“Blocking Traffic” pretty much the same as “Rioting”.
Lmao.
This one really gets me. Had an arguement with a irl lib friend during the George Floyd protests. They were like, “they need to be peaceful like MLK, not blocking traffic.” MLK blocked traffic!!! What are you talking about!!!
Of course, libs hate living revolutionaries, but dead ones don’t do inconvenient things like support oppressed people or criticize oppressive power structures. Or as Lenin put it:
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
I remember Michael Moore talking about how he felt when he was a kid, hanging out with a bunch of unionized detroit auto workers, and how they roared with approval when the radio announced King’s assassination.
MLK was constantly tarred for inciting riots (even when he didn’t), for inciting property damages (which he didn’t), for his followers being rude or destructive (even when they mostly weren’t), and just generally painted as a violent, uppity ****** in his time
Fucking idiots
I find it funnier that some people think blocking traffic is more acceptable than burning a flag. Blocking traffic is at least a major inconvenience, burning a flag literally doesn’t affect you in any way.
You’re just fucking over people who work for hourly wages and/or have childcare issues. People who otherwise might be sympathetic to your cause.
It’s the stupidest form of protest there is. Maybe it would be fine in a country with a better social safety net, but in the US it impacts poor working people the most, while wealthier people can just work remotely or stay home and still earn their salary.
Meanwhile some single mom is being blocked from picking her kid up from school.
What kinds of protest action would be most effective, in your view? The point is to be disruptive so that people get pissed off at government and demand change.
I’ll be honest; I don’t have a great answer. I just know for a fact that blocking traffic hurts the working poor far more than it does the elite who are ostensibly the people being targeted by such protests.
As a union member and union activist, my ultimate answer is always going to be more union organizing and more union actions.
I am all in on Local 10 till I die!
>blocking traffic is the #3 worst thing anyone can possibly do
🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸
🫡 🫡 🫡 🫡 🫡 🫡 🫡
to be fair, almost everything on this list is extraordinarily tame and nonthreatening to power
The Canadian gov sure thought blocking traffic was a crime against humanity lol (stopping emergency services is kind of a big deal though)
In a trial brought against the crown from the trucker convoy, (finance minister) Chrystia Freeland’s main defence was along the lines of “international banking sectors wouldn’t do business with us until we had control of our supply chain”
Send in the horses!
(stopping emergency services is kind of a big deal though)
capitalists care about human health, suddenly (listen to Death Panel podcast)
people do really think this way. I was incredibly close to getting ran over by a fascist in a truck at one of the George Floyd uprising protests in my city and I had several liberal ex-friends tell me it was my fault for blocking the road.
people need to be blocking traffic for shits and gigs. Just walking to the grocery store and take your sweet time in the cross walk. The public space should be for people
I walk the same pace on the crosswalk as the sidewalk and I swear most drivers you’re in the way of expect you to fucking run. Always slightly inching past the line to show their impatience, as if they’re not getting around 20x faster than me either way, and I don’t have to wait just as long as them til I get my right of way
I’d love to see this stacked up with an identical poll except instead of asking what is acceptable or not, ask what is effective or not. I don’t think even libs are dumb enough to think any of the acceptable things are actually effective. It’d be a real telling chart.
counterpoint: yes they are that dumb. they keep telling us to VOTE despite the fact that the people they want us to vote for can’t do anything.
I dunno, usually when I press them on that they agree it’s not that effective but then they double down on “it’s the only tool we have” and “it’s better than nothing.” I think they know, I just think they don’t care enough to actually do anything differently.
I mean, during the peak of the BLM movement literally every lib I knew was saying “violence doesn’t accomplish anything, peaceful protests and civil disobedience is the only way you win support!”
i want to meet with the 5% that think creating a petition is “unacceptable”
Maybe they think that doing anything but is undemocratic/undermines institutions or something.
Or maybe they’re an ancap and think that the only way is to shoot a mctactical nuke into the privatized former public service.
6 % of people think it is unacceptable to call your representative. Half of those think it is not just usually, but always unacceptable.
I think it is fine so long as you just snicker and hang up whenever they answer the phone. You can also ask them if their refrigerator is running.
See also:
36% of Americans support US airstrikes that explicitly kill civilians
51% of Americans support ICE raids against illegal immigrants
52% of Americans support US strikes in Mexico to fight the cartel
53% of Americans support stand your ground laws
55% of Americans support the death penalty
58% of Americans support drone strikes in general
65% of Americans have a favorable view of the CIA
82% of Americans oppose defunding the police
94% of Americans support the troops
Real pacifist crowds you got there
Don’t we support the death penalty? Surely Elon wouldn’t just get prison that would suck
I would support violence in the revolution that’s inevitable and necessary for the revolution to succeed (in minecraft). But hell no I do not support literal murder as a part of a justice system, I’d hope most of us aren’t that bloodthirsty and retributive
Lock Elon and every other ghoul up, their torture can be spending the rest of their days seeing the world change
I still think the greatest revenge is turning them in to good communists, as that would require utterly destroying the person they were and reforming them as something else.
99% of cases I’m against the death penalty. But in the clear cut cases where it’s obvious someone is an irredeemable Nazi, line them up.
Like Anders Breivik. The relatively comfy imprisonment he’s been given is great for most people, but he should have been taken out back, shot, and dropped in a ditch.
There’s a fair amount of us that are against punitive/retributive justice as a rule actually. Whenever I post about it I get a fair number of upbears so I assume I’m not alone.
just get prison
Wait till you find out most of us are prison abolitionists as well lol.
Restorative justice is cool and good!
As long as we keep people like musk under tight surveillance so they don’t get up to any counter-revolutionary shit they wouldn’t be dangerous after we take their stuff. We might have to spread them out over long distances and confine them to rural areas to make it hard to do conspiracies, but there are ways to keep them in check while allowing them a degree of freedom and dignity (which, let me be clear, they do not deserve. It’s not for them, it’s for us)
I think there’s a significant contradiction between prison abolition and running any sort of state, especially a post-revolutionary one where reaction is inevitable.
To paraphrase , the day after the revolution, are we suddenly going to treat the fascists with kid gloves? Will they be allowed to go back to what they are doing now and we can’t even arrest them?
I don’t. It doesn’t work and provably makes things worse. There is no justification for killing prisoners or criminals during peacetime. It’s not even a mercy or compassion thing, it provably creates negative outcomes for the community.
