[samdk]

You're missing some big ones, I think. In the last few years protest movements have effected regime changes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Ukraine. Those transitions have been at all smooth, but it's hard to claim the protests in each of those cases weren't hugely influential.

The protests in Ferguson, MO are still playing out so it's hard to say what exactly the effects will be, but I suspect not nothing.

In Hong Kong protests in 2003 helped stop the passage of a security law restricting activity that the mainland Chinese government doesn't like (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_1_July_marches). More recently protests helped prevent a "moral education" bill from being passed here also.

In general I think it's a bit shortsighted to look at protest movements and think they're ineffective because many of them do not produce change. Protests are (generally) a way for people without a lot of political power to have their voices heard. They're going to fail a lot of the time, because protest movements start when people don't have other kinds of leverage or power.

Also, I think it's important to remember that at least part of the goal of a protest movement is getting attention. The Occupy Wall Street protests didn't directly change much, but they did create a national (and international) conversation about equality that didn't really exist before. It's a lot harder to evaluate that kind of indirect result, but I think it would be a mistake to discount it. (The OWS protests also spurred the creation of Occupy Central, one of the organizations that's leading these protests in Hong Kong.)

[saeranv]

The Ferguson protests are a good example. It's already resulted in some sweeping changes to their municipal court system[1], which has been described as, "One Big Shakedown Racket Targeted at Black People"[2]. These are changes the activists and lawyers had long sought, but was refused by the City Council until these protests made that untenable.

It is continuing to force the local police to a higher standards of accountability and transparency then they would have done without[3]. Additionally, this along with the recent national attention to other unarmed black men being shot by cops, has played a huge role in getting police officers equipped with dashboard and body-mounted cameras[4].

eta: grammar

[1] http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/policymakers-eye-big-cha...

[2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/09/04/st_louis_f...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown#Poli...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/us/todays-police-put-on-a-...

[saeranv]

Oh, also apparently the iconic 'hands-up, don't shoot' gesture from the Ferguson protests has migrated to Hong Kong: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/28/6860493/hong-kong-protests-mike....

That's pretty cool.

[khuey]

It's a pretty universal gesture when someone has a gun pointed at you.

[briantakita]

At the climate change protest in NYC (over 300k in attendance), there seemed to be consensus & understanding of the necessary systemic change.

A complaint about Occupy Wall Street is there was not much unity. There seems to be unity & respect among the groups now.

[collyw]

I heard that criticism about Occupy Wall Street.

Pretty pathetic, that because there are so may things that Occupy were complaining about, then they should just be ignored. (The real message was that people want a fairer more just system. I managed to get that, why did none of the critics work that out).