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by BobaFloutist 895 days ago
People always say that they're ok with protests as long as they don't cause them any inconvenience, and I think they're mostly being honest with what they feel, but I also think that protests are about generating mindshare, and if they're freely ignorable, they don't work. It sucks, but the average person isn't going to care about something that doesn't affect them, and sometimes the best way to make them care (enough to actually look into the issue) is to make it affect them. And even if they go into it with a perspective of "Wow these protesters are annoying assholes", if they look into the cause and see a bunch of people online saying "We don't think our allies should have blocked the freeway, but also look how fucked up this is" enough people might be converted to make the disruption worth it.

It's super easy to say "this was bad tactics because I personally was not converted" (and I'm very prone to feeling that way with irritating or intrusive advertisements), but I don't think it's actually a very useful way of thinking about things.
1 comments
SteveNuts 895 days ago
I agree with you on principle, but in reality it seems like it just gives the media more ammo to villainize the cause even more. Or worse, block ambulances from getting to where they need to be. I highly doubt the family of a person who died because they couldn't get to the hospital, or got fired from their job is ever going to look positively on that cause.

Shutdown a courthouse or government building or something instead, I guess is my point.

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BobaFloutist 895 days ago
> Shutdown a courthouse or government building or something instead, I guess is my point.

That's reasonable, but you also know that you can always come up with a justification for why this protest in particular was unacceptable.

Shutdown a courthouse? You're ruining people's weddings, you're preventing trials right before the statute of limitations expires, you're keeping people in jail for longer than they had to otherwise and then what if they commit suicide because jail is so bad?

People (justifiably) really hate being inconvenienced, but that's also kind of the point of this kind of protest.

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