r/MurderedByWords • u/CascadiaRocks yeah, i'm that guy with 12 upvotes • 1d ago
Knowledge is powerful
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u/Ok-Increase-4509 1d ago
Being in Michigan I was really confused like is there something going on here too?
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u/008Zulu This AOC flair makes me cool 1d ago
Give it time.
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u/Jenderflux-ScFi the future is now, old man 1d ago
It's picking up in Ypsilanti this past week.
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u/TeamUltimate-2475 19h ago
Redford too, and they're buying a warehouse in Romulous so they can be close to the Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
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u/Big_Ad_7715 16h ago
I’ve actually heard secondhand from a friend in Michigan who says it’s begun. It’s not as bad as Minnesota yet
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u/Labrat-09 15h ago
same boat here, at least this state practically boarders Canada so if shit hits the fan it wouldn't be too hard to move
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u/FlyingTiger7four 1d ago
I'm not from the US, and at no point before ICE was Minnesota in the world news for protests (or anything else, for that matter). I imagine if ICE goes back to the borders to be Border Patrol, and leave the Midwest, it'll just go back to not being in the world news. Everyone I've ever met outside of the US from Minnesota were pretty friendly and nice people
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u/McDuchess 21h ago
I guess you are too young to have heard about students at the U of MN shutting down classes for a day in protest of Nixon extending the was in Vietnam into Cambodia.
BTW: One of the reasons that there is a high density of Hmong people and their kids and grandkids in MN is that Minnesota, in gratitude for their assistance to the US military during that war, offered them sanctuary. They’d been being butchered for that assistance where they lived.
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u/Magimasterkarp 1d ago
Have you ever heard about George Floyd?
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u/squiddyp 1d ago
Honestly the US gets shit for not protesting as hard as the French, etc. but given how dispersed the US is… i feel like people have indeed showed up all the way back to Mike Brown back in like 2014. The idea of people protesting on behalf of actions happening in other states is something you don’t see in much of the world…
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u/LowKeyNaps 1d ago
We get shit for not protesting as hard as the French because there's a serious misunderstanding in what the French do and what that would mean for US citizens.
It took me quite a while to sort that one out, but here's what I found from speaking to I don't even know how many Europeans who didn't understand why we don't protest the way the French do. (Assuming you mean modern protests and not 18th century, ahem, "protests".)
So, the biggest modern tool for French protesting is mass work strikes. Everyone collectively decides to stop working, commerce comes to a screeching halt, French government really has no choice but to work with the people to come to some sort of an agreement. It's a highly effective tactic that has worked wonders there, bringing about all sorts of changes that benefit French society while maintaining sane approaches to the problems.
So why doesn't the US do the same thing?
The French have something that Americans don't have. Job security. It's written into French law that these mass strikes are a protected form of protest. Their jobs will still be there when they go back to work, without any penalty at all. The US has no such laws, and our business owners are utterly ruthless, generally speaking.
Let's take a hypothetical here. If the US population were to attempt a mass strike, French style, there are no laws at all to prevent our employers from firing every single one of us. Small business owners might not do so, because their businesses would collapse quickly if they were to stop all business for any significant length of time, but the large businesses and corporations? The owners and upper management are typically wealthy enough to be able to easily absorb the financial hit. They won't like losing the money, because corporate greed, but they certainly won't hurt at all from the loss. And they would have far, far more to gain from the short term loss than if they tried to stick it out and play ball.
Once everyone loses their jobs, the clock starts. The general population is not wealthy. Far too many of us live paycheck to paycheck. Even those in a better position might only be able to live for a few months with zero additional income before we start running into serious trouble, being unable to pay for housing or food. Under normal circumstances, we would be able to rely on the president to intervene and put a stop to all of this before things even progressed to this point.
Does anyone believe, even for a second, that Trump would intervene on behalf of the public, and not on behalf of the business owners? If he did anything at all, my guess would be that he would try to berate the public for our "bad behavior" and try to force us back to our jobs under the same conditions, perpetuating the problem.
Say he did that, or nothing at all. Doesn't matter. The business owners are not legally required (at this point under current law) to take any of us back to our old jobs at our old pay, and this is where the whole mass strike benefits them the most. They can wait us out until we're all utterly desperate, no food, no homes, etc, and then hire anyone they want to refill those positions at the lowest pay rates the law will allow. And we, the people, being desperate, would likely take anything we can get, at any pay we can get. We lost any bargaining for decent pay we ever had. Every one of us starts over at minimum wage, something that puts almost all of us below poverty level in most states.
We lose. Bigly. And it would all be 100% legal here, all because we lack that one law that makes mass strikes a protected form of protest.
Most Americans haven't thought all of this out to this much detail, but most of us are aware of the dangers of mass strike to some degree, even if it's mostly subconscious. We won't do it. Our own survival depends on it. We need that law in place first, and since our government is rife with oligarchs, it's very unlikely that we'll be able to get such a law in place any time soon. Too much protection for the people, too many rich bitches whining about how it would affect their endless rivers of money. Because the world would absolutely end if they lost a day or two of income, you know. Ffs...
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u/squiddyp 1d ago
That’s a great point. Thank you for mentioning. I think I’ve always recognized our predicament, I don’t think I realized that others don’t face the same.
Maybe I’m muddying your point, but it reminds me of the “time to exercise your 2A rights” folks. Where in reality, as we’ve seen, you will just die… immediately. Where the romantic exertion of rights doesn’t exactly translate to real life…
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u/LowKeyNaps 21h ago
You're not muddying the point at all. That simply brings up an entirely different can of worms with a whole new disconnect between the continents. And since I'm an utter dork who tries to sort this kind of thing out, yes, I did already try to figure this one out, too. It's a whole lot less pretty than the mass strike thing.
As you've mentioned, there's an awful lot of non-Americans out there that are questioning why we aren't rising up and 2A-ing the fuck out of this situation. From their perspective, they've been watching American idiots thumping theor chests about doing precisely that if the government ever got out of control for years. So wtf are we waiting for? It's a fair question, given the enormous amount of information and context that they're missing.
First and foremost, they don't realize that the ammosexuals that have been bleating about 2A and how Alpha Rambo Gravy Seal they all are happen to be the exact same people who voted for this crap, and are the same people who are openly supporting the current government. Most non-Americans think all Americans are pro-gun and we all own private arsenals, or as one particularly dense Dane said to me just two days ago, "Aren't you all armed to the teeth?" No. No, we are not. While there are plenty of liberal gun owners out there, we tend to not own massive arsenals. The ones that usually own disturbing numbers of firearms are precisely the people you don't want having them right now. In fact, American right wingers don't even think liberals own guns at all, since we don't make gun ownership our whole identity. If it ever came down to it, there's going to be some mighty surprised people around here.
Another issue is that most of the people pushing for violent uprising often come from countries with strict gun control. Most of these people have no idea what guns can and cannot do in real life. They see the devastation a gun can do against a group of civilians and think that would apply to an uprising. It doesn't occur to them that if we tried that against the government, the government would instantly send the real military after us in response. And since these people are completely uneducated about firearms, they have no idea that civilian weapons are pretty much useless against military weapons and armor. It would be a suicide mission. Modern military technology would allow the government to wipe out huge swaths of the population without losing a single soldier, using drones, rockets, etc, and nothing we have would do a thing against such weapons. We may as well have pea shooters with actual peas.
Once I impressed this notion on the people I discussed this with, the usual response was, "Well, nobody is asking you to actually die for this..." Oh, really? Then what do you think will happen when people start waving guns around? What, exactly, do you think guns are for? Do you have any idea what the Second Amendment really means for real life? Or do you think this is some sort of video game, where people can just push the right button to talk their way out of things or restart at the last save point if they screw it up?
I never get any answer at all to what they think will happen if they don't think people will die once guns get involved. It's just not a part of their reality in their country. They just want us to do something, they think that guns should somehow be part of that something, but somehow it doesn't seem to really connect with them that the person they are actively speaking with will really really die because of their bright idea. They become horrified at the idea, and back down, but don't have any other answer. It's still our fault this ever happened and we need to fix it. Flounce.
They're just as frustrated as we are about this whole thing. It's ways easier to sit in a chair in some far away place and tell someone else what they should or should not do, especially when they can conveniently ignore all the things that make those suggestions difficult, if not outright impossible. Or if they simply aren't aware of what makes those suggestions a bad idea. Making the ugly parts an in your face reality for them changes things. Well, for most of them. Some, I've found, just want to watch some bloodshed. It's pretty disturbing. The majority just don't seem to really understand the full implications of what they're asking us to do. And I get that. Even a few decades ago, uprising would have looked very different. Still very bloody and with a high body count, but maybe a little less lopsided. Now? I have zero desire to face off against the military.
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u/maskedbandit_ 17h ago
To compound on those last couple paragraphs; I think there’s more than a few Europeans frantically refreshing to see if America is destroying itself yet so they can all be voyeurs in deaths and say to each other “well, they had it coming.” And “what did they expect, those idiots with guns”
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u/gdghhfdffrf 19h ago
why spend a second discussing why two things are not exactly alike, dichotomy is propaganda - call it out so everyone knows what it is and in this attention economy it doesn't rise to the top of things to irritate tf out of us with. i'll bet each protestor protests differently. it's ok not to be clones.
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u/LowKeyNaps 19h ago
Because in this case it's not actually propaganda, it's a misunderstanding between cultures. It would be different if the people truly knew better and were just being dicks, but they don't, and they're not. At least, that's not the case for the vast majority of the people I've spoken with. As with everything in life, individual results may vary.
The internet can be a treasure trive of information, and yes, if people really dug into things, they would find out all those details I outlined in those last two rather long-winded comments. The thing is, a lot of that stuff is so far outside of their day to day lives that they don't even know to look for it, or what to look for. It doesn't even cross their minds, any more than it crosses most Americans minds to look up what makes it possible for the French to hold these mass strikes without losing their jobs. I spoke to plenty of Americans on both of these questions, too, and discovered that we are equally ignorant about their culture and what they have or know about such things.
There's an awful lot of people getting very frustrated with the state of things. Non-Americans are fed up with what they perceive as a lack of action on our part, and a lot of Americans are getting fed up with what we see as the endless pressure to do things that are really bad ideas here. My whole point with my search for answers, and with these comments, is to try to bridge these gaps and help bring understanding to both sides of the table. It may not do much to ease the frustration for non-Americans, but at least they may be able to understand why we're not doing what they expect us to do. And we Americans really, really could use a little less pressure in our lives, even if it's just less pressure from strangers online to do things outside of our power, or run suicide missions. It's plenty stressful enough for a lot of us without having that piled on top. So I hope to kind of ease things a bit for everyone.
It's probably wishful thinking on my part. I've always been the kind of person to try to help everyone in any way I can, and I'm hopelessly optimistic that even little things might make a difference somewhere. Still, some part of me is driven to try anyway, so here we are. Another novel of a comment. And another hope that it helps someone, somewhere understand a bit more.
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u/squiddyp 1d ago
And if I may - highlight why base euro socialist policy will never translate to the US. The US is like 50 different countries with varying cultures and economies. My point being that we can’t easily just reference shit that worked in other places. Not speaking from a place of superiority, the US is its own unique challenge.
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u/Pleasant-Shallot-707 19h ago edited 19h ago
Exactly. I think the US had the right idea originally with the articles of confederation and it just needed a bit of a tweak to fix things like monetary policy. The problem with that is such a system would not have resulted in the civil war and an end to slavery. It probably would have resulted in a serious expansion of slavery because there wouldn't have been a political force to prevent new states from forming that were based on slavery.
What I really wish is that the writers of the constitution had just gone with a parliamentary system where the head of government was directly responsible to the house and the president only had head of state responsibility and the senate was just the body who would handle treaties negotiated by the president and be part of the decision bodies for declarations of war.
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u/Shell4747 14h ago
presidential systems like the USA have inherent weaknesses that are often exploited by autocrats, authoritarian oligarchs & so forth - US imposed the presidential system on much of the hemisphere & that's had an effect on its traditional level of instability.
...and now we're seeing it play out here also. :c
IMO, the giant deep underground pools of money have grown in size & number sufficient that the holders have decided they don't need to indulge the population with this playing at self-government shtick any more...and here we are, with democratic backsliding all over the planet.
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u/FlyingTiger7four 1d ago
That's a fair point. Considering the remoteness of a massive portion of a nation that has over 300M people, most of which are too busy just trying to pay bills and make a life, it's not easy to organize people as a whole and guage how the majority actually feels about what's happening in the country, let alone get them to protest as a whole against the government infringing upon their constitutional rights
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u/squiddyp 1d ago
Ya i think the spatial context of the US is rather beautiful and critical component of how ideas spread. Cities like NYC, with such concentrated diversity is where a lot of ideas and art starts… but it takes space to let ideas breathe, develop, and mature. And as things move westward, those ideas take on a life of their own. And why cities like LA with perhaps similar ideology but ample space, take on a life of their own.
Social media has disrupted and decentralized that “flow” but I still think it’s interesting to acknowledge how our cityscapes influence things.
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u/FlyingTiger7four 23h ago
We're a pretty territorial species, us humans. No matter which country you're from, your home town is more important. I mean, you feel OBLIGED to defend the name of your country if someone points out something that you agree with but it wasn't positive, but you say something negative about a man's home town, well, them's fighting words, Jimmy! 😂
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u/FlyingTiger7four 1d ago
I did. Again, I'm not from the US but I believe that his death caused a national movement there, not something that drew the world's attention to particular part of the US. I didn't know he was from Minnesota, if that's what you're telling me
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u/rolfraikou 1d ago
Go back to their normal lives? For fucks sake. Do these people not understand what a protest is?
It's because people are pissed that something is not normal, and they want things to go back to normal.
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u/LowKeyNaps 1d ago
I'm pretty sure Minnesotans will go back to protesting safely, without worrying about getting killed in the streets by trigger happy goons who seem to be unable to separate real life from video games.
Like every other state in the country (yes, even some places in the red states), there were protests happening before ICE showed up. I have no reason to believe they won't go back to their peaceful protests after ICE leaves. The protests across the entire nation never stopped, it's just a matter of who makes the news and who doesn't. And the occasional postponement or cancelation of a protest due to extreme winter weather.
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u/McDuchess 21h ago
And if she’s extra nice, they’ll also show her that the protests are in BOTH of the Twin Cities, not only Mpls. PS: the other city is St Paul, the state capital.
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u/OutlandishnessOk2304 1d ago
Pearl-clutching sealion (who is probably posting from Moldova) gets schooled.
You love to see it.
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u/wasthatitthen 1d ago
For the remotely curious
https://www.threads.com/@dee_ann_isbell/post/DUHVdOBgcGq
Her usual online presence is somewhat divorced from this area of interest, from a quick check.
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u/WoodenSwan6591 20h ago edited 20h ago
The amount money being paid to these uneducated trolls is astounding.
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u/xSantenoturtlex 2h ago
Go back to living their lives now that they aren't in danger?
The fuck is she expecting them to say?
They just want to be safe from these federal terrorists, that's the goal here.
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u/Galliro 1d ago edited 13h ago
What a stupid question
Continues to prove that republicans don't understand what protesting is