this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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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.