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Cake day: June 29th, 2025

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  • If your tactics disrupt the order of things under capitalism, you may well be accused of violence, because “violence” is an elastic term often deployed to vilify people who threaten the status quo. Conditions that the state characterizes as "peaceful’ are, in reality, quite violent. Even as people experience the violence of poverty, the torture of imprisonment, the brutality of policing, the denial of health care, and many other violent functions of this system, we are told we are experiencing peace, so long as everyone is cooperating. When state actors refer to “peace,” they are really talking about order. And when they refer to “peaceful protest,” they are talking about cooperative protest that obediently stays within the lines drawn by the state. The more uncooperative you are, the more you will be accused of aggression and violence. It is therefore imperative that the state not be the arbiter of what violence means among people seeking justice. In the past, activists frequently leveraged the violence of police, taking actions they believed police would likely respond to with violence, in order to expose the brutality of policing and force the public to witness and confront it. Many of those actions, including protests carried out by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the Student Nonviolen Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement, took place in a context that was very different from today’s world of pervasive mass media. Today, people are much more accustomed to witnessing violence, including violence against protesters, as such imagery is shared widely on a regular basis, particularly through social media. The public has largely become inured to such imagery. The violence of the state in response to protest is rarely scrutinized to the degree that protesters are scrutinized. The idea that if you are defiant in the face of authority you should expect to incur its wrath is firmly entrenched in our culture. When people who defy police are abused, we often hear people ask, “What did they think was going to happen?” The ubiquity of the abuse puts the onus on the abused to avoid it, because they simply “should have known better.” Protesters are expected to remain “nonviolent” at all times, regardless of the circumstances, while the state is assumed to be justified, at leas sometimes, in inflicting violence to quell “unrest.”









  • aaa@lemmy.ziptome_irl@lemmy.worldme_irl
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    3 months ago

    If you’re referring to the direction each boat is facing, this is just because they are anchored and there is wind and current in the water. If you watch a time lapse of boats parked in a bay, you will see they all eerily move synchronously over time.


  • In the region of the world I’m from, waiter unions themselves are against tipping. The reasons I have heard are that

    1. wage negotiations should not happen between customers and employees
    2. the principle of everyone’s salary being enough to cover all costs of living
    3. neither customer nor employee will benefit from service staff having too low wages
    4. worker’s rights cannot practically be built using funds from tipping
    5. normalising tipping will be used by the employer as an argument to pay below liveable wages

    That being said, waiters are given a liveable wage here. And locals also sometimes tip for great service. But that’s just a bonus for the waiter, not the expectation.

    I would personally suggest you reevaluate your pro-tipping stance given the above, but I don’t know where in the world you’re from, nor how waiters are treated or paid there




  • Thanks for the thoughtful response!

    I am an avid but slow reader. I think the main appeal for me to read many of the classic (western) books is so that I can get a better understanding of each author’s inspirations, which would hopefully finally help explain how we got to where we are today. But I think your answer is pulling me in the direction of starting with the books I want, and moving backwards in time for each book I want to delve further into, and then moving forwards when questions can’t be answered by the past.

    I read more about HTRB today and it seems totally fine to just skim a full book briefly, and decide it’s not for me. So I think I’ll use that as well.

    Thanks for mentioning HTRB!