Political Memes

How’d not burning cars work out when Biden was prez?

??? Pretty okay? We got some significant climate change legislation etc... If you're saying we should have been rioting against the Biden presidency, I don't think you're particularly helpful for our current crisis.

Martin wouldn’t have won without Malcolm. Peaceful protests only work when there’s a third option besides listening to them or stays quo.

Strongly disagree, look at Gandhi.

I think there's a dangerous tend for kids in the West to romanticize political violence after having grown up in privilege and safety that would be unimaginable to much of humanity even nowadays, let alone across history. And more dangerously, to only look at narrow slices of history they like rather than the full sweep.

That's not to say seriously violent riots and protests can't work, it's just that they cost a huge amount of innocent blood and lives, and of course more often than not, they don't work. (But those same spoiled kids don't like reading about those parts of history/current events.)

That being said, I'm not sure we're strong enough to actually do a peaceful protest properly. The power of MLK wasn't the willingness to protest, it was the willingness or even eagerness for supporters to be beaten black and blue over and over and over again in a desperate and eventually successful attempt to shock the conscience of a nation. I've seen nothing that indicates we'd have the resolve for that.

What does blame have to do with it? Everything. That is the entire problem with cops, they get away with literally everything

Well . . . I don’t disagree, but I still don’t know what cops have to do with the metaphor. There’s no cops in the metaphor.

The left being progressives -- democratic socialists and socialists

Okay, so no anarchists, communists, or - other - just the Democratic socialists and socialists. I’m assuming you mean voters, non-office-holders and not national party leaders specifically?

Democrats as in neoliberal leadership such as Schumer, Jeffries, Durbin, Biden, Obama... etc.

Well, okay ‘leadership’ is good there, but the etc. kinda defeats the purpose of defining that, so - all ‘neoliberal leadership’ ever, say?

Also can you define neoliberal leadership? Like neoliberal for one, but for two is that officeholding leadership at all levels; federal, state, local, or just federal?

Defended as in standing behind them when they're blamed for nonsense or scapegoated as anti-American.

“Standing behind them” as in literally like in a press conference, or do prior established positions count as “standing behind them”? Are you saying there should be a public statement like a press release or do you mean some equivalent amount of press coverage?

“blamed for nonsense”, I think you know I need that specified because - it’s very broad. “Scapegoated” is even trickier because are you talking about Fox News reporting or something more all-outlets-reporting? “Anti-American”, as well - you mean literally the phrase “anti-American”? Or something else?

Ilhan Omar comes to mind. Did any Democrat defend her when she was being called a terrorist because she's a first-generation Muslim refugee with criticism of American capitalism?

Okay, good that’s a better example. Except Ilhan Omar is a Democratic leader, which doesn’t match the “left being Democratic socialists and socialists”. Unless Democratic party leaders can be “Democratic socialists and socialists.” I mean, if they can, then it’s a whole other question isn’t it. It’d be more like ‘Why don’t Democrats support Democrats’, right?

Perhaps while we're explaining obvious meanings

“Obvious meanings” don’t scale well enough. That’s why science spends so much time defining things. Political science, in this case.

. . . you can explain why the cops, who were not blamed for shooting a reporter live on camera because the cops have too much power over media

Okay, again, cops have nothing to do with this discussion. Just - forget the cops for a second. In the picture, the figure marked “Leftists” is shooting the figure marked “Democrats”. Shooting with a non-lethal round. Something deliberate. Something stupid. And something which is designed to hurt the “Democrats” but won’t kill them.

Something like refusing to support them when they’re the only option against chaos and cruelty. Which was last November. That’s the metaphor. And here come the Midterms.