Because they were trying to topple the entire system, not voice disapproval or change policies.
There’s no peaceful way to do that without a level of coordinated effort that we will NEVER get from groups of humans. To say nothing of the fact that even after the revolution, you have to share space with the people and sympathizers of those ousted, so sending a message of severe, popular consequence for regression is almost a necessity for lasting change.
Also, the “no violence” thing has a LOT to do with what the mobilizing group is trying to accomplish.
Changing policies and ousting leadership that isn’t performing? Hell yeah, peaceful marches and protests all the way.
Want to remove a hostile and oppressive militarized regime? That shit is NEVER pretty, and turns even the best of people into monsters by necessity.
I’ll deliver this reply in Choose Your Own Adventure Format:
If you want to make a reference to Donald Trump being at his birthday parade and thus exposed, vulnerable and in the open and presently not looking up, turn to page 89.
If you rather make a reference to how we should leave the Devil be because the Devil himself is more respectable and honorable than any of these monstrous despots who murder out of spite and wrap themselves in scripture, turn to page 322.
100%, all of that.
I once owned and raised exotic reptiles, I remember being told “Take precautions in your terrariums, if there’s a way they can harm themselves, no matter how remote, they WILL find a way to maim or kill themselves with anything you put in there.”
I realized over time that this rule applies to all of us.
I am just astonished the concept of blanket safety rules is getting pushback on the same website where people routinely show gifs and clips of people suffering freak accidents at worksites.
Then there are landscapers working in a garden pulling weeds even if there are no trees for miles. What’s going to happen?
As someone who used to be an operations manager for several work-crews, I fully understand why you would just make a fucking blanket-rule. Because the more people you put on a work crew, the more obvious and stupid risks they will take. It was a daily struggle to get people to wear glove and eye protection using hammers, and the times that I didn’t enforce it as a “do it or get sent home” rule, can you guess what happened?
No really, we were on first-name basis with people at the urgent-care center my company worked out a deal with.
Sure the day that they’re raking the yard there’s no chance of someone suffering a head-injury. Until one of them is loading the wheelbarrow back on the truck and didn’t bother lowering the lift-gate because they chose to load their buckets and tools first and didn’t want shit to fall out of the back of the truck, then the goddamn wheelbarrow falls and lands on Martinez’s head and now he needs stitches and X-rays and is off the team for a week and we have another worker’s comp claim and everyone’s paycheck suffers for it.
We wouldn’t need PPE rules and a thousand other safety regulations if people were always smart, alert and watching for hazards. They’re not. They’re incredibly dumb. Everyone is. So we need blanket-rules.
China, now the leading global super-power, took drastic measures decades ago to make sure their population wasn’t getting indoctrinated by outside influences.
They also used this power to cover up genocides and such, but I feel like a healthier balance could be maintained if we could just get our population to understand that their unfettered access to literally anything is like opening up a wound to the world’s bacteria.
There are brands moving there, that’s how a place starts generating value or the perception of value. I saw the same shit happen with twitter and reddit back in the day, this is just the same cycle repeating.
Lemmy is barely a thing. Lets not get ahead of ourselves.
People do prefer centralized platforms with shiny front-faces and easy-to-navigate corporate bullshit. The reason why that stuff is so successful is because it works.
People fled to Bluesky because advertisers moved to Bluesky.
But maybe some kind of resilience to the forces of destruction plaguing commercial social media.
This isn’t going to be the effective slogan that turns the masses who are finally just barely starting to fill Bluesky.
As soon as any platform sees a measure of success, it becomes a product and thus vulnerable. If we want social media that isn’t just a massive propaganda and advertising machine, I feel like we need to change something else.
Like physically storming corporate offices and returning the means of production to the people?
Maybe.
This is very much a real effect.
I play some video games on my downtime, I hop into discord groups of male gamers and it’s like jumping into Penthouse Letters - Oops! All Men Edition.
The weird way a lot of straight men “joke” about erotic ideas with each other seems to spiral out of control as they hang out with each other, and rapidly leaves the realm of “ironic dirty talk” and becomes full on eroticism and while I’m no prude and don’t feel offense, I sometimes wonder if these guys should just get in a private channel and get it out of their system.
Because we’re all being trained to be afraid of each other, we have rising phenomenon that indicate a deep human desire for connection that’s being lost. Why is incest porn so popular right now? Not because people commit incest at any higher rate than at any other point in modern history, it’s because a growing swath of the population, mostly men, are so distanced from the idea of intimacy with a female partner that they can only imagine it with someone they have a pre-existing, non-threatening relationship with. Erotica with imagined siblings, anthropomorphic “pets” and of course sexualizing underage or “innocent” characters other ideas of non-relationship sex with “safe” partners are flooding media and it’s absolutely a sign of our current male population not having ANY idea how to grow up and have adult relationships and it’s more sad than anything, and it’s only going to get worse and worse.
I wish modern men would finally come to terms with the reality that almost every contentious social issue boils down to them having some kind of sexual insecurity.
I’m not even kidding.
I am not a woman but I have many female friends and family members and a partner who talk about the things they deal with, so let me give a few examples of things you may deal with as a woman online or off, in increasing levels of severity and threat level:
There are a lot of social “rules” that women have to deal with, and a lot of men aren’t even aware of them. Like how they never leave drinks unattended when out with friends. When being dropped off at their house, they ask the driver to wait until they get all the way inside with the door closed before the driver leaves.
I often hesitate to give these kinds of examples because invariably there will be someone who claims it’s all lies or exaggerated, or they dismiss it and say “I wish I got that kind of attention online!” and other mind-meltingly dense, stupid or aggressive takes. This is why I asked if you have talked to real women you know about their experiences, because they don’t talk about this stuff, particularly online to people they aren’t close to. As soon as you get close to any women you learn exactly how much sexual predation they endure their whole lives and yeah, they do “get used it” in that they don’t go around telling everyone about every interaction. 1 out of 5 women are raped or have been assaulted/attempted rape. Of these victims, 1 out of 3 had it happen between ages of 11 and 17.
Most women who are murdered are murdered by a spouse, boyfriend, acquaintance or someone who met them once or twice.
Women have very good reason to feel afraid of strangers, online or off, if you’re actually interested in learning more and reading actual examples there is a WEALTH of information online and plenty of women’s stories on major forums, from Lemmy to Reddit to twitter threads.
There are a lot of things you probably aren’t even aware of that are normal for women, I would really encourage you to broaden your social sphere and make friends of other genders and backgrounds and listen to what other people deal with.
You probably don’t even know how much harassment and threats you would face just being a woman online, it’s not exaggerated, there are a LOT of people who really enjoy making women feel unsafe, it’s a game to them. Most girls I know hide their identities online and pretend to be men. Imagine not being able to express yourself freely even on the internet because you don’t want to feel unsafe or hated.
We’re in free-fall right now, but kind of like the market when a recession begins, we don’t see it until it’s in hindsight. But right now it’s already in full swing, whatever people meant about the “singularity” it’s already happening, because we have no idea what’s going to happen next, predictive models are toast. We used to be able to predict the future out to the decade with ideas about politics, technology and society being extrapolated with fairly good accuracy.
We can’t predict what’s going to happen next month now. Even our so-called leadership has just abandoned all semblance of control and appearances of normalcy and are just trying to get as much as they can as fast as they can before it all collapses.
I don’t think we’re going to lose everything. We’re going to have some hardships and a LOT of people are going to suffer. And likely there will be deaths at a scale that grows so steadily and so long-term that we’re all going to collectively tune out the news. Again. I just don’t know what’s going to be built on the other side. It will either be solar panels and servers and robot factories, or it will be death machines and tools of darkness. (And server farms and robot factories, but meant for like… mulching brown people who still have oil and water.)
This is a really, really scary time right now, if there was ever a time to know a general, baseline level of fear, it would be now. We’re entering a world where it’s really hard to tell what’s real, but we’re a population of creatures with brains designed by the last Ice Age and as a result, all our brains do is tell stories to make explanations for how we feel.
These brains are woefully inadequate for relating to a world with several huge, complicated issues intersecting, from technology/AI, to climate change, to political instability and misinformation.
I’ve been around a few, I’m getting up there in years. And I have NEVER seen a world more lost and confused and embattled in issues we’re incapable of sorting out as individuals. And it’s all going to get so much worse before it gets better.
Yah, you’re not alone, but you also can’t sit on your hands. Seriously, save money, put dry or preserved food away, bury some cash or gold. Learn to cook and shoot, get your passport updated, have a go-bag.
Within the next 10 - 20 years we’re going to have a global instability like we’ve never seen. Half of all animals will be facing potential endangerment, oceans will have a harder and harder time sustaining yields and the fresh-water problem is going to be a full-on emergency in many places. And on top of all this, we will have dictators and little tyrants throwing missiles at each other left and right, old alliances will crumble, wars will stack on wars, and machines will start thinking like people and controlling our weapons and our world. I have no idea what’s going to happen but I want everyone to be ready. America in particular hasn’t known the hardships of forced migration and famine and war and artillery barrages, so people here are going to have a hard time adjusting to how tough things may get.
Our species has a lot more vulnerabilities in our minds and hearts than we really want to admit to even ourselves… but there are wicked people who do know about them, and they will try everything to pry those vulnerabilities open and make us feel things so our brains latch onto stories to explain those feelings.
We have to be constantly wary of anyone who says things that make us feel powerful emotions, no matter who or where, this our future battleground. The next world-war will be waged internally.
(And with missiles too of course.)
Have you ever really talked to women who use online spaces a lot? Like a real conversation, face-to-face or in person. Serious question.
edit: the soft chirping of distant crickets provide me all the answers I need.
Okay now lets change it again.
“Are there any Lemmy communities FOR rape survivors and by rape survivors?”
And someone says “Well why do you want to create division? Shouldn’t rapists also have a chance to share their side?”
I’m not saying this is a realistic “turn the tables” but neither is yours. I will explain why.
Right now, despite whatever stupid fucking propaganda a select few assholes are hung up on, there are no systemic attacks happening on white people just for being white. At least none of any value or meaning. No, fringe groups don’t count because they don’t have power and never will have power in this system. However there ARE in fact many white-nationalist groups that ARE gaining power and voice, and attempting to return to an old hegemonic ideal of race. This isn’t a “that’s not fair!” issue, this is an issue about our very future as a diverse species sharing a world together.
I don’t think there should be ANY exclusionary spaces, but I do think there should be well-moderated spaces for people of similar ideas or demographics to share thoughts without being attacked for their identity. There should be spaces where people know they will be ejected for trying to sabotage the conversations.
Division and segregation hurts all of us, and if we want to fight it, we have to fight the fuckers who drive people to want to escape, we have to fight the trolls and monsters and bullies and nazis who make people feel afraid. Those are the ones trying to divide us, and those are the ones we shouldn’t be giving voice to.
I can’t tell if your question is in good faith or not because of how awkwardly it’s worded, but if you’re asking how women can feel uncomfortable online, you’re obviously not a woman, so enjoy that I guess.
Most of that I put on our ineffectual Democratic leadership who are supposed to represent the people. We had a mandate of millions and I don’t remember a single, actual dramatic effort to reshape policy by our elected leaders.
At that time, many people still believed Democrats were actually the opposition group to conservative fascism, and not the checked-out wine-mom getting alimony checks every month from the right.