Keep in mind, the property damage after the murder of George Floyd was started by a white supremacist, too. “Umbrella man” smashed windows on an auto zone and spray painted it “free shit zone,” it would later be set on fire. Out of 20 people charged in Minnesota for rioting, only 4 were actually local to the state.
and msm and fox was showing mostly the looting and not the protest itself.
Always with the “liberals”.
Usually for posts like these I assume they’re talking about the unfortunately large group of milquetoast left-leaning Americans who think the system destroying their livelihoods can be reasoned with, as if the people stepping on our necks are just unaware of their actions, and would feel really bad if we wrote them a letter explaining the situation. They’re certainly better than the neck-steppers themselves, but neither will ever actually fight to improve the situation we’re in.
Ah, the Liberal Surrogate ™️.
Insert the thing you want to use as a punching bag. The right, the left, the middle, doesn’t matter. Choose your own adventure.
To be fair, back when I would have identified as a Liberal, I was exactly the type of person to say “If we just communicate that we’re unhappy more effectively, they’ll listen this time for sure!”
I mean, I miss those days.
Bright eyed and bushy tailed. Believing that most people are kind at heart…
Now I’m pretty sure my neighbors will call ICE on my other neighbors if they ever do anything even slightly annoying.
Spent nearly a decade doing data analysis for the corrections system. Just one small part, but we interfaced with many others in different parts of government, academics, and NGOs, spinning our wheels discussing how to implement progressive reform, reform we have had mountains of hard evidence corrects a lot of problems, especially reducing recidivism. The big hurdle wasn’t corrupt politicians, or privatization of the prison system (not saying those weren’t major problems, just different ones) the big issue was that the average person is vicious, and wants to sit in their house, seeing “bad” people on a screen, get destroyed by the system. A HUGE portion of the population have a vicarious blood lust for seeing people get punished, the harsher, the better. This allows for the punitive system we have, which makes it an open field for other predatory practices. Suggesting anything to the counter will not get anyone elected, and will stir backlash from throngs of morons asking why we should do anything less than just execute criminals on the spot.
Those who don’t either are a minority that grew up differently, or had this unjust bloodlust targeted at them, or someone they care about.
Yeah, exactly which liberals are we talking about? Maga? This shit is beyond moronic.
Philosophical liberals. Right to private property and engage in commerce, individualist, idealist, legalist ethics liberals.
maybe people who are really into Liberace?
classical liberals maybe
Classical liberalism was an improvement over what came before it. Neoliberalism is when it morphed into anarcho-capitalist-esque “austerity for the poor; rights and subsidies for corporations”
They keep forgetting to put “neo” in front.
I dunno man, there are some who ONLY operate under the Marxist definition of “Liberal”. They don’t believe language evolves and that maybe to most people “Liberal” is the term used to describe anyone with progressive ideals.
Because the Marxist version of liberals still call themselves liberals and have intentionally erased the semantic existence of all ideologies left of them so that they can pretend to be the left.
Sure. But the bucket of people that term encapsulates doesn’t match that definition anymore.
That’s not how that works. That only makes sense if like liberal parties didn’t exist. Saying Social Democrats or Socialists or Greens are more liberal than Liberals on some issues doesn’t make any sense, it like implies that the Liberals are ontologically the most progressive.
Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK)
Is it democratic? Is it a Republic? Names don’t always represent their namesake.
There also is no party titled “Liberal” in the USA, which is what I’m specifically referencing since this post is about USA “liberals”.
Like no, just no, stop trying to make “liberal” synonymous with progressive, they are different things.
They don’t learn that part during their tankie training
Where’s that tankie factory anyways? They must come from somewhere
.ml mostly
It’s a Tankie thing. They call everyone a liberal.
Nah it’s a leftist thing.
Liberals are centrists who maintain the status quo and at best ask for “reforms” without substantially wanting to change the underlying system.
They think improvements like ranked choice voting would make capitalism magically end poverty and inequality. That if a few more people benefit from social programs, that you can overlook the others still suffering because it’s “better”.
I am a leftist. I’m telling you they call everyone liberals. They even call Trump a liberal.
Liberals are moderate conservatives, a.k.a. Establishment Democrats. And then you have the GOP, which consists of extreme right Fascists, so far right they’re practically the antisis of liberal. There is no dominant centrist or leftist party in the United States. The closest we have in office are AOC and Bernie, and even they’re just barely to the left of center in my eyes.
Ranked choice voting won’t solve everything, but it’s a step in the right direction. It’s worth giving it a chance.
Leftists often call them liberal because many of them use the term to define one who believes in Liberalism.
“Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.”
Thus anyone who is liberal believes in the right to private property. MAGA strongly believes in such. No leftist believes in such. Thus in their use, a leftist cannot be a liberal.
It’s just a different usage of a term based on cultural differences.
Liberals are moderate conservatives
What kind of brainrot is this?
I see the problem. You heard something from leftists, and then brought up something said by liberals.
Easy mistake in the bullshit US discourse
Yeah the monolithing OP is doing is honestly impressive. Here, let me try another:
“Americans say trans rights are human rights, but then they also say trans people should be banned from public restrooms. Wtf lol???”
During the BLM demonstrations right wing provocatours deliberately caused damage to discredit the demonstrations. Two were caught and prosecuted in Cleveland where i live. Don’t be a tool
Yep. Pretty much all of the negative issues from the BLM protests were off duty cops or non-local white supremacists trying to provoke violence.
Remember the conveniently placed pallets of bricks?
Ahh yes how could we forget those government-provided taxpayers’ bricks that mysteriously overnight appeared on city street corners.
Then after nobody used them to break windows or anything at all, the brick pallets mysteriously disappeared the next night.
Here we had The Umbrella man https://abcnews.com/amp/US/man-helped-ignite-george-floyd-riots-identified-white/story?id=72051536 And another guy who set fire to a parking lot attendants booth
Um, all BLM has to do is wear merch and hold up a sign and the police start lobbing CS grenades.
The point of protest isn’t to riot, but to get the state to over-respond, brutally. Its why the entire world knows about and sympathizes with the BLM cause.
At least that’s the game, according to COIN. Hearts and minds. Though in the Civil Rights movement, we added lawsuits.
And Trump and the red states are quick with their riot squads. Left wing movements just have to represent and make booga-booga faces to trigger anti-riot shooting civilians with rubber bullets. (They’re plastic and steel, actually.)
And then two years later, the victims are awarded millions from the districts or the US treasury, depending on the department of the officer who decided it was time to bust heads.
Law enforcement in the US has already lost its legitimacy in the public eye, worldwide. We know they’re just thugs of the state, and their response to protest, especially minority protest, especially black protest, figures largely into that paradigm shift.
So, just because protesters in the US still carry signs instead of molotovs, doesn’t mean the protests are weak. It means the state’s responsers are incredibly easily trolled into initiating violence while camers are watching.
The point of protesting is not to provoke the state to kill you so that people will watch it.
There are many points to protesting. Provoking the opposition is one of them. We see this in civil disobedience protests and noncooperation actions.
Provocation of state responders is one of the effects of protest, regardless of whether it is intended. But it’s so consistent, especially in authoritarian regimes, that it is absolutely figured into the calculations of organizers. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, staged actions expecting casualties, but knowing they would ultimately further the cause by orders of magnitude.
It’s unlikely you (a specific person) will get killed at a protest, but we see casualties at protests all the time, and they are often honored, such as the Kent State victims, who have a folk song written about them. It also sparked a student strike four million strong, and helped to speed the end of the war.
Not all antagonistic responses have to be lethal or even injurious to to create a backlash in support of the cause. The No Kings Snapchat account shutdown by Meta is already resulting in backlash against the Trump regime, against Zuckerberg, and against the tech bro coalition in general.
But again, all a state really needs to do is manage a protest with grace. Authoritarian regimes just have a tendency to take visible dissent personally (or any criticism, really), and then more liberal states often fail to instill in their law enforcement a predisposition of deescalation. I suspect right-wingers just enjoy the notion of cracking dissenter heads so much they can’t help themselves.
sorry but that’s an amazing photo. i hope it’s a photo, i ain’t look too close
I’m pretty sure I remember that actually happening, because my shithead dad was angry about it.
They should make him eat there
it ain’t the same guys saying both.
Goomba fallacy
I will never forget when the neighborhood Facebook was alight about the hoards that were going house by house through the suburbs. That was almost 10 miles of suburban sprall…my nerd brain can’t fathom the logistics of that and where that force would have come from.
“Having a conversation” is a stall tactic.
Americana’s will only do shit that doesn’t inconvenience them. Which pretty much rules out any and all meaningful protest. They’ll gather in streets, sure. But the moment it comes at a cost- they’re far too busy.
This happens because they slept. And it got worse because they refused to wake up.
Americana’s will only do shit that doesn’t inconvenience them.
For some, sure. For others I think a good part of it is the fear of doing shit that will negatively impact others like them.
I am in a position of privilege and can afford the inconveniences, but what effective act could I take that wouldn’t result in making the lives of numerous other people tip out of balance and potentially cause them or their dependents to become unhoused or go without food or medicine?
For the average person, living has become more and more precarious. We have fewer and fewer safety nets and the rich are quick to make those they have power over feel the pain of resistance first. We have no guarantee of healthcare, less and less food assistance, unaffordable childcare, poor elder care. All purposely done by the capitalist class. This has created a human shield around them.
It’s like the only options are indirectly accelerationist. Cause unavoidable collateral damage, blame those at the top, and hope it inspires those at the bottom to act instead of turn on you? I don’t like that.
All these people saying that Americans can’t protest forget that we literally host hometown hero Luigi. Arguably the best way to get the message across. Needs more consistency, but It’s certainly effective.
a lot of people somehow missed the fact that luigi’s actions worked to force change immediately.
“somehow” as in the media kept that part quiet as best they could.
I’ve said it before.
People are alive today that wouldnt be alive if someone hadnt shot that UHC CEO.
The entire insurance industry got so scared and so panicked that they stopped denying coverage for curable issues for like… the next year. Hundreds, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people are alive today, and are in better health today, because one vile piece of shit got shot and died.
Thats an easy trade to make any day of the week.
And that change was the mass deployment of Flock cameras Nation-wide.
Temporarily IIRC. Didn’t they quietly revert their changes later, denying just as many claims again?
To be fair, I’ve never met someone who doesn’t either support or denounce violent protests in general - French or otherwise. This sounds like someone getting angry at the internet as a whole, without seeming to understand that it’s made up of so many different people that it simultaneously holds all possible viewpoints at the same time.
The people that “denounce violent protest” are people that have never been to a protest that wasn’t a planned parade. Violence is an inevitable result of protests because the state itself uses violence to stop the protest. No matter how peaceful its initial intentions of protest are.
A “protest” that has a start and end date coordinated with the state is not a protest. It is a parade.
The majority of what people call “violence” is property damage. Property damage is not violence. But somehow we convince everyone that broken windows are worse than broken bones.
The same people that “denounce violent protest” also seem to have no problem with the use of chemical weapons on crowds of unarmed people. You go out to a protest, the first time your eyes are burning from tear gas you’ll understand why any protest will fight back when violence is first placed on them by the state.
Steps to make people watching on TV “denounce violent protest”
(0) Society reaches a breaking point and protest form with the purpose to disrupt the ability of society to operate without acknowledging the injustice the protest is pointing towards. (1) Protest are labeled “violent” because of property damage. Usually with less property damage than the aftermath of the average football match “celebration” results in. But these initially small acts of property damage are the focus of the media. Very little is said about why the protest started to begin with. (2) Police use chemical weapons (banned in warfare) on their own citizens. Rubber bullets, flash bangs, hoses, etc. All acts of actual violence. Don’t believe me? Take a rubber bullet to the head and tell me it’s not violence. (3) Protesters respond to violence with self defense measures. Kick back tear gas canisters, using leaf blowers, and becoming more defensive in body armor and gas masks to maintain the disruption the protest is meant to create. Yes. The goal of a protest is to disrupt society and inconvenience you. That’s the whole point. Stop saying “it makes me not support them when they block the road”. Dude, they are blocking the road because you weren’t supporting them. Protest is the voice of the unheard. (4) Police work to escalate violence through plain clothes officers working to increase property damage and get crowds of people to reach levels of property damage not intended by the protest. An individual act of violence of a single protestor or act of property damage can be used as justification to use violence on to a larger degree on the crowd. The police goal is not to keep the protest peaceful. The goal is to escalate the violence so they can justify their own levels of violence. (5) Media covers the protest primarily on the property damage and violence of the protesters. The violence of the police is not spoken about. The violence of the police is treated as “keeping order” when it is doing the opposite. All the time we watch media people on the ground not “afraid of the violent protesters” but are literally running away from tear gas and flash bangs themselves. Next time you watch media coverage, watch how the media acts, it’s far more telling than how the media speaks. (6) The protest either dies out due to people not wanting to risk their lives as the violence is escalated by the police. OR the protests continue and are primarily maintained by those willing to use violence in self defense.
All of this time. The protestors would leave and allow the disruption to end if even a fraction of their demands are met. Paris protest started because of a failure in the education system. The government would rather spend their money on a militarized police force than on education. That should tell you a lot about the reason why protest became necessary to begin with.
TLDR: There are no “peaceful protest” that are capable of achieving the end results the protest itself is trying to achieve. The state will respond in violence to stop anything that actually has a chance of forcing change. There is no staying peaceful when chemical weapons and rubber bullets are introduced.
It’s refreshing to see someone else explicitly state that property damage isn’t violence.
It’s capitalist and media propaganda to conflate the two to protect themselves.
It’s one of those things that is just heavily a part of the education system and media that no one really questions.
However, it’s also a very easy thing to explain. When people realize that their governments and their media care more about property damage than the lives it’s populations children; it’s a very radicalizing moment for a lot of people.
Thanks. My app always errors uploading images.
I don’t think the people saying “protest like the french” are the “liberals” OP is claiming “lost their mind” at BLM. This feels like strawman of strawman.
i support violent protests. light teslas on fire, raid a walmart, block amazon delivery trucks.
but i don’t support, for example, people breaking in and robbing some independent shopkeeper’s grocery store. like, those are working class people on your side…
Well yeah liberals value property more than human life. That’s been true for all of liberalism. I’d say it’s the core tenet of liberalism. For liberalism private property is the most sacred belief they have.
Don’t forget order. Order is the other guiding principle of liberalism. Although I guess you could say that order exists to protect property. So maybe it’s a 1B kind of thing.
As a liberal, I’m gonna need these rules in a paper copy if you don’t mind. Because I’m all for killing authoritarianism and budgening oppressors… And I care little about my own private property in my pursuit to do those things.
Property can be replaced. Murdering your oppressors is forever.
I’m assuming you aren’t a liberal? Or left of anything? On a scale of one to ten, how much do you love boots?
What private property do you have? Do you have like a factory or a own a forest or a mine or something? You sure you’re not talking about personal property?
My house? My acres of farmland? My acres of forest I own? That property?
Yes, I do own part of a forest on my property.
Also for the record I’m not American. Your definition may vary wildly from mine.
Well your house is personal property, but as for the rest sure. I was wrong. You are a capitalist. Congrats on that I guess.
You’re throwing a lot of words around without knowing the meaning of any of them. How is the government deciding where my property line starts and ends, how the county taxes my property where it starts and ends, makes me a capitalist because I pay into taxes that help people in my community, I don’t commercialize my land, I keep my woodlands open for public hunting every year, and let people camp on my property as long as they let me know they’re there?
Are you sure you are a liberal? Cuz it sounds to me that you’re way to the left of liberals. I could be wrong though. Maybe you are a liberal. Maybe you’re one of that group of people that every single time it comes to supporting the the workers or supporting fascism you’ll support fascism. Cuz that’s what liberals do.
Liberals will always turn against the working class. We have 300 years of human history that backs this lesson up and I have no sympathy for people who have refused to learn from it.
Liberal has a completely different meaning in the US and has for about the last century. Wikipedia article on social liberalism in general and here’s one on modern liberalism in the US, but if you don’t want to read all that, here’s an excerpt:
Modern liberalism in the United States emerged with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and is the prevailing version of liberalism in the country. It is most synonymous with the ideology known as social liberalism in much of the world, combining in the U.S. version elements of cultural liberalism, American progressivism, civil liberty and social equality with support for social justice and a mixed economy
and a bit later in the same article:
Economically, modern liberalism embraces a role for government to protect against market failures, ensure competition and prevent corporate monopolies, and supports labor rights through the strengthening of public- and private-sector labor unions, collective bargaining, unemployment insurance and minimum wage laws.
So I think perhaps you can see how the term means something completely different there. It’s really closer to socdem than classical liberal.
And as a kicker, the US “conservative” party is economically liberal, whereas much of the “liberal” party is not (unfortunately much of the old guard there are more liberal rather than liberal).
TL;DR: Yes, the economic term “liberalism” means “let corpos do whatever the fuck”. In the modern meaning of the word politically, it’s more “all people are created equal and all deserve to be free”.
I’ve seen this argument parroted a few times online. Unfortunately it just does not hold water whatsoever. We have 50, or closer to 60 now, years of liberal policy in America that flies in the face of this argument 100%. We have decades of anti labor, anti-regulation, Pro corporate, pro Wall Street, anti civil liberties and all around liberal policies to show us otherwise.
It’s no coincidence that we are where we are. Because as you alluded to it’s not just one party. Republicans are absolutely liberal, or they were before the last 10 years at least. As were Democrats. That’s the history of American politics basically since the beginning. Two liberal parties. One leaning slightly more conservative and one leaning slightly more Progressive. Or some might put it, the party of the grand bourgeoisie and the party of the petite bourgeoisie. But both fundamentally liberal. America was the first great liberal Revolution and it is something that gas guided us ever since. But it has not changed.
You mentioned the Old Guard of the Democratic party being “classical liberal” instead of your supposed new definition. However that Old Guard has been just the guard for a very long time. I would argue always. It’s not a remnant. It’s a feature. With the new arising of the new Democrats in the '80s. Clinton and Gore and their ilk. What did their rise to power bring about? Massive deregulation. The gutting of Labor. With their Republican allies they instituted an extremely liberal policy that tore apart any Progressive advances that had been made in the previous decades. Though it’s not like Jimmy Carter didn’t put his stamp on it either. Was Obama old guard? I wouldn’t argue so certainly, yet there’s a very good reason why when he tried to implement his liberal free trade policies he had all of the Republicans and about half the Democrats behind him. Certainly his expansion of their surveillance state and protecting big Banks like Wells Fargo were extremely liberal policies of a classical nature.
We could go on and on. The point is It doesn’t hold up. This concept of a new definition of liberal just doesn’t coincide with reality. Because the reality of what the Liberals in America vote for what they support what they legislate is the exact same definition of what liberals world over do. So when people tell you that liberalism is a different word in America understand that that’s a psyop. Because liberals and conservatives in America would love you to think that liberalism is as far left as you can go. They would love you not to have a actual Progressive Party. Which is what the Democratic party pretends to be but it’s actually a liberal party with a few progressives chained up in the bowels of the boat.
Ah the great lie of American politics. That Liberals are somehow different in America than the rest of the world. But it’s funny. When you look at the things that American liberals vote for and support it sure seems like the exact same fucking things they do in the rest of the world doesn’t it?
There is an enormous amount of evidence to disprove the idea that liberals will always support fascism. Fascism explicitly rejected liberal democracy, individual rights, and political pluralism. Liberals were among those persecuted by fascist regimes, and liberal democracies were instrumental in defeating said fascist regimes.
Never understood the lengths some Lemmy users go to describe liberalism in these ways. It’s just as bad when people do the same thing towards ideologies such as communism
Return2ozma: posts accurate meme
Americans: (insert excuse or bad reaction here)
Always happens
But if the protests are supposed to go against the status quo why are they worried about whether those status quo liberals are angered by the protests that would be going on against them?
If we try to do a proper protest, we’ll get killed by subpar gun laws and a shot by some members of the official Kyle Rittenhouse fan club.
