[astrange]

There's like four different New Left misconceptions here.

1. Protests are effective - no they're not, this is a myth because people believed they ended the Vietnam War. If you have power and a belief in doing something, why should you care if a random stranger doesn't like it?

2. Corporate media - this comes from the idea that everything bad is because of "corporations", common with Gen X people. The only successful media right now have strong personal opinions, although frequently those are evil personal opinions, and aren't solely motivated by profits.

3. Defense contractors - this comes from the idea that since war is bad, and corporations are bad, we must be doing wars because it makes money for defense companies. This is in fact totally false - they make less money during wars because they have to make boring products that work, whereas in peace time they get contracted to make fake superweapons we think sound cool. Wars are basically unprofitable for everyone.

4. And finally, if you think everything gets worse all the time this is actually depression and you should get it checked out.

[nozzlegear]

> Protests are effective - no they're not, this is a myth because people believed they ended the Vietnam War. If you have power and a belief in doing something, why should you care if a random stranger doesn't like it?

MLK's civil rights movement was one of the most effective protests in history. If you said that they're not always effective I would agree, but to say that they're not ever effective? It doesn't hold up. Even in modern times they can continue to be effective — the BLM protests were a huge personal focus¹ of Trump's at the end of his second presidency; he hated that people were protesting and blaming him, and his advisers immediately recognized the protests as politically threatening to his reelection. BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states.

¹ Source: Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa

[astrange]

The civil rights movement was effective of course, but they were very, very careful about how they did things, and iirc the public protests were part of an intentional media strategy because TV would show them doing nothing and getting attacked by police.

> BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states

Did it? I mostly remember it leading to police doing work stoppages and no one noticing or being able to control them.

Like, the NYPD kidnapped de Blasio's daughter. SFPD just stopped issuing traffic tickets and hasn't restarted, and Oakland police just stopped enforcing everything, so the airport In n Out closed because literally all of their customers got their cars broken into.

[nozzlegear]

There's no doubt that it lead to pushback in a lot of places, but that just highlights why people were protesting in the first place. When the police kidnap the mayor's daughter, or walk off the job in response to calls for accountability, it's not a failure of the protest but rather a failure of the institutions being protested.

Like I said, I do agree with you that there are protests which aren't effective, and there are some that are even counterproductive. BLM was successful though, it did lead to reforms: Minneapolis banned chokeholds and revised their use of force policies, New York reallocated some of its NYPD funding, Colorado and New Mexico passed police accountability laws, etc.

Anyway, I know your main point wasn't about BLM, I'm not trying to drag you into a mire over whether it was successful or not.

[nozzlegear]

> the BLM protests were a huge personal focus¹ of Trump's at the end of his second presidency

(It's too late to edit now, but just for posterity's sake, I meant they were a huge personal focus of Trump's at the end of his first presidency.)