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In Europe, normal people, almost all with low-income jobs or on welfare, have time to do this sort of shit every weekend for nine months of the year. They are setting out to commit more violent actions than American protestors, under much greater surveillance, and often dealing with police far more willing to use force than US cops. They aren't limited to one city, but travel around on their own expense committing violence all around the country and across the continent. They have no multi-million(/billion?)-dollar infrastructure behind them as American protestors have, no systematic legal support at all, and the media hates them rather than running cover.
Why do they do this? Because they want to beat up fans of other soccer teams.
The analogy isn't perfect, but what I want to say is that it's really not that hard for someone, even on a low income, to do this sort of thing if it's their main hobby. The full-spectrum infrastructural support from the leftist machine helps a lot, of course, and many of these people are given bullshit jobs by that machine in part so they can agitate, but it's not necessary for motivated people. This also probably goes some way to explaining why, in my experience, so much more of the resources of the leftist machine are dedicated to motivating people to become agitators compared to what's paid out to support actual agitators.
I'll say. Unless something changed since I followed these fine folk, these fights are mutual combat. There's not much to coordinate when both sides just want to pommel each other for shits and giggles.
Soccer hooliganism is very illegal in Europe, actually, and these clubs are well coordinated. There’s a book about it, I can’t remember the name.
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Mutual combat that is very much illegal, with additional penalties over 'standard' mutual combat, and often involves fighting cops! It was far more intense back in the day, but despite that, in the modern setup (where sometimes hooligan groups will even coordinate with each other where they'll meet to fight), there's still a fair amount of organization involved. The coordination involved is in avoiding getting identified/arrested by the cops in the process of doing that mutual combat, or in avoiding that while beating up random people, as also often happens.
Anyway, your point was about the time and expenses involved in being a protestor, and I submit that hooligans have more onerous financial investments required (tickets, beer, trains, flights, beer, hotels, beer), generally on lower incomes, and the time requirement is not terribly dissimilar (the main difference being protesting in the week during work hours, but that burden is spread across a lot of protestors and your typical US protestor probably doesn't need to take time off work - they're retired, or unemployed, or a student, or a bartender, or have shift work).
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