What do you mean?

We are on the same side of the barricade.
There was a good convo here in the thread, but some block occurred and cannot access it anymore. I explained my perspective, which basically is "in comparison with what we could achieve if we added some direct action to the mix, the effects are almost zero."

YEAH!

Any direct action, however small, multiplied by 7 millions, would make any opponent kneel and beg for mercy. Even better if it was random, unpredictable, and done using people's best skills. That would be indefensible, but exactly that was missing unfortunately (again).

What I like about Bluesky is this exactly.
We talk and then start to understand each other.

Yeah, me too.
I guess now you see what I've been talking about ;)

When there's only banners and balloons, there's no change.

Good that you mention front liners.
They do direct action because they know that protests and elections don't change much.

Unless you think that protesting or voting is being on the front line.

Yes, I agree that they are part of resistance, but very toothless. And I propose to change it - there are already dozens of examples what such crowd as No Kings can achieve if it only add something to the hype.
Strikes, direct action, blockades, doxxing, tracking, ddos, SHAC, ALF...

Millions of people and there are a few elections won.
You say it's a success.
I say we can do much better if we use our strength, not only banners.

By the way #TeslaTakedown was not a protest. It was a huge direct action campaign. And it's actually a good example of what I'm talking about.

I unsubscribed from The Guardian because of their stance on Gaza.

I'd like to highlight once more than in my opinion protests shouldn't be just an occasion to meet likeminded people. We've been tricked to treat it like collective 100% hype + 0% action.

4) Absolute most of all other protests.

But maybe it's only the matter of perspective. I just expect more effects from millions angry people than you. I feel that millions of people are capable of bringing a real change, not only information, inspiration, realisation, and publicity.

3) No Kings x2. Millions of people. Effects? Information, inspiration, realisation, publicity. Not much else, unfortunately.

2) No one can even count how many people participated in countless anti-genocide protests worldwide since Oct 7th '23. Effects? Ceasefire which has been broken every single day since its announcement.

Well, information, inspiration, realisation, and publicity don't change much in real life.
Let's have some examples - 1) the biggest protest in history of humankind - 30M+ people protesting globally, no effects at all besides destroyed country, 1M+ dead Iraqis, 70% innocent civilians.

Mate, can you remind me under what post we are discussing? It shows "Post Blocked" to me and I don't recall what was that it deserved to be blocked.

Mar-A-Lago: Symbolic win, which easily can be presented as a major uprising and Trump has an excuse to use the Insurrection Act. Plus a lot of additional oppression - arrests, detention, torture, etc.

ICE stations - better (80% support from Dems), but still huge backlash possible.

That would be bloody and they would get upper hand after that (shock doctrine or sth along these lines).

I'd say many smaller easy targets, picked collectively at random times, organic communication. No violence, with these numbers it's counter-effective.
Indefensible. Then build upon the momentum.

If we look at stats protests are generally useless.
But yeah, if we concentrate those scattered forces in one/two places and then disperse them even more creating dozens of them at the same time, it'd be indefensible.
And of course we should DO sth, cannot stay 100% hype + 0% action.

The thing is that indigenous people of Africa, Americas, Asia, and Australia also surrounded themselves with good humans and the empire came to them anyway.
The difference between us and them is access to information, so apart from gardening and community building, we must resist.