Genuinely despicable to force people to choose between protecting themselves from disease transmission and protesting for causes they care about
The cruelty is the point. It only affects those protesting for good causes anyway – those protesting in support of their orange Jesus won’t have masks anyway.
For real. Those morons didn’t mask up when they gathered a lynch mob in the capital building when covid was at its highest. There was every reason to mask up and still they didn’t bother
Yeah I don’t disagree :/
A disabled and chronically ill writer, who goes by @broadwaybabyto on social media, views masking as community care, saying she wears a “mask to protect others and show solidarity with all disabled and vulnerable people.… Many of us have sacrificed four and a half years of our lives, going to great lengths to preserve whatever health we have left.… As more and more COVID restrictions were dropped, masks remained as the single best accessibility tool disabled people had.… Taking that away…tells us you want us dead.… You don’t want us in your world. And it hurts.”
This part.
If you don’t show your face in a political protest in a free country, then you don’t actually believe in the cause.
This is obviously different in countries that are not free.
I was here. There is no fucking way that I would have shown my face at a Nazi rally. That very night in Eugene the Nazi’s were going door to door looking for people to arrest. Of course, the article is saying that it was antifa who instigated… As if a literal Nazi rally isn’t instigative of itself.
I kindly disagree that showing your face makes people take you seriously. All it makes you is a target. I think the key factor is what is the protest for, as whether or not I wear a mask depends on what I am protesting. If I’m protesting a hate group or hateful ideology, I am going to keep myself safe. If I am protesting social and environmental issues I generally do not feel the need to.
Also, going to protests is inherently dangerous because peaceful protesters are not treated with peace. In that article I linked, tear gas was fired at us, the peaceful protesters, when the Nazi’s were the ones crossing the police lines. Also the police had their back to them the entire time, facing us with their riot shields. I wonder why the cops were protecting the Nazi’s at the “far-right” rally. Peaceful protesters against being treated with excessive force being met with excessive force… So honestly, no. Wearing a mask is necessary because you will be targeted and will be followed home.
The thing about peaceful protests is that they are almost impossible, because a peaceful protest is inherently the peaceful protesters dying for their cause by not retaliating. No, I don’t think we should allow Nazi’s to assault people in walking aides and attempt to stop on them. No, I don’t think peaceful protesters who are being attacked by police should just let the cops beat them to death. And even if we did, they would still label us as anything but peaceful protests.
FFS, there’s so much evidence of planted and instigated protests, like bricks being thrown by people not part of the protest but claiming that they were. Basically, there’s no such thing as a peaceful protest and so wearing a mask should be prioritize for the protesters safety.
Note: any right-wing or conservative protesters disregard this. Show the world who you really are! It’s the right thing to do!
As I have repeatedly stated, the US is not a free country in this regard.
So mask away!
Haha I did happen to see one of those comments, it just ended up being after I posted all this lol. But, I would have probably posted it anyway because it’s been on my mind a lot lately.
Thank you for hearing me :)
I understand, I believe heavily in trying to see the other guy’s logic even if I disagree with them.
Sadly the world in general has seen a rise of the far right, which I realize will make masked protests needed, even here in Sweden, I don’t like it, but I understand that it peobably is comming. But that is not today.
That’s because the US is not a free country.
Which a I have noted in several comments here
Tell me, what does showing your face add to the protest, other than making it easier for opposing groups to target you?
If makes people take you seriously.
No, numbers make people take a protest seriously.
If you are discounting a cause based on whether the supporters show their faces or not, that’s just you looking for an excuse.
In my experience if there is a masked protest here in Sweden, it is beacuase people want to riot, even if the initial idea was not to riot, the concept of a masked protest will attract more people who will riot.
it is beacuase people want to riot
You may be living in a country that allows you to protest, but you have created your own mental shackles by buying into an authoritarian narrative against masked protests.
Masks == dangerous potential rioters is not a “free” mindset.
I don’t think I have ever seen any masked protest that didn’t devolve into rioting or violence in some way.
That is obviously not exclusive to masked protests, but most unmasked protests I have seen then to be be peaceful.
It is almost as if hiding their identity makes people less restrained.
I am going to posit that this says more about your media, and how it is shaping your perceptions in line with someone’s agenda.
“My government is totally fine with protesting, but our media makes it seem as though any masked protest is a precursor to a riot, so I argue against people protesting in masks, but it’s not that the government wants me to argue that and has shaped the media to ensure I do, it’s actually just my free and un-manipulated opinion!”
Have you seen people protesting against Nazis in Sweden? That’s the sort of situation where you do not need to fear the state, but the violent and retributive people you are protesting.
Yep, I have seen them, and in my experience it is the little cowardly Nazi bitches who tend to be quicker to mask.
That’s not the point, though, is it? It doesn’t matter if Nazis mask faster. What matters is that there are Nazis and other non-state-actors who will happily try to identify and dox people who get in their way. Such doxxers aren’t even necessarily at the protests. They might be in, say, Russia and looking to shut up pro-Western activists in neighboring countries.
It may be that no one in Sweden is immuno-comprosmied and that no one in Sweden could get hacked or doxxed when their identity is uncovered, but for the rest of the world, there are plenty of reasons a person might want to wear a mask that don’t involve wanting to be riot-ready.
Restating an opinion doesn’t make it better.
If you don’t have the freedom to cover your face at a political protest, the country you are protesting in is not free.
Oh, and which countries are “free”? I’d like to know which state has liberated all its people. I’ll wait.
There is an ongoing pandemic and the global capitalist efforts to downgrade, downplay, and minimise this pandemic for " the economy" mean that it’s even more important to mask, not least to challenge the health supremacy and ableism of this current capitalist culture. Masking is one of the most easy yet powerful ways we can promote safety and engage in intersectional anticapitalism (in times of universal deceit, and all that).
Protests are not about “being seen” as individuals to gain clout or appear cool and edgy, not least with the increased assault on the right to protest.
To truly “believe in the cause” is to act, not attract recognition. Besides, if you want a revolution, you’d better start dressing for the occasion.
I am talking about countries where you don’t get punnished for protesting orderly.
Which ones, in particular? Be specific.
Here in Sweden you won’t get arrested for protesting peacefully.
If you want to stage a protest you need permission from the police, they are required to grant it to you unless it can’t be done safely, then they can suggest a different location for the protest.
A year or two ago, the police did deny permission for a protest where a guy wanted to burn a quran, that was a big deal about it and the police was found to be at fault.
The US has long since lost the “land of the free” title in my oppinion, and I do not count them among the free countries
Here in Sweden you won’t get arrested for protesting peacefully.
If you want to stage a protest you need permission from the police, they are required to grant it to you unless it can’t be done safely, then they can suggest a different location for the protest.
Wow I hope Sweden never has any sort of rightward turn that would suddenly leave your “right to protest” (“peacefully”) (with mum’s permission) very much in the air. I hope you never have to fear they ID’d you at an event where the police kettled things from a protest into a survival riot. I hope you never have to decide whether to pop your phone in a faraday bag. Take the battery out. Never need to hide your face from a government fond of making lists. Never fear gait recognition following you home thru a hundred CCTV cameras. The raid that comes in the night when you realize your freedoms were quite illusory. I hope your protest movement isn’t demonized by the media or arbitrarily designated a terrorist organization.
Fuck your shaming. We don’t protest for glory and clout. We protest because we are human. And some of us land immediately in the crosshairs unless we try to protect ourselves. Am I being hyperbolic? Ask the environmental movement the UK branded as terroristic for highlighting how close to extinction we are. Ask Cop City protestors. Ask Palestinian supporters in Germany. Ask BLM protestors who did nothing illegal and ended up in black vans being intimidated.
Grow up. Freedom isn’t free.
Meh, in my experience, demonstrators wearning masks just want to riot or cause violence without consequences.
If Sweden falls into a dictatorship or similar, I’d gladly revise my stance on the status of Sweden as a free country.
Untill then, if you are protesting, take off you mask and show your face! Else I can’t take the protest seriously
Well that certainly is some words you just said. Enjoy your naivete while you still can. I hope Sweden is always so wonderfully safe feeling. That must be nice.
This is obviously different in countries that are not free.
So… the US? People are regularly arrested for perfectly legal, not even a shadow of a doubt, activity at protests. And protesters are vulnerable to not just cops, but dangerous actors who support the thing they’re protesting against. Whether it’s doxing, billionaire-funded slander, your boss not liking the cause, or actual violence, there’s plenty of reason not to want your face to be easily identifiable, even while orderly protesting for a just cause. Never mind health concerns like not wanting to catch COVID (or breath tear gas).
The idea that orderly protesting is safe in the United States is incredibly naïve.
At this point in time, I do not see the US as a free country in this context.
This is a story about protests and mask bans in the US and non-governmental actors can still be a threat to protesters in a “free” country.
All rights are won through violence.
You are partly correct, plenty of rights have been won through negotiation
And what do you think the negotiators are negotiating about? Why do you think anyone took Martin Luther King serious? They were fucking scared of Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. “We make a deal with you so the scarier people don’t get any scarier than they are right now”
And Martin Luther King STILL got killed for speaking out. You’ve shown some really ignorant and privileged views in this thread. I’m glad Sweden’s been so kind to you, but maybe don’t chirp about shit you don’t know about if you don’t want people to say you sound like a tool for oppressors, especially when your nations wealth comes from the fossil fuels that’s killing everyone else. You are a beneficiary of colonialism even if you’re not the beneficiary of colonialism.
