Logistics - for example, it takes time to hire the people the government needs to have to perform domestic oppression at an increased scale, i.e. they need more cops and ICE agents. And they probably have identified that some things need to be done in sequences (or more generically there’s a graph-like dependence), so they can’t just go immediately to the worst possible things.
Lack of collective vision. Simply, the people currently in power are more self-interested than they are interested in their collective political project.
They probably still do think that there is something they can do that would push Americans over the edge…but they’re slowly realizing that’s only vanishingly the case. I.e. I don’t reject that Americans can literally be pushed into action, but it would take a severe perturbation of comfort for Americans to actually get moving. Frankly…an unrealistic perturbation.
I brought up disaster capitalism in a different thread last night and I think that’s the ticket for this. It’s not that they were sitting around waiting on a moment. You don’t waste time trying to predict moments like this. You maintain a relative state of readiness for anything and when something like this happens, you pounce and milk it for all you can. Even they don’t know what affordances Kirk’s death will provide. They’re experimenting. That’s why it’s quickly morphing into this weird catch-all cause. Somehow military recruitment, late night TV, transgender rights, AI grifts, and social media are all tied into this. The somehow is that there are different groups who have different goals and interests beyond the general goal of maintaining capital control. They’re all trying to figure out what this will let them get away with. Can we re-align late night TV so our constituents aren’t hearing how shit we are? Maybe. Can we take a moment to stomp on trans rights some more? We’ll try. Can we get some more police drones that scan public events? Might as well, it’ll stop another Charlie from happening.
The dude’s corpse is being divided up and mashed into oil for all these different machines. It is related even though it’s not actually related, if that makes sense. They weren’t waiting on a moment and they also aren’t able to do it without a moment because opportunism requires an opportunity.
You maintain a relative state of readiness for anything and when something like this happens, you pounce and milk it for all you can.
In Kwame Ture’s autobiography, he has a quote from an organizer who said that you stay ready so you don’t have to get ready. It’s the same exact thing that orgs need to completely internalize. If you’re waiting for the revolutionary momentTM to come before acting, you will be nowhere close to seizing the opportunity when it actually happens. The George Floyd uprising was a revolutionary moment. And absolutely no org was even close to turning that opportunity into something far greater than what it turned out. Now imagine if there was an org on par with the BPP at its height in 2020 that simultaneously had the ability to wage war against the pigs on top of providing political education that inoculate the masses from the cringey recuperation shit that the Democrats successfully pulled off.
IMO there are three convincing explanations:
I brought up disaster capitalism in a different thread last night and I think that’s the ticket for this. It’s not that they were sitting around waiting on a moment. You don’t waste time trying to predict moments like this. You maintain a relative state of readiness for anything and when something like this happens, you pounce and milk it for all you can. Even they don’t know what affordances Kirk’s death will provide. They’re experimenting. That’s why it’s quickly morphing into this weird catch-all cause. Somehow military recruitment, late night TV, transgender rights, AI grifts, and social media are all tied into this. The somehow is that there are different groups who have different goals and interests beyond the general goal of maintaining capital control. They’re all trying to figure out what this will let them get away with. Can we re-align late night TV so our constituents aren’t hearing how shit we are? Maybe. Can we take a moment to stomp on trans rights some more? We’ll try. Can we get some more police drones that scan public events? Might as well, it’ll stop another Charlie from happening.
The dude’s corpse is being divided up and mashed into oil for all these different machines. It is related even though it’s not actually related, if that makes sense. They weren’t waiting on a moment and they also aren’t able to do it without a moment because opportunism requires an opportunity.
In Kwame Ture’s autobiography, he has a quote from an organizer who said that you stay ready so you don’t have to get ready. It’s the same exact thing that orgs need to completely internalize. If you’re waiting for the revolutionary momentTM to come before acting, you will be nowhere close to seizing the opportunity when it actually happens. The George Floyd uprising was a revolutionary moment. And absolutely no org was even close to turning that opportunity into something far greater than what it turned out. Now imagine if there was an org on par with the BPP at its height in 2020 that simultaneously had the ability to wage war against the pigs on top of providing political education that inoculate the masses from the cringey recuperation shit that the Democrats successfully pulled off.