#someone i know (not me definitely) was at a counterprotest to some out-of-town fucking proud boys who

[outlier-roddy]

sum up in the tags lol

#someone i know (not me definitely) was at a counterprotest to some out-of-town fucking proud boys who #1) attacked us first and started the physical fighting that ensued #2) pepper sprayed (or tear gassed? i dont know what it was but it fucking hurts) A CHURCH GROUP #3) were allowed to go walk around the downtown area unhindered while the police showed up enmasse with riot gear #and kettled in peaceful protestors that were running away from the fighting to arrest them like you CANNOT make this shit up!!!! #hey declared the streets a police zone or some shit and gave the counterprotestors ten minutes to disperse or be arrested #WHILE I REPEAT THE PROUD FUCKING BOYS WERE ALLOWED TO DO WHATEVER THEY WANTED #it was absolutely terrifying bc these guys had no compulsions abt hurting ppl they were dragging this lady around #and the police of course were arresting the black ppl mostly which like oh my god?? we been knew but oh my god it was disgusting #we did win tho bc they wanted to get into this park/arena thing and we had armed leftist dudes all around the perimeter #so they had to march in the streets for a bit before they got run out of town #and it was actually rlly funny bc they'd all been staying in this fancy hotel or some shit which meant they TRAVELED into our town #and we kicked them to the curb in like half an hour and they didnt come back asdjfkdjf #anyway. if i wasnt already radicalized!!! #personal tag #cops tw

[brazenautomaton]

@nitrosplicer you appear to have blocked me so I can’t actually click on your angry replies, but 

1: that’s the opposite of what a shit test is. a shit test is when you make an unreasonable demand of someone to see if they will give in or show some backbone, and you want them to show backbone and refuse you.

2: I didn’t say that I knew for a fact you were lying, I said your faction lies about this thing all the time but cops are also violent abusive authoritarian assholes so I wouldn’t believe you without proof. If you can provide proof (which I can’t click because your reply won’t show up for me outside my dash feed) that’s great. Believing you without proof is stupid. So I said I wouldn’t believe you without proof, and then you could provide it. That’s not proof I’m a bad person, that’s honestly something where both of us did the thing we were supposed to do.

3: “If people hadn’t protested, we would be showing that we believe Nazis in our town shouldn’t go unchallenged”.

No. Stop that. Stop that right now. That’s not how this works. That’s not how anything works.

Protests are entirely about optics. There are two primary means a protest can be effective, and they rely on being rare or shocking. Protests can be effective because it shows outsiders “Whoa, this issue I hadn’t put much thought into really is serious, look how much it motivates people!”, or because they show outsiders “Wow, these people aren’t doing anything wrong and the police are just losing their fucking shit all over them, the people in power are really afraid of what they have to say!” 

The Hong Kong protests are effective for these reasons. People in Hong Kong don’t protest all the time, so when lots of people start getting out and protesting, you know that the thing they are responding to is a rare, serious situation. And the police are brutally, violently cracking down on them, which lends credence to the protestors’ argument that this is about a brutal police state extending power over them. People look at the HK protests and take notice. Protests are also given credence by being underdog stories of standing up to overwhelming power, and Hong Kong is definitely that kind of event.

The left has burned up all of those things with their own protests. They protest all the time, constantly, about everything (What the fuck was the Women’s March actually about, as in actually?), and any protest about any one thing BECOMES about everything that professional-protestor lefties dislike (as with Occupy Wall Street, the point when everyone should have acknowledged American protests are dead). So when you come out to a protest, you convey no new information about “Whoa, this is so serious, people are coming out to protest”, because you do this all the time. And your protests so frequently turn violent, and you so frequently lie about that happening, and people do still remember how much you praise and exalt Antifa who absolutely love violence, so when you get brutalized by the police, people don’t really care because they think you had it coming. Is that fair? No, no it isn’t, but saying “people shouldn’t think that way” doesn’t change the fact that they do, and that changing that perception requires you to do things you aren’t doing.

But perhaps most importantly, you are not the underdogs. You have had unquestioned control of American cultural discourse for fifty years, and when there is the slightest threat to it, you flipped your shit and started calling everyone Nazis. You outnumbered the parade three to one. There were barricades to keep YOU from charging them, not the other way around. And they weren’t waving swastika flags or chanting about White Pride Worldwide, they were saying “Hey, we’re just being straight, like most people are, and look how much the Left is losing its shit over that!” You’re the overdogs. You’re in charge. You decide what is acceptable to say and think. You have allowed them to easily paint a picture where they are the heroic underdogs standing up to your tyranny.

Their strategy is to say things that are not and should not be offensive (it’s okay to be white, straight people can be proud of who they are), wait for the left to predictably flip its shit, and then say “Wow, the people in charge of our culture really don’t think that it’s okay to be white / straight people can be proud of who they are! Maybe you should look into joining some kind of movement where white/straight people all look out for each other and oppose the interests of minorities, because those people are opposed to us!” 

Your side says “We have to overreact, because this innocuous sounding thing is actually a Nazi code phrase to recruit you!” One, taht relies on people trusting your judgment about who evil Nazis are, and they do not trust you any more. Two, again, their recruiting code phrases have no power unless you give them power. If someone on 4chan decided “Hey, the OK hand sign should be a white power symbol!” and that was the end of it, the OK hand sign would not be a white power symbol. They don’t have the power or numbers to do that. They would have no ability to signal each other by flashing the OK sign, because everyone would still be using the OK sign anyway, so they wouldn’t know “okay this guy is on my team so I can talk about white genocide to him.” But you flipped out and screamed at anyone using the OK hand sign, and now anyone using that hand sign innocuously gets yelled at by you and comes away correctly thinking you are assholes, and anyone who keeps using it now effectively signals “I don’t care what the screaming leftist control freaks say is racist.” You did their plan for them. You made it a white power signal when nobody else had the power to do that.

Their strategy is to lay a garden rake on the floor and you step on it like fucking Sideshow Bob every single time. 

They recruit by pointing to your compulsive overreactions and saying “You should join us, because you need to prrotect yourselves from these assholes!” You keep compulsively overreacting and making it worse. There is no interpretation of anything that justifies “I have to do what the Nazis want me to do and I have to play into the Nazis’ plan, because otherwise, I am tacitly supporting Nazis!” They know you are going to do that. They count on you doing that, and they make plans so you doing that helps them. Stop helping them.

What would have happened if you didn’t show up to counterprotest? If you hadn’t tried to suppress the march in the first place, it probably wouldn’t have even happened, because nobody would care about it. If it did, it would need no assistance from the alt-right, and the alt-right wouldn’t care because it wouldn’t be Sticking It To The Libs. It would be a lame event nobody cared about that fizzled out like the XFL. But if everything was the same up until the day of the march, and nobody showed up to protest? It would be a lame event nobody cared about. It would not be in the news. It would not be shocking. It would not help the alt-right push its narrative. There would be nothing memorable about it. You would show you didn’t care. They are beneath your notice, because they don’t matter, and nobody should give a shit about what they say. Nobody would think “Oh, wow, the left thinks Nazis are okay!” because the entire strategy of the Nazis here is to not let on to normies that they are secretly Nazis, and because normies already know you are Maximally Upset about everything all the time. A straight pride parade is just called “traffic”, so it would have no more power to intimidate or terrorize anyone than fucking traffic does. 

I need you to understand this. Okay? I need you to understand. Your side has been in control so long, that you are facing political opponents who know how you will behave. They have predicted how you will behave and their strategy is to use your behavior against you. They KNOW that you will say  “If people hadn’t protested, we would be showing that we believe Nazis in our town shouldn’t go unchallenged”, they are COUNTING on you saying that, because they have created a situation where that behavior harms you and helps them. 

You are doing what they want. You are not helping anyone but them. If you continue to do the things they have predicted you will do and that they rely on you doing, then you will keep helping them and harming yourselves. No amount of “I can’t show that Nazis shouldn’t go unchallenged!” will change the fact that your compulsion to behave this way and demonstrate your moral purity only harms your interests. 

Protests are entirely about optics. They do not have mythic power beyond their ability to convince other people through their optics. The only people leftist protestors ever try to convince are the people who already agree with them.

#culture war never changes #life is not worth tolerating