been lucky enough to go forty-two years without having to put the skills I learned in the Marines to use.  I continue to train and keep those skills up to date because I see the madness that is happening all across this country.  I don't train to attack others like you do.  I train to defend others FROM you. I'm not alone either. There are thousands of men and women in this country who have seen war and death and don't want any more to do with it.  They want to live in peace.  They want to forget the things they've had to do in the service of their country.  They want to raise their kids and have family BBQ's and build tree houses and soap box derby cars and have tea parties. They don't want this s###t that you're selling. You have the extremist left and the extremist right that are doing their best to get something started.   To force us into a Civil War. Even in the 1860's, the violence between the North and South was nowhere near what we see today.   Nowhere.  Even.  Close. And yet we still had a war of ideology that consumed hundreds of thousands of lives. All you young and naive kids on both sides of this equation who think that having a Civil War will advance your agenda or restore your vision of what you think is America, just remember this... Those of us older generations aren't having any of this s###.   And if you jump off, you better be prepared to deal with US.   We don't care what color you're wearing or what sign you're holding if you come after us, our friends, our family, our co-workers, our neighbors, etc.,  we WILL kill you. So remember that when you're thinking that it's just Left vs Right, or Liberal vs Conservative, or Commie vs. Fascist.   We are the variable you're not considering. That 'Silent Majority' that you pretend does not exist is getting really sick and tired of your bulls###...

Geoffrey B. Higginbotham, Major General, USMC (Ret.)

[auskultu]

Honest Dissent vs Ugly Disorder

uncredited writer, Life,  10 November 1967

Dissent, largely over the war in Vietnam, is talking in harsh tones on American campuses and American streets these days. Like the war itself, the targets of abuse are widening. Suppose the President of the U.S. were to make a public speech in, say, the Yale Bowl or the Los Angeles Coliseum. Could he safely do it without worrying about the shambles it might turn into, with rowdy hecklers chanting, "Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?”

It would only be a fringe at work— but it is at the fringes where the trouble comes. No Vietnam war protests in this country have yet, it is true, proved unmanageable. So far, only the issue of race has produced something resembling revolution (or more properly, civil war) in the U.S. No Vietnam demonstrations have remotely approached the scale of Watts, Detroit, Newark.

But sporadically, the protest is beginning to take on an ugly, intolerant, occasionally even sadistic quality. A Navy recruiter is trapped in his car, a hapless Dow Chemical representative held prisoner seven hours in a Harvard room. The 35,000 marchers on the Pentagon were mainly sincere young demonstrators who had traveled long miles to oppose what many considered an evil foreign policy. Among them were the best—the young woman who by excruciating coordination managed to move from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon on aluminum braces—hut also the hoodlums who spat on the troops, threw rocks through Pentagon windows, daubed the walls with lavatory obscenities.

The political engagement of the present generation is vastly preferable to the non-involvement of the Eisenhower generation. And no one over 30 (the watershed, apparently, in these matters) should underestimate the quality of participation that the Pentagon march represented for most of those who were there. But with the spread of Vietnam dissent, calls are increasingly being made for more direct action. From the Washington demonstration came the slogan by its organizers: "From Dissent to Resistance.” What is being advocated? A healthy confrontation or something more disruptive?

Some surprising voices are currently being heard in support of wide permissiveness in the form of dissent. The escalation of the war, they argue, must be met with the escalation of protest. Dr. Robert McAfee Brown, professor of religion at Stanford, advocates civil disobedience and condones draft evasion. (Last week, however, he cautioned that the practice of civil disobedience should be "exceedingly restrained,” and he backed "the privilege of free expression” for a CIA representative.)

The liberal Catholic weekly Commonweal in identifying with Dr. Brown and others who have taken the same course, adds its own note of despair: "The escalation of dissent ... is a natural consequence both of the failure of the peace movement to achieve ends through ordinary political techniques and of frustration that comes from being ignored or, on occasions when notice is taken, of being sneered at.” Commonweal explains that its appeal "is not a call to anarchy or bloodletting. . . . The resistance envisioned is a passive disobedience in the tradition of Thoreau.”

But in their own way, however moderate in tone, both these statements testify to a disillusionment with debate. And here is w here the present danger lies. Defiance must not replace open discussion. The line must clearly be drawn between legitimate protest and behavior which approaches a U.S. version of Red Guardism.

Basically, the question that is posed to dissenters is whether they remain committed to the democratic system or whether they are, in effect, copping out. For University of Chicago Historian Daniel Boorstin, debate is "orderly exploration of a common problem,” and there is a fundamental distinction between dissent and disagreement. "People who disagree have an argument, but people who dissent have a quarrel. People may disagree but may count themselves in the majority, but a person who dissents is by definition in a minority. A liberal society thrives on disagreement but is killed by dissension. Disagreement is the life blood of democracy, dissension is its cancer.”

The avenues of disagreement with Administration policy are far from blocked. Actually, the Vietnam conflict marks a political development in some ways unprecedented in American history. It is not only under searching debate; opposition in many areas of the country is almost fashionable. As the Washington correspondent Richard Rover remarks: "It seems in downright bad taste to invoke patriotism.” In Cambridge, Mass, and San Francisco, continuation of the war is being challenged in municipal voting. The San Francisco proposition, asking for a vote on "immediate cease-fire and withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam so that the Vietnamese people can settle their own problems,” was put on the ballot by 22,000 signatures on a petition, removed by the city attorney, reinstated by the California supreme court.

There is plenty of legal freedom around. The dissenters whose tactics recall sit-down strikes of the ’30s sometimes forget that the Supreme Court then ruled that peaceful picketing was deserving of First Amendment protection as free speech, but stopped short of extending protection to physical interposition. Says Dean Louis Poliak of the Yale Law School: "When it comes to surrounding the Dow man or spitting in the face of an MP, I don’t see how you could possibly suppose that was constitutionally protected activity.” In Poliak’s view, the new protesters seem to have given up on the idea of acting legally at all. "They are simply saying, I’m operating on a different set of premises which take me above and beyond the Constitution or any form of secular authority. ...’ If we were living in Nazi Germany or present-day South Africa, that kind of disobedience might be justifiable on the ground that the whole legal structure was unreformedly corrupt from within, and that there was no political mechanism by which you would win another election and change things. I don’t think that describes the U.S. by a long shot.”

More likely than a court test is the street test; there are sufficient signs already that the excesses of violent dissent are being met with incomprehension if not outright hostility. California’s Governor Reagan, who made a campaign issue out of the Berkeley student riots, seems inclined to consider the militant protesters treacherous. Right-wing columnist William Buckley Jr. would jail Dr. Robert McAfee Brown as a test of the law. In the South and Southwest, the new dissent, as a Life correspondent reports, tends to be regarded "as disloyal, disruptive, disrespectful, damned near criminal.” On national tours, Alabama’s Dixie hawk George Wallace gets appreciative laughs when he says: "The other day Dean Rusk said the Vietnam protests had Communist elements in it. Well, the cab drivers of my state knew that five years ago.”

Simplistic views on one side are apt to be matched by simplistic views on the other. Much of the current academic attitude is based on the assumption that dissent, and even disorder, need not answer to reason hut is healthy per se. There are some welcome signs of distinctions now being made between what is honest argument and acceptable opposition and what is unacceptable disorder.

[crazy-pages]

Don’t Debate Nazis

The choice of debate vs. violence is actually a pretty classical Prisoner’s Dilemma (x). There are three possibilities in such a dilemma:

1) Both people choose to debate. No one expends resources or gets harmed, there is a possibility of mutual understanding and learning. Worst case scenario is some wasted time and hurt feelings.

Progress might be made with the flow of ideas.

2) One person chooses violence and the other chooses debate. The aggressor will almost certainly win (that’s what happens when you sucker punch someone), because they get the vicious glow of making their opponent shut up by delivering violence and they don’t have to hear any reasons why they’re wrong. This typically feels better than admitting the possibility of being wrong, so 2) is better for the aggressor than 1) would have been. 

The debater though, does not feel nearly so good. They are injured (or maybe even dead), didn’t get heard, and probably feel betrayed and far less trusting of the world. 2) is obviously worse for the debater than 1) would have been.

No progress gets made with the flow of ideas.

3) Both people fight. Both people get injured, both hurt, maybe someone dies. Unless one side happens to win a decisive victory, no one is happy, but even so this is a worse outcome than 1) or being the aggressor in 2). 

No progress gets made with the flow of ideas. 

We teach children to always use their words instead of being violent, to the point of a pathological obsession with non-violence, because we really, really want to live in a world where everybody always picks debate over violence. It’s the only way to reliably achieve the best possible scenario: 1). This is a good thing. The world is better when everyone chooses to cooperate. 

But all that falls apart the moment someone states out loud “I do not intend to listen to other’s opinions and if it looks like my opinions might not win I will use violence”. Or the even simpler “I intend to use violence”. The moment someone else says they prefer violence to the possibility of losing a debate, 1) is no longer an option. Which means you have to pick between 2) and 3). Specifically, being the debater in option 2) and option 3). (Note how neither 2) nor 3) have the possibility of information being shared? Yeah that option’s already sailed the moment someone commits to violence, no one will benefit from your non-violence). 

And given that being the debater in 2) is strictly worse than picking 3) ... Well, when someone starts throwing around terms like “peaceful genocide” (what kind of bullshit oxymoron is that?) and “do we need a black race?” you should probably punch the fucking Nazi. 

Their are rare exceptions to this. If you can be fairly sure your opponent only has the stomach to beat you so many times, choosing debate repeatedly in the face of violence may eventually lead to option 1). This was Gandhi’s (successful) strategy. But you know what? Gandhi also advocated non-violence against the Nazis, should they invade India. And it’s a damn good thing that never got tested, because do you know what the Nazis did to non-violent protesters? The lucky ones were forced to kneel and shot in the back of the head. The unlucky ones got sent to the concentration camps. Gandhi’s strategy would not have worked against the Nazis, because the Nazis did not provide the opportunity to debate twice. They just killed people the first time they chose to the be the debater in option 2). 

It is not possible to deal with Nazis using debate. Non-violence is not an option. When dealing with people who have stated their intent to use violence outright or stated their intent to use violence if they can’t win by other means, non-violence is a losing strategy. 

There is no strategy of cooperation that can beat an avowed defector. Unlimited hatred can only be fought with force, no other tool will do. 

Oh, and one last thing. To those who say “but we’ll lose some people’s support if we’re violent”: Those whose support you lose were clearly not going to use force to combat Nazis anyway. And, hey, guess what? We just discussed how choosing debate can’t beat someone who has stated their violent intent. So that person was already a non-contributor, they weren’t going to be of any help combating the Nazis anyway. So let them withdraw their useless support, shrug off the dead weight, and go punch some fucking Nazis.