@quadrismegistus I've always thought it was pretty clearly inspired by the highway shutdown marches, which is a tactic that seemed pretty mainstream in BLM marches from ~2015 and has also been picked up by extinction rebellion... Plus Occupy-style theatrics in the core?
@quadrismegistus The irony is that to combine occupy's extralegal carnival with BLM's shut-it-down you need control of the trucks, right? And trucks are one of the more expensive pieces of capital in wide circulation.
@quadrismegistus Marches during the 2016-17 protest movement in New York and Boston were usually led by BLM organizers--there was a spontaneous demonstration on November 10, 2016 in Boston I think about a lot where a bunch of BLM old hands had the megaphones and were largely succeeding at (+)
@quadrismegistus instructing and steering the crowd. I thought one way of seeing many large marches in late 2016/early 2017 in NYC to be essentially practice runs to getting the people that would enable a full economic shutdown of NYC in the event of anti-democratic moves that would force (+)
@quadrismegistus some of the fence-sitting power structures (Wall Street, commercial distributors) in the US to more actively contain Trump. (NYC is actually poorly positioned for this b/c the ports are in NJ--LA might be more important.) The choice of Ottawa is interesting b/c the right wants(+)
@quadrismegistus is aiming explicitly to discredit democrat governance by attacking its strongholds--state capitals in the Jan 6 2021 insurrection, as well. Leftist protest in occupy/BLM has more opportunities for success in some ways because the general shutdown of Occupy+BLM disrupts economy+
@quadrismegistus more than rightist protests can disrupt legislation, although they can *discredit.*
@quadrismegistus A lesson that I took from the 2010s into the Trump admin more strongly than anyone else I know is that for everything Berlusconi ever did that was politically and legally disastrous, it was only the bond markets that could actually dismantle his power. Sic semper Trump/DeSantis.
@quadrismegistus (I'm gonna delete this thread soon b/c it's off-brand--but lemme end with an endorsement of Yannis Varoufakis' memoir as "one of the greatest political memoirs of all time." Not to embrace Varoufakis himself.) theguardian.com
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