vvilld

At the Tesla protests, yes. it's mostly standing there with signs and chanting. At the one I attend, the dealership is on a major road with a TON of traffic. People line the street on either side stretching for about 1/2 a mile. The first protest had a bunch of people at the front door of the dealership, but police came and arrested one person. Since then, there has always been a police presence right at the front door. The cops tend to leave us alone if don't go up to the door of the dealership. A couple of times every hour a group will organize to try to block the road. They'll usually hold the space for about 5 minutes before the police come and force everyone back to the sidewalks. The point here is to challenge authority.

On a broader scale (I attend a LOT of protests), it depends on the protest. At those that are planned and coordinated by a larger organization (think the Women's March, March for Science, etc) there's usually a stage with a series of speakers "preaching to the choir" to energize the crowd. There's lost of people chanting in unison various slogans/chants. Usually there's a single rallying point where the speeches happen, then there will often be a march from that point to somewhere else. Along the route the crowd shuts down the streets, chants, carry signs, etc. The point here to make connections with like-minded people and demonstrate that there is popular support for whatever issue/concern there is.

At less coordinated protests without a central organizing committee (think the 2017 airport protests, the 2020 uprising) there's not as much of set "schedule of events". It's more of a way for a community to express their collective anger/fear/outrage/etc. The specific goal will depend more on the specific event. For example, the 2017 airport protests were against the first version of Trump's Muslim Ban. People entering the US from the countries he had tried to ban people from were being held in holding rooms at airports. A large number of activists showed up at airports where those people were being held and the sheer numbers and anger we were expressing got the people working at the airports to let the people go. There were also immigration lawyers who showed up to those protests. When the people in holding were released, they had legal representation right there waiting to support them. The 2020 uprising events were about showing that people weren't afraid of the police and wouldn't be silenced by police violence.

At every protest I've ever been at, there are always people from various organizations walking through the crowd trying to get people to sign up. Sometimes it's just collecting names/emails/phone numbers for a fundraising list. Sometimes it's staffers for politicians raising signatures to get on a ballot, or to get a referendum on a ballot. Sometimes it's activist organizations trying to get people who might be willing to take further actions.

As virtually every protest winds down, there's usually a group of people, almost always not affiliated with the "official event" who organize to continue taking action, typically less sanctioned, and dubiously legal actions.

Most protests don't achieve their immediate goal. That's how it's always been. The way we tend to talk about it, any given movement or event has 3 sets of goals: short-term/immediate goals, mid-terms goals, and long-term goals. We usually fail at the short-term goals (although not always). But we're almost always successful at the medium- and long-term goals. These Tesla protests, for example. The short-term/immediate goal is to shut down the specific dealership we're protesting at. That has only happened where police presence has been light and where protesters are willing to take illegal action and get arrested (which is always a minority of protesters). This goal has largely been unsuccessful. The medium-term goal is to destroy the Tesla brand so much that the stock price plummets. This is already happening. After the election, Tesla stock prices skyrocketed. Since the protests started, the stock price has already dropped back to where it was before the election, wiping out all that value added since the election. Keep this up, and we'll hopefully force it even farther down. If we're lucky, they'll have to start closing dealerships. The long-term goal is to remove Musk and Trump from power. Obviously, that hasn't happened yet, but that's why it's a long-term goal.

Because society isn't structured around proscriptive definitions. Just because you can craft a definition of human trafficking which sounds similar to a normal parent/child relationship doesn't mean they're the same thing.

Expecting consistency between beliefs and actions from bigots and fascists is a mistake.

There were well over 1000 people at the protest I was at on Saturday...

Next Saturday (April 5) is supposed to be a huge day of protest across the country, notably with a very large demonstration planned for the National Mall in DC. I plan to be at that one.

You can guess what happens next?

He fixed the cable?

Also, dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.

I'm not talking about the guys who built the fucking railroad here.

Communism is just a red herring!

History is written by the victors

I have a BIG nitpick with this framing. While it is correct in many instances, it's imprecise, and sometimes just flat out wrong.

A better framing is "History is written by the historians". In other words, the historical narrative is set by those who put forth the effort to do so. In many cases, those historians are writing from the perspective of the victors, but not always.

I'll give you a few examples:

The Mongol Empire was one of (if not the) largest contiguous land empires in world history. They conquered everything from China to eastern Europe and Mesopotamia. By any interpretation of the word, the Mongols were the victors in virtually every conflict they had. Yet they also didn't really write histories. There's only 1 real Mongolian historical text we have: The Secret History of the Mongols. It was an account of the life and conquests of Genghis Kahn written shortly after his death. Yet, as the title alludes to, it wasn't a public document. It was written for the ruling dynasty. The earliest copy we know of is a copy from ~200 years after the original was written, and it didn't become widely read until another 300 years after that. For the first half-millennia after the Mongol conquests, the historical narrative was entirely based on the accounts people who were conquered by the Mongols. In other words, the history of the Mongol conquests and their subsequent empire were almost entirely written not by the victors, but by the conquered. This heavily influences our popular conception of the Mongols as barbaric war mongers who committed horrific acts of violence. We don't think much about any other contributions the Mongols had in the realms of culture, economics, political administration, philosophy, diplomacy, etc because the people who wrote about the Mongols (and set the historical narrative) had no interest in portraying them in a positive light. Compare that to someone like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, etc. All of them were similarly successful conquerors and warlords, yet the historical narrative about them is FAR more complex and positive than that of Genghis Kahn. Because the history of Genghis Kahn was not written by the victors.

Another example which is probably more accessible to a lot of people: The American Civil War. For most of the 150 years after the war ended up until just the past couple of decades, the prevailing popular narrative portrayed in pop culture and taught in schools was the Lost Cause narrative. The war was about States' Rights. Slavery was not a part of the war at the beginning and the Union only brought it in later to justify their aggression towards the South. It was called the War of Northern Aggression by many. The South was primarily fighting to preserve a pastoral and romanticized way of life, etc, etc. This is the narrative portrayed in fiction such as Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation. Of course, we know this to be bullshit. It was a war over slavery and the South was fighting to maintain the most brutal and oppressive form of slavery the world has ever seen. Yet for over a century that wasn't the broadly accepted historical narrative because after the war ended people in the South put a lot of effort into creating and disseminating the Lost Cause narrative while the victors (the Union) didn't put any effort into crafting an historical narrative. The North was more concerned with reuniting the nation and rebuilding, so much so that they completely gave up on Reconstruction and let the same people who had led the Confederacy run the South as an apartheid state for the next century.

These are just 2 examples, but they aren't the only ones by a long shot. History is not always written by the victors. It's written by the people who put forth the effort to write it, and the historical narrative ends up reflecting this down to the modern day.

Remember: if you're not paying for a service, you're the product.

They harvest your data for a variety of reasons. 1) they pair your data with your broader Google profile (including search results, ad clicks, website views, etc) to better deliver targeted ads. 2) they train their AI (although that's an indirect revenue stream, and much more recent).

The very first time Trump's name was in a major newspaper was in the 1970s when The New York Times reported on the Nixon administration suing Trump and his father for racist housing policies in the apartment buildings they owned in NYC.

Then in the 80s he was the model for Biff Tannen, the villain in the Back to the Future movies. He was parodied by everyone from The Simpsons to MAD Magazine to SNL as the epitome of the sleazy 80s business guy.

No, he was never cool except to a very small slice of people who the sleazy 80s business guy aesthetic appeals to, and nobody thinks those guys are cool.

Governments were formed and exist to protect property rights. As much as they can be said to have an underlying purpose, it's to protect property rights, and those who own more property will always have a greater level of protection.

The thing the liberal revolutions of the 19th century, socialist revolutions of the 20th century, and the development of social democracies in the 20th century taught governments is that there comes a point where wealth inequality gets so extreme that it threatens the stability of government, which poses the largest possible threat to property rights. Governments learned that they need to have some form of wealth redistribution in order to prevent a violent revolution. To the degree that governments do address wealth inequality, it's focused on doing it just enough to prevent the system from collapsing.

That's why there's really nobody focused on complete wealth equality. They don't want that. They want to maintain status quo property rights.

I'd call it "teasing" or "play" rather than "trolling". Trolling has a bit of a mean connotation to it where as teasing/play is more, well, playful.

But, yes, after a certain point babies/infants do understand teasing play. That's essentially what games like peek-a-boo are. Babies don't have real object permanence until they're 8-12 months. That is, they don't fully have the ability to recognize that a thing still exists when it is not within their site/sensory perception until they're 8-12 months. (It gradually develops, so they'll gain more and more object permanence as they get older rather than just turning on all of a sudden.) When you play peek-a-boo, you're using this lack of fully developed object permanence to tease them. They won't recognize it as teasing at first, but they get it pretty quickly. That's why they laugh and have fun with it.

If we're giving them the benefit of the doubt, which I don't think most deserve, there's also a theological argument. For religious people (specifically Christians), they believe that people are made to God's plan. If you are born male, they believe that's what God intended. So changing your gender is, in their mind, blasphemy against God because it's denying his plan for you.

Of course, this argument completely falls apart when you draw the parallel to people who change their hair color, get corrective or cosmetic surgery, etc. God also intended you to be blonde with bad eyesight, but you dyed your hair and got Lasik.

But the real answer is just bigotry. They try to rationalize their bigotry, and may not even recognize it as bigotry themselves, but that's what it is.

I know when they were threatening to pull out of OnlyFans and Pornhub, the big concern the payment processors cited was child abuse. I don't know to what degree that's the entire story, so take it with a grain of salt.

Their complaint was that the primary method those sites had to prevent child porn from being uploaded was reports from other users. By definition, this means that the site has to allow the child porn to be uploaded, and only then takes it down after it's been reported. So someone must have seen it before it gets removed. They said they didn't want to be associated with sites that share child porn. That's why PornHub removed a TON of amateur content and changed their rules so that all users who upload content have to be verified on the site. That's their new control to prevent child porn.

Right now, it would likely harm other countries at least as much as the US. We're just too interconnected into every aspect of the global economy. Cutting off the US cuts off a lot of services that other countries rely on.

But, Trump's current foreign policy is driving countries away from the US fast. Give it a few years for countries to disentangled themselves from the US and it would likely be more effective without harming themselves in the process.

Did you read the post?

It's not that kind of protest. I've been to plenty of that kind of protest, and this isn't that kind.

Right? How can one be brave if they're not afraid? Isn't the definition of bravery doing a thing even though you're scared to?

There was a book that came out in 2010 titled Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. It's an analysis of the insurance industry (not just healthcare, but with a special focus on healthcare) that details how insurance companies operate to delay approvals of insurance claims, deny insurance claims, and defend wrongful denials in court. It basically shows how it is cheaper for insurance companies to not pay lawful claims and fight them in court than to pay out claims.

When Luigi Mangione killed the UHC CEO last year, he left behind 3 bullet shells at the scene of the murder with the words "Delay", "Deny" and "Depose" written on the bullet shells. It was a pretty clear reference to the book, and was the first indication (before Mangione was caught) as to the motive of the shooting.

So, given that you don't live near DC, what are you doing?

vvilld

@ vvilld @lemmy.world

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vvilld

Why are there no large demonstrations in the USA against Donald Trump's policies?

Permanently Deleted

How do the likes of JD Vance and Drumpf rationalise no more DEI when they have wives who are DEI? It makes no sense.

Why are there no large demonstrations in the USA against Donald Trump's policies?

Whats the most quotable movie?

Whats the most quotable movie?

Whats the most quotable movie?

History is rewritten by victors. How can I find texts about actual history? Any ideas?

How does Google make money from Gmail, the google calendar, drive or other services when used with third party front ends?

Was Donald Trump ever cool?

Why aren’t any government making wealth inequality and property supply focused policies?

Do babies and infants get trolling?

My sister’s AMAB friend likes to look like a girl and even said she wanted to be a woman, why would conservatives think using she/her pronouns for her is forcing an agenda?

Why DO credit card companies make a stink about adult content anyway?

How effective would sanctions on the US by the international community be?

Would it be a bad idea to show up at a protest outside a Tesla dealership with a sign that says "Deny Musk, Defund Doge, Depose Trump"?

Would it be a bad idea to show up at a protest outside a Tesla dealership with a sign that says "Deny Musk, Defund Doge, Depose Trump"?

Would it be a bad idea to show up at a protest outside a Tesla dealership with a sign that says "Deny Musk, Defund Doge, Depose Trump"?

Would it be a bad idea to show up at a protest outside a Tesla dealership with a sign that says "Deny Musk, Defund Doge, Depose Trump"?

Would it be a bad idea to show up at a protest outside a Tesla dealership with a sign that says "Deny Musk, Defund Doge, Depose Trump"?