Way to prove my point. You wanting to deny others right to peaceful assembly is you getting political. You just don't realize because you (obviously) agree with yourself.
If you are absolutely determined to inconvenience other people then congratulations; everything can be political because you have the power to make it so.
However this is a hostile approach. If you can't get results through the usual political channels, trying to inconvenience the neutrals into compliance is a dodgy way of proceeding. I'll accept that nobody in politics plays fairly, but the people being harassed by an organised protest are completely reasonable in claiming that they were apolitical and the protestors are forcing politics upon them.
We have a word, 'apolitical', because it is a possible state someone's opinions can be in.
Protest doesn’t work unless it it causes extreme inconvenience. You’re telling the protestors not to protest.
Americans have a completely impotent understanding of protest. Protest and asking nicely are NOT the same thing. You do the former when the latter doesn’t work.
> Protest doesn’t work unless it it causes extreme inconvenience. You’re telling the protestors not to protest.
No. This is the kind of misguided logic that protesters use to do things like block freeways, stand on caltrain tracks, and trespass on private property.
When protest causes extreme inconvenience, more often than not it inspires ire for the protesters. None of my friends that were stuck in traffic when BLM protesters blocked highways in Oakland came away from that experience with an improved opinion of BLM.
It's not really that misguided because in general it does work.
One has to understand that the inconvenience you feel by being inconvenienced by a protest is truly a tiny fraction of the "inconvenience" that motivated the protestors to protest. You know, have some empathy.
If a woman seeking an abortion has to drive 4 hours to the next state because protestors stormed the abortion clinic, would you tell her to "have some empathy" for the protestors? Or how about a bunch of white and Asian tech workers disruptively protesting women and URM ERGs in objection to discriminatory hiring processes (e.g. diversity quotas). If not, then you're at least conceding that only some protestors are justified in causing "extreme inconvenience" and that others are not justified in causing inconvenience. And in my experience, whether or not a person feels a protest is justified in causing inconvenience largely correlates to whether or not they agree with the protest - a pretty hypocritical position in my view.
Empathy works both ways. Protestors that lack empathy for the people they're disrupting aren't going to get good reactions from most people because most people don't like to be disrupted.
Yeah, I think only some protestors are justified in their action because I think some protestors have stupid immoral beliefs. I would say that if a group is storming an abortion clinic, I'd at least have to concede that they're doing what has been demonstrably effective in accomplishing their goals.
I don't see any hypocrisy. I want what I want, and I don't want my enemies to get what they want. We can't both get what we want if our views are incompatible.
The abortion protestors would not be effective because fortunately the bulk of society does not agree with your belief that protest grants license to disrupt other people's lives and we have enacted legislation to prevent protestors from interfering with the operation of abortion clinics, businesses, transportation, etc. If abortion protestors did that, they get hauled to jail. Same deal with BLM protestors blocking highways. Protestors have a right to be heard, not a right to disrupt the lawful activity of others.
> I don't see any hypocrisy. I want what I want, and I don't want my enemies to get what they want. We can't both get what we want if our views are incompatible.
You're essentially saying, "it's good when I do it, it's bad when people I disagree with like do it." This is hypocrisy, justifying actions for oneself but criticizing others for doing the same. And not to mention, I frequently find that this mentality fosters enmity between people with different views - you even referred to protestors espousing views you don't approve of as "enemies".
"You may well ask: 'Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?' You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored."
- Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Not sure about anyone else but disruptive protest has the opposite effect of its intention on me. It inclines me to like the movement less if people are going of their way to inconvenience me in its name.
You're going to rip some refugee family apart to invisibly spite some trust fund kid protester who is fully insulated from any negative externalities of Palantir?
You want to have your cake and eat it too. You can't both be a jerk to people and expect them to also support your cause simply because you aren't the beneficiary of your cause.
> Protest doesn’t work unless it it causes extreme inconvenience
Extreme inconvenience for who/what you are protesting, inconveniencing the average Joe is counter productive and will turn them against you.
You're right though, apart from in some mythologized version of the Indian independence movement peaceful protest has never done jack. You need to throw your body on the gears and the levers etc.
Or you could try engaging with the system directly?
There are a lot of political movements that achieve a huge amount without getting serious about protests. Any modern democracy gives people the option to get involved with shaping how the government works.
Waving the broad brush of generalisations, usually the people protesting are doing so because is because they have no chance of getting the numbers to effect change - because the majority simply doesn't care about whatever their special interest it, or will actively resist it because it is secretly a fringe issue. If they have a chance of capturing majority opinion, they'd be too busy using effective channels rather than protesting.
