this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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I can understand that people don't like riots.
What really shits me is when people are opposed to completely non-violent disruptive protests. Street marches, die-ins, gluing yourself to statues, throwing non-destructive liquids onto monuments, etc. If you put your mild inconvenience or sense of propriety ahead of a cause, that's clearly not a cause you believe in, so stop blaming the protestors for your lack of support.
Not all protest is good protest. Criticizing the form of protests is valid.
Block a random highway and all you're going to do is get people mad at your cause for making them late for work. Those people could be future allies that are getting driven away.
What's a more effective protest, people holding signs handing out cookies, or people holding signs squirting passersby with water pistols?
The point of protests is to make the issue more palatable to deal with than the protests.
Being completely demure and effecting nobody is a bad protest. Make the consequences measurable.
I often think that when people talk about peaceful protest, they use the broadness and ambiguity of the word """peaceful""" to clamp down on any actual protest. The civil rights movement was non-violent, and if non-violence is your standard for peaceful, than it's peaceful. Conservatives however see anything illegal happening in a protest, and even though there was lack of violence, will say "they did something illegal, therefore it isn't peaceful". Civil disobedience, that is illegally not following an unjust law, must be practiced for non-violent protest to be effective. Over the years conservatives have managed to make it seem as if the civil rights movement won by just passively picketing buildings.
By the way, It's a matter of semantics sure, but sometimes, semantics can be very important, especially if you want to make a very specific point.
Yeah it primes the minds of the conservative base to blindly accept that protesters = civilly disobedient = doing illegal stuff = criminal = bad other = subhuman barely worth your contempt.
Ikr
Pissing people off does not make your cause palatable. Especially when there is no obvious correlation between what you're doing to piss them off and the goal you mean to achieve.
You wear your name well.
Not even going to attempt to defend your point?
By Inconveniencing people, there is a fighting chance to break the status quo.
Inconvenience force people to take a stance for or against, and a movement can start.
History has shown that over and over, and any person arguing against that is simply ill informed.
Thus my comment that you wear your name well. The junk food of a stand.
Ruining a piece of art does not force people to do something about Global Warming. The reason everyone shits on activist types is because these stunts are clearly cries for attention and the supposed cause is just an excuse for college kids whose parents gave them money instead of love.
I'm not saying effect nobody, I'm saying that the right people need to be effected. Effect the wrong people and you just make enemies.
Sorry when you can get criminally charged for trespass, the "right people" can buy themselves a big moat of real estate to insulate from protests. Sometimes the people they work with, services, and customers need to be inconvenienced.
If you can't empathise with people protesting, and you just get angry at them, maybe do some self reflection on why you can't look at the bigger picture and not take things personally.
Thats what I'm advocating for. Targeted disruption is necessary. Indiscriminate disruption is harmful to a cause.
If your cause is so just that random people automatically empathize with your protestors as soon as they are aware of the protestors, no matter how much the protestors make their day worse, then what's the point of disruption?
Clearly they're just waiting to be made aware of your cause, just say hi and they'll join you. You've already won, go forth and make changes with your broad support of the population.
Ok let me expand that list
Sometimes you need to put pressure progressively up the chain into more wide reaching efforts. It's not like a highway blockade is day 1, other things were tried and ignored.
To force people ignoring the issue to engage with it. People who are fine with status quo and ignoring the issue now have to deal with it. Either they're going to be people who agree to some degree with the protestors and will be more voices saying "just give them what they want FFS so this distribution can end" or they oppose the protestors at which point why would the protestors be upset that they have been disrupted?
You do realise that you're literally being the person that's being made fun of in the OP, right? Do you think the suffragettes, the anti-apartheid campaigners, or American civil rights campaigners never impacted anyone other than those with direct power to fix things? As Martin Luther King Jr said:
People love trotting that quote out, don't they? They hide behind it, defending their ineffective protests and their unwillingness to improve. Any criticism and here we go, it's time to blame "the White moderate".
They think that gay rights started and ended with the Stonewall riots, ignoring how veterans of the Civil Rights movement taught the gays when and how to protest effectively. Protesting is a skill, and ignorance of that skill harms the cause.
Are you saying the Stonewall Riots were an unnecessary part of the struggle for gay rights? Also, what effective tactics do you think veterans of the Civil Rights movement taught the gay rights protesters? Do you think they taught them to be demure and to not disrupt anyone's day? Is that how you think the Civil Rights movement played out?
No, I'm saying that Stonewall was a singular event in a larger movement. I'm saying that indiscriminate disruption only turns everyday people against a cause as you are making their days worse. I'm saying that choosing your targets and your disruptive protestors to be disruptive is a skill.
Several months before Rosa Parks chose to sit at the front of a bus, an unmarried pregnant young black lady did the same thing. The Civil Rights movement chose not to elevate her and make her arrest a big deal, because it wouldn't have been bad optics. They waited and picked a nice old lady coming back from work, someone unimpeachable to turn into a national story. They didn't say "all protest is good protest" and throw their entire weight behind a figurehead that could be easily torn down.
So if you think all protest is good protest, then by all means, put on your "Palestine lives matter" T-shirt and start throwing rocks through people's windows in broad daylight. Your cause is so just that people won't help but join you, right?
I'm not writing the whole history of the gay rights and civil rights movement, do your own research, but I'll share this article for an overview:
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/different-fight-same-goal-how-black-freedom-movement-inspired-early-n1259072
So you think people in this thread want all protest to start out as a riot. That's not what anyone is saying. We are saying that when a disruptive peaceful protest turns into a riot due to the aggression of police or other agitators, the legitimacy of the protest is not diminished.
Sorry, no.
Our enemies have been consolidating power and influence for over 40 years. We do not have the time to nicely convince everyone that 'our side has cookies'
It is either get with it or get the fuck out of the way. Anyone with a brain recognizes that fact.
So you think squirting people with water pistols is more effective? It was an either/or question.
Or maybe a different, historical hypothesis?
You're a Roman Senator, trying to gain support for election. Do you
a) give bread to plebians with your name carved into the crust or
b) have your personal guard beat anyone that doesn't promise to vote for you?
Historically uhhh b
Voter intimidation was such a problem that it led to the invention of the secret ballot.
So yes, violence is more effective.
Inconveniences like being stuck in traffic are not violence. Grow up.
Butbutntu turnrurntjrbbut but I will be stuck in traffic!?! Did you think about me when making your comment?
Really depends on how hot it is outside