What you are missing is that you think I am suggesting stochastic terrorism or something. That doesn’t scare the rich, they can always build a bigger fence and pay more security guards.

What scares the rich is when they see that the fault lines they are using to vent steam (redirect the suffering and anger) are beginning to close into a wall of solidarity, and we are beginning to realize that as much as we despise each other and can’t agree on religion, ideologies, values… whatever… that we realize that none of that matters until we all deal with the rich people problem.

Solidarity and a direct understanding of the class war we are in is what scares the rich.

I think anything meaningful has to start from local mutual aid networks, creates connections with your neighbors under the assumption that we need to take care of each other, we can’t assume the system will be functional.

Even if your goal isn’t directly to organize locally, it is a prerequisite to getting pretty much anything meaningful done (which I kind of hate because when people call it “organizing” they aren’t kidding, and I hate organizing things lol) because whatever meaningful thing you want to happen will inevitably be implemented on a human level through those local connections.

Better shower thought: When the rich push the cost of housing high enough that a good portion of a society is one or two crises away from being homeless the best economic policy for fixing the situation is making the rich scared as fuck so whatever compromise we put on the table looks much more appealing than what the general public is threatening to do to the rich in the streets.

It’s not nice to beat yourself up like that, a shower should be a place to unwind not judge yourself.

NYC and other cities briefly dropped some cop funding and all that did in the end was for crime to go up. NYC subway now needs metal detectors and the national guard was called in recently due to the uptick in violent crime.

I am sorry, but you viewpoints are clearly based on your desire to engage with a narrative rather than the facts

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2023/manhattan-violent-crime-record-levels-trump-fact-check/

https://www.ahdatalytics.com/dashboards/ytd-murder-comparison/

The only spike in violence New York City saw was from the pandemic making desperate people even more desperate. There was a spike and then it subsided because people got less desperate.

At best some shallow, meaningless changes like a mural or a rainbow or BLM flag painted on a street, hell, maybe even a street name change or something akin to that, and in some cases, it just increased crime and looting statistics in the aggregate in numerous cities. Sorry bro, this is reality.

The reality is that the people with the power in the US political system are like you and will categorically not accept less police violence, it is a feature not a bug. Meanwhile, crime has been decreasing and will keep decreasing no matter how much rightwing figures make a bunch of noise about crime and scary immigrants to try to distract people from noticing they aren’t actually doing their jobs and passing legislation to meaningfully improve people’s lives (that addresses REAL problems like unaffordable healthcare or lack of access to affordable housing, not whether hypothetically a transgender person might have a slighttttt advantage in sports??)

It also increase social tension and some distrust between races, which ain’t good, either. I dare say that racism, from all races went up since 2016. Won’t fully blame BLM for this but the movement sure did not help.

Cite your sources bro. If anything has changed it is that rightwing extremists have become less capable of hiding their racism under a veneer of acceptability politics and have become more openly violent as they realize the general public is beginning to see rightwing extremists (which is effectively the whole damn party, since it is a party of cowards that just follows the loudest, angriest person) for the losers they are. In this sense, yes maybe tensions have increased, but if they have the overwhelming evidence points to conservative rightwing extremists specifically escalating tensions in the vast majority of cases.

Perhaps more existentially for the conservative movement in the US, the general public is also beginning to realize how irresponsibly rightwing extremists behave in policy making (again which is essentially every Republican in office because they all just fall in line no matter how hateful their leader is) because their basic sense of empathy was utterly lobotomized by spending too many hours in front of the tv watching the likes of New Gingrich and Bill O’Reilly. Republicans are the dog chasing the car and the car is hate, and we can only hope that they have finally caught the car in banning abortions and overturning roe vs wade (which the numbers are looking promising, my fingers are crossed :) ).

I think there is a big piece missing if we want to make lasting change. Protests should be the first part and we have missed many opportunities by skipping the second part.

Certainly so, but also I think an important difference between the civil rights movement with MLK and current day is the public is actually much closer to siding with the civil rights protestors now, MLK and others were not necessarily anywhere near as accepted during their time as a political activist figures though their ideas may have won out in the long term. We forget this when we see people like MLK as “popular figures” now.

I think the current problem is not that the majority believes in defending the racist structures of society, we don’t need an MLK to convince us that systematic and direct racism are abhorrent. The majority of us know, but the other difference between the civil rights movements of the MLK era and now is that we are far more powerless as a public body of normal people to actually wield power politically and enact the changes Black Lives Matter advocated for. We can’t change the laws, the rich and powerful WILL NOT let it happen, and we live in a time period where their power is near absolute.

We can’t judge the BLM or Occupy movement for failing to create policy changes when both movements were specifically born out of a desire to directly express the unsustainable nature of disempowerment in the US of the average person. We have reached a maximum point of powerlessness against an entrenched, corrupt political system and at this point policy just isn’t going to happen unless we all collectively keeping threatening to shut it all down.

Exactly and as time goes on I have shifted from a perspective that Occupy Wall Street was an unfocused failure to a perspective that the control of the finance industry and money on politics is absolute and those in power will not tolerate it being questioned, so Occupy Wall Street could never have resulted in immediate policy changes, Wall Street would have prevented it any cost even if it meant physically walking into the street and shooting protestors until they went back to work. Of course “financial instruments” would probably be used instead of guns, but murder is murder and the weapons the finance industry uses to make their living make mass shooters with assault rifles look like amateurs playing around with toys, see the 2008 financial crash as example A.

The role of Occupy Wall Street was thus to lay bare this power relationship and the associated threat of violence towards those who seek to modify it. The impact of Occupy must be understood in terms of how the internal psyche of the US was irrevocably radicalized from a collective witnessing of this truth.

In the same way that a crowd of fans will remember a ref on the soccer field making horrible calls that screw their team over (…and even though the crowd has no actual codified power to stop the ref from making bad calls and swinging the game), the crowd will remember:

the injustice itself

the collective shared awareness of the injustice among fellow strangers in the crowd

the disempowerment forced upon the crowd in that moment to preserve the status quo of the injustice

These are not things that crowds forget easily, in sports or in broader political contexts. Movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have to be understood as acts of reality crafting that first and foremost validate individual’s feeling that the majority of the public understands the power structure of the status quo as an existential threat to the common good.

Once people have seen the validation from essentially 1 out of every 10 people in the country showing up to Black Lives Matter with them it flips a switch in their head and talking heads on tv permanently lose a degree of power to manipulate people into believing their feelings are fringe in regards to rejecting police violence and systematic racism.

Just to add a tiny bit of clarification, I think what BLM did was change the subterranean psyche of America, you can’t measure it in policy or material changes because those were resisted absolutely by the ruling class, but they could not stop the change in perspective and thinking that occurred.

I think a better question to ask is whether the groups and ideologies involved in the BLM protests (which were MASSIVE) were ever allowed to have power?

If BLM failed to enact significant policy change than I don’t think it is because BLM wasn’t focused enough, had unrealistic goals or was handled badly, I think it is because in terms of law enforcement policy it really doesn’t matter what voters do or don’t want. Any kind of noise made by voters and the public about police violence and the inherent problems with police (and their vital role in maintaining economic injustice and inequality through state violence) will be aggressively pushed back in the opposite direction by the political forces of law enforcement, and because the average person has no power and their vote is useless this will result in a broad push in policy in the opposite direction of BLM’s goals.

However, the function of BLM must be seen for what it was then, to lay bare the true nature of the power relationship between voters and cops and in the minds of countless, countless people living in the US it delegitimized the authority of law enforcement to commit violence wherever and howsoever it chooses. It sent a massive crack through the entire structure of policing, jails and systematic divestment from minorities and the poor. Just because BLM didn’t create significant policy changes doesn’t mean that the battle hasn’t already been lost for the legitimacy of law enforcement in the long term in the US, and I call that a victory.

Migraines….

…but also… seeing my mom lose all her patience and yell at my dad for having aggressive late stage dementia and not being able to function properly.

Seeing that and being broke and unable to materially change the situation was by far and away the most cynical, insufferable thing I have ever experienced in my entire life and hopefully I will never experience something as awful again or I fear I would shatter into a million pieces.

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Also ninja stars are legitimately so much fun to throw around if you have a safe spot to do it where you won’t wreck anything if you miss.

They are like throwing knives without the fiddly part.

Ninja stars.

A good life hack is when you are being pursued place them into the ground in key spots where a pursuer might step.

Also work on throwing two ninja stars at once so you can increase DPS.

It is as simple as the fact that being banned from a Lemmy instance does not shutdown access to all of Lemmy’s communities like it does with Reddit.

This allows actual, messy, contextualized moderation to happen within communities according to the values of those communities without creating broader distortions in a global moderation policy and enforcement scheme.

In other words there are unfortunately transphobic communities on Reddit and Lemmy, but the difference is there are also (many) communities on Lemmy that if you start spouting transphobic bullshit a moderator will unceremoniously and fairly quickly shut you down without a bunch of techbro handwringing about censorship or general apathy towards violence against trans people.

This aspect does in fact make Lemmy clearly better than Reddit on the whole, because this is a fundamental issue to social networks and communities.

Hey have you tried discord? Me and all the communities I am part of have moved to it!

edit I should I have put /s in my comment, I mistakenly thought that was obvious but I really shouldn’t have thought that I guess lol