@Tattered

It’s photogenic. It’s also fascism washing.

@GhostOnTheHalfShell Absolutely agreed.

I am cynical enough to wonder whether the woman is a police plant.

@Tattered

Whoa.. more cynicism than I have, but also possibly plausible

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @Tattered That seems a little off to me. Unless it suddenly comes out that she brought guns and was shooting cops or something crazy like that, the entire optics around this absolutely work against the cops and really the regime in general with this photo.

Even if it did turn out she was a plant and did something to try to sabotage things, it has such a strong imagery that it *still* would stand on its own as working against their side...

@nazokiyoubinbou @GhostOnTheHalfShell I guess the image might hit a US audience harder than the tear gas story. I don’t know. I’m just a bewildered foreigner.

I mean, the whole “No Kings” thing seems odd to me, and I don’t just mean in its absence of a goal other than “protest”. Feudalism is not the problem. If DJT dies, Don Jr won’t be next. It’s the existing oligarchy that will ensure what comes next. And I’m not sure that Team Blue has an effective countermeasure to the Thiels and Ellisons, anymore than Team Red does.

Still, talk of a General Strike is good, so there is some faint hope.

@Tattered @nazokiyoubinbou

The people behind the no kings protests are reasonably knowledgeable. The purpose of no kings is to build collective action. The United States doesn’t have the social organization you see in countries like France or Italy, where, especially in the former protest is sort of much more integral to the general culture than it has become here.

This is the prerequisite for being able to sustain a general strike

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @nazokiyoubinbou I like that as a reading! I hope you’re right.

I remember the days of flying pickets in the UK. I’m still waiting for my own country to catch on. I think it’s coming.

The French are very good at protest, though I think the US may need to take Nepal as a model before it’s all over.

I hope you all can get the government you, and we, all need.

@Tattered @nazokiyoubinbou

Well, I hope so as well. The indivisible people at least what I’ve heard of individuals who are in the meetings, the organizing meetings and what not communicate that there’s a very deliberate method to all this.

In order to sustain the general strike, there’s a lot of communities support needed like to make sure people can feed themselves pay rent and other shit. I have no idea where anything like this is.

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @Tattered It's worth noting that another point of all the mass protests is also getting up to that magical number. (What was it, like 3.5%?) The short version is that it's really hard to send an army against its own people once there are enough that the soldiers begin to actually know the people they're being ordered to kill.

Yes the regime has ICE for acting as a sort of SS, but they're way too small and weak to enforce the final takeover of the country on their own.

@nazokiyoubinbou @Tattered

The number is the military logisticians use something on the order of 10 or 20 soldiers per 1000 occupied population.

There isn’t enough military in the United States to occupy itself, much less Iran.

Men would have to be drafted to build out the numbers and plus it’s stupid.

Occupying blue states and cities in blue states is the strategy they deployed so far

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @nazokiyoubinbou I’m a bit suspicious of the magic number. I don’t think enough USians have realized yet that you can’t just get rid of Trump and then everything will be fine. The system enabled the GOP to be an openly Christofascist party. Biden tried the peacemaker approach, and we can see the results. The system that made the current administration possible has to be changed, and I’m not sure that enough people are ready for that level of restructuring. Least of all, the Dems who are funded by techbros, Big Oil, & AIPAC.

I know. One step at a time. There must, though, be an attempt to build public awareness that the US has reached a “Never again” moment.

@Tattered @GhostOnTheHalfShell The idea isn't "you reach that number and suddenly things are fine." It's "you reach that number and the army is less inclined to obey orders to fire on its own people."

Anyway, that is a separate issue, but it is a doozy. Trump *is* important for Project 2025. They need his bull in a china shop ways to make all this happen so fast. I think whether they can make the rest happen depends on *when* Trump is no longer our ruler (even if age/etc gets him first.)

@nazokiyoubinbou @GhostOnTheHalfShell I understand the logic behind the number. I think it rather depends upon what the movement that has reached that number does with it. However, as you say, it’s a side issue.

I agree that Trump has been important. I think that’s why you have lunatic senators posting AI images of Hegseth and Rubio as crusaders. It looks like the Pentagon is getting behind the Holy War idea. Will that carry the MAGA movement? I don’t know. I’d rather I didn’t have to think about it, but here we are: Thiel’s puppy as VP and the crusaders in charge of the world’s most murderous military. It would be nice if they could be stopped before they kill us all. Because that is the endgame. Christ comes back in their time or they annihilate everything trying.