Cross-posted from "Nina going off today" by @seahorse@midwest.social in !antifascism@midwest.social
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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There's a much better reason to not be violent: So that you can get more people onto the streets. Figures that most people don't fancy dodging burning trash cans and you want everybody on the streets, not just your polycule. People need to feel like they're safe at the protest, the only danger there is is coming from the state.
That's a nice argument when the cops are not yet shooting random passerbys with rubber bullets and teargas. People don't stay home because they're afraid of other protestors.
There's a massive fucking vibe difference between a crowd taking cover behind whatever is at hand and one setting fire to shit and throwing back stones is all I'm saying. Be the former vibe. Stones aren't going to stop them. Assault rifles and tanks wouldn't stop them. Pining for escalation hands them excuses on a platter for no strategic gain whatsoever, it's pissing in the wind. The only law you should be breaking is refusing to follow a dispersal order, or at least take your sweet time with it, everything else is fedposting.
And that's the one they point to as an excuse to start shooting, you shitlib.
They don't need an excuse. They will escalate it long before anyone in the street does. It's also wild to me that 'throwing stones' is somehow seen as more violent than literal fucking munitions and chemical weapons. "Just stand there and let them shoot at you" is quite a take from someone who has clearly never been shot at by fascists in riot gear.
If this were an ordinary liberal riot guard we might be able to count on deescalation, but as libs have so been eager to point out when votemaxxing online, this isn't an ordinary liberal riot guard. Either bend over and spread for the next phase of american fascist policing or shut the fuck up about how people are choosing to resist it. Communities are fighting against unaccountable and un-identifiable gestapo pigs blackbagging innocent children - don't concern troll us about deescalation.
To shoot? No. To justify themselves in the media, in the public eye? Yes.
It's not. That's as much a shitlib take as "police violence isn't violence because it's state violence".
But it's the perception that exists among the population, you're not going to change it by throwing stones.
You know what people did to protect Jews from the Gestapo? Hide them. You can't protect them by throwing stones for the simple reason that police dgaf when they're hit by stones, they'll just blackbag you alongside.
Look there's exactly one thing I'm saying here: Act strategically. I'm not arguing against violence because it's evil -- at most, violence is unaesthetic. I'm arguing against it because, unless you start an actual insurrection with plans to take on and take out the military, it's ineffective. Just because your pigs are worse than what we're dealing with over here doesn't mean that lashing out at them suddenly becomes good praxis. You're there to have an effect, not to blow off steam.
They’re already shooting.
No they don't. Just look at how often they use footage from completely unrelated events in their coverage. Anyone with even a slight predilection against protestors or a law enforcement bias will accept any willful misrepresentation as 'aesthetic' and condemn the whole group regardless.
Nothing the protestors actually do will move the needle - it's the extreme overreaction of the fed that will.
Only after the Nazis had actually banned extra-party protests and clamped down on all opposition, and only after they had already carted away several million jews and political opponents off to concentration camps. You want to wait that long do something? Be my guest.
The goal of most rebellions isn't to take control of the reigns of power - the goal is to make it so costly to suppress that the state is forced to cut their loss, or else risk the resistance spreading. There is no version of resisting a fascist movement in the US that involves armed militias overpowering federal forces. Liberals are desperate to maintain the illusion of democracy by simply resisting at the fringes - if they don't piss Trump off too much, then maybe there will still be enough democracy left for them to vote him away without any real conflict! What a wonderful fantasy that is.
Liberals need to pick a lane - either trump is a dictator who must be removed before he solidifies his hold on power, or we need to conduct ourselves until the midterms so that we can vote our way out. It can't be both.
Who said anything about waiting? Stop posting and organise that shit. Don't look at me I'm on the other side of the Atlantic.
Please look up opinion polling after the Kent State Massacre: It took years for public opinion to shift away from "the National Guard did nothing wrong". For what you say to occur the overreaction has to not just be extreme, it also has to be obvious -- like the Aussie journalist which got shot, that's a good video. Things don't become more obviously an overreaction when cars are burning and shopfronts are deglassed.
I wouldn't argue for either. Both are unrealistic for various reasons and the latter isn't a good in itself. What you want to do is obstruct the fuck out the feds so they fall on their face, that's best done on a level of state and lower administrations. California isn't cooperating with ICE so make sure to have the state's back. Yes, I, an anarchist is saying "have the state's back", fascism is too large a threat to risk over feelings of disgust regarding liberal democracy. Last thing you want is the Governor seeing himself in a situation where he has to ask the feds to intervene to keep (a semblance of) order instead of being able to say "fuck off feds we got this".
Most of us do both.
Yup, and with any luck Trump will continue with the lack of subtlety.
Those things happen every day in the US. Hell, some sports fans will flip cars after a moderately good football game. Corporatized media will find footage of those things regardless of what the actual protestors are doing, and implicate them with it. Even when counterprotestors are actually assaulting peaceful protestors, Fox news and their many subsidiary channels will find the one shot with an angry exchange that paints the picture and use it to implicate the entire movement. And when they do, liberals will be right there to wag their fingers.
The good news is that Trump is such a dipshit that he'll send in fucking tanks for just about any goddamned reason, and those are really fucking hard to hide and even harder to justify with a few broken windows and lots of unarmed protestors.
Yea, this is what i'm referring to by saying 'middling around the fringes'. There is no amount of legalese that will slow down an actual authoritarian. You can't run around screaming that he's going to fucking end democracy and then strategize on how to bury him in legal threats. Either he's a dictator or he can be obstructed by judicial paperwork. You can't have a dictator that politely complies with the judiciary, that's what makes them a dictator.
This is how liberals end up collaborating with fascists: they are so uncomfortable with extralegal resistance that they delude themselves into a belief that working within the structures that are actively being dismantled is the 'only realistic way' to resist against it. What happens when we get to the 'outlawing of rival political parties' part of fascism? We've already crossed over the 'no due process for criminals' line, how many more core democratic foundations do we have to lose before it's game over?
Not everyone can or should be in black bloc sabotaging ICE vehicles, but pretending as if the usual checks and balances are still functioning is willful ignorance.
You're being accelerationalist. Also that wasn't Trump that was a local jackboot jacking off.
Who the fuck cares if the dictator complies, what matters is that the overall system complies. There's still quite some inertia left in the gears of the rule of law, people around Trump (not him, he doesn't care nor does he understand) know how to attack that but chances are they're severely underestimating the task. Unlike back in the Weimar Republic, you e.g. don't have a country full of judges considering law passed by parliament to not even be law because law must be passed by the Kaiser.
Noticed how the Border Tsar backed off when Newson (what's he spelled I don't care) told him "go, come arrest me"? That's not the behaviour of a viceroy of a dictator, that's the behaviour of one who would like to have that power, but doesn't.
One of the first things btw that the Nazis did was to (functionally) dissolve the states and put them under direct federal control. That's another reason why you want to shout "state's rights" right now.
The fuck are you doing that as a black bloc. Those are a lightning rod for police violence so that others can protest in peace, you don't want the sabotage squad to be a lightning rod, you want them to be ninjas. Unseen, unheard, unnoticed. More of a warning west and not black hoodie kind of task.
And, see, suddenly we're talking black blocs. An actual tactic. One that acknowledges the importance of peaceful protest, at the very least the necessity to separate yourself from the overall crowd, so that liberals can go to baby's first protest because we want them in the street, actually seeing shit, feeling vibes, and not in front of the TV, watching propaganda. Not, as in the OP, "fuck this shit I want to smash things", at least that's the vibes that I got: Justification for a foregone conclusion, not a plan grown out of analysis of the overall situation.
I'm not saying "I hope he keeps being a fascist", i'm saying "I hope he keeps being obvious about his fascism". If there's someone running around pantsing people, I'd rather them be doing it in broad daylight while screaming "i'm gonna pull everyone's pants down!" than them doing it in the cover of night where nobody sees what's happening.
Lol ok, granted, but Trump's been boasting about the strength of his response this whole time, so then I guess I hope Trump keeps taking credit for the actions of the local jackboots? Is there a point to this?
What are you talking about? We have a ton of judges who have publicly endorsed the unitary executive theory, and Trump has been publicly threatening the judges who haven't gotten in line. They've unconstitutionally raided multiple courthouses against direct court order and flaunted their willful disregard of their rulings. Yea, the US governmental structure is different, but you're delusional if you think it's functioning as an actual check on executive overreach and abuse.
Yep. What Trump has been doing in LA with the National Guard is largely regarded as unconstitutional, since the 'legal framework' he's using as justification could be so broadly applied that State sovereignty and the constitutional restriction on keeping a standing army are functionally dissolved (similar to the Nazis who claimed there was a national emergency to dissolve their own parliamentary checks on power). It would basically be up to his discretion on what constitutes 'insurrectionist activities', and checked only by the judiciary (who would rule on its applicability and constitutionality) and congress via impeachment. It functionally does not matter if the judiciary rules it unconstitutional if congress refuses to enforce it, and congress functionally cannot impeach when a majority of representatives are complicit or otherwise held in line by threats of retaliation by the president and his capitalist collaborators. Basically - what the US is experiencing is a multi-layered failure of our constitution to render checks to the President, who is now abusing this failure to solidify his hold on power. Sure would be pretty pointless if we waited until it was a complete constitutional failure.
Those are two things you absolutely would not be doing if you're concerned about the optics of a resistance movement, which was the point being communicated. And anyway, why wouldn't you be obscuring your identity while committing a felony?
Lmao, the intent of black bloc is absolutely not an acknowledgement of peaceful protest, it's an acknowledgement that violence is necessary against oppressive capitalist systems and state violence. But while we're on the point, weren't you just lecturing us on the bad optics of unruly protests, and suddenly you're singing the praises of the premier movement for openly violent resistance? Give me a fucking break. Black bloc is predicated on creating chaos, and famously referred to as 'piggyback' protest because they will embed themselves in larger demonstrations. I'd be happy to discuss good protest practices if you weren't whinging about the "bad optics" of broken glass and vandalized cars, especially while you're simultaneously claiming to support a tactic used to explicitly do those things at protests.
Fuck off shitlib, go concern troll somewhere else.
Yeah you're stuck in the 80s. That type of black blocs wasn't a tactic, it was Autonomous Marxists jacking off. They were starting shit on May Day for the purpose of starting shit. It had the net result of lowering attendance to union marches because, circling back to my very first comment: Not that many people fancy dodging burning trash cans. Name comes from the federal prosecutor describing them as "Schwarzer Block", the translation and weird lack of k came later.
As a modern tactic the black bloc is, as I said, a lightning rod. Marching alongside, holding still, if police act up they're shielding other protestors by engaging. Yes, it acknowledges that violence is necessary to defend a protest. Defence being the key word, here.
You're ignoring like 30 years of development in protest tactics. What you're trying to do, we've been there. Doesn't work.
There's a prayer vigil planned for today, isn't there, what are you going to do? Come there in black, mingle with the grandmas, and start throwing molotov cocktails? You know who does that kind of thing? Agent provocateurs. That's why I've been calling you a fed.
I'm not even going to get into it with you about the specifics of black bloc and it's uses, because the point i'm making is the same either way.
Let's pretend there's black bloc present at the LA protests, exactly like you're saying. LAPD and NG are there, and being advertised as an 'anti-insurrectionist' force by the fed, and if protestors do nothing but stand their ground, jackboots start shooting nonlethals, teargassing and zip-tying groups of 'normie' protestors.
What is black bloc doing to mitigate this?
I'm just trying to imagine what you think black bloc is, even by your own definition, that somehow doesn't involve even just optically violent engagement with police. If they're supposed to be a lightning rod to take the heat off normie protestors, how does that not still get used as justification for militarized escalation by police? Even if they're just standing there acting as shields and not actually engaging, it still sure sounds like something that can be used to justify more violent enforcement. A video of a mysterious group of protestors in all black and motorcycle helmates and makeshift shields disobeying police orders for dispersal and lobbing teargas canisters back at law enforcement? Sounds like a riot, better send in the marines. A group of black bloc breaking off from the main protest to break shop windows and lure police away from demonstrators? Sounds like looters and opportunists trying to fuck shit up, better send in the water cannons. If there's a house fire a mile away, media is going to implicate the protest with it. In what world does black bloc somehow not contribute to that media fodder?
I think you're just a shitlib who enjoys larping as an anarchist. An anarchist would not be blowing smoke for local governments trying to stop fascism with bullshit legal threats and bureaucratic legalese, and they sure as fuck wouldn't be running around complaining about the "bad optics" of clashing with police during an anti-police protest. We're literally protesting against unprovoked police violence and oppression, the police were already escalating before the protests started.
Again - just fuck off
It splits the whole thing. Liberals can have their prayer vigil while the police is busy. Especially with jackboots, with individual motivation and not "crack down on them and I mean everyone" being the order from above, all you have to do is occupy them, they just want to have fun. Scratch that itch. Use their toys.
And then liberal media can go on waxing about non-violent protest, about that beautiful prayer vigil, how nice that is. Before, they couldn't: Because there was no clear delineation, the vigil and the riot couldn't be told apart. Thus you enable things getting air time, positive or at least neutral coverage, that would otherwise be swept under the rug.
And before you go on and say "but the whole US media landscape is captured by capital interest and racists" -- yes. And the capitalists want their immigrants. They don't, in principle, mind speaking of "ICE excesses".
What I think is the actual issue here is an American incapability to actually organise. Last time you had a civil rights movement with any sort of discipline was, well, the civil rights movement. MLK, Black Panthers, etc. I suggest reading up a bit on what they did instead of jacking off to pseudo-insurrectionist fantasies.
You act as if that was something that never happens elsewhere. As if others haven't found ways to deal with it. Me saying "Telling everyone to just throw stones is a stupid idea" is not an opinion, it's observed history. It has been tried. It doesn't work. Other approaches work better. But Americans, in their infinite wisdom, will do the right thing only after having exhausted every other possibility. Listening and learning from other people's experience? Why, what's the point, America is so exceptionally exceptional nothing could ever apply to you. Protesting with discipline, diversion, and de-escalation tactics cannot work because you have more people per capita or something. I retract that "fed" and will simply call you "yank".
It absolutely does not. Anything that happens in LA is being attributed to protestors, and it's been that way for every protest in the US since before the 1950's. Any protest with more than a couple hundred people either doesn't get covered by US news or it gets implicated with every act of violence and vandalism for the entire city. That's not even me being hyperbolic, US media will even uncritically report on completely unrelated events as if they are a part of a large protest. It's not as if black bloc is a uniform that makes them invisible to protest coverage.
I don't actually disagree, but I think our hyper-connected social media makes it practically impossible to avoid the kind of cross-contamination that soils the optics of even a well-organized protest here. Maybe it's different overseas, but from what I've seen written about it in our media you have the same problem.
Nobody has said they should.
I've grown bored with this disagreement. I think I'll just leave you with a MLK quote I think is relevant.
"The tactic that we're not employing in LA has no effect in LA".
On the live feeds I watched I spotted exactly one protester who might have had training. She was good at leading a chant, that's it. Noone had an understanding of the larger situation, everyone was driving by the seat of their pants.
Now, of course, it's too late to build those structures, build professionalism, but in the civil rights era you had it. Rosa Parks didn't just decide one morning to sit in the front of the bus, the thing had been prepared for months and months. Everything was gamed out, people trained to have the right reaction in every circumstance, the whole shebang.
Fun fact: I actually played "Greenpeace and police" on the primary school schoolyard. About ten people sit down, hook into each other's arms, four or five "cops" try to separate them. That's the kind of cultural diffusion you want, enough dissemination of tactics through workshops that primary school kids pick up random fun exercises as a game.
Indeed, it is relevant: Because you still haven't learned how to make yourself heard.
That's not a call to violence. It's a call to get out of a comfortable rut and fight for justice, equality, and humanity. Show me an MLK quote where he says "Yo dudes, just riot, man". Especially the black civil rights movement was vulnerable to being portrayed as violent (racist stereotypes and everything). How did they get around that? Did Rosa Parks spit in the face of the cop who arrested her?
"Protests were overwhelmingly peaceful with riots at the fringes". The social media sphere is its own battleground, the AfD basically employs the same fake news outrage tactics as the MAGA sphere does in the US. No, you won't get Fox News to change its narrative and to stop just making things up, but that's not the only news network you have. Achieving anything on the social media front requires consistency and reach, honestly not my speciality. Ask someone who has never used a dial-up modem. Centrist-compatible edgy meme accounts with the occasional leap into the radical when the opportunity is right? Broad outreach is crucial otherwise the important stuff will stay in your bubble.
Also never forget that Antifa action can look like this. People do love to laugh at fascists, also liberals, even plenty of conservatives, give them plenty of opportunity to do so. Nick their clothes while they're bathing, the whole republic was snickering. Those things are click magnets as you can see them being picked up even by US media.
I actually did. I've got an ex girlfriend i really don't want to run into.
Edit: look, if i remind her i exist she might mention how bad i am in bed, and then id make it into some history books. No thank you.
I hope you're not sincerely avoiding protests because of an ex. I can't laugh about exes and bad sex when I live in fear every day that ICE might snatch my partner off the street.
It's not a bad joke on its own, it's just in poor taste considering the state of things. The fear of Trump's dictatorship far outweighs the fear of running into even my most abusive ex.
So, whether or not this is a bit¹: the potential harm from edgy jokes is the same as the harm from dystopian fiction warning us about bad things that could happen. The potential for harm is that dipshits with zero self awareness and less media literacy will just blindly copy the thing. Like how siliconbvalley billionaires have tried to do almost literally every part of 'snow crash'.
If my character in the bit is shitty and not someone you would want to be at any point, or I'm on a server defederated from beehaw and world; this danger is mitigated.
And for those who have actually been through shit, your criticism here comes off as privileged, colonizing, and completely misunderstanding what humor is, because you've never had a use for it. It comes off as 'if i laugh at myself i am lesser, because the only way i know how to laugh is by sorting groups and affirming my group's position at the top'. And thats a really bad fucking look. Im not saying shut up; im saying read up on the topic.
¹just for you; I'm never gonna tell now.
That's what you take away here? That I'm some privileged, humorless bigot that's never "been through shit"?
You gathered that from one comment. I guess all the 900-ish comments I've made here on Lemmy, many of which discuss my experiences with "shit" like disabilities, homelessness, and sexism just don't factor in. I make no secret of my struggles, past and present, and I genuinely fear my partner getting kidnapped and tortured in El Salvador. I was born with some kinds of targets already on my back, but under this administration, my partner's targets shine brighter than mine.
Of course, I didn't expect you to know any of that, in the same way I wouldn't expect you to know much of anything about a stranger after one interaction with them.
But it doesn't matter, as I can see I'm onboard the Lemmy Downvote train. So choo-choo, motherfuckers.
People usually only remember part of Thomas Jefferson’s quote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of tyrants.”
The full thing goes “The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
This is class warfare. We all need to start getting used to the fact that many of us patriots are going to die fighting this fascist machine.
I know, right? These fuvking anachronistic world war mashup re-enacters, fucking tear gassing and shooting random people as they get so mean towards the cops!
the fact that people are still "mostly" upvoting you proves they just haven't suffered enough yet. we'll get there.