One common tenant of direct action is decentralization. It’s a lot harder to squash direct action when the people doing this stuff are just groups of 2-5+ friends (it’s called an affinity group) who believe in the same stuff and have no common leader. Sometimes direct action is as simple as smashing up some windows in the dead of night and running away.

I might add that masking up is a good idea even if you plan on doing nothing but observing. Sometimes rightwing media personalities will photograph unmasked people at protests in an attempt to send online harassment their way regardless of whether they’ve done anything wrong. Additionally, there have been instances where innocent individuals have been charged with actions that other people in the crowd did, so even if you plan on being good, you could still get in trouble for the actions of others. A mask would add another layer of protection from identification and hopefully prevent you from getting wrongfully charged. I expect this administration to be particularly vindictive against protesters.

I’d recommend you don’t sign anything at a protest, ever. No petitions, no signing up for orgs, not even if a goth baddie asks you to sign their tits. Do that stuff offsite before or after a protest on your own time where’s it’s a lot less likely to be an informational gathering tactic. You don’t want a record of which protests you’ve been to, especially if they’re the spicier kind where direct action might be happening.

Mask up and bloc up.

You’ve changed the subject immediately, none of this has anything to do with a general strike. Did you seriously think I was talking about 2020 when I brought up Seattle? But hey, if you want to change the topic to another thing I’m pretty knowledgeable about, that’s cool, too.

Oh right, I just remembered you also used to complain all the time about BLM because you had to briefly sit in traffic a couple times and now are on the side of the police state. Way to remind everyone of your petulant pettiness, too.

It sounds as though you’re advocating against any kind of protest now. Your sentiment seems to indicate that if you don’t get every single demand met permanently, then it was a total waste and you should’ve just stayed home and stayed silent, but that’s ridiculous. It’s worthwhile to stand up and fight against an unjust system simply for the sake of opposing evil in the world. Getting crushed under the boot of the police doesn’t make you wrong for that. You don’t protest with the expectation of winning any concessions, you protest to stand up for what’s right.

Besides, cops having a way outsized budget was the case before the protests, too, so what’s your point? It’s still just as worthy of protest now as it was then. The protesters won concessions, but they were almost immediately and undemocratically reneged on. For all the “defund the police” hysteria the media threw around, it never really happened anywhere (not even Minneapolis), despite many promises from officials in major cities all over the country. It’s like if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was dangled to get marches to stop and then it was thrown out as soon as they did. You make it sound like it was the fault of protesters that city councils nationwide voted to increase their police budgets after promising they’d decrease them.

Tell that to Seattle.

General strikes can be localized, too. They don’t need nationwide adoption.

I think I’ll take my activism advice from someone who doesn’t actively despise homeless people, but thanks, Jordan.

That’s called a fossil word, a word that only ever gets used in a specific phrase. When was the last time you heard the word “inclement” outside of the phrase “inclement weather”?