There was actually a pretty good comment here once about how MLK and Gandhi only really succeeded with progress when a visible and difficult threat to the system was perceived.
Civil rights stagnated until the ramp up with the march to Washington and widespread riots from groups like the black panthers were damaging public society.
Similarly, Gandhi had trouble convincing the British to even consider independence until widespread communal violence swept the nation in the aftermath of WWII.
Both figures were touted as succeeding in history books due to their non violent movements, but in reality they simply became the center of attention for media at the time which solidified them as icons of their respective movements.
Ironically, both were assassinated which means their opposition definitely viewed them as a a powerful political threat, and not just some supporters for peace.
Oh for fuck’s sake, if you want to start a revolt then fucking start it already. Fascism is here right now, so you need to fight it right now. You’re doing no good by sitting around and saying “I would have totally joined the Revolution if one had spontaneously formed around me.”
If a violent resistance isn’t feasible in the here-and-now (and it isn’t) then you need to find other ways to resist.
Ok I go do a revolution now, thanks for the pep talk.
We will join if we hear about it
I remember learning about people like MLK with respect and admiration for his methods, but also being taught to not use our first Amendment Rights to stir up trouble. It was definitely a conflicting message, and probably the reason everybody today recognizes that we have an extremely serious problem, but nobody wants to start the trouble that will finally deal with it.
We won’t have to, though. They want trouble, and they will have their trouble, even if they have to instigate it.
The thing is that MLK’s legacy, while absolutely awesome, has been appropriated by whites and we’re constantly told “he was one of the good ones”. Many of MLK’s false advocates will conveniently forget that he was the target of the FBI for sowing civil disobedience.
checks and balances is not a lie it just does not work when folks don’t do their job. its like they did the patriot act because bush jr. didn’t do his job. No system can work when a significant amount of the components are bad actors.
Yeah, we entrusted too many shitty people.
Threat actors are colluding… Democrats included
I wouldn’t say democrats are in on it. I would say democrats are being lead by the same strings. It all ties back to the money. GOP and DNC alike are results of private interests. Now, how the private interests align cant really be known but it is something to think about. I mean its safe to assume thier only function is to amass more wealth but then we are just talking about capitalism.
Truth is, normal people arent part of the equation they are a remainder that gets deemed negligible or shuffled to the side. Its absurd, really, when they are the driving force but to consider them anything other than a statistic is against all modern theories of capitalism.
This is probably the wrong venue for this discussion but I just wanted to say, I dont think democrats are in on it but are just as much chess pieces being moved around as the GOP are.
I can get behind that… They are both regime whores with specific functions.
They dont call to shots, they execute daddy’s master plans.
Dems are in on it too. Look at insider trading and Nancy pelosi. There is money to be made by them so they’re not in a hurry to change things either for the greater good.
The fact that everyone is stuck on Nancy Pelosi when there the list of people making money off their station in government email goes on and on. Mostly just sexism.
I read: “checks and balances do not work”
They arent working. Att least the checks and balances we have now.
Yeah you can’t be taught about future failures of a system. The only way for it not be able to not be working is for humans to not be in the equation of government. Which is one of the reasons ai taking over does not scare me. Either they kill us all. Win for the planet. Or they run things properly. Win for everybody.
They dont teach future failures but they do teach the robustness of our checks and balances.
Which turns our to be not very.
Its incredibly robust. Its lasted over two hundred years through several constitutional crises. Its possible it might even survive this. Whats happening now required complacency of a majority of both houses of congress, a large swath of the judiciary, plus the executive. Thats pretty damn robust. Its like saying a bridge is not robust even though its stayed up when some of its supports got destroyed but once over half of them were taken out it finally started to crack.
It didn’t last over two hundred years. It failed utterly in 1861 and wasn’t restored until 1865. That was only 160 years ago.
It probably would’ve failed again in the 1930s but the Roosevelt Democrats were able to take control of both the legislative and executive branches and make the checks and balances irrelevant, and then the rest of the world bombed itself into the dirt, allowing America to become fat and rich enough that you didn’t notice the rot.
“Watches an orange buffoon turn the government into a authoritarian regime.”
Its incredibly robust!
Same time, “the American experiment”, “a young democracy”, “27 constitutional ammendments”, etc.
You’re missing the whole point. If majority are shitty people, that’s what you get.
Youre missing the point, government was suppose to be designed to fend off shitty people destroying it.
Edit:
Listen, Im taking this position not because Im particularly enthusiastic about it but really just trying it on for size.
Is there anything else you would like to add to bolster your position? Im sure these is more nuance and I havent hit on it yet.
What did you guys not learn about civil disobedience?
It’s non-violence, but it breaks the laws “designed to keep things civil.” It’s meant to disrupt, it’s means to obstruct, it’s meant to annoy the shit out of the people you are protesting.
I haven’t seen any civil disobedience. Which is weird because the boomers did it all the time.
A protest isn’t civil disobedience. Boycotts aren’t civil disobedience.
A crowd of hundreds blocking a bridge is. People blocking entrances to government buildings is. People surrounding bases is. People flooding the capitol or disrupting the discourse of policy is. The reason they use the military and ICE is because they are terrified that people will remember that even 1% of the US doing this far outnumbers them.
Non violent protests work if the alternative is violence. Otherwise they just keep sending in violent bullies to dismantle the protests.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice
A crowd of hundreds blocking a bridge is. People blocking entrances to government buildings is. People surrounding bases is. People flooding the capitol or disrupting the discourse of policy is. The reason they use the military and ICE is because they are terrified that people will remember that even 1% of the US doing this far outnumbers them.
The absolute whining from people when they are moderately inconvenienced is depressing. “Sure, death camps are bad but did they have to block the bridge? I’m going to be late for my brunch!” Well, the person in a camp is going to be late for stuff, too.
I’ve seen someone on this platform, call out people who block bridges as having a “lack of empathy because you’ve never had to be somewhere on time”
You’re so right, how dare I make someone late for their dentist appointment. Let the genocide continue, by all means.
Which is why it’s effective if coordinated and done well. It makes things relevant immediately for the public, for officials, for businesses.
It will annoy them to the point of either joining them out of frustration, or at least saying “do something!” To the government.
I have no misconceptions that they will happily massacre civilians when those orders arrive, but until those orders arrive they are only trying to intimidate. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the current orders are quite simply: “Walk and look scary.”
They are clearly more afraid of us than them. They’re nothing more than buzzing insects with stingers.
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There’s a reason why Marsha P. Johnson is remembered.
For throwing the first fucking brick.
So basically what the climate protesters are doing.
The only way you are hearing about protesters on privately owned media is if those billionaires want you to hear about them.
YES! As my aunt would tell me: if you aren’t getting arrested, you aren’t making an impact.
Ehhhh… they’re more so just being a bit… annoying once in a while. They make the cause look bad sometimes. Throwing soup on a van Gogh just looks a little dumb.
Because only the annoying parts get put into oligarch-controlled media.
I really wish climate protesters grew some ovaries and literally killed CEOs with firearms, but they are are all limp-dick pacifists and nothing is being done to cease the degeneration of climate change in the past 50 years.
Why do you wish that?
You could buy a gun and do it yourself. Why does it need to be someone else’s job to do it for you?
Problem is I’m not a climate protestor and don’t give a shit about the climate because I’m barely able to afford rent. What’s stopping you from doing it?
I’m not a climate protestor and don’t give a shit about the climate
Then why are you complaining that climate activism is ineffective?
We learned the hippies were ineffectual drug addicts that believed in super weird stuff. Then HIV happened and free love was over. Then Manson family killed a bunch of people and became a scape goat. The hippies lost their appeal. Computers blew up and we never went back to that place to try and figure out how to do it right.
Wow. Really? When was this? Where was this?
I certainly remember several times when learning American history throughout my education about the Civil Rights movement and the resistance to the Vietnam War.
Admittedly though, I don’t know how much of that I learned in school, vs learned in Museums.
We learned about free love and the hippie movement in school. I went to school in a very blue state.
That’s incredible. Maybe Minnesota is just that different? My son still learned about the civil rights movement and civil disobedience in 2nd grade. Specifically they mentioned MLK Jrs marches and sit-ins, and how even something as small as Rosa Parks sitting where she wasn’t allowed to was an act of civil disobedience.
I wonder if Id remember the cover of the text books if I saw them. Anyway, sorry your kids arent getting the education I received but to be honest, it wasn’t that great. At least for me but there are another of other personal factors that attribute to that.
? No, I’m saying they are getting the education I received. It’s not exactly a topic you dump on kids in second grade in its full reality. You introduce the pieces over time. Edit: I should say this is Minnesota.
One misconception I had about civil disobedience from what I’d learned in school is that it’s a reliable means of drawing attention to your cause: your willingness to subject yourself to legal punishment will communicate to the public how critical you consider the issue to be.
What I learned from witnessing it first-hand is that officials and the media will invent their own narratives about your actions out of whole cloth, and the statement the public thinks you’re making is subject to arbitrary filtering and distortion.
Sounds about right.
When it comes to the media the well is poisoned. We need to teach an entire population how to consume new media and we cant do it fast enough.
Eventually, though, that will stabilize. Then there will be cultural revolutions in that space.
What is this “new media” for you? Because for many it means sources that tell an alternative truth. Usually written in Sankt-Peterburg.
And there use to be these things call tabloids, what is your point?
And there use to be these things call tabloids, what is your point?
Asking you what you mean with “new media”.
I don’t really think you define it as “anything that isn’t a tabloid”, because tabloids have the same content as what I understand under “new media”. And because my understanding of “New Media” is basically “alternative facts, just like in tabloids”, and I don’t think you necessary understand it the same way, I am asking.
That’s what Im asking. Not all new media is tabloid hogwashery. So, impasse?
Civil disobedience is not meant to draw attention. It’s meant to fight back without violence.
Drawing attention is a protest or a boycott.
Civil disobedience can overlap with both direct action and protest. But that’s my point: we were only ever taught about the latter.
Ok fair, yes.
“Checks and balances” in the context of US federal government just means that each branch has the ability to check the growth of power of the others. It’s not “a lie” because it’s still true. Right now congress could, if they wanted to, impeach the president or pass laws preventing him from doing the things he wants. The SCOTUS could stop him too if they wanted to actually take up cases on the law instead of using the shadow docket to avoid making rulings.
Trump partisans hold a trifecta in government right now so they are not going to use their checks they have available to them. But one branch refusing to check another because its members were elected from the same stock of partisan lunatics is not the same as checks and balances not existing.
The executive is exceeding its power. Whether the other branches are just ok with it doesnt matter, they fail their obligation to the constitution. The executive does not have the power to rewrite the constitution. The executive does not have the power to write law. The executive does not have the power to deploy the military. The executive does not have the power to tariff. These are all things that are going unchecked.
The legislature doesnt even have some of these powers without a super majority. They are only stalling the process to prevent the checks from occuring.
The checks still exist to correct those abuses of power. Just because congress or SCOTUS is unwilling to use them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
A law that can be ignored is not a law.
That’s a nice bromide but framing the current constitutional crises as the result of a “lie” about checks and balances fundamentally mischaracterizes the issues at hand. For one it diminishes the compliance of the other branches which is clearly critical for enabling the abuse that we see. And it also overlooks the general issue that about half the national actively enables the naked corruption and ascendant facism of the current government.
The problem of the present moment is not the structure of the government it’s the tolerance of the population.
The constitution never intended the general populace to govern. Look at things like the electoral college, the make up of the senate, gerrymandering, voting rights. Liberals believe in majority rule. I wouldn’t go as far as to say populism but we are seeing the results of populism from the GOP. The founders (not my fucking fathers) looked at governments like Athens and said, no way.
The people do have power, but after they express that power they need to establish government. Our constitution is basically toilet paper to the people in charge because it doesnt grant them what they really want. Authoritarian rule. Today, checks and balances are not preventing them from imposing it.
The point I was making was that the people who are in power are in power because about half of all voters are fine with them being in power and about a third actively want facist rule. Ultimately thisis not a failure of government structure. It’s a failure of citizens. Maybe that will change as those who supported trump from ignorance experience the consequences of their decisions. Maybe not. But trump won the popular vote last election cycle and has always enjoyed a fairly substantial base. A base that penalizes conservatives who worked against him by removing them from power. You cannot ignore the role that the people played in bringing about the current state of affairs. We are getting what people voted for.
Btw the checks do still work. They work in lower courts as they apply the law without regard to partisanship. They, surprisingly, work in grand juries. And they work for non MAGA states to the extent that our federalized system gives more influence to local governments. Where they have failed is where maga politicians enjoy wide support.
The point Im making is that checks and balances were not intended to hinge on the will of the people. They were supose to protect the structure of government themselves.
I was taught that the founding fathers’ did not take into account a two-party political system when they designed the system of checks and balances.
They did take it into account and George Washington himself said it was a terrible idea because it would lead to exactly where we are now.
Fuck those slavers.
It is kind of just the endstate of democratic systems. If you need the populace to vote for you (whether directly or through representatives in a parliament or whatever), you inevitably end up down selecting based on key issues. Which means you get more and more coalitions based on, generally speaking, the French Revolution (i.e. Left and Right).
The US is obviously ahead of the curve. But we are increasingly seeing coalitions between the political parties in Western Europe and so forth. Because they understand that splitting the vote between the three left leaning parties that disagree on the exact level of taxation or the priority queue is just a guaranteed loss once the other side has already stopped doing that.
Ranked choice voting theoretically helps with this (and isn’t too dissimilar in impact to things like the party primaries in the US…) but it still ends up on 2-3 core mega-parties.
What did the nebulous “they” teach us about civil disobedience again? Because I’m not sure I ever learned that lesson in the first place 😈
IDK, in school they spent a lot of time on MLK and Gandhi, focusing on non-violence. You’d never even know that these men ever talked about anything else.
Nobody ever learns about Fred Hampton, the Haitian revolution, or Malcolm X by sticking to the curriculum.
Or the Pullman Strike, Haymarket.
We covered Malcom but mostly as independent research.
Teaching is something usually done by teachers and or parents
Or youtube… now…
YouTube is a VERY SHARP double edged sword. There is a wealth of knowledge, but there’s also a wealth of disinformation.
It’s also a bit of a catch-22; YouTube can teach you to think critically and look for good sources, but the algorithm will not start that cycle for you.
Im just saying thats where the children are learning things now. Its not a suggestion its the reality.
They enshrined the 2nd amendment for a reason. but for now its enough to do simple things like:
- boycott / disrupt any local companies that aid and abed ICE/national guard/armed forces. grocery stores/hotels/restaurants. etc.
- disrupt these peoples ability to sleep.
- repeat the above for any federal agents in your state who are carrying out trumps agenda.
You guys are getting taught stuff?.jpg
Someone has had an incentive to teach you pretty much everything you know. You hope much of it was benevolent, but maybe the teachers were taught to use benevolence that way (by pedagogical teachers before them)… Then there’s this whole thing called “The Hidden Curriculum” which is the accidental lessons burried in the structures and systems of how we learn (for instance showing up, but avoiding detention and homework are part of the Hidden Curricula of the school system, unintended lessons that we absorbed without being told to)… And then there’s Labour History, which is like this secret history of workers rights that most schools won’t teach, and it soon becomes obvious that teaching can have ideological and systemic purposes attached, and even hidden or subconscious back flows and subconscious effects.
It’s all a bit much.
The internet is like a kaleidoscope. You feed it a bit of information, because of human nature, it fractures into many different pieces.
Jan 6 rioters got hired to run DOJ https://www.npr.org/2025/08/07/nx-s1-5493197/doj-trump-jan-6-defendant-jared-wise-capitol-riot
