The line to draw, I feel, is are you attacking institutions (i.e. smashing the windows of Wall Street, chaining yourself to the doors of the police station), or people (like the loons here in Oregon attacking minority families during the fires)? Are you harassing oppressed groups (like kristallnacht did) or the overpowered establishment (like Blair Mountain did)?

(Obviously, punching individual Nazis is still fine.)

But really, at the end of the day, violence is still violence, and while it may be the right action, it is never a good action. That is something I feel all protesters need to keep in mind.

To paraphrase Dan Shive, there are times when you best (or only) choices lie between the least-bad and most-bad options. And when that happens, humans tend to try and rationalize the least-bad choice as being the good one. This is a trap. If you start to think of the least-bad choice as a good choice, pretty soon you start to believe it—and then you stop looking for the actual good options.

Even if an actual good option—like a nonviolent protest—isn’t feasible for one situation, you should always try to find a truly good option, if you can. That’s why the combo of violent protests on one side, peaceful group on the other, tends to get the best results.

Good for you. History disagrees with your disagreeing.

Look up Malcom X, the Black Panthers, and the Battle of Blair Mountain sometime. Pretty much every victory oppressed groups have won has had to draw blood in order to win the day.

MLK didn’t; Malcom X did. MLK’s underlying message was ‘acknowledge my peaceful protest, or you get stuck with his less peaceful protest’. Peaceful protesting alone tends to get you a whole lot of nothing.

Edit: of course, most history classes seem to forget Malcom X even existed, because the ‘just peacefully protest over in that corner and don’t bother us, it will totally make us change our ways’ narrative is much more desirable for certain demographics.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

-Martin Luther King Jr

Got a lot of the same vibes, really

No-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine they made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.

-Sir Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

I am sorry for your loss. May her memory forever climb mountains alongside you.

Imagine being told every minute of every day that you don’t matter. That as a woman, your only purpose is to glorify men, support men, breed more men. That it’s the greatest and highest calling of women to surrender your life and your choices to men.

That women are stupid and sinners because of Eve’s actions, and will be forever. So you can never be allowed any kind of authority, because like Eve you’ll just do something foolish or abuse it.

Now imagine everyone and everything around you shows and supports this worldview. All the time.

That’s where it comes from. When something is all you’ve ever known, then it’s normal. And, even if you consciously don’t believe it, it still worms its way inside of you.

It’s definitely more of a ‘The Rapture is coming! The Rapture is coming!’ Type of nonsense.

Oh, they still have all four branches. It’s just Oregon got a bit more Blue.

To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

-Charles Haddon Spurgeon

It’s a lot easier to blame things than to fix them.

If it makes you feel better, the one genuine silver lining I’ve found is my family in the military say that the odds of these chucklefucks getting full military support is very unlikely.

But is such a small silver lining…

I would imagine (if they’re savvy, and the people running Project 2025 definitely are) they’d be more likely to keep him around as long as he was a useful distraction, then have him assassinated at a key point, and blame a liberal.

That would not only get him out of the way so the real work could begin, it would do double-duty of riling up his murderous base and giving them a ‘legitimate’ excuse to start sending the military after blue states and political rivals.

Isn’t just the aging ones sadly. Lots of young people, especially young men, went for Trump. Andrew Tate has taught them well.

Requested!

What’s your location? What is the soil like (pH, mineral content, clay vs loam vs sand, etc)? Full sun, or are their tall buildings or other trees around?

I remember in a discussion about whether AirBnB was bad or not, and a PoC pointing out that, before AirBnB and prices posted online, hotels would regularly charge PoC higher prices, or ‘somehow’ be suddenly out of rooms when someone with dark skin walked in the door.

They agreed AirBnB was rotten, but they also were glad that the company forced a transparency that the service industry really needed.

Oh boy did they ever. Tearing up fences and burning them, stealing produce out of fields and throwing it at houses, barricading all the adults inside their houses so they couldn’t ruin the fun…

Tasting History did a pretty interesting video on it, actually.

Men who are inferior to their fellow men, are always most anxious to establish their superiority over women.

-Mary Wollstonecraft

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.

This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

-C. S. Lewis

They already had that out in Court. Fox successfully argued they’re an entertainment channel not a news channel and so the judge said what they were doing was fine.