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I'd recommend you don't sign anything at a protest, ever. No petitions, no signing up for orgs, not even if a goth baddie asks you to sign their tits. Do that stuff offsite before or after a protest on your own time where's it's a lot less likely to be an informational gathering tactic. You don't want a record of which protests you've been to, especially if they're the spicier kind where direct action might be happening.
Mask up and bloc up.
Yes, this. Phone at home, mask up if you plan on doing ANYTHING other than being an absolute boy scout. If a goth baddie asks you to sign their tits, use a fake name.
I might add that masking up is a good idea even if you plan on doing nothing but observing. Sometimes rightwing media personalities will photograph unmasked people at protests in an attempt to send online harassment their way regardless of whether they've done anything wrong. Additionally, there have been instances where innocent individuals have been charged with actions that other people in the crowd did, so even if you plan on being good, you could still get in trouble for the actions of others. A mask would add another layer of protection from identification and hopefully prevent you from getting wrongfully charged. I expect this administration to be particularly vindictive against protesters.
The goth baddie gets me every time.
Every serious American Leftist and member of a minority group needs to arm up yesterday.
A lot of "serious leftists" put us in this mess by being stubborn children in November.
Ok, I mean, not strictly relevant to action today, but ok.
What a lot of people forget is that for the vast majority of people, this is a progression. The reason petitions work is because they get awareness out there, which leads to more people showing up to the protest. The reason protests work is because that's where you sign people up to the orgs. And the reason all of these things work is because the people on the other end understand that if there are enough people petitioning or protesting, some percentage of those people will, if pushed hard enough, resort to more direct action. A petition isn't a plea, it's a threat. A protest isn't a complaint, its a show of strength. If people show up, those people can then be called upon for the next step, and the next. And when things go right, the steps further down the chain aren't needed, because the threat is enough.
Showing up with a slung AR-15 in an open carry state. It is AMAZING how polite the pigs are when armed citizens are standing around. You might also note the lack if ICE activity in such states. Funny that.
look man, i cant even schedule a movie night
Only violence really works, sadly
It is one of many viable avenues of resistance. You can also sabotage, disrupt, defund, harass, and scam the assholes.
This isn’t targeted towards you specifically but I gotta get this off my chest.
I keep seeing calls for violence, “Americans need to do X”, “why won’t Americans get real in the streets like the French etc”. They have a point but…
Lemmy is a public forum. The US famously has a large surveillance apparatus. What reasonable person would discuss illegal actions here?
Any real effective action like you’re probably imagining ain’t getting discussed here. Be serious and stop risking this platform with these whimsical calls for violence.
Good thing I do not live in the USA
They can't stop us all. Fuck surveilance
You know what worked in 2020?
Voting.
Voting for a few people will never let you truly speak for what you want. That's particularly the case when the voting system has problems like clearly being in favor of wealthy people
Or when you want to change the economical system entirely, things like that
When official agencies lie to the people, there's not much you can do
Please elaborate "direct action". What does that mean?
Costing relevant people money, basically. Strikes, sabotage, obstructions, that sort of thing
I love this idea, but how would this be mass organized without having the leaders of this movement almost immediately placed into prison?
One common tenant of direct action is decentralization. It's a lot harder to squash direct action when the people doing this stuff are just groups of 2-5+ friends (it's called an affinity group) who believe in the same stuff and have no common leader. Sometimes direct action is as simple as smashing up some windows in the dead of night and running away.
That’s where the mass action comes in. With enough people acting simultaneously, you have nowhere near enough prisons to hold the people protesting; and then the only way to stop them is some act of appeasement.
I don't think I can offer a solid answer to this I'm afraid, I am terrible at organising people. I would suggest that there are a lot of existing established groups with many different goals though, so it might be worth seeing if there's one you like that has a presence in your area
There's legal direct action (striking for example). As for the illegal stuff I have no idea, but it happens. Just Stop Oil made it three years before disbanding, and there are plenty of direct action-focused groups lying around.
No leaders. Small, independent cells
You all can't be serious right now. Are you saying the same lame fucking actions that all businesses are already aware of and have multiple folders for every single one just waiting to be countered is the way we do things?
I wouldn't doubt there's insurance for direct action.
I have never understood why people think stuff like this works in modern times. They're organized and funded. They have PhD mentats producing action plans and optimizations for how to handle any direct action you can throw at them. To the degree that I bet some of them fund projects that market direct action to their detectors since they already paid for the counter plans.
Anything that has been done in the past 50 years should be considered dead in the water. Need to adapt and find new ways to cost them.
Hell shit posting is honestly one of the most effective. They pay millions to get their message out there. They're limited by funding and how ever many bot farms they can purchase. But we have numbers and free time. If organized and done right you could exponentially explode their costs just by shit posting and making them pay more to get eyes on their stuff.
And yet, Brian Robert Thompson will never kill again.
It seems very silly to claim that strikes don't work, they regularly get shit done. But I did not actually advocate for anything in particular in my comment, I just answered the question above
A strike?
Most of you post platitudes when 20 workers in Scranton Pickett for weeks without pay only to gain $5 in wages in exchange for 2 weeks of vacation. Imagine actually organizing and boycotting that company collectively and giving them attention instead of just passively observing which is my point.
Ahh yeah I hate when I go on strike and successfully get better pay and more holidays. Why even bother? I should just shit post online instead.
UHG and Blackstone.
He wants other people to commit violence and risk their lives while he stays safe behind his keyboard.
This is what I assumed, and correctly I see.
Most of this shit i see online is pacifist Democrats and leftists who dont own guns trying to instigate a mentally ill person to commit violence for them.
