Jacob Levy, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University, cautioned in a Blue Sky thread that the case involving a Maryland man the U.S. government acknowledges was "wrongfully deported" has reached a "crisis moment."In March, Kilmar Ábrego García was accused of being an MS-13 gang m...
If dissenting online makes them feel like they are doing enough to not act IRL, yes.
Revolutions don’t just spontaneously materialize from nothing, they grow from riots, that grow from peaceful protests, that grow from people complaining to each other in social settings. None of the early steps are sufficient, but they are the type of things that are necessary for the end result. There is no world where less dissenting online leads to more direct action.
How many years does online complaining need to take place before we get to uprising? I’m just curious if we should prepare for war yesterday in Canada or next week cause complaining from Americans and not acting has been going on for multiple presidential terms now. I think Cheeto did the uprising in around 4 years if I remember correctly. It was a few groups of Nazis that led the entire thing. Nazis don’t tend to be very smart.
People dissented online a lot in Russia ten years ago
And that grew into protests and riots, so… what’s your point?
Hey guys, guess what. Authoritarianism isn’t trivial to beat. All the other authoritarian states in the world aren’t just full of lazy people who didn’t use the one simple trick. Turns out both propaganda works and a lot of people are actually scared of being murdered or sent to a gulag.
But again, you get none of that if you try to skip the first steps.
I feel like that’s unlikely and that a lot of the people dissenting online are the same ones who are protesting, calling their lawmakers, etc.
Also, it’s not like any of the IRL stuff has been effective yet anyway. Online dissent probably gets seen by more eyeballs than any one protest sign or IRL action that doesn’t end up with the person doing it being arrested or killed (and thus unable to continue resisting this administration), so if it really is an either/or situation I think online dissent is more effective than IRL peaceful protest or writing yet another letter to my lawmakers.
That all said, I really don’t think it is an either/or situation, so I think we can and should be encouraging all the kinds of dissent.