I think many American movements tend to take on an everything bagel quality and it becomes too unclear what the actual demands are and what any politician could do to achieve the goal.
I had a conversation about this with my French teacher a few months ago
It was striking how different our outlooks were on the effectiveness of protests. Her position was that together, she and her fellow protesters _could_ enact change. When I look around, the stench of preconsigned defeat permeates the space. We've lived in it for so long that we've become blind to it. We've learned to be helpless.
Not to mention, when a fresh face inevitably proposes large scale action, the responses always include FUD about needing to solve the poverty issue first so that participants can even attend such action. The end result is that it's stopped at the idea stage, nothing changes, and six months later a new freah face will repeat the cycle.
Part of the issue is that without social safety nets, much of the public is afraid that missing a week to a month of work will guarantee them homelessness.
I believe this is the intended effect of maintaining some level of homelessness and unemployment in American policy decisions. Full employment and suffering reduction through a strong safety net are the correct moral imperatives, but they reduce the leverage of a central authority. You can see whose priorities win out.
I think there is a soft self-destruction happening among millennials and beyond in the US and similar societies. They have been so worn down by living in a system that refuses to invest properly in them that they are taking the fatalist route of simply refusing to participate in the building of a future.
Limited procreation, disengaging from politics or mindlessly bandwagoning demagogues, deaths of despair, etc… it’s not universal but the trend lines are certainly worrying.
I feel like, historically, protests have beared fruit in America for leftist / progressive causes. Everything from Suffragettes and Civil Rights / anti-Vietnam to the Floyd protests of the modern day. Maybe they didn’t overthrow an entire government but the marked forward progress of each one is clear.
I feel there is currently a bit of of internalized propaganda about protests being stupid or worse. Witness any cause which involves protesting by blocking the street. You get an army of internet trolls talking up the idea that this is somehow evil.
In the civil rights era, events like crossing bridges on foot were a key feature, done by people like Martin Luther King. In the modern era, if you see a protest on the golden gate bridge as an example, they'll be called terrorists and people will advocate for violence against them.
Oh, there was plenty of internalized propaganda about civil disobedience being the "wrong approach" [0] - it is by no means a new phenomenon. Such criticism was common enough during the civil rights
movement that MLK addressed it in Letter from Birmingham Jail:
> You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.
> Oh, there was plenty of internalized propaganda about civil disobedience being the "wrong approach"
Yes, I'm aware of this. But I think it's surprising to me because decades later, MLK et al. are nearly universally accepted to have been right, but people using the same tactics are not.
But the cyclical propaganda lines do cross the decades. In the Bush 2 years I was rather taken by similarities between discussions of the Vietnam war or Watergate (which I read about in books or heard about from boomers) and what was then current events. A lot of the right wing stuff we've encountered more recently reminds me a lot of the 90s, when Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich bursted on the scene. All of the same talking points go in waves. Nothing new under the sun.
35 years ago, protesters blocked the Golden Gate Bridge.
I'm pretty sure they were protesting the war with Iraq (Bush the First) in response to Iraq's invasion and capture of oil wells in Kuwait.
But far more clear is my memory of the searing rage of a coworker that day. She was flying on it, the hatred coming out of her mouth.
It shocked me for a couple of reasons. She was close in age to me, just out of school. I think that my college years had led me to presume to most young people would be more sympathetic to opposition of general warfare. There was lots of talk of forcing military enlistment among people our age.
But the main reason was that the trigger for her rage was the temporary threat to her right to drive her car wherever she wanted to.
You think Americans are nuts about their guns, don't you ever threaten their right to kill people with cars.
Any sympathy she could have felt for the protesters' cause was gone because they blocked a highway.
If society at large is being a dick to me and my group as a whole, I'm likely to be an even worse dick to society at large, which is why protesting doesn't work for people like me because protesting is generally about very nice and calm about outrageous things and causing a bit of inconvenience, that is to say being not as bad as what one is protesting with the hidden message you don't want us to make things bad (I decided to drop the dick metaphor before it would have to get graphic)
Well, then I suppose feminism, civil rights (to say nothing of ending slavery,) labor rights and literally every other right you enjoy didn't deserve to advance because all of them are the result of some people at some point at the very least being a dick to others.
> Witness any cause which involves protesting by blocking the street. You get an army of internet trolls talking up the idea that this is somehow evil.
"Evil" is a stronger word than I would use, but I think it's fair to say that blocking the streets is both reckless and extremely antisocial. Making my life harder when I didn't do anything to wrong you doesn't make me more sympathetic to your cause, it makes me think "wow the people who support X are real dicks".
Also I like how you label this as a position espoused by "Internet trolls", as though no normal decent person could be irritated when they get screwed over by protesters.
I've been thinking about them recently. Did any of them "directly" threaten capital? I'd argue that Suffragettes and Civil Rights ultimately helped capital. Maybe anti-Vietnem since it directly affected defense contractors income streams?
Can't speak for everybody, but maybe it has something do with hundreds of thousands of us being laid off, and we're just too busy trying not to go under.
That's funny, as it's the same reason I moved off Gmail. Most egregious was a reply to my message ending up in spam, and the other party was someone also on Gmail
What I mean is, the mandatory spam filter was so braindead it sent a reply to my own message to spam, which is itself absurd, but even moreso because the other party was also using Gmail
Windows Vista/7, search was instant and correct (modulo hard drive speed and RAM). Then Windows 10 came along, I click a local result, half the time it takes forever to open Explorer, or nothing happens, or there's no results once it does open.
By the way, things still work correctly and instantly with OpenShell, so something still works underneath whatever shit veneer has coated the shell
Let me fix the title: Microsoft, please get your shit together
I tried to help a relative set up a new Windows PC recently and had to give up. Everything was confusing and/or broken, and for the first time I am ready to just send them to Apple while they can still return it. A literal brand new PC with nothing installed, and after logging in, clicking Explorer in the task bar doesn't work and I have to reboot and try again? I'm not even angry, just disappointed.
Did you know there's no more Office, they literally call it Microsoft Copilot 365 now? Like, I've been through shades of this before (".NET", anyone?) but it's a thoroughly unhinged clusterfuck on an entirely different level now.
Oh, I'd say AI is rotting our brains, all right...
Not only that, but it provides opportunity to create levers such as you describe in the first place, due to the concentration of power and influence. Funny how that part of Adam Smith isn't worshipped as much
"I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
"[My probabilistic languages] team in particular was at the point where we were regularly putting models into production that on net reduced costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of the work.
...
We foolishly thought that we would naturally be protected from any layoffs, being a team that reduced costs of any team we partnered with.
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The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting measure. I have no explanation for how this was justified and I note that if the company were actually serious about cost-cutting, they would have grown our team, not destroyed it."
Edit to clarify: perhaps the various sentiments described in the replies didn't come about entirely organically
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