Yeah, its messy and incoherent and is unlikely to be effective in its current form, but that's what a bonafide grass roots movement looks like. Maybe if the Democratic party seemed like it had an actual plan, individual activists wouldn't have to be grasping at straws to take up the slack.

Power was lying in the streets so we picked it up.

I'm practicing for the General Strike. I didn't even buy a sandwich after working out.

I'm trying really hard not to be the grinch because I know people are trying to do whatever they can and god knows I'm not doing anything any more effective, but I can't help but roll my eyes at a one-day boycott aimed at nobody in particular without any particular demand. Even in the theoretical universe where this had any economic impact at all, what's the plan to leverage that tomorrow?

It would be difficult to better capture the oblivious impotence of so much liberal protest in a single "action." Everybody wear your pussy hats while you don't order from Amazon today.

I can't decide whether this is closer to "thoughts and prayers" or the Yippies levitating the Pentagon.

How many of the early tea party protests were inchoate and incoherent? When they still called themselves teabaggers.

It's a media hook, if nothing else, and gets a wide range of people practice in doing something.

Everybody wear your pussy hats while you don't order from Amazon today.

With no due respect shove this take up your ass. I'm with the wine moms. The motherfucking-- but very embarrassing to all you cool motherfuckers-- early resistance fucking worked pretty fucking well. See 2018. wine moms were one of the most effective resistance this country has seen. But no, they' are cringe.

Sure, maybe this thing is ineffective. Maybe people can get more organized about it.

Sorry, reading this fucking naysayerism after watching the incredibly infuriating clips from Trump/Vance two-timing Zelensky in the White House was a bad combo.

OK. A lit calmer. With some due respect.

It's okay. I know it's an uncharitable take on my part and, like I said, it isn't like I'm doing anything. It's a long-running frustration with what feels like an endless victory of symbolic politics over substantive politics.

...an uncharitable take that extends to myself, for what it's worth.

Yes. Am also struggling with what best to do for me personally. We've all been driven a bit insane.

Honestly, my instinct is that it's time to get out for people who can, and that's where a lot of my focus is. This would have been a hell of a lot more convenient for me if the fall of the republic could have held off for just one more cycle.

Optimism isn't a belief that something will turn out well, but faith that something has meaning. It's a lot easier to believe in meaning if other good people are visible and nearby, but in our atomized and individualistic times that's tough. I don't know what to do either. Things have been worse in the past is what I keep coming back to, not in a fatalistic way, but as a source of examples that it's possible to stay decent and sane.

12. Get out where? Necessary to contribute in a new place, and most places already have people. Also, anyone still in a Red state in the US, that's where a vote or a voice might still matter.

I write this as someone whose neighbors basically are fine, public goods havent collapsed and are popular, I don't know how I'd do living in place with trump flags all over. I'm nervous when I drive through what's clearly enemy turf, so I'm not a meaningful personal example, the only real expression for sentiments like these.

My thinking is that we've hit the limits of what we can do with legal, Constitutionally-protected forms of protest. Protests within the bounds of permits are easy to ignore. Lawsuits with the current Supreme Court will just stall bad actors, and maybe not even that given how much the administration is ignoring the courts. Writing to your Congressman might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in purple states an election year but that's a lot of caveats.

As for boycotts, the really bad actors in our economy are big and pervasive enough that it's basically impossible. Amazon, for example? Our household has personally cancelled our Prime subscription and I think Cassandane had a Post subscription she's letting expire, but Amazon is so big, literally hundreds of millions of people would have to do the same thing indefinitely to have a noticeable effect. Tesla is a good test case for this. Its stock price is down something like 40 percent since Musk's seig heil - but was already on a downward trend, and that's still above where it was a year ago. If the company actually goes bankrupt because of his actions, I'm happy to admit I'm wrong and boycotts can be effective.

Instead, the next effective bit of protest will be hard to distinguish from terrorism. But I'm not practicing what I'm preaching because my life is comfortable and I'd like to keep it that way. The closest I'm likely to come any time soon is buying a Luigi shirt.

I agree it's dumb and ineffective, but I'm fine with not buying anything today, and it seemed like this was a good opportunity to (finally, after so much shameful delay) cancel my Amazon prime membership.

14: I have an easy immediate out, as my gf has a house and legal residency in Mexico, but it would be the staging ground for moving further south because I suspect it will get steadily less comfortable for gringo ex-pats there in particular. I'm close enough to retirement age with sufficient assets to qualify in several South American countries and am planning visits now to scout.

Making Tesla go down is relatively easy because by any normal standard it's wildly overvalued; it's kind of a ripe target, as such things go.
Amazon would be much harder - nevermind the amazon.com retail store, AWS makes them more money and powers half of what's on the Internet, and is hard to avoid even if you want to.

I have no idea how I'd possibly get out. I also have no idea how I'd stop using Amazon. (yeah yeah I try to minimize it.)

17 once Trump starts sending SOF after the cartels I'd be wary of going to Mexico, American expats and tourists will be an easy target for retaliation

And I was so proud of myself for going a whole 1/2 day without buying anything. You guys are the worst!

I don't buy much most days, so it's pretty easy to not buy anything today. Mostly just means brewing a second pot of coffee rather than going out and buying a cup. I don't see it as very likely to be effective at anything meaningful, but sure, I'll do that.

I've seen some versions of the idea where it's supposed to just be not buying anything from big corporations, so even a cup of coffee would be fine as long as it's not from Starbucks. Nevertheless, I am brewing a second pot.

23: Good work, teo! Together, we're destroying fascism!

Hooray!

24/25: Thanks guys! Are you done?

endless victory of symbolic politics over substantive politics

I did all the Resisting I possibly could the first time. My assessment is that it accomplished virtually nothing. (Getting on a board accomplished a very minor technocratic thing, but nothing else changed anything.) My take the whole time was that the alternative was doing nothing and that was worse. Now I'm not sure of that, because perhaps we taught the Republicans that they can ignore massive protests.

I ended Trump I with the (best case) theory that all those marches and shit were essentially practice runs and it was worth doing them to keep in practice for The Big One. I mean, I did get fast at making signs, and we had a whole routine that was easy to do and stuff. So I was better at March-ing at the end than I was in the beginning.

Just at the beginning of Trump II, I read an article that I think I linked here that said that the point of protests is that they are a show of force, for what you can do when you really mean it. If that's the case, the problem is that we marched and then there wasn't an especial follow through (except for the elections, which worked), so we all learned that protests don't do anything.

I actually think the one time that things were about to change was over the family separations at the border. I was super upset over those and so were all the people like me, and even the normies, and I was getting traction with other normies to go occupy buildings and stuff and then Trump I backed down. I thought the country was getting close to doing whatever the next thing after protests was.

I still don't understand how the public can exercise enough power to make this government take notice. It is that much more diffuse if you are trying to do it from a blue state.

I do actually, perhaps from my American-trained optimism, think that the public will eventually find something (prob not a one-day boycott) that will break through, perhaps after a Kent State type shooting of someone attractive.

I mean, direct action on the highway system? Blocking ports? Blocking airports? Sabotaging the grid? Whatever comes next after protests, I do think we'll get there this time.

Blocking private airstrips, so the superrich can't fly? Blocking freeways to the warehouse clusters?

26: Not till midnight! This sealed shut wallet kills fascists!

29: Burning Tesla dealerships and vehicles is my guess as to where it starts.

Yeah. It will work best if it is something that people want to do anyway.

The private space companies are out in the desert. I wonder how hard it would be to blockade those.

4: I'm thinking of going to a Tesla protest on Sunday.

Fuck shit up!

17: Tim only got his US citizenship 6 months ago. I can't see us moving to Canada.

His friend from Venezuela who is a levturer at U of florida, finally got a green card, but his kids were over 21 at that point, so they couldn't get it through him. Luckily his wife was able to get Spanish citizenship for them. I'd consider Europe but would be wary of South America.

They're probably wary about you too.

35: if the US is pulling out of NATO, which appears inevitable, Europe may not be the haven it has been.

I'm not disagreeing with you that the US pulling out of NATO seems likely, but it's also literally unbelievable. Everything is unbelievable.

NATO or no NATO, I'm gaming out relocation to western Europe more seriously than I ever thought I'd be doing. Doing it in real life would be completely stressful and heartbreaking, but we do have a feasible path, and if I want to spend my old age somewhere relatively safe it seems like I should make the shift while I'm still working age. It's not yet bug-out time and I'm glad to be working for a state government rather than the feds, but one wants to have a plan in place before they take one's medicine away. The NSA firing all its queers on the pretext of a salacious chat room felt like a warning shot.

So I think about a month ago was my third not-quite-revolutionary experience, and in Germany of all places. But like the other two in Georgia, it was really big, and really fast, and nobody really knew for sure how it would turn out.

The immediate backstory was that the leader of the center-right party -- who was comfortably ahead in all the polls to be the next chancellor, and who three weeks later did in fact win the election -- decided that it was time to make common cause with the far-right party and pass a resolution in parliament. He chose to throw some sparks across the firebreak to see what might catch. Instead he nearly got crisped by the backdraft: within days, there was a demonstration in Berlin that by some counts drew close to 10% of the city's population. (There were big demonstrations all across the country, so this wasn't just a capital being volatile.)

I don't know wtf Merz was thinking with that initiative. He just walked up to the third rail of German politics and grabbed it with both hands. The evils of Nazism are so thoroughly in mainstream German political culture that I can't think of an American parallel; they get it in schooling like we get the Pledge of Allegiance. Working with a barely veiled neo-Nazi party was shockingly beyond the pale. The shock went deep in German society, and people turned out.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, the next bit of AfD footsie failed. Tempers cooled and the election took place as planned. The big demonstration ended at the headquarters of Merz' party, but I really think that if he had passed a law with AfD votes, the demonstration after that would have ended with storming party headquarters and trashing everything inside. I don't know if it's flammable, but we would have found out. (After the election, Merz took a rhetorical torch to the AfD and its leaders. Lesson learned?)

Anyway, the point is that even in a staid-looking place, large and very direct public action is a thing that can happen. It needs: people who are really pissed, people who are not afraid, and symbolic targets. Leaders are useful, and may lead to better outcomes, but I don't think they are strictly necessary.

My main points of comparison are the 1989 anti-communist revolutions, the color revolutions of the early 2000s, failures in Moscow in 2011 and Belarus in 2020 among others. People with knowledge and experience from elsewhere -- Arab Spring, for example -- please chime in and correct me.

Czechoslovakia in 1989 is the clearest example of the three needs. By the time their turn came, Poland and Hungary had shown it was possible to turf out the hardliners, and the Berlin Wall had been opened, fear was overcome. The symbolic heart of the capital was Wenceslas Square, the leader they wanted was Havel, and people were both pissed that their leadership showed no signs of change and unafraid that said leaders would try a Tiananmen solution. In the East German example the exact time and place of opening the Wall was a bit of a bureaucratic cock-up, but the size and momentum of the Leipzig demonstrations the weeks before showed the scale of repression that would have been necessary to keep from opening the border somewhere. Anywhere would have done. The East Germans didn't have a home-grown leader like Havel, but their symbolic target was the border, they were past fed up, and after the first big demonstrations in Leipzig they were not afraid of being gunned down en masse.

Georgia is currently in the middle of another semi-revolutionary situation. In the first nights, the protestors almost broke the government; now near the end of the third month, it's settling into something close to ritual. Sitting governments learn, too. Georgia's bent the two times during my tenure that there were major occupations of the capital's symbolic center; I think this one will as well. As I think I've said here before, the thing that would really endanger Georgia's setup would be for protestors to go up the hill to where the oligarch lives. I only see a little social media from there -- though my brave friend Giorgi is on the scene nearly every night -- and I don't think they're going to go after the oligarch directly.

Applying these historical and political observations to the case of the US, the symbolic targets are obvious: the White House, the Capitol, the National Mall. The January 6 insurrectionists held the White House and the Mall, they brought about 50,000 people to the area, of whom about 2000 seem to have made it into the Capitol. They came very close to their goals. There is, at present, no American Havel or Walesa or Dubcek or Nagy. What share of people are pissed enough to consider the present administration beyond the law is an open question, very much affected by its actions. How many are sufficiently angry to overcome the armed response that awaits is also an open question. Washington's symbolic heart is not a confined space like Tiananmen Square, not if we are talking about a very large number of people.

In any fluid situation the attitude of the "power ministries" -- the police and military closest to the scene, plus the means of communication with the greatest reach and trust -- can play a decisive role. In Europe's 1989, they mostly turned to the side of the protestors. In Belarus five years ago, they stayed on the side of the sitting government, which is still in power.

There are plenty of people in organizations like NDI, IRI and USAID who know much, much more than I do about such things.

Most of the protests I mentioned were against consolidated anti-democratic governments. Trump's rule is not consolidated. There remains hope that it will adhere to some norms and pass in four years at the most. That will tend to dampen participation in dramatic direct action. On the other hand, if the government keeps showing that the law does not apply, more and more people may draw the conclusion that they are outside the law.

If this is all obvious to the plain people of Unfogged, I apologize for going on at such length. Since I am on here with my real name and everything, I emphasize that this is speculation based on what I have read and heard about 1989, and experienced in various post-communist parts of Eastern and Central Europe.

Apology to this plainfogged unnecessary.
While you're Mitteleuroping, what is Merz thinking re Netanyahu? How does it play in Germany?

Also, appluase for the display of civic virtue by Stormcrow and apo upthread.

Thanks, Mossy. Unfortunately, I haven't the faintest what Merz is thinking re Netanyahu. No idea what he or his party/staff thinks there is to gain by inviting Netanyahu to Germany.

Baiting the left-of-center? He's in coalition negotiations with the SPD, he needs the normie-ish left quiescent. That part of the spectrum doesn't like Netanyahu and does like international law. Provoking Arab and Palestinian people in Germany so as to look tough by cracking down on them? Too complicated, and also the people who would most enjoy a crackdown aren't exactly keen on Israel or Jews either. Netanyahu doesn't have a constituency here, what is even the point.

It looks to me like an unforced error, though one that's going to be remembered as minor, if it is remembered at all.

43: Knowing very little about German politics, but going on the rule that that in the stupidest of times the stupidest explanation is the right one, isn't it just that Merz got in trouble for cozying up to Nazis, so now he's proving he's not a Nazi sympathizer by showing he loves Israel?

No date night Friday for lurid and lourdes will be observed March 21. (Genuinely heartened by this move, but it still personally kinda sucks.)

Occasional (former?) poster sam has some pics from today's #TeslaTakedown in NYC. I've been hearing helicopters nonstop for over an hour now; not sure if that's related but elsewhere on social media I did see a flag about a substantial police presence a block *away* from the protest.

(I'm in NY but wasn't at the protest.)

I heard a bunch of people at Sugarbush weren't going to show up to work to protest Vance and family being there.

Apparently, I'm not growing any beans this year, because of the tariffs and the potential for worse tariffs.

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Hey, whats a good term for the kind of folks who show up at school board meetings and yell about transgender content in library books? So far the best I've got is "right-wing anger-bear."

|>

I hate them so much. That's a pretty good phrase, assuming you need something for polite company.

How many of the early tea party protests were inchoate and incoherent? When they still called themselves teabaggers.

I don't know, I think a lot of their actions were the kind relatively well calculated for influence, like constituent rallies targeting specific members of Congress.

The TeslaTakedown stuff seems more targeted to a clear and relatively achievable outcome: make Teslas socially toxic to the point that it is no longer a viable company.

52 are you still short Tesla?

"Short Tesla" is the only pseudo worse than "Wry Cooter."

There's a car in the garage with a Stein-Ware sticker on the trunk.

53: Cashed in last week. Made about 22% return in 3 months on the drop from 293 to 202. I think it has further to fall though.

56 excellent

I still have puts against Tesla, bought when the stock was cheaper so they're still underwater. In the past, when I've done well out of puts against something, my first instinct is to roll them over quickly into another bet on some (or the same) falling price, which has been a mistake every time I've acted on it.

Not sure if finance writing is interesting for people here-- Andy Constan is mostly a fixed income analyst, consistently thoughtful if not always right (of course). He's written up an assessment of what might happen if equities drop soon: https://dampedspring101.substack.com/p/possible-fed-actions-if-spx-falls

54: They never did find EV Cooter after he jumped from the plane with all that bitcoin.

A friend of mine who I told about my investment success recounted an anecdote from his father, of a wealthy investor who, asked his secret, said, " I always sold too early."

Excuse me, the drop from 393 to 302.

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Apo - wasn't your undergraduate degree in something like international relations with specialty in Eastern European countries dominated by the USSR which became totally useless right when you graduated?

What is your take on whether Europe is really about to up its defense spending? I saw Canada showed up at the European summit, but they have not been keeping their full 2% commitments, and Denmark is calling for a much higher percentage of GDP.

They can't rely on us, obviously

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Poli sci, with a Soviet/East Bloc concentration. I know pretty much nothing about EU budgets or military, particularly 30-some years later, so couldn't even make vague hand wavy motions toward anything. I'd start with Ajay and Alex.

European defense spending will fluctuate.

The discussion I've seen (French and Czech) is how quickly European production can ramp up, and what should happen to the newly made weapons (Euro stockpiles against future aggression vs straight to Ukraine).

Sweden is mining Uranium again. I haven't looked all that hard at what's happening now at Jáchymov and Topolčany, the Czech Uranium mines.

My friend just floated the theory that Musk will put proprietary software on the federal computers to replace the COBOL and require the government to pay a monthly subscription fee.

I feel like in practice this is too much of a wild west shitshow for that to pan out, but it's a diabolical thought.

61 reminds me of its sports equivalent: better to trade a player a year too early than a year too late.

Aaron Rogers probably has one more year in him.

40 et seq: The 2nd half is (optimistically) relevant to the power ministries in Russia. (In short, it appears increasing numbers of low-mid police seem to be thinking the gig is up.)

https://www.ft.com/content/68f14f5b-57ae-49b0-a709-128c678a9255

Weidel has also aligned herself with the party's most notorious right-wing radical, Björn Höcke. Earlier this week she approved the return of two controversial lawmakers to the AfD parliamentary group: Matthias Helferich, who had been forced to sit as an independent after describing himself as "the friendly face of National Socialism" and Maximilian Krah, who last year was expelled from the party's leadership after playing down the crimes of Adolf Hitler's SS.

Weidel has seized on the support shown by Musk and Vance. But political scientist Ivan Krastev said that the prospect of US tariffs on European exports and Trump forcing a peace deal on Moscow's terms could put the AfD in an awkward spot, with Friedrich Merz emerging as more patriotic than Weidel. "Suddenly the far-right could start to lose their national legitimacy," he said.

63, 64: I took a course in Comparative Communist Systems in 1988. When I met up with the prof again in mid-90s DC, he said, "Yeah, I sold that one to the History department."

I am doing not very much outside supporting the kids connected to us and their families and friends as much and as actively as I can. If we go to a restaurant, we generally go to one that's immigrant-owned, but that was mostly true already. Actual Nazis showing up here and then actual armed-carry resistance from the mostly Black neighborhood where the Nazis showed up has been... I don't know what the adjective is. And I haven't been personally involved in the marches about that or for immigrant rights. I don't know if people protest at the Vance homestead here regularly. College students protesting "biological sex" signs on their bathrooms got the signs removed an apology made, which is moving to watch but still doesn't make things feel very safe for the students who are already at the school and now see how they're viewed. But it was striking how awful it felt when I saw a Black friend share the White Power banners she saw as she drove to pick up her son and I am not emotionally ready for that even though I am also not in denial at all that it's there and we talk about it all the time. The middle child has a passport with an X and I couldn't get that changed without outing them to my ex, whom they haven't seen or spoken to in about five years, so we've had to talk about what the implications of that are, that it's going to be harder for them to get a name change (though they'll turn 18 next fall in their last year of high school and allegedly if Odile and I adopt them it would be considered a family adoption and not mean they lose their Medicaid and other benefits related to adoption from foster care, which they very much need because of all their various health needs, so we could potentially do a name change of some sort then.) But balancing all that plus the friends the kids are losing back to Guatemala because that feels safer for their families and the pressure on Odile and other teachers to be careful about what they say while bigotry is being weaponized and it's all horrifying and exhausting. But Odile and I took an 8-year-old who's been her student (and whose family we support as much as we can since the state has continually refused to remove the kids even though they have a million reasons to) to see the Dog Man movie so he could get a break from being a caretaker and just be a kid. All four of us in the family at home went to a glass studio and made flamework toads because learning a new skill is healing and creating something is fun and now we each have a cute little wonky guy. None of this is as active as I've ben in the past (before long Covid and other health problems) and a lot of it looks selfish and maybe is. But I don't know how we're going to get through these next few years without at least a little of that.

Not selfish, Thorn! Yay for all that you are doing!

Lighting Tesla dealerships on fire is for the young.

74: As Doug says, not selfish at all. All of it, including the flamework toads, is the sort of thing that the very best Americans are doing now.