Being disabled from 14 years of taking beatings from Nazis and cops at protests is my excuse. I’d wheel my disabled Graves diseased ass out to a protest again against doctors orders if only they would be organized outside billionaires homes.
Same, dunno if it was typed to mean the opposite though. Getting plenty of excuses like this from ex-reddit libs that get salty when you tell them to go protest.
Why else would they be trying to scare people from taking action?
Precisely. It’s already done to our homes and our food and the water we drink, pretty soon it will be done to the air we breath unless we stop that unnamable thing that privatizes wealth and is defined by the ability to profit from it.
I’d rather a free and powerful energy source that’ll benefit humanity not have a logo and pricetag slapped on it so that only the ones who can afford it are allowed to use it.
Isn’t this sorta how the Corporate Wars started in the Cyberpunk universe?
I’ll believe it when I see it. Anything short of most Americans not showing up to work and grinding the economy to a screaching halt won’t be enough. And that’s the best case scenario.
I haven’t seen any socialist or anarchists show up with guns to protect protestors from police with guns, nobody has since the 60s.
I haven’t met a single centrist that supported (voted for) Hillary or Kamala let alone attended a protest or demonstration.
Good luck, it’s not easy, study their common arguments and give it only so much benefit of the doubt in so far as there’s a rational human being that has come to those conclusions. The ones who care enough to be swept up by populism are ironically some of the good ones, they’re some of the biggest victims of fascists as well. The truely evil ones, the ones that keep fascism strong, are the ones who won’t even engage in the discussion, who don’t really care, who are “too busy taking care of myself to pay attention to politics,” who donate xx.x% of their salary to charities but can’t take 20 minutes to read Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?”** or even less time reading the communist manifesto.**
** This is less an advertisement for socialism/communism so much as how lazy one must be not to be able to digest those small pieces of leftist perspective by people who claim to be “balanced” or “centrist” while being anti-communist and pro-capitalism.
All in all don’t bother trying to have a discussion with centrists, they’re the most hopeless and selfish people with no code, no morals, no higher belief, just “I’m a mechanistic robot chemical bag trying to survive, the world is a zero-sum game, I get mine and if you don’t it’s your fault.”
Doubt I’ll ever get the opportunity, but I’ll take it if it presents itself.
If you do, don’t push. Instead, pull. Ask them questions, ask them “What do you want at the end of the day?” “To get the illegals out!” “Yeah but why? What is that a step towards?” Fact checking doesn’t work, lecturing doesn’t work, understand that they know no better than you know better than them. At least then there’s a fighting chance of having a conversation, seeing eachother as on the same side, and agreeing on who the real enemies are.
Yeah, those MAGA. The ones you typically see on youtube videos or twitter aren’t your average MAGA supporter, if you actually talk to one and ask them what they want, they start going off on things that even the most far-left Star Trek commie eutopianist could agree with, only to right at the end blame “the libtards!” or “DEI” or “immigrants” etc. They’re uneducated, they’re seeing things aren’t good and rightfully so, but they’re tricked into scapegoating before coming to the right conclusions.
Centrists? They say “You shouldn’t pay attention to these things.”
Pretty much my entire family fit under this category, plus at least 75% of the people i’ve met in my entire life, including schoolmates and work colleagues. Of the 25% that are barely conscious, 80% of them are (somehow and unfortunately) MAGA while 20% have moved into a tiny home or cabin somewhere to grow their own food. The MAGA crowd are at least looking around going “wtf, workers need to seize the means of production” meanwhile the centrist liberals are the ones going “things would’ve been better with Hillary or Kamala.”
I’ve been lied to, gaslit, and blamed by my self-proclaimed “centrist” family my whole life, been called alarmist my whole life when i’ve been pointing at these very same things coming from a mile away. There are tons of others that did the same, at least alt-right MAGA freaks give you the time of day to argue. Centrists though? They’re the first to say they “dont really care much about politics” yet hold their heads high with masturbatory egotism and confidently proclaim “both sides are wrong, I disagree with extremists of any kind.” They’re betting their childrens lives and future on their own malicious ignorance, like that joke with the priest who denies life saving medication because “Don’t worry, God will take care of me,” but replace God with the Markets and you have the modern day peasant that’ll rat you out to soldiers for “heresy” and have you hung, disembowled, or burned at the stake. A person of self-interest is not a person of reason.
How did we overthrow Kings again? Something about us becoming ahem “Enlightened” during some sort of era or period? What can we learn from the successes and failures? How did Europeans get ideas of freedom, autonomy, equality, and question of authority from when all they knew about was Kings and Divine Right? Did they perhaps go to some kind of ahem New World with a matchcoat and musket to live and trade amongst the natives for 200 years?! Perhaps there was some sort of ahem Indiginous Critique on European Culture that sorta blew the minds of the French, English, and Dutch alike? Perhaps they wrote some plays about this! That they could disobey or :gasps: impeach their leaders? That pursuasion and reason might be more important? Perhaps over some coffee and pipe tobacco? Oh right, next thing you’d think i’d say is they didn’t trade or so much as look at silver? How they MUST have had a “Market” how else could goods or heirlooms possibly trade hands? Certainly not gifts, quests, or gambling! Jeez, I wonder if we still have something to learn from these ideas that were just too darn complicated for Ben Franklin and Jean Jacque Rousseau!
good is the overwhelming majority.
Let the overwhelming centrist majority in 1930’s Germany tell you otherwise. People who peacefully ignore evil, even if it’s preserve their own safety, are not good at heart. People just don’t want trouble or disturbance, that’s why people are naturally kind from day to day. But ignoring the piles of bodies while saying “no politics at the dinner table” is literally how the holocaust happened - the majority failed to act.
1930’s Germany at least had the excuse of limited information/education, all they had was radio from which only Hitler’s voice was present. 100 years later with the worlds knowledge at our fingertips, ignorance to politics is a choice. Might I say an evil one, all things considered.
I used to go to protests, from USA to Australia to NZ and UK… I’m not going to another protest until we start occupying gated communities. I’m sick of standing around looking pathetic occupying some sidewalk and politely leaving when told to by police. And to think that’s the best the so-called “leftists” can do, then I remember to back when things were bad - how the police and FBI would raid groups, murder them, drop bombs on them, and assassinate their leadership - and realize that leftism was defeated long ago. I want to keep it peaceful, and start picketing in places that matter like outside mansions and gated communities. Just stand outside the homes of billionaires to tell them we know where they live, we out number them, I think would be enough to shake things up a bit because they’re cowards too. However, in my heartest of hearts, I believe anything short of an armed overthrow of one dozen billionaires will never be enough. Fuck tinkering and pushing the needle slightly. Loud and armed leftist groups are needed now more than ever and there’s zero of them to be found.
Here’s a way.