• 2 Posts
  • 94 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle


  • Fox News Host: “We found a real live LA resident to tell us how they feel”

    Real Live LA Guy: “Yo, hey, hello from Miami, I’m here to say Go Trump! Love MAGA! Based! Chad! Bitcoin $1M, you gotta buy my book The DJ Entrepreneur! Also, yeah, love my Cuban homies. Word up to everyone who came over here in a raft with no money, no documentation, no nothin! America land of the free home of the fat bags of change, amirite! Hey Ainsley, you fine as hell, want to bounce on my thang after this?”

    Fox News Host: “As you can see, the residents of LA are terrified and cry out for a stronger police presence.”





  • I’m opposed to citizens being the ones to escalate the situation.

    “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!”

    Don’t just hand him an excuse.

    The excuse was the existence of Hispanic people in Paramount, California. Everything that followed was a consequence of Trump’s bigoted pogrom against Latinos.

    Make them look like the bullies they are.

    They already do. But slapping the “bully” bumper sticker on an ICE truck full of your neighbors does nothing to get them out of that truck.

    What the people of LA are doing is so much more than optics. They are actively saving lives and guarding their friends and neighbors from police violence.

    They are resisting in the most material and direct way anyone can ask.



  • A country split in half by a Russian military occupation is a direct result of a Russian military occupation

    The goal of Maidan was to push Russian oligarchs out of Ukraine. You can’t call that a success, unless you just stop recording history after 2021.

    The idea that Ukrainians just showed up with guns and poof they won, is blinkered.

    We didn’t choose to get invaded.

    Simply showing up with guns did not make a rival military force vanish.









  • We had six months without protests. The administration seemed happy to escalate in their absence.

    What if these protests aren’t what’s driving public policy? What if the problem is the administration itself and not the people reacting to the violence they’re inflicting on the locals?

    And ask yourself this. If ICE came into your city, what kind of community would you want to live in? One where your neighbors took to the streets to shut down the police convoys and scare off these thugs? Or one where friendly neighbors locked their doors and hid, while reactionary neighbors singled you out for the police to grab?




  • When they finally got sick of it and announced that they were going to come back tomorrow and do an armed march, the cops suddenly remembered that they all had dentist appointments in Belarus that day and skipped town.

    Sure, but that was in lily-white Ukraine where the people doing the protests were aligned with Western European geopolitical interests and looking to overthrow an ally of the Putin Regime. So, of course the history we write about it is going to valorize the Ukrainians and paint the effort as trivial and the opposition as spineless.

    What happened when Iraqis started showing up in armed protests outside of the US-occupied Green Zone? Or the Yemini Houthis began arming protesters against the Saudi-allied national government? Or the West Bank protesters began throwing rocks at Israeli tanks? Or the Ferguson BLM protesters or Hong Kong democracy protesters or Syrian Green Revolution protesters started showing up to tussle with police?

    Hell, even taken in the best possible light, the Maidan revolution ended in… what? A country split in half by a Russian military occupation.

    This isn’t to detract from the virtues of armed resistance. But people love to harp on the eventual, occasional victories and hate to reminisce on the far more prolific depressing failures. It’s easy to talk about Vietnamese insurgents triumphing in 1974 when you forget the revolution kicked off in earnest in 1940.

    “Just show up with guns and the police will crawl away on their bellies and you’ll win” is as painfully naive as the “Just show up with flowers and the police will put down their riot gear and greet you with hugs and songs”.

    Nothing about this is easy or guaranteed. Nobody is getting to the end of this without shedding blood. If you show up with a weapon to a protest, you better be prepared to have weapons used on you in turn. Don’t go in thinking you can bluff your way to a glorious revolution.