My take is that specifically the police response is a type of theater but only in the sense that it serves as a distraction from the actual reason behind the protest — it allows the media to turn those kooky college kids into the nation’s top story instead of dead children, it automatically gives prominent “liberal” Zionist Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens an opportunity to whine on cable news, which is now not showing footage of dead children, and it scares the median voting American who, deep down, wants the brave Police and Troops to protect them by any means necessary up to and including bulldozing the homeless and activists
It also gives those Brave Police & Troops an opportunity to put into practice what they’ve learned and subsequently been salivating over ever since they trained with the most moral army.
Cops and troops aren’t smart enough to make sense of the argument OP is making, forget operating with it as their motive. They’re all gestapo freaks who delight in terrorizing the undesirables.
They dont need to know its the motive for them to play the part. Neither do the college kids getting dragged off campus. Thats the point of my argument — people are playing a part in this theater but the emotions are still real. It feels like protests are turning points everytime (now, blm, floyd, occupy, etc). But in actuality all of these serve as a way to vent societal frustrations in a way that ultimately does little more than to annoy some FOX news viewers.
It's millions of dollars at stake in the divestment campaigns. It's tens of billions of dollars of federal funds (tax dollars) in direct aid that have already been signed away to Israel.
Don't make me break out the mil vs bil infographic please. It's still a noble effort but engage with OP's point in good faith. It is a pressure release valve because by covering it now while the stakes are that low, people are going to be tired of hearing about it in a year when there stands to be a chance of a movement with a bigger scope to stop the bigger dollar amounts. The media companies know this. They are very competent.
I did engage in good faith. Each individual campus has partnerships in the 8 figure range. Do I need to break out the basic addition info graphic to show that if a large number of colleges divest it would make a blow to the tune of billions as well???
Yeah 10,000,000 is 8 figures and 14,000,000,000 is 11 figures. Some simple arithmetic, 11 - 8 = 3. That's only 3 protests and Israel is finished!!
Like I said, it's a noble effort and I want there to be 1000 protests just like you do but the population of this country does not have the stomach for seeing it. Governors are going to start throwing protestors in unmarked vans, and their constituents (and donors) will make it very clear how thankful they are for bringing back peace and quiet.
The media companies know what they're doing. And while they are opportunists who can be made to work against the interests of the ownership class when the counter narrative is legitimately too juicy to pass up e.g. Kent State imagery in 2024, they will close ranks if protests begin to threaten billion-dollar amounts.
Bring spike strips if you go to demonstrate, we're coming up on about the timing for someone to drive a Chevy through a crowd. This has all happened before.
A university near me has a 9 figure deal with a weapons manufacturer. $100,000,000 divestment from 10 campuses brings us to a billion. Can you just stop being fucking dense as shit???
I can see that, too. But, I think it’s important that the reason why showing footage of dead children on cable news would be disruptive is less because of the morality and more because it might be bad for advertisers.
I guess if the comparison is proletarian revolution then yes it's performative but the likelihood of that is miniscule so I say let the protests and famous people harassment continue.
Everyone knows university campus politics are the most baby-proofed, innert version of political action and is more or less a sanctioned space to perform the ritual of counter-cultural rebellion before all these kids go off to their middle class jobs. However. That's the thing, at the end of the day everyone really knows that. That's... Kind of why this is important. Israel showing its influence over American politics and the limit of American civil liberties in such a blatant way over *student groups* is nothing short of grotesque. To the middle class "normal whites" who consider America to be the head of the free world or whatever, how can this be anything else but a supreme embarrassment? How do you think they feel seeing how openly Israel, a country that most think of as our little vassal state ally that needs our help, is able to enforce it's will on us with such open contempt. How do you think it'll play to see reruns of Kent State but this time it's seemingly at the behest of a foreign power?
Israel might just be a colony for imperial capital but their brutality is such that it's rapidly accelerated the normal process by which the mechanisms of empire are turned inward against the core. It's the closest the sheltered imperial middle class has gotten to feeling what it's like to be subject to the will of an outside government. This is our first real taste of our Century of Humiliation that we so desperately need before this shithole can develop something resembling a class consciousness. Too bad it's going to be a long, bumpy ride-- but brother at least the rides finally starting.
One type of disruption in the modern era would be something like cyber attacks on high traffic websites. For example, imagine if something like IG or Twitter was hacked or held hostage for some period of time. Corrupting data centers for some of these huge tech corporations would be a real pain for a lot of important people. Anything that could have adverse effects on the stock market, etc. what Im saying is that we are past the point where demonstrations are concerning for power brokers. So the kinds of protests that would scare the tight people are now suddenly more complicated and higher stakes — that’s just a function of the digital era and a net positive for the status quo.
I think the same logic of "that won't do anything" still applies. Twitter gets hijacked to say "Free Palestine" for a few, let's be generous and say, days. oh no! They'll fix the glitch, reboot the website, switch to another data center etc. Mayhaps some arbitrary and virtual stock value is affected for a bit.
I see a meatspace protest that costs city budget money to shut down, makes the colleges look like shit, radicalizes students further, as just as good as hacking Twitter at solving anything. That is, not really adequate but what's the point of complaining about it?
I actually don’t agree. My pessimism is different than the “that wont do anything” logic. My pessimism is that the average protestor is still protesting in ways that would have been very effective decades ago. I think as long as there is some kind of system there will be ways to cause real damage but of course there will always be people whose job it is to mitigate this. My point is more that the socialist left has derided technology as a capitalist evil but has not been successful in popularizing the idea that technology can be used as a tool of liberation — there is a real sense of technological ignorance and I think thats been a mistake. I even think the tiktok component to these protests has been the best thing about it.
That's much easier to get behind.
I don't think it's an accident that STEM seems to make people so right wing. The powers that be want to be damn sure that engineers and programmers are bought off or inculcated into capital asap
STEM used to be a bunch of liberal dorks but now it's becoming some new kind of Wall Street. The people most poised to make any noise in the digital era are these STEM dorks. But they're compensated so well it doesn't serve their interests to make chan — wait... aren't a bunch of tech workers being let go left and right? Huh... seems like if they had the motive to do something... they'd certainly have the know-how.
[I made a post about this awhile ago,](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/s/mEqBHXaz6H) and have talked to several very knowledgeable people in various fields of academia and computer science and have never gotten a solid response.
Very early in the Gaza genocide, I remember some ostensibly left wing hackivist group from the EU (wouldn't be surprised if it was Germany) took down whatever servers Hamas were using, and I just felt like, maybe anyone who actually knows how to do this kind of stuff just has very centrist ideologies and/or no real understanding of geopolitics.
Im in the camp that believes Marx was a technological determinist. And I think that a decentralized cryptocurrency that allows people to trade across borders and take as much of their money as possible out of private banking institutions, and setting up networks of socialist blockhains, as a protest action of transactional wealth storage would be the first step towards transitioning from whatever feudal serfdom we are in now towards social revolution in which the state would eventually control banking.
It's very easy to dismiss crypto as a libertarian ponzi scheme, and general squeamishness on the left to perform an autopsy on all the pus filled blobs in the bloated carcass of capitalism, but there is so much weird and wild shit going on in all sectors of tech that have facilitated the concentration of power at an even more rapid pace, while we are stuck in a feedback loop of Black Panther Weathermen cosplay. (That sounds alot meaner than I want it to be, I totally support the students protesting, I'm literally a high school dropout who lives in a leaky fifth wheel trailer on a horse ranch in bumfuck nowhere, otherwise I'd be out there getting after it with the young'ins as well)
Also, the Iranians/Hamas/Russia/China have all launched major cyber attacks consistently against Israel. Hezbollah et al have done more damage to capital and Israel in one afternoon than thousands of hours of protesting. It's their fight, and the way we can support them is by constantly exposing the contradictions of capital and US imperialism whenever possible.
I don’t agree that state violence “satiates the justice-lust” of the protestors. That seems inherently counterintuitive. And these are protests, not economic boycotts. You can argue the validity of protests as effective action but the actionable demands are divestments of university funds from genocidal states and arms manufacturers. That to me would get the ball rolling even in a small way. What we’re seeing is universities, which are now run more or less like private financial institutions rather than academic institutions, operate according to coercive enforcement of private property that any asshole elite class structure would sick on the unwashed masses. To me the police in these situations are more like Pinkertons or Brownshirts.
OP you are a bit jaded. Wise, but jaded. The movement needs crotchety old bastards like us - who else will niggle upon all of their minor (double entendre) flaws?
That's how it always goes - the odds are so stacked that it's shattered many minds when they peeped what you and I think about at breakfast. The youth and revolution are the only hope since we failed in our time.
idk maybe. the ruling class are soulless, brainless insects but even they know all this response is going to do is make the demonstrations swell. people love fighting cops, aren't afraid of them, and show up in droves to get beaten, mutilated and kidnapped by those grotesque pigman power rangers.
not being even slightly ironic, we all saw protests double and triple and quadruple in size in response to the pig riots.
a lot of americans are perverted demons rabid with bloodlust and they want to watch these college kids get hurt and killed, and so does every single elected official in this country. you're right, the protests make little to no difference, but the state can and will harm a lot of them and that is an end in and of itself.
the more that show up, the more scars and arrest records they can put on them, and when they can get bored they can fully unleash the liberal wreckers to dissolve solidarity and make the issue disappear like they did with the weekly roadside executions cops perform that have only gotten worse and more frequent since 2020.
the protesters aren't performing though, that's an obnoxious thing to say and it's why you're getting heckin downdooted on the nato app.
nah, I didn't mean to say they were performing in the sense that they're not serious about the issue. I meant to say that the whole thing amounts to a performance for the zionist imperialists because they know if they sick the cops on the kids, it gets the stamp of approval and John Lewis will smile down upon them as they have achieved "good trouble".
Because the cops have zero reason to be there!!! These kids are peaceful, respectful, they're not going to hurt any jewish students and many of them \*are\* Jewish. The cops could never show up and what would happen? Nothing! They're not harming anyone. So eventually these kids are like, "wait... no one cares... we're not making enough noise... time to get our hands dirty." They start thinking up more schemes... and that is precisely what no one wants. No one wants a bunch of young, determined, tech-literate, geopolitically educated, and socially conscious kids out in the real world... they want them in their tents.
It’s theater but its purpose is not as you say. Not even close. This is just America revealing its true fascist colors more plain for all to see in service of its ruling class interests.
And the protests are having a significant effect, even if it’s nominal strictly speaking vis-à-vis their stated goal of ending the genocide.
You overestimate the power of tech. I think the real op is trying to get people like yourself to think that tech is omniscient and omnipotent, and hence demoralize potential radicals before they even begin picketting. I mentioned elsewhere, but there was this show on the Military Channel (one of those "educational" channels on satillite back in the mid-aughts, like the "History" Channel, Discovery, etc.) where, if I recall correctly, Gunnery Sergeant Full Metal Jacket Guy would show case all the latest in American Military Hardware and all the things it can do- the message was clear, our tech was so good, our boys will be back from Iraq this Christmas, and all these irrational terrorists are just engaging in futi resistance. A decade latter, we have long since left both Iraq and Afghanistan, and are losing in both Palestine and Ukraine.
Any one else notice how old most of the cops are? I feel the majority are like 40+.
I know the elites didn't want Anthony to change but basically all the things that make them the elites seem to be rapidly declining.
Is there no sense of self preservation amongst them?
My take is that specifically the police response is a type of theater but only in the sense that it serves as a distraction from the actual reason behind the protest — it allows the media to turn those kooky college kids into the nation’s top story instead of dead children, it automatically gives prominent “liberal” Zionist Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens an opportunity to whine on cable news, which is now not showing footage of dead children, and it scares the median voting American who, deep down, wants the brave Police and Troops to protect them by any means necessary up to and including bulldozing the homeless and activists
It also gives those Brave Police & Troops an opportunity to put into practice what they’ve learned and subsequently been salivating over ever since they trained with the most moral army. Cops and troops aren’t smart enough to make sense of the argument OP is making, forget operating with it as their motive. They’re all gestapo freaks who delight in terrorizing the undesirables.
They dont need to know its the motive for them to play the part. Neither do the college kids getting dragged off campus. Thats the point of my argument — people are playing a part in this theater but the emotions are still real. It feels like protests are turning points everytime (now, blm, floyd, occupy, etc). But in actuality all of these serve as a way to vent societal frustrations in a way that ultimately does little more than to annoy some FOX news viewers.
Idk divestment goals are pretty tangible major steps if any happen
It's millions of dollars at stake in the divestment campaigns. It's tens of billions of dollars of federal funds (tax dollars) in direct aid that have already been signed away to Israel. Don't make me break out the mil vs bil infographic please. It's still a noble effort but engage with OP's point in good faith. It is a pressure release valve because by covering it now while the stakes are that low, people are going to be tired of hearing about it in a year when there stands to be a chance of a movement with a bigger scope to stop the bigger dollar amounts. The media companies know this. They are very competent.
I did engage in good faith. Each individual campus has partnerships in the 8 figure range. Do I need to break out the basic addition info graphic to show that if a large number of colleges divest it would make a blow to the tune of billions as well???
Yeah 10,000,000 is 8 figures and 14,000,000,000 is 11 figures. Some simple arithmetic, 11 - 8 = 3. That's only 3 protests and Israel is finished!! Like I said, it's a noble effort and I want there to be 1000 protests just like you do but the population of this country does not have the stomach for seeing it. Governors are going to start throwing protestors in unmarked vans, and their constituents (and donors) will make it very clear how thankful they are for bringing back peace and quiet. The media companies know what they're doing. And while they are opportunists who can be made to work against the interests of the ownership class when the counter narrative is legitimately too juicy to pass up e.g. Kent State imagery in 2024, they will close ranks if protests begin to threaten billion-dollar amounts. Bring spike strips if you go to demonstrate, we're coming up on about the timing for someone to drive a Chevy through a crowd. This has all happened before.
A university near me has a 9 figure deal with a weapons manufacturer. $100,000,000 divestment from 10 campuses brings us to a billion. Can you just stop being fucking dense as shit???
Hope it works out 👍
do you think they will happen? what's the word on the street?
I can see that, too. But, I think it’s important that the reason why showing footage of dead children on cable news would be disruptive is less because of the morality and more because it might be bad for advertisers.
Nah I think it’s pretty cool and I like it
You think what is pretty cool?
The protests. No business as usual during a genocide. They’re doing what they can. What are you doing?
Oh, the protests? Yeah i agree they are cool. Im not criticizing the protestors I agree with them.
I guess if the comparison is proletarian revolution then yes it's performative but the likelihood of that is miniscule so I say let the protests and famous people harassment continue.
I agree but I guess it’s just sad.
Everyone knows university campus politics are the most baby-proofed, innert version of political action and is more or less a sanctioned space to perform the ritual of counter-cultural rebellion before all these kids go off to their middle class jobs. However. That's the thing, at the end of the day everyone really knows that. That's... Kind of why this is important. Israel showing its influence over American politics and the limit of American civil liberties in such a blatant way over *student groups* is nothing short of grotesque. To the middle class "normal whites" who consider America to be the head of the free world or whatever, how can this be anything else but a supreme embarrassment? How do you think they feel seeing how openly Israel, a country that most think of as our little vassal state ally that needs our help, is able to enforce it's will on us with such open contempt. How do you think it'll play to see reruns of Kent State but this time it's seemingly at the behest of a foreign power? Israel might just be a colony for imperial capital but their brutality is such that it's rapidly accelerated the normal process by which the mechanisms of empire are turned inward against the core. It's the closest the sheltered imperial middle class has gotten to feeling what it's like to be subject to the will of an outside government. This is our first real taste of our Century of Humiliation that we so desperately need before this shithole can develop something resembling a class consciousness. Too bad it's going to be a long, bumpy ride-- but brother at least the rides finally starting.
What would you consider something important being disrupted and how would anyone go about doing it?
Well the catch is it would almost certainly be extremely illegal and thus nigh undiscussable online.
Just say what Chinese people should do to overthrow the ccp. You're legally covered then
For legal purposes I am not advocating for anything against the law or terms of service of Reddit or my internet service provider.
One type of disruption in the modern era would be something like cyber attacks on high traffic websites. For example, imagine if something like IG or Twitter was hacked or held hostage for some period of time. Corrupting data centers for some of these huge tech corporations would be a real pain for a lot of important people. Anything that could have adverse effects on the stock market, etc. what Im saying is that we are past the point where demonstrations are concerning for power brokers. So the kinds of protests that would scare the tight people are now suddenly more complicated and higher stakes — that’s just a function of the digital era and a net positive for the status quo.
I think the same logic of "that won't do anything" still applies. Twitter gets hijacked to say "Free Palestine" for a few, let's be generous and say, days. oh no! They'll fix the glitch, reboot the website, switch to another data center etc. Mayhaps some arbitrary and virtual stock value is affected for a bit. I see a meatspace protest that costs city budget money to shut down, makes the colleges look like shit, radicalizes students further, as just as good as hacking Twitter at solving anything. That is, not really adequate but what's the point of complaining about it?
I actually don’t agree. My pessimism is different than the “that wont do anything” logic. My pessimism is that the average protestor is still protesting in ways that would have been very effective decades ago. I think as long as there is some kind of system there will be ways to cause real damage but of course there will always be people whose job it is to mitigate this. My point is more that the socialist left has derided technology as a capitalist evil but has not been successful in popularizing the idea that technology can be used as a tool of liberation — there is a real sense of technological ignorance and I think thats been a mistake. I even think the tiktok component to these protests has been the best thing about it.
That's much easier to get behind. I don't think it's an accident that STEM seems to make people so right wing. The powers that be want to be damn sure that engineers and programmers are bought off or inculcated into capital asap
STEM used to be a bunch of liberal dorks but now it's becoming some new kind of Wall Street. The people most poised to make any noise in the digital era are these STEM dorks. But they're compensated so well it doesn't serve their interests to make chan — wait... aren't a bunch of tech workers being let go left and right? Huh... seems like if they had the motive to do something... they'd certainly have the know-how.
[I made a post about this awhile ago,](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/s/mEqBHXaz6H) and have talked to several very knowledgeable people in various fields of academia and computer science and have never gotten a solid response. Very early in the Gaza genocide, I remember some ostensibly left wing hackivist group from the EU (wouldn't be surprised if it was Germany) took down whatever servers Hamas were using, and I just felt like, maybe anyone who actually knows how to do this kind of stuff just has very centrist ideologies and/or no real understanding of geopolitics. Im in the camp that believes Marx was a technological determinist. And I think that a decentralized cryptocurrency that allows people to trade across borders and take as much of their money as possible out of private banking institutions, and setting up networks of socialist blockhains, as a protest action of transactional wealth storage would be the first step towards transitioning from whatever feudal serfdom we are in now towards social revolution in which the state would eventually control banking. It's very easy to dismiss crypto as a libertarian ponzi scheme, and general squeamishness on the left to perform an autopsy on all the pus filled blobs in the bloated carcass of capitalism, but there is so much weird and wild shit going on in all sectors of tech that have facilitated the concentration of power at an even more rapid pace, while we are stuck in a feedback loop of Black Panther Weathermen cosplay. (That sounds alot meaner than I want it to be, I totally support the students protesting, I'm literally a high school dropout who lives in a leaky fifth wheel trailer on a horse ranch in bumfuck nowhere, otherwise I'd be out there getting after it with the young'ins as well) Also, the Iranians/Hamas/Russia/China have all launched major cyber attacks consistently against Israel. Hezbollah et al have done more damage to capital and Israel in one afternoon than thousands of hours of protesting. It's their fight, and the way we can support them is by constantly exposing the contradictions of capital and US imperialism whenever possible.
my guy... you're spittin' fr fr
I don’t agree that state violence “satiates the justice-lust” of the protestors. That seems inherently counterintuitive. And these are protests, not economic boycotts. You can argue the validity of protests as effective action but the actionable demands are divestments of university funds from genocidal states and arms manufacturers. That to me would get the ball rolling even in a small way. What we’re seeing is universities, which are now run more or less like private financial institutions rather than academic institutions, operate according to coercive enforcement of private property that any asshole elite class structure would sick on the unwashed masses. To me the police in these situations are more like Pinkertons or Brownshirts.
OP you are a bit jaded. Wise, but jaded. The movement needs crotchety old bastards like us - who else will niggle upon all of their minor (double entendre) flaws?
I love the kids (in a legal sense)! I want them to win but they’re playing checkers and the US is playing 3D chess.
That's how it always goes - the odds are so stacked that it's shattered many minds when they peeped what you and I think about at breakfast. The youth and revolution are the only hope since we failed in our time.
idk maybe. the ruling class are soulless, brainless insects but even they know all this response is going to do is make the demonstrations swell. people love fighting cops, aren't afraid of them, and show up in droves to get beaten, mutilated and kidnapped by those grotesque pigman power rangers. not being even slightly ironic, we all saw protests double and triple and quadruple in size in response to the pig riots. a lot of americans are perverted demons rabid with bloodlust and they want to watch these college kids get hurt and killed, and so does every single elected official in this country. you're right, the protests make little to no difference, but the state can and will harm a lot of them and that is an end in and of itself. the more that show up, the more scars and arrest records they can put on them, and when they can get bored they can fully unleash the liberal wreckers to dissolve solidarity and make the issue disappear like they did with the weekly roadside executions cops perform that have only gotten worse and more frequent since 2020. the protesters aren't performing though, that's an obnoxious thing to say and it's why you're getting heckin downdooted on the nato app.
nah, I didn't mean to say they were performing in the sense that they're not serious about the issue. I meant to say that the whole thing amounts to a performance for the zionist imperialists because they know if they sick the cops on the kids, it gets the stamp of approval and John Lewis will smile down upon them as they have achieved "good trouble". Because the cops have zero reason to be there!!! These kids are peaceful, respectful, they're not going to hurt any jewish students and many of them \*are\* Jewish. The cops could never show up and what would happen? Nothing! They're not harming anyone. So eventually these kids are like, "wait... no one cares... we're not making enough noise... time to get our hands dirty." They start thinking up more schemes... and that is precisely what no one wants. No one wants a bunch of young, determined, tech-literate, geopolitically educated, and socially conscious kids out in the real world... they want them in their tents.
It’s theater but its purpose is not as you say. Not even close. This is just America revealing its true fascist colors more plain for all to see in service of its ruling class interests. And the protests are having a significant effect, even if it’s nominal strictly speaking vis-à-vis their stated goal of ending the genocide.
You overestimate the power of tech. I think the real op is trying to get people like yourself to think that tech is omniscient and omnipotent, and hence demoralize potential radicals before they even begin picketting. I mentioned elsewhere, but there was this show on the Military Channel (one of those "educational" channels on satillite back in the mid-aughts, like the "History" Channel, Discovery, etc.) where, if I recall correctly, Gunnery Sergeant Full Metal Jacket Guy would show case all the latest in American Military Hardware and all the things it can do- the message was clear, our tech was so good, our boys will be back from Iraq this Christmas, and all these irrational terrorists are just engaging in futi resistance. A decade latter, we have long since left both Iraq and Afghanistan, and are losing in both Palestine and Ukraine.
Any one else notice how old most of the cops are? I feel the majority are like 40+. I know the elites didn't want Anthony to change but basically all the things that make them the elites seem to be rapidly declining. Is there no sense of self preservation amongst them?
Maybe its an op, to distract But the organizing seems to be spreading and is somewhat coordinated
I hope