Part of the problem is that the images suck. Honestly. Here we see a bunch of body bags, we know literally nothing about who’s in them. But on Oct. 7 there were lots of images and video of what happened, with people’s faces visible.

The most effective thing that could be done to support Palestinians, infinitely more effective than spray painting neighborhoods and camping in public spaces, would be to give them cameras and a means of releasing video. As long as it’s just numbers, no one will care.

Just get drones to drop a trail of food to a POW camp.

I used to work with Ukrainian contractors at a company I left before the war started. I always wonder if those guys are doing ok. I guess as the picture shows, being a software dev doesn’t mean you stay out of combat.

Search for “airplane” and “explosion”, I’m sure that doesn’t look good either. Seek and you shall find. Cancun had 10 million visitors last year, I’m sure everything happened to everyone at some point. But kidnappings are winning the bad luck Powerball.

Mexico’s murder rate leveled off years ago. It’s still unacceptably high, but it’s been a while since they’ve been a less-failed state than today.

However, Guerrero is one of the worst-affected states for drug violence

This is the same mistake people make in the US when talking about “unsafe cities” ignoring that crime is concentrated in certain parts. The same rule applies everywhere in the world: there’s safe and unsafe spots. So no, you’re not gonna get kidnapped from a Cancun resort anytime soon.

It’s a good question. Her policies as mayor were very different from AMLO’s, and it’s frankly weird that AMLO (a fossil fuel fundamentalist and Trump-like populist) had a PhD climate scientist as his successor. But she is officially his successor and kept a lot of AMLO people. There’s no easy answers, we’ll just have to wait and see.

I’m just making an appeal to evidence. We can’t go back and know what changed minds, obviously many factors are at play. But what we can say for certain is that, because the stall-in didn’t happen:

1. The stall in was unnecessary for the civil rights act to pass.
2. We don’t know what would’ve happened if the stall in did happen.

I’m guessing most historians would say it wouldn’t have made a difference. But even if it were 99% likely to make no difference, if we had a time machine there’s utterly no reason we’d go back and risk that 1%. Point being, even in the best case scenario, the stall in logically cannot be evidence of such tactics being successful.

Speaking of riots, I think a more clear example is the protests following the killing of George Floyd, which sometimes descended into riots, with every last bit of chaos being lapped up by Republican media and used as an argument against reform. Ultimately that tactic succeeded and very little actual police reform has passed following a shift in the mood. It got so bad that Congress, with many Democrats signing on, took the rare and extreme step of overruling a DC local criminal code reform in 2022 that was actually quite ordinary, but was very dishonestly portrayed in the media as radical decriminalization. As someone who followed that closely, I definitely think the perception of criminal justice reformers being a brainwashed radical mob, helped along by the riots, was a necessary part of killing that reform. That reform effort also was started in 2016, before the Floyd protests - so it seems that the actual effect of these protests was to set back criminal reform efforts rather than advance them.

You also refer to suffragettes vandalizing museums, which is more similar to this action. It seems this was primarily a British thing, and as this article explains, art vandalism occurred in the sprint of 1914, while suffrage wasn’t granted 1918 for some women, and 1928 for all women. Notably, between 1914 and 1918 there was a world war. So it’s hard to imagine that in 1918 or in 1928, that the public was still thinking about the vandalism years before. And maybe that’s why it was able to pass.

I think we should recognize that these tactics persist for reasons other than their effectiveness. Mainly they’re a great way to get attention, even donations. But that attention is pretty much always the wrong kind, and those donations might be coming from the people who aren’t truly interested in the cause (see how Russia has donated to more angry/violent protest groups on all sides). In essence they’re good for protest leaders, bad for the movements.

MLK was brilliant at activism, but not all his actions were created equal. Notably it seems despite his protests, the stall-in never happened. Perhaps everyone realized it was a terrible idea. Then the Civil Rights Act passed without it. How do we know there’s not an alternate history where it did happen, pissed off a bunch of voters, and caused the Civil Rights Act to become too politically toxic to pass?

I do think blockading oil terminals would be much more sympathetic. But it’s hard to blockade enough to have a serious effect on oil usage, hence the lack of attention. A better example is the protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline, which included blocking construction. Public opinion eventually turned against the pipeline.

Instead of intentionally pissing people off at climate protesters, put effort towards educating people on the myriad of ways we actually subsidize fossil fuels and the corrupt relationships that keep that going, so people instead get pissed off at the fossil fuel industry, lobbyists, and corrupt politicians.

Of course some people do work on this already, Climate Town being a good example. We should be talking about those efforts instead of these.

Yeah but what are they saying when they’re talking? Most people are saying “look at these crazy climate people, something is clearly wrong with them”. Maybe the protesters should do something that makes people say “maybe we should care more about climate change” instead.

This is a common problem I see with modern protests. Protesters of a certain other cause I won’t name spray-painted my neighborhood. I try to be a logical person, and logically I’d like to think my perspective on the issue they were spraypainting about is unaffected. But I can’t help but notice that on an emotional level, I really do not want to be on the same side as the people who disrespected me and my neighbors by spraypainting our neighborhood. To the point where if someone says they find that cause important, I actually feel a slight uncontrollable pang of disdain for them.

I don’t think most people try to be as aware of how their emotions affects their thinking as I do.

This is invalid civil disobedience. The point of civil disobedience is to disobey unjust laws (see: Rosa Parks disobeying bus segregation). So unless they think laws against throwing soup at paintings are unjust, their point is lost.

I like the terminal because:

1. It’s the same everywhere. You don’t lose knowledge by switching to a company that has a different git client.
2. You know what’s going on, mostly. Most clients will assume you want to do things one way and do it that way for you, especially when it comes to fetching/pulling/merging. I’d rather go through all the steps in the terminal myself so I can assure myself that I won’t be reliving various past broken merge traumas.
3. If you like the terminal generally, you’re probably also doing other stuff there anyway. So you can get used to running whatever commands to test, lint, push, etc. without switching windows or even taking your hands off the keyboard and it becomes muscle memory.

support for Russia (not Putin, as historical materialists don’t subscribe to great man theory) is only a partial, temporary, tactical one, in the context of imperialist liberation.

So you’re pro-Russian in the temporary, tactical sense, in the context of imperialist liberation. And you would be pro-Putin too, but for not believing in great man theory.

I can think of several, but it’s so cringe to say any of them. There’s a disdain for do-gooders in all societies, but especially American society. Which means that it’s just not cool to admire someone who is simply a good person.

Then why is Israel helping them? It is, after all, quite true that Israel has refused to stop settlement activity in the West Bank. Seems like a great way to cause protests, and then responding with a shoot first, ask questions later mentality will lead to a lot of martyrs. Are you accusing the Israeli government of being in league with Hamas?

It’s a tradition in the Russian army:

Bushnell vaguely recalled a game called “cuckoo” in which officers turned off the lights, hid behind couches and chairs, and took potshots at one another when someone yelled “cuckoo.”

When the leaders treat the soldiers like their lives don’t matter, it’s only a matter of time before they start to believe the same thing themselves.

This is what I see a lot of from Elon supporters - holding him to a much lower standard than themselves. You say you have a similar situation, but then you still recognize that Putin is utter and complete shit. Well, Elon doesn’t and uses his child’s transition as an excuse to believe all sorts of horrible things. You can feel free to look down on him and would be correct to do so.

He’s said nothing about it on his twitter, instead doing the usual boosting of misinformation about US politics. The silence says a lot.