Duke of Rat, I did participate in protests against the Iraq war on the way to that war, the fact that you forget how massive some of the protests were speaks volumes about how often the mainstream bothers to remind the public about what happened then.
you are partially correct that more protests are needed, but it is silly to ignore the growing alternative media. The chances one gets to distribute some information in a message board, even tough small (the chances, not the message board ), are not to be ignored.
You are forgetting that many new protests owe their organization to the Internet, like I said before, guys like Daily Kos are just starting, IMO they are not quite ready yet for prime time, but in less than a generation I see them becoming a bigger force after more people realizes how the mainstream media just acts like the defenders of the government rather than the investigators of it.
I don’t think GW is a Hitler either. However, comparing exact action for action isn’t the point. It’s mindset. GW claims the right to do whatever is necessary, even if the laws are stretched out os all shape in the process, if he, and he alone, thinks it will protect what he thinks is national security.
That sounds a lit like “I am the leader (fuhrer) and know what is best. Just be good little boys and girls behave as I say and I will take care of things.”
I remember a couple of large protests, Seattle I think was a good one, but that was a couple of years ago??. Not sure if it was timed at an election or not. With all the emphasis people TRY to place on the election cycle when attributing almost any other event ( I wouldn’t be a damn bit surprised if an asteroid were to hit, the left would blame it on Bush trying to take away from the war in Iraq this close to the elections), it seems like some opportunities are being squandered. Are there any impending demonstrations in the next 2 weeks I’m ignorant of? Fill me in.
Sure, blogs are starting to eat into the market share of the MSM, do you think a generation might be a bit too long to make an impact on the current situation?
I still think a hundred thousand citizens protesting 2 weeks before an election would be a bit hard for the media to sweep under the rug, regardless of who controls it.
Yeah yeah. Fucking demonstrations. Four legs good, two legs bad. Whaddaya wanna do today? Beat the Bengals!!! Ooops sorry that’s sports cheerleading… What do we want? Our rights! When do we want them? Now!! There we go. I knew I had the right page somewhere…
Look, demonstrations and marches were spectacular in the 1960s because people hadn’t done that before (or not recently in the US) and the powers being confronted didn’t know what those folks might do next. Now, it’s kind of canned. We’re gonna have “a demonstration”. We all know what a demo looks like. Bring your signs. You know how to make your signs so as to be in compliance with the applicable regulations about what you can carry. We want some of us to be arrested. Who is available and OK with being arrested? Civil dis, we’re going to do a sit-down and the cops will ask us to move, then they’ll tell us they’ll have to arrest us if we don’t move, then they’ll arrest us, we get a bench ticket and then we go home, we fought The Power, la de da. (Cop: So what is this one about? Oh. You the ones doing the civil dis? OK, we’ll ask you to leave. If you don’t want to be among the arrested, you really do need to leave at that point, OK? Next time we say leave or be arrested, that’s for real. Any questions? Yeah, you need some ID on you, and if you think there’s any chance you’ve got unpaid parking tickets or bench warrants, maybe you shoudn’t be doing it. What? Oh, plastic handcuffs. No they don’t hurt. Umm, that’s up to the commander, not sure when the van will leave, if you need to pee maybe you better not do this, it might be a while. OK, we ready?)
It’s got no fangs. I’m not saying I favor some neo-Weathermen violent shit, because I don’t. But whatever tactics are seized upon need to be tailored to draw attention, to amaze people, to push everyone off-balance in the sense that things are now upside-down and they don’t know what is to come next. Marches and demos? ::giant yaaaaaaawn::: We counted 490,000 marchers, police said 125,000, yadda yadda, scarcely makes the news, it’s another freaking march and everyone in TVland knows about marches and they don’t capture the public imagination.
Go research Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH). They had a sense of theatre. A sense of theatre is what is needed here. Something must be done, it must demonstrate commitment and numbers and solidarity of support and all that shit, but above and beyond that it must be creatively entertaining, cleverly designed to freak out the proverbial Powers That Be (aka The Man), and it must be FUN.
Marching around in ovals with a sign in the hot sunshine chanting “four legs good, two legs bad” or whatever the fuck is the chant du jour, that isn’t fun. No one cares. It has no impact. It entertains no one. It’s dead — move on.
I was at the Vietnam demonstrations, including the one that drew 400,000 people in DC. As much as they felt good, I don’t think it’s what ended the war. The voters just saw a bunch of long hairs an didn’t pay attention to what they said. I think it was the threat of the draft that turned things around. At some point parents were no longer willing to send there kids to die. That was even more true when college deferments ended and the elite knew that their kids were in danger as well.
I don’t think that has happened yet for Iraq. The elite don’t see their kids going off and dieing and the patriots in the heartland still see the Iraq war as tied to TWOT. Once that shifts its all over for W and the pubs. Vietnam was a mistake, but it was not the great deceit that the Iraq war is.
The protests get plenty of press coverage. The difference is that there are far fewer of them today as compared to 1969. You’re not going to get the press to cover a protest that happened 6 months ago. The other difference, of course, is that the protests of the late 60s were about a lot more than just the war, so they kept people engages on a range of issues.
Maybe the era of the “virtual protest” will at some point overtake the era of the real protest. Maybe that era is now-- I don’t know. But when that era does arrive, then the MSM will have become irrelavent, so it won’t matter so much what makes the nightly news because a critical mass of people will be forming their opinions based on what they hear, see and do on the net. We’re making history now as we speak (or post), even if it’s not happening as fast as soe of us may want.
A lack of demonstrations may just as well mean that the point of view we might express has become so mainstream, a demonstration as “attention getter” isn’t so necessary. A sign of strength more than weakness.
It’s too late and I’m too tired to go back and reply to everything I’d like to comment on, but this I have to reply to. . .
Bullshit. Bull SHIT. Expressing my abject fear created by the actions of this arrogant, law-breaking, torture-endorsing, prisoner-hiding, lying, war-mongering, power-hungry administration has nothing whatsofucking ever to do with “trivializing the Nazis.” ESPECIALLY as a Jew, I deeply resent that implication. The fact that people didn’t speak out against Hitler’s regime before it became a living fucking nightmare is EXACTLY the kind of mistake I never, ever want to see repeated, which is why I think it’s vitally important that we stop this administration before they go too fucking far.
And they’re well on their way to already going there. George W. Bush and his cronies, are our enemies as far as I’m concerned. They are enemies of every fucking thing they arrogantly profess to be champions of. George Bush is the enemy of democracy when he declares himself the DECIDER, and he’s got the UNCHECKED POWER to actually act on that declaration. And with a minority representation in every other branch of government, those who oppose his tactics are literally impotent to stop him, and by extension, the wing of their entire party and the political Machine they have built that could keep them in power in perpetuity.
NOT speaking out and calling this administration exactly what they are is what’s dangerous! What’s fundamentally destructive to our democracy is how this administration has crapped all over our constitution, and when we voice our dissent over the wrongs they are committing in the name of “Freedom”, they call us goddamn traitors and terrorist supporters!
There can never be a middle ground when people are being held captive without charges or legal representation in-fucking-definitely. There can never be a middle ground when innocent people are dying by the thousands in a war that was pre-planned with some kind of agenda that had nothing whatsoever to do with the made-up bullshit they told us it was about. There can never be a middle ground when the goddamn Secretary of Defense puts out a memo outlining the authorization of allowable torture techniques.
I don’t give a shit if you’re offended by my hysteria. I have damn good reasons for being hysterical. This isn’t about a disagreement over fiscal policy, the minimum wage, estate taxes, affirmative action, abortion rights, gay marriage, or any other national item where Republicans and Democrats might reasonably disagree.
This is about life and death, about my government creating secret prisons that we citizens are kept in the dark about, much like the average German was unaware of the existence of the concentration camps. And I’m not saying they’re the same exact thing – but they’re close enough to terrify me when I learn that people are being secretly subjected to them, given this administration’s propensity to authorize torturing people! And it’s about so much more that I just don’t have the energy to itemize anymore tonight.
Some day, I hope history doesn’t look back on us as a nation during this time and say about our citizens’ role in this mess, “[Americans] cheered [George Bush and his Religious Right Republican Regime] into power and cheered [them] even more once [they] gained absolute power.” I want them to remember that there were a hell of a lot of us who fought back, who spoke out, who voted against these bastards, and who tried to take our country back from those who are systematically destroying it and everything it stands for.
To be fair the persons in question have become scarce of late. Excepting your 2 bold examples, have you not noticed this?
Misinformation, like any other military strategy, must rely heavily on reliable supply lines. And for the boys at the SDMB coalface the supply lines have collapsed. The r-w blogs and media, on which they must rely but never link, have run out of puff in the face of the barrage of contradictory evidence. The uniforms at ground zero, once so full of bravado, have allowed the terrible vice of honesty and candour to colour the reports they make.
With this, compulsive poster Scylla turns to domestic affairs and the rest are silent.
Strikes me that the entire US Constitution was built on exactly the slippery-slope argument that Shayna used.
King George III wasn’t a tyrant by the standards of the time, and the American objections to his rule were to do with self-determination and a few lame-ass taxes - in this case a clerical inflation-buster. But the checks and balances of the Constitution were put in place to prevent King George and subsequent leaders (or “Georges”) turning into something that was way worse than he actually was.
Throw out that argument, throw out the checks and balances.
(Which, coincidentally, is what appears to be happening.)
On that one, he has something of a point. An independent Kurdistan with oil revenue is very likely to have an eye towards uniting all the Kurdish people. Oil revenue means allies that will sell you weapons and train your people. For Turkey, that’s the “wake up screaming!” scenario.
), are not to be ignored.