It's exhausting that the "solution" to problems like this is getting tens or hundreds of thousands of citizens stressed until enough public attention gives some small chance of redress. I'm not calling for violence, but if we can't get these things fixed in court there has to be a more effect and more forceful avenue for protest than venting on internet forums.
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I saw a clip the other day of an American comedian doing crowd work in Paris. He asked the audience what America should do, and the French said - something like - they should punch the police more and light things on fire.
To me that sounds crazy! But, I can see how it works for the French. They protest all the time, and the government is very responsive to the needs of the people. Much more so than the American government sees to be.
I don't know how effective the French protests are, since I haven't lived in Europe for a while. But even as a Swiss, at least judging from TV, protests in the U.S. generally seem very tame.
Not advocating punching the police as a default, but in my opinion, protests need to be disruptive if they're going to get anyone's attention at all. I don't really see what a few people standing on the sidewalk with cardboard signs are supposed to accomplish.
American police are much more inclined to escalate any violence instead of trying to de-escalate.
In the US if you're with a group of people and there is some leader or group planning unlawful property destruction or violence, there is a very very good chance it is a fed or confidential informant operation and you are the mark/patsy to which all the blame will be assigned when you're staring at a sheet of paper that says US v [your name].
Americans don't even protest on weekdays, they wait for a weekend to do it. So it is easy to say that they aren't serious but on the other hand, they're a lot closer to the knife's edge of stability and missing a day of work can get them fired (especially in at-will employment states), Europe is not like this as much.
I agree. people should be shutting down all commerce, but people are so overworked or living from paycheck to pay check its probably hard to do the kind of protesting that needs to happen. Seems like UK is bad.
There are people with cardboard signs, and there are BLM protests or occupy Wall Street. Can't remember when the last disruptive protests were in Switzerland, but in Germany I'd say tame protests are the norm and disruptions are an exception
I think it’s important that the ultra powerful never feel they’re unreachable by guillotine.
> the French said - something like - they should punch the police more and light things on fire.
I'm trying to wrap my head around this as well. Do these people want "punching the police and lighting things on fire" to be a freely permitted form of free speech?
If so, should anyone be legally allowed to destroy any amount of stuff, for any reason they feel unhappy about? Or is this a case of "blowing stuff up should only be permitted for causes I like, not for causes I dislike"?
If not, do they see the irony in endorsing behaviors that they simultaneously believe should not be legalized?
France is a much smaller country. When there is a mass protest in the US, it ends of being a bunch of smaller protests all over the country, which lacks the power of a single concentrated protest. These various satellite protests just end up being a minor nuisance, which don’t amount to much.
The media in the US often ignores the protests they (or their owners) don’t agree with. This also weakens them significantly. I remember having to go to Twitter to see what was going on with a lot of the Occupy Wall Street stuff, because the news was acting like it wasn’t going on. Without attention, and fractured across the country, it faded out. The protest area where I was living at the time slowly shifted into a homeless encampment, before they eventually cleared them out.
Is the French government more responsive than those of neighbouring countries?
I know that "French strikes" and "French setting fire to things" is a popular American trope, but things really don't work like that. If that were the case France would be a much better place than other European countries, and it really is not.
That only works for the French because they're afraid to disappear their own citizens. US has been doing it for the last year and a half.
Those two things are contradictory. Obviously the government isn't very responsive if they are constantly protesting.
I feel like in the US if you punched a cop the cop and his colleagues are much more likely to just shoot you, or at least unleash brutal violence on you and the rest of the crowd. I guess the idea is to provoke these kind of battles in hopes that the cops can be overwhelmed or at least public opinion goes to your side?
It is much more than that, egalitarianism is fundamental to French culture.
That's alot less risky in France where the police have more than an 8th grade education, no guns, and aren't jacked up on right-wing hate propaganda 24/7. You punch a cop in the US and there's more than a 50% chance, that a given cop has been dreaming of "protecting himself" by any means necessary. In other words, you are going to get shot in the chest.
In Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, he reviewed Roman records and compared provinces with heavily fortified seats of power to ones that weren't as fortified. The ones that were more fortified tended to be governed in a way that was more callous, less efficient, and less popular. He concluded that it was good for governors to have a reasonable fear of those they governed.
The U.S.'s institutions of power are heavily fortified. Political leaders of most countries travel about with a security detail of a few cars at most. The U.S. president has a gargantuan motorcade that's only rivaled in size by those of third world dictators. Arguably, the U.S. president doesn't hold power so much as wield it in the interest of oligarchs, who are even more insulated from the public.
If Americans want better government, what they really need to do is make oligarchs and politicians feel like they might actually be made to feel the consequences of their actions. That doesn't necessarily have to mean violence though, if people are creative enough.
e.g. Elon Musk wants so much to control what the world thinks of him that he bought Twitter and had Grokipedia made in an attempt to kill Wikipedia, since they have honestly reported on his misadventures with the same standards of rigor applied to other public figures. If you want to make Elon Musk feel consequences, just never let up on him. The dude made Nazi salutes during Trump's inauguration twice. His DOGE idiocy is why Texas livestock is being banned in other countries because of screwworms. Keep talking about that and don't stop.
By what measure does it work for the French?
They have 8% unemployment, 30% less GDP per capita than the US, and many other problems.
Government by caving in to riots is not in general being responsive to the needs of the people.
Being 'stressed' about the corruption and ineffectiveness of governance is literally the exact and only way you make government not be corrupt and ineffective. Democracy is not a spectator sport and voting is just the polite mechanism. Mass protest and outrage is the actual mechanism of democracy - voting is just there to make them afraid of the protest so you don't have to throw moltovs.
It certainly feels like we need a reset on the expectations placed upon politicians at all levels of governance. Somehow.
I think politicians have completely lost the plot in their job and who they represent. Instead, they seem all ideologically or financially motivated, and largely seem to get their marching orders from select wealthy CEOs. It's a very bad look that will get worse since trust in govern being so low goes hand in hand with voted apathy. And voted apathy means we get more of the same.
It's a bad cycle and I think we'll land on a civil esque war sooner or later.
Society's elites have forgotten that civil institutions exist to be an alternative to resolving disputes through violence. If they completely bend those institutions to their will and leave the common people out in the cold, the result isn't acquiescence, it's revolt.
I, too, worry that they're going to rediscover this the hard way at some point.
I am ambivalent about whatever this controversy is (taking it at face value, it seems pretty bad, I don't know all the backstory) but we have in fact in the US the exact opposite problem: tiny, nonrepresentative groups of noisy stakeholders have an alarming track record of halting development, which has been deployed in the service of keeping home prices high, neighborhoods white and/or wealthy, transportation inefficient, and the power grid fossil-based and rickety.
The solution here might be the appeals court, since there is a deed restriction. The city agreed to it when they paid $10 for the land. The article mentions that Texas courts tend to be pretty serious about enforcing deed restrictions.
> there is a deed restriction
Was there ever a deed restriction? The government says no, but they say there was something else which I don’t understand.
> In the notes about the grantee, the cash warranty deed states that the property was to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas. This was not a deed restriction.
The rest of the page doesn’t display properly on iOS. https://taylortx.gov/1293/Blueprint-Projects-Data-Center
That property was transferred multiple times after the farmer gave it away. I can’t tell if that save deed restriction followed those sales
> I'm not calling for violence
We all know that you are, and that that's fine, and you're just hedging because you're scared of the list you'll be placed on. Do not worry, you're on it already.
You would never have mentioned it if you weren't.
I’ve organized so much that I’m exhausted from organizing
but if somebody else wants to organize I will 100% show up
So consider me first on the list of people ready to do whatever it takes to fix this shit
yeah, it's interesting how we're not allowed to call for violence, eh.
The problem is that, while there are times when violent acts may bring about positive outcomes, it is extremely rare for those outcomes to be in the minds of those committing the acts. It is far more common for someone to commit violence as an expression of their anger, while rationalising that it is justified because they are aware of the arguments in favour of violence apply to whatever it is that they really want to do in the moment.
We absolutely CAN call for violence. And especially political violence. Theres even a TV show with it as a name.
Its calling for "Law and Order". Its violence against the 'correct group'.
You absolutely can call for violence (now) against protestors, ANTIFA, anti-surveillance (DEFLOCK), unionists, homeless, drug users, and other deemed by federal, state, and local officials as undesirable.
You cant directly call for violence to black people by name, but eupamisms are still fine to allude to. "Those people", "ghetto", etc.
And the violence BY police and government way exceed the violence by the public they target.
Also, thou shalt NEVER advocate for violence against CEOs, business leaders, politicians, and the like. Their lives are worth like 1M of us plebes. So those who come to their defense will do so crazily and way over-respond, like cops do routinely.
Thats why the feds threw threw the book at Luigi Mangione. Cause if he did it, his way is illegal but tremendously effective. And the elites have little defense against this.
(Case in point. In my local area, a person took $100 from a cash register, and got arrested for a class A misdemeanor and 2 other charges. Whereas the same restaurant had their owner committed mass wage theft of 27 people to the tune of $72000, and only had to pay a fine.
There absolutely hypocrisy who can advocate and not for violence.)
We aren't, but the president and certain politicians sure are.
You're edging on terrorism
What is left when all other options are exhausted?
The American War of Independence, French Revolution and English Civil War were acts of terrorism.
Were those acts justified? Not if you're the ones who were initially holding the power.
I am a freedom fighter, you are a rebel, and he is a terrorist.
You're edging on support of a terrorist state. The entire goal of groups like ICE is to instill terror. It doesn't get more terrorist than that.
People have weird kinks these days
If a government does not respond to the wishes of its people, violence is an inevitability. It is in the best interest of the state to be accommodating enough to placate the citizens.
The funny thing is it's neither terrorism nor illegal if you're just lobbying the government to do it on your behalf.
So why do people keep pointing at an Amendment when it comes to gun control?
It is quite easy to get the government do if the people really want it. Just stop using a car. Stop buying gas. Stop consuming the stuff and cause business real pain.
Then the government will listen. Because businesses, not people, are what governments really listen to.
In India, Gandhiji made it work like 5 decades back in India against the British, where the whole country rejected consumption of foreign goods on his call.
Whats the problem here?
Farmer gives land to city.
City goes "We can have 10 million dollars AND a brand new data center, hot diggity"
City is enriched in both money AND services.
Thanks Mr Farmer.
No.
Farmer SELLS land (for $10) with a deed restriction that it is to be used for a public park.
Hand wavey timey wimey...
Deed restriction 'magically' goes away.
Gets sold for $10M.
Farmer donates land for a park
If you are my friend and I gift you a nice item … I would be majorly pissed at you and would not talk to you ever again if you would sell it online.
I would expect you give it back or pass for free to someone who is also close to you.