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by ghusto 879 days ago
The same way any out of context attention seeking hurts your cause; by showing arrogance, and a disregard for others. People generally stop listening to whatever you have to say when you treat them with disregard.

When a law doesn't work, you don't go around breaking it, you work with the system we have to change it. Similarly, when people aren't listening to your message, you work within the system to get it heard.

2 comments

> When a law doesn't work, you don't go around breaking it, you work with the system we have to change it. Similarly, when people aren't listening to your message, you work within the system to get it heard.

These don't seem comparable. Breaking the law shouldn't be your first option, but it absolutely sometimes becomes a necessary option. Conversely, I agree that essentially yelling louder at people doesn't make them "hear" your message any better, therefore I don't think the two things make a good comparison with each other.

> When a law doesn't work, you don't go around breaking it, you work with the system we have to change it.

In this world there wouldn't be a USA, nor Gandhi, and Mandela; segregation in the USA would still exist, and labour laws would have never been discussed.

That's never how bigger changes have been made.

Gandhi and Mandela are interesting cases, that I think serve my point. Both highlighted the injustice of current laws with _relative_ civil disobedience. Think how differently their message would have been taken were they to conduct unrelated civil disobedience, such as throwing soup on a work of art.

I actually find it a little offensive to compare these people to Gandhi and Mandela.

Environmentalists seem to have a penchant for terrorism. Look at the Weather Underground for example.

Also worth remembering that Mandela seems to have been big on "necklacing" which is the practice of throwing people (one of the first victims being a woman) in a stack of tires and lighting the tires on fire, suffocating them in the process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing