this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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Back in 2014 in Ukraine, the thing that caused what had been some pretty normal student protest issues to explode like a bomb and become an active revolution by the people against the government, was that the government really cracked down on the protests. They had students, their children, getting sent to the hospital with broken bones or skull fractures, and they said absolutely the fuck not. Now you are hurting our children. It turned 100% of the country against the government in a really active and personal way.
I fear that in America there is no community like that to be turned against any oppressive government or action. People have been watching random citizens getting snatched off the street and disappeared, children getting sent off to concentration camps, and it’s more or less “oh well that is happened to someone else. It’s a shame.”
Turns out decades of "stop resisting or you will get shot and it will be your fault" has some real nasty side effects...
What?
I can't even tell what you're saying here or how it relates. Are you saying that militarized police in the US have intimidated people to the point that they're unwilling to rise up against an oppressive government?
Do you know what the biggest and most popular protest movement in modern US history was?
Yes. They literally cracked skulls during the BLM protests. We're looking down the barrel of the worst economy in U.S. history and not even 1% of the country bothered to get out of the house on a Saturday to protest. 90% of Americans do not watch or read the news. Many were surprised that Biden wasn't on the ballot in November, and many more haven't noticed Orange Monday wiped out their 401(k)s yet.
Absolutely agreed. Horrible media, both in the "lazy" and in the "corrupted" sense, combined with comfortable-life-induced apathy by the majority of people, combined with corruption of the levers of democracy so that it's not really clear how people now even could influence events without taking them in an even worse direction, have left us in a dire state. I am having trouble seeing how it's plausible that there is any future in store other than collapse, hopefully followed by something better although the reasons to think it will be better are slim. I think it's very notable that Tim Snyder who studies this kind of historical time period professionally and is clearly very amenable to the idea of getting involved to try to fix things, is leaving the country.
I fail to see how any of that is in any way a result of police brutality. Actually police brutality was the one issue recently which actually did motivate people to get off the couch and go try to do something about it in a big way. I feel like SinAdjetivos just kind of had their pet issue they wanted to bring up and emote about, and the fact that it has nothing to do with what's currently happening didn't deter them.
Motivated people to get off the couch and do what exactly? Other than skulls caved in what was the result? Was there any actual police reform? Was there a massive shift of funding away from incarceration as the cure-all? Have the number of extrajudicial murders decreased?
Yes, I am saying that police militarization has resulted in a populace that is unable/unwilling to revolt in even the slightest of ways since the uncomfortable truth that all Americans live under is that even something as minor, routine and unintentional as speeding can be reason for death. Much less any meaningful/intentional disobedience.
It is a very direct, but often overlooked, reason for a lot of what we are currently seeing today. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone as even the US founders knew you can't have a functioning democracy while staring down the barrel of a gun. That's what the whole "standing military" thing was about.
As an aside, why are you coming at a "I completely agree, here's another interesting facet/perspective" comment where you don't see the connection with such hostility and defensiveness instead of curiosity?
An absolutely massive historic protest movement. Among other things, they burned down the police station at the heart of everything, millions of people marched in the streets, businesses shut down, in scattered little places (pretty rarely) they actually rioted or burned police cars, some people got killed, they changed the language of policing and basically made it clear that the people wouldn't tolerate anything other than change and would back it up with direct action.
Yes. Do you remember those walls of names of people who got killed with no particular justice, and notice that the names basically stop in 2020?
Do you remember all those constant news stories involving no charges for the cops, and have you noticed that every single one of the stories in the modern day involves charges for the cops?
I'm not saying the system is fixed. In particular that cop who broke the neck of an elderly Japanese man and then had his charges overridden by someone at the state level when the system attempted to charge him with a crime. That's the one big example I can think of recently. But the constant drumbeat of dead unarmed black people who posed no particular threat at all, and the lack of consequences that always accompanied them, has stopped. It's weird that the people who were so passionate about having made it happen through direct action don't seem to have noticed.
No. I mean, it barely matters now, we're switching away from the democratic justice system completely and into ICE as the new Gestapo, quite quickly. Reforming the police at the city and state level is a dead issue now. But, if for some reason you want to get back to it after the coming of real fascism has somehow been defeated (how, I don't know), you could start at the level of prosecutions and incarcerations, which are still horrifying as policing on the streets used to be, now that the rank-and-file of policing on a day-to-day basis is about the least unjust part of the system thanks to successful action.
DUDE THEY BURNED DOWN THE FUCKING POLICE STATION
Millions of people were in the streets this past weekend. Is it enough? Fuck no. Did any of them get gunned down by state or city level cops? Or even rubber-bulleted? Not that I'm aware of.
BECAUSE OF THE EXACT REFORM THAT IS THE SUCCESS OF THE MOVEMENT YOU'RE SHITTING ON THE RESULTS OF AND INSULTING THE PARTICIPANTS IN
That's fair, and you're right that in my frustration I'm not giving proper credit where credit is due. It was definitely the last time I had hope of things improving somewhat and the bad takes/wrong lessons learned sometimes make me forget that.
Some localities did, but largely no. I'm assuming you're referencing the George Floyd bill, go look at what it actually says.
Police killings in the US have been rapidly increasing since 2020 your anecdotes and what the media chooses to report are not going to be good/accurate reflections of reality.
The US justice system was never democratic, and DHS (ICE as a subsidiary) was explicitly created by Bush Jr. to function that way. I apologize for my frustration and I'm glad you're finally on board/aware of it but you're also 25 years late my dude.
You are correct that I am not giving those involved enough credit for that level of bravery and action, but it also wasn't a consistent trend and with the benefit of foresight we can look back and realize that no police reform came from any of it.
Because they threw a parade instead of a riot. The pro-palestinian protests absolutely did face that level of repression.
The real issue is that you keep contradicting yourself so which is it:
A. the 2020 protests reformed the police and we're all safe now.
B. We're entering an era where the already abysmal human rights abuses are about to become far worse.
Very little that happens at the level of a federal bill will impact policing on a local level. I assume the impact of the George Floyd bill will be effectively 0 beyond several congresspeople being able to pat themselves on the back.
How many of the people in that graph do you think were unjustified shootings? Just to get a sense of what you think is going on. I actually don't know of any quantitative tracking of unjustified police killings, which is a massive lack if we're going to have a fact-based conversation about it.
I periodically have this conversation with people who have no idea what they're talking about.
You can make a municipality with any type of police you want. Any type of prison system you want, or none at all. The city council can make no police at all. There are actually a tiny little handful of case studies of individual places where for some reason it happened: Those libertarians in New Hampshire, the whole cult community talked about in "Wild Wild Country," what the Freak Party had in mind in Aspen back when that was going on, and a handful of others.
The fact that you personally don't have any impact on the police in your community doesn't at all mean that it's not democratic. It's just that US culture is pretty conservative, so what the city council (or whatever) authorizes for the police force is reflective of that. But if you and your friends got elected to mayor and city council, you could disband the police completely if you wanted to. You could literally do whatever you wanted.
ICE is something different. I have no idea how you think that Trump enacting a for real no-trial no-warrant neo-Gestapo is somehow in any type of same ballpark as the mayor and chief of police not caring if Officer Brother-In-Law shot someone and then said he was in fear for his life. They're not comparable.
Pretty sure I explicitly said the exact opposite of that. My wording was, "I’m not saying the system is fixed. In particular that cop who broke the neck of an elderly Japanese man and then had his charges overridden by someone at the state level when the system attempted to charge him with a crime. That’s the one big example I can think of recently."
The fact that things are about to get a whole lot worse from one agency, is not contradictory to what some totally other group of agencies is doing. The two have literally nothing to do with each other (aside from both being rooted in the US populace being pretty conservative and also not watching the news and having no idea what's going on). There's no contradiction any more than there is "I thought you said the hole in the boat is partially fixed and so how can there be a fire in the engine room." They are different agencies. Different things.
I feel like you're just saying weird stuff to try to wind me up or something.
Here's another source you're turn, shop around a bit see if you can find anyone who publishes a number that agrees with you. Nobody agrees with your speculation.
This is a uniquely American problem. Either 'Americans are just soooo unbelievably violent and deadly that they must be put down like the rabid dogs they are' or something else is going on. Please stop insinuating people like George Floyd are rabid dogs that need to be put down.
It's a nice idea, but not how any of that works because we don't live in anything like a true confederation.
98% of criminal cases in the US already don't get a trial. If we're going to talk about the George Floyd protests we should talk about Breanna Taylor and the fraudulent warrant that led to her death.
And worse. I agree, but it's a continuation of, and supported by, the same police you are claiming are "fixed". ICE cannot operate effectively without direct LEO support.
Thank you for this. There has been far too much of people utterly ignoring the hard work that people have done against authoritarianism in the US and the actual impact it's had. Lemmy seems to be inundated with people insisting that nothing anyone can do could possibly help and the no one has ever done anything meaningful to resist, and that's just bullshit. It's some terminally online doomerism and it's the last thing we need.
Frankly, it's complicity. It needs to be called out and opposed, and you're doing good work by not mincing words here.
People who pull this shit day in and day out are as much a part of the problem as the MAGA idiots, both in their constant attempts to undermine any and all resistance and very likely in getting us into this situation in the first place.
We need to stop tiptoeing around them and throw their bullshit back in their faces. It's fucking shameful, and they should be embarrassed to be such spineless bootlickers.
Your turn! Point out where what I said is bullshit.
I'm not
I'm saying that we have the benefit of hindsight now and can look back and see the results of actions taken and determine what tactics were and weren't effective. If you don't do that and instead only focus on how much "hard work" was put in instead of the results of the labor you're going to be constantly wearing yourself out and accomplishing nothing.
I'm begging you to focus less on the "how many people showed up" and focus more on the "what did it accomplish" and update your tactics accordingly.
Am I wrong, or was your original comment saying that people were so intimidated by police brutality that they weren't willing to show up?
And they aren't, at least not in any way that matters.
The Hands Off protests are only permitted because they have no impact. They even schedule them on a Saturday so that nobody who works at the places being protested at will be inconvenienced, and they very deliberately leave the genocide in Palestine out of it because they're organized by Indivisible, which is aligned with the Democrat party.
THEY BURNED DOWN THE FUCKING POLICE STATION
Also many police cars. This is the weirdest conversation. Like I say, I really think you guys are just saying random stuff to try to wind me up.
And I cheer them for it, but a momentary expression of righteous anger against the injustice of our ruling order does not constitute a successful movement for systemic change.
The people who own this country allow us to protest peacefully because they can easily channel all that energy into a political structure designed to diffuse it and any non-peaceful protests stand out so much they can easily be brought down by the intelligence services before they get any momentum. That political structure has been falling apart since Nixon and the violence they dish out to suppress protest has escalated to the point of sending college kids to torture camps without due process on nothing but an accusation of thought crime.
Suffice it to say, I'm too cynical to have much faith in the most domesticated culture on the planet. Americans will not turn out to cause problems in unignorable numbers until the government gives in, we'll follow the course of that old poem until they come for us and there is noone left to speak up.
What is the argument you are trying to make with repeating that?
Is your argument that was a massive blow to the material holdings of US law enforcement? There are 17,985 police agencies in the US, we'll pretend they only have one station per agency (that's a gross underestimate, the Minneapolis 3rd precinct should make that clear...) then 0.000056% of police precincts were burnt down during the protests. I would argue a number that small is negligible.
Is your argument that a burnt down precinct is a form of justice that was achieved? There were ~1200 police killings in 2020. If that is your argument, then only 0.083% of people murdered that year got justice, much less any from previous/subsequent years.
It should be pretty obvious. You said the American people are too scared to do resistance. I'm saying that the police killed a black man and they mobbed the police station and burned it down. (And that's actually a step down from what people often used to do in the pre-2014 time, where they would sometimes burn down a big chunk of the city and shut everything down for a few days, because they felt that there was no other way to be heard.)
The reason why you saying that, could lead to me bringing up that, as a way of counterargument, should be pretty obvious. It's pretty weird that you seem to be confused by the sequence and jump off into talking about something else or not understanding why thing A might be responded to with thing B.
I'm saying that is an important factor, yes.
Yes. I'm also incensed that "let's all not vote for Kamala Harris because we don't want a cop as president" "let's all not vote for Kamala Harris because we care about genocide in Gaza" has been replaced by "ho hum let's not protest ICE, that sounds scary, they might do something to me" "ho hum I've moved on from Gaza, I care about other issues now" and so on.
I saw earlier today someone I saw who has moved on completely from hand-wringing about Kamala Harris about Gaza to hand-wringing about Eric Adams's opponent, for perfectly sensible reasons I am sure. I thought about going back and seeing how many of these people who were super concerned about fascism in America and policing and the cop who spoke at the DNC and Gaza, are now trying to publicize the 50501 protests, but (a) I already have a pretty good idea of the answer (b) it's a little mean spirited I guess and just more mud-slinging (c) what's the point. But yes. This bullshit on a friendly social network should get people yelled at. In my opinion.
I've been saying this for months and I'll keep saying it. These people aren't genuine users. They're a combination of bot-farm workers and useful idiots. There's a reason their perspectives don't reflect those of actual human beings that we meet and talk to out in the world. Because they're literally just hired to demotivate us.
I trust the content I see on Beehaw and Lemmy in general less and less as the months go by, because it's inundated with this shit to the point that it's clearly being targeted to demotivate any resistance. It's literally flooded with messaging designed to make us feel hopeless and helpless.
The messaging I'm seeing (and assuming that it is what you're referencing) doesn't seem to be arguing against "resistance" it's arguing against "performative resistance". If you don't understand the difference between the two I can definitely see why that would come across as demotivating.
Personally that same messaging you are finding demotivating gives me lots of hope in the future as there seems to be an upswelling of desire to actually fix things and coming to terms with the scope and reality of the situation.
It's bad. The work to fix the last 50+ years of buried/ignored problems is a monumental amount of work, but facing it head on means that we can start making progress instead of just leaving it to pile up further and to get worse.
Hoping this "bot-farm"s perspective helps a bit with the whole "hopeless and helpless" feeling.
Lol
Keep your well-meaning sympathy and education.
We're obviously in favor of both performative and non performative resistance. I was the one that brought up the resistance movements that were actually rioting, to a small extent.
Nobody feels "hopeless and helpless" or demotivated. We are feeling that you are trying to create that feeling, unsuccessfully, by saying repeatedly that nothing in America has produced positive change. I'd be happy to have a conversation with you about it, because there are factual things I want to talk about in regards to police killings, but I'm 100% not interested in that if you want to keep strawmanning what I'm saying and weirdly shifting your positions around, for example between "everyone in the US is scared and they won't do anything" and "sure they burned a police station and a bunch of cars and pre-2014 there were sometimes for-real riots in response to police killings, such as in LA or Baltimore, but why does that matter? Why are you bringing that up?"
Actually, this message is another textbook example of trying to shift things around and pretend that one thing is another thing so you can frame the conversation they way you want to. Keep it to yourself.
Yeah. It's infuriating to me.
It's a hard thing, because there's no way to tell for any particular individual user, and it's not real productive to introduce random accusations that someone is secretly a troll farm or something into the conversation. That just makes it even more divisive, which I think is a big part of their original goal. But yes. It's a whole bunch of crap that this stuff is tolerated and it's just "Oh yeah frequently someone comes in and ruins the conversation we're trying to have, for their own fucked-up reasons, and we just have to smile and tell them politely that we disagree while they're pissing all over the table and everyone at it." That can't possibly be the solution.
I mean, honestly, they make it incredibly obvious. The idea that we somehow can't tell is just a tactic they use. We can both smell it on them. Why pretend we can't?
Usually I don’t think the users are literal LLMs. I used to have suspicion of it but I’ve never seen really any indication that they are other than real humans. In this case I’m actually a lot less sure.
Not only were they persistently confused by the context of the conversation including flipping back and forth between “the American people are too cowed to do anything” to “sure the American people are doing things and God bless their courage for it but it won’t succeed” while seeming unaware even when the discrepancy was pointed out… but one of them managed to pick up that I was really emphasizing that American policing is certainly not “fixed” and flipped it around to get all forceful about how silly I was for saying it was “fixed”.
And then when I pointed out the weirdness specifically as to how humans don’t really often make those mistakes… both of them suddenly just fell silent.
Idk man. It’s usually not productive to make that accusation. But both of these people are acting super weird. They’re also taking turns responding in a sort of weird and disjointed way.
When I say bot farms I don't mean literal LLMs. I mean people hired or forced to work in a call-center type environment where their day is spent disseminating propaganda and sewing meaningless conflict. Often using multiple sockpuppets. Some are working for hostile governments, some are working for companies. They try to sway elections and influence public opinion to strengthen their allies and weaken their enemies. They're all over the place.
Okay, I wanted to drop this because bucket seemed to be spinning out pretty hard after getting his world view repeatedly fact checked and proven repeatedly wrong, but I'm a big fan of treating others the way they want to treat others and this sort of conspiracy theory nonsense is 100% some "bullshit that needs to be thrown back in their faces"
So are you going to engage at all with the material of the conversation or are you just going to spread conspiracy theories because the worldview being expressed isn't your own?
I actually really like engaging with the material of the conversation. Here's what makes that hard:
You strawmanned what I was saying into comical evil and into the literal exact opposite of what I said. You also keep switching back and forth between "everyone is too scared to resist" and "yes they're resisting but it's not accomplishing anything" and then pretending to fail to comprehend the difference between those two things even when it's directly called out. That's why I suspected you of being an LLM, is that that surface believability of language but lack of any underlying model that the language is encoding is a hallmark of them.
At that point, whatever you are, it's time to put the brakes on and call you out for it, instead of just pretending we're both still playing the "good faith debate" game. That's not "spinning out", that's calling out your horseshit for what it is. If you want to go back to the reasoned-engagement game, just back off from doing that and we can talk. I actually like talking and you made some points I do want to respond to. But, in the current format, it would be a waste of time.
We're actually talking about this exact issue right at this moment, and how once your opponent starts breaking the rules it is a mug's game to keep playing by the same conversational principles that they're pooping all over.
My thesis is "the general population is too scared for effective resistance" nothing I have said is contradictory to that.
You keep moving the goalpost and going on tangents. Would you like to directly answer any the claims I've posted?
Find any stats on police killings that support your views?
Sounds good. You ignored the other two examples I brought up (because, what could you say)?
Also I would give you benefit of the doubt that when you said:
Was BLM meaningful? Was it intentional? Was it "even in the slightest of ways"? What about the LA riots? Baltimore?
What about the other two examples of bad faith I brought up, though? Address them, please. Again it is impossible to have a factual conversation with someone who is going to twist my words into the exact opposite of what I said. That's why I am pausing the rest of the conversation to call our your bad faith, and you're still just pretending I didn't say anything or somehow I am the asshole for quoting your earlier words and my earlier words and lining them up next to each other. I actually talked a little bit about the underlying subject matter in this comment and then deleted it.
Again, your conduct in this conversation makes it impossible to have a factual conversation until you change doing the word-twisting thing. If you just retract it and agree not to do that in the future, then sure, we can rock and roll and I can send some citations and we can go back to talking about the subject matter.
Stats. Facts. Stop gish galloping and ad homenen-ing.
You can pick another of the arguments I made if you'd preferable.
Oh. Yeah, it's definitely that, or partly that. These two accounts in particular are so bizarre with their conversation patterns that I'm pretty convinced that it's something like that.
I actually did think they were potentially literal bots, just because of how much trouble they had in comprehending context and meaning when you look beyond the surface level. One of them was able to count "S"s, though, so maybe they are not.
I sort of motivate people to disagree irrationally with me sometimes I think, because I am so abrasive and condescending when I think someone is wrong that I think they're just inclined to start debating with me and go against everything I have to say just as a result of that. But yes, I am fairly convinced that these people are doing it professionally in some sense.
I think one of the most important tells is the laziness of it. People who are on the internet debating, whether they are rational or not, usually invest some effort into making their points and trying to prove the other person wrong. The weird accounts, in my observations, don't really seem to care all that much if anyone believes them. They just want to kind of keep the conversation going and be disagreeable and throw in various talking points that they want to throw in. This thing where they can't even really comprehend or address discrepancies in what they're saying or the context of the conversation, and just kind of repeat various things they have programmed in, could just be that, that they just want to type their message and move on to whatever the next thing is.
Thanks for sharing that, I wasn't aware of that event in Ukraine. I should read up on it more
I think we still have hope. I think we just have to wait for another spark. Another unfortunate moment that will spur people to action.
Similar to the George Floyd protests. One action that people can't look away from and will cause the pressure to burst. I believe we'll see it at some point. It's gona suck but I think positive change will come
I've also been wondering why we haven't seen people act out more. But I wonder if it's just because it hasn't hit close enough to home yet. Maybe everything has been too surreal for people to digest? Or maybe people are afraid to act and don't feel like they'll have someone watching their back? I'm really not sure.
Watch “Winter on Fire”. It’s so good that the Russians had to make their own confusingly-named film “Ukraine on Fire” to try to make it more difficult for people to find the first thing.
Fucking hell that was a hard watch. People should watch it though. They need to understand what happens when we let the intolerant have power