this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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They should be less annoying to the common people. They should target people in power, glue themselves on the road to the house of parlement for example, not prevent common people from going to work or vandalize art work.
It makes them look like idiots who have no clue.
I think the idea is to wake up normal people. If protesters only annoy the rich then nothing changes because it’s easy for the rich to ignore a couple of protesters.
If you annoy regular people then hopefully more people wake up. It’s a lot harder to ignore regular people especially if a lot wake up.
We need everyone in this world to be pissed off, not just a few activists. The sooner everyone is pissed the less leverage rich people have to ignore it all.
Also, publicity is a big factor. You pretty much guarantee some degree of media coverage when you do something like shut down a busy highway. I don't think people consider often enough how important even negative press is in spreading the message.
Their actions make me hate them, not sympathize with their cause.
Then you never liked them to begin with and you were never going to sympathize with them anyways. If doing a completely harmless form of civil disobedience causes you to lose your marbles then you're not interested in fixing anything to begin with.
Colin Kaepernick literally just kneeled before games, that's it, that's literally all he did , and still people lost their marbles, but the people losing their marbles were Trump voters who never cared about BlackLivesMatter to begin with
This same thing happened during the Civil Rights Era and it's happened in other countries too
And he started kneeling after a military veteran told him that would be a respectable form of protest. Literally can't win.
we don't owe terrible people anything. we shouldn't care what they think and focus on defeating them and changing the world without their permission, which we don't need and shouldn't be worried about obtaining.
This is too simple of a view. There are few, if any, effective ways to strike at people in power without hitting common folk at the same time. Maybe you can mildly inconvenience them, but that's it. Their power isn't isolated, it often derives from the complicity of common folk. Protests are disruptive for a reason, and it's not because "everybody involved is stupid."
For example, by blocking streets you inhibit commerce, and therefore inhibit anybody whose power derives from that commerce. But at the same time, you're blocking the average person from going to work. How great must the threat be, how dire the circumstances, before you view that as an acceptable trade-off? Because if we are not at that point now, I find it hard to believe you'd ever find it acceptable, yet I've never been given an actionable and effective alternative from the people who are squeamish over these kinds of protests. So I have to ask; if not this, then what? If not now, then when?
Infiltrate the political parties, especially the conservative right-wing ones that right now have disastrous environmental policies. These organisations are currently echo chambers driving a narrative that environmental policies are the enemy. They need to be reformed from within to get the message across that capitalism won't work if there isn't anyone around for the wealthy to sell their shit to. As long as political change is confined to what is seen as the "radical left", it is easy to marginalize the moment.