This is a style of protest where I really have a problem. My stance on it is “protest however you like, do not block roads”. I understand that the point of a protest is to be disruptive but I feel like that is a line too easily crossed.
An example I expirenced was a long time ago when I lived in Boston and there was some climate protestors that did their stunt on mass pike (the big highway into the city). They put a pipe through a bunch 55-gallon drums, dragged them out of their trucks onto the highway, handcuffed themselves to another protester in the pipe, and then filled the drum with instant concrete. Blocked traffic for hours while the cops had to cut them out of their contraptions. The problem was that there were several emergency vehicles stuck in the jam that they made, while protesting is an admirable persuit, these people caused the deaths of atleast 2 others (the redirection of emergency services, and endangered the lives of random individuals) because the ambulance they were in got stuck in the gridlock. IIRC, most of the protestors got manslaughter or worse charges and spent a few years in prision . (Edit: It was pointed out I am misremembering the concequences for its organizers and what they were protesting, the point still stands)
This may just be a random internet tale to most, but it really should highlight that protesting must be more than random disruption and it has to be coordinated (within itself and with local municipalities), otherwise people get hurt.
Everything you said about the protesters can almost certainly be said about the important things to protest over. People die from our shitty system every day. Denied healthcare claims take hundreds of lives a year. Genocides speak for themselves. You just don’t care because those things don’t personally effect you at the moment.
That’s what a disruptive protest looks like though. If workers go on a general strike, do you honestly think that won’t cause some people to die from losing access to vital services? Every protest or action that secured the rights you have today resulted in some innocent bystanders dying. Hell, think about how many innocent people had their lives disrupted due to the Civil War. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, do you think that didn’t cause disruption to normal bus operations that day?
In truth, I think you just want protests that are easy to ignore. You seem the kind of moderate MLK said was the greatest threat to progress. You’re not openly opposed to progress, but you don’t want change to cause any kind of disruption that might conceivably hurt or inconvenience someone. And unfortunately, we live in a society where everything is connected to everything. You can’t disrupt it without putting life and limb on the line somewhere.
So, I challenge you this. You said you don’t mind disruptive protest, but just not like blocking the roads like that. Can you give a few examples of disruptive protests you would approve of?
Personally. Im all in favor of any financal disruption to businesses, do walk outs, sit-ins, strike, most any other form of protest. I feel like the line is crossed when public infrastructure or essential services are unnessesarly impacted. It shows that the participants lack the planning capacity to select their venue appropratly.
Going to go out on a limb and hope the mods dont whack this post (Hi .LW mods), but Luigi has the right idea (minus the murder part… Bit too late to workshop that though). His protest was targeted at the individauls responsible for supporting the problem in the first place. A vast majority of the decision makers in the world are not elected, they can not be voted out of their money and influence.
This is why I aplaud most protesters, but climate groups almost always seem to miss the mark. Bringing attention to a topic does not change policy, throwing tomato sauce at a painting or being an intentional cockwomble in traffic only inconviences those who have no power to effect change.
Traffic disruptions do not work on people who can afford private jets. Be better protester, and have standards.
This is why I aplaud most protesters, but climate groups almost always seem to miss the mark. Bringing attention to a topic does not change policy, throwing tomato sauce at a painting or being an intentional cockwomble in traffic only inconviences those who have no power to effect change.
But climate change groups are “target[ing] the individuals responsible for supporting the problem in the first place” when they block drivers.
People are largely too poor to live close to work and anyone who works the kind of inconsistent shifts lots of peoplework can’t carpool. They also aren’t the ones fighting work from home
First of all, I have doubts about the degree of overlap between the two groups of people you mentioned. Jobs with inconsistent shifts tend to be things like food service and retail, which are distributed and local enough that anybody working such a job should be picking one they live near. Conversely, jobs specialized enough to be worth commuting a longer distance to are more likely to have consistent shifts, making carpooling more likely to be viable.
Second and more importantly, “work from home” is only one aspect of the problem and being among the executives fighting it is hardly the only thing that would make a person part of the problem. That gets us back to your first claim: “people are largely too poor to live close to work.” No, they largely are not. They’re too poor to live close to work and have a single-family house with a yard at the same time, and they choose to prioritize the latter. That not only makes them directly responsible by participating in the traffic that they’re in, it also makes them indirectly responsible by demanding policies like low-density zoning that inflates supply of single-family houses while restricting supply of dense multifamily housing. This subsidizes the price of the former, drives up the price of the latter, and physically displaces even some of the people who would like to live in dense multifamily out into the suburbs.
things like food service and retail, which are distributed and local enough that anybody working such a job should be picking one they live near
This is a pretty huge fantasy. Jobs like that have a strong tendency to be clustered around expensive business districts where those who work can’t afford to live. The average commute is half an hour by car or an hour by bus.
people are largely too poor to live close to work.” No, they largely are not.
Outside of your fantasies they actually are. The average single family home is now 589k and many old folks are burning down the equity in their home rather than passing them down. Also its not much of a solution to tell everyone to move in from suburbia to the city to rent from a slumlord when there isn’t enough housing there NOW. A fraction could move in but it doesn’t scale to the rest of them until we actually build more housing in the places people want to live.
I don’t see how carpooling is relevant here at all. Even if you carpool or take a bus, you still need the road and wouldn’t be able to commute if that road gets blocked off.
The person said the people on the road were responsible for the climate issue when individual decisions other than whom to vote for often has limited impact. If we want to effect meaningful change we need collective action on the part of our nation and government not just individuals.
Putting the blame on individuals knowing that the sum total effect of best case individual action means jack shit is a way to defect attention away from the decision makers whose actions actually have some hope of changing our trajectory.
His protest was targeted at the individauls responsible for supporting the problem in the first place.
You… honestly think this is the first time anyone has ever protested directly to the CEO of UHC? You don’t think the guy got thousands if not tens of thousands of direct one on one calls/emails/texts/personal pleas over his tenure?
And if those walk out or sit ins were successful, would people not also die? Imagine a vast coordinated effort. Thousands of climate protesters break into various oil processing and refining plants and do everything they can to disrupt operations without killing anyone directly. They throw emergency stop switches. The close valves and epoxy them shut. They drain critical pipe segments and then cut them open with torches. And they chain themselves to equipment. Or maybe they just force everyone out of the facility at gunpoint and set the whole place on fire. Through their efforts, they substantially reduce US oil production for a period of time. That’s what a disruptive protest of the kind you’re suggesting looks like. Direct action against the most offending industries, done in a way that takes no human life.
And yet, people would still die. What good is an unblocked road if you don’t have fuel? People would lose their jobs because they couldn’t afford the fuel. People in critical condition would die, unable to get to the hospital.
The point is that any event that actually seriously disrupts the operation of any major company or industry is going to inevitably hurt regular uninvolved people as well. We live in a system and all that.
And the point of blocking roads is not to “draw attention.” The point of direct actions like that is to cause economic disruption. The key thing to keep in mind is that the truly wealthy are highly diversified in their investments. Those with the real power to change things aren’t moved by a single factory somewhere being inconvenienced. Change in societies like ours really only happen when the reform movement, whether peaceful or violent, grows to such an extent that it risks taking a serious chunk out of nationwide GDP. All the people at the top really care about is money. And there really isn’t any way to hurt them financially without throwing a wrench into the gears of the entire economy.
That is ultimately what it took for the Civil Rights movement to secure its victories. Black people then were around 12-15% of the population. That number of people is never going to be able to secure their rights on their own through the ballot box. But even 1% of the population working together through direct and indirect action can be enough to grind an entire national economy to a screeching halt. Historically, that is what it has taken for any group to ever secure rights from their oppressors. Asking nicely never works. It always comes down to, “compromise with us, or we will (metaphorically or literally) burn this whole place down.”
Change and reform are disruptive by nature. There is no such thing as a successful reform movement that only hurts a few narrowly defined perpetrators.
There is a tangible difference between cutting off utility infrastructure and the fallout from shutting down oil refineries. Sabotaging a substation or power plant, blocking vital thorofares, shutting down water plants, etc will cause direct deaths and fall more in line with an attack on the population than a protest. That is what certain countries are doing to their neighbors and we rightly condemn that even in war.
Causing a drop in available fuel through refinery or pipeline embargo or sabotage would at worst cause rationing and prioritization to emergency services. This will of course cause damage to those that rely on transportation, but allows the ability to plan for/around that infrastructure disruption does not.
Blocking roads is the least impactful infrastructure disruption obviously, but disruption of fire, police, and other emergency services is still a more direct impact than what would amount to the 70s oil embargo.
When we get into acceptable losses, it can sound like the “left’s” equivalent to gun rights. I am not saying these are the same, or of the same magnitudes, just that the argument is made for how many gun deaths are acceptable to retain fundamental liberties. Both are probably important discussions to have, but there will be people who is answered to both will be zero or who don’t even want to engage with such a topic.
Firstly, your hyoptheical protest is no such thing and a strawman, that is an act of war, expected of despots and revolutionaries, not groups of rational individuals demanding change. It also highlights my point, you stated that reform movements begin to gain steam when a critical mass of the population backs them, how can a group expect to gain such a following when their protests cost proportionaly more to the people you need to support your cause than it does to the people actually making the decisions?
How do you expect to find supporters if you cost average people a measurable portion of their living. I did some napkin math, assume a days worth of hourly work at 15$, before income tax, thats ~120$, versus an oil C-suite who according to my search take home ~24m a year (does not include the other parts of their pay and benifits) meaning you have to cost them ~100k of their personal take-home income to proportionaly effect them the same way. This is not worth noticing for the suit (notice how all those Return-to-office articles only mention normal workers and not executives) and personally damaging loss of income for the average person who statistically has little savings.
This was my point about being better protestors, damaging or disrupting public infrastructure (roads, rails, things essential to emergency services) should be reconsidered as venues for the protest because its disruption alienates the people who you would like to support your cause, is ignored by the people with the power to affect the change being demanded and makes the protestors themselves look like fools.
Apologies for the late reply, people got to sleep ya know.
Then argue against my point, (did a quick search) the Stanford University debate rubric has “respect for the other team” as the first field. Insults will reduce score and also indicates you do not have a rebuttle (also a points reduction). Im simply trying to get my replies to work through the logic of the discussion.
The person proposed that people protesting climate change shouldn’t block roads because cars are more important (or something - they didn’t argue all that thoroughly and their one example wasn’t as they described it)
I think the point is that making people hate you isn’t going to bring them to your side. If you look at the successful protests throughout history, you’ll find that none of them tried to make the general public hate them.
The goal isn’t to get random people hearing about it to support you. The goal is to sabotage and disrupt fossil fuel production or consumption. Being inconvenient is the entire point.
This is indeed what the masses do on every social platform. Too lazy to have a discussion or formulating a response. Down vote, and on with my day, let’s go. 👉
This is a style of protest where I really have a problem. My stance on it is “protest however you like, do not block roads”. I understand that the point of a protest is to be disruptive but I feel like that is a line too easily crossed.
An example I expirenced was a long time ago when I lived in Boston and there was some climate protestors that did their stunt on mass pike (the big highway into the city). They put a pipe through a bunch 55-gallon drums, dragged them out of their trucks onto the highway, handcuffed themselves to another protester in the pipe, and then filled the drum with instant concrete. Blocked traffic for hours while the cops had to cut them out of their contraptions. The problem was that there were several emergency vehicles stuck in the jam that they made, while protesting is an admirable persuit, these people caused the
deaths of atleast 2 others(the redirection of emergency services, and endangered the lives of random individuals) because the ambulance they were in got stuck in the gridlock.IIRC, most of the protestors got manslaughter or worse charges and spent a few years in prision. (Edit: It was pointed out I am misremembering the concequences for its organizers and what they were protesting, the point still stands)This may just be a random internet tale to most, but it really should highlight that protesting must be more than random disruption and it has to be coordinated (within itself and with local municipalities), otherwise people get hurt.
Fun fact, that event is easily searchable.
Either your memory of the event is falling, or you’re lying.
It was a racial justice protest.
Nobody died. One man with life threatening injuries went to a different hospital and no further news was reported on that.
Nobody was charged with manslaughter, the most serious charge was disorderly conduct.
Everything you said about the protesters can almost certainly be said about the important things to protest over. People die from our shitty system every day. Denied healthcare claims take hundreds of lives a year. Genocides speak for themselves. You just don’t care because those things don’t personally effect you at the moment.
Your anger is directed at the wrong target.
That’s what a disruptive protest looks like though. If workers go on a general strike, do you honestly think that won’t cause some people to die from losing access to vital services? Every protest or action that secured the rights you have today resulted in some innocent bystanders dying. Hell, think about how many innocent people had their lives disrupted due to the Civil War. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, do you think that didn’t cause disruption to normal bus operations that day?
In truth, I think you just want protests that are easy to ignore. You seem the kind of moderate MLK said was the greatest threat to progress. You’re not openly opposed to progress, but you don’t want change to cause any kind of disruption that might conceivably hurt or inconvenience someone. And unfortunately, we live in a society where everything is connected to everything. You can’t disrupt it without putting life and limb on the line somewhere.
So, I challenge you this. You said you don’t mind disruptive protest, but just not like blocking the roads like that. Can you give a few examples of disruptive protests you would approve of?
Personally. Im all in favor of any financal disruption to businesses, do walk outs, sit-ins, strike, most any other form of protest. I feel like the line is crossed when public infrastructure or essential services are unnessesarly impacted. It shows that the participants lack the planning capacity to select their venue appropratly.
Going to go out on a limb and hope the mods dont whack this post (Hi .LW mods), but Luigi has the right idea (minus the murder part… Bit too late to workshop that though). His protest was targeted at the individauls responsible for supporting the problem in the first place. A vast majority of the decision makers in the world are not elected, they can not be voted out of their money and influence.
This is why I aplaud most protesters, but climate groups almost always seem to miss the mark. Bringing attention to a topic does not change policy, throwing tomato sauce at a painting or being an intentional cockwomble in traffic only inconviences those who have no power to effect change.
Traffic disruptions do not work on people who can afford private jets. Be better protester, and have standards.
But climate change groups are “target[ing] the individuals responsible for supporting the problem in the first place” when they block drivers.
People are largely too poor to live close to work and anyone who works the kind of inconsistent shifts lots of peoplework can’t carpool. They also aren’t the ones fighting work from home
First of all, I have doubts about the degree of overlap between the two groups of people you mentioned. Jobs with inconsistent shifts tend to be things like food service and retail, which are distributed and local enough that anybody working such a job should be picking one they live near. Conversely, jobs specialized enough to be worth commuting a longer distance to are more likely to have consistent shifts, making carpooling more likely to be viable.
Second and more importantly, “work from home” is only one aspect of the problem and being among the executives fighting it is hardly the only thing that would make a person part of the problem. That gets us back to your first claim: “people are largely too poor to live close to work.” No, they largely are not. They’re too poor to live close to work and have a single-family house with a yard at the same time, and they choose to prioritize the latter. That not only makes them directly responsible by participating in the traffic that they’re in, it also makes them indirectly responsible by demanding policies like low-density zoning that inflates supply of single-family houses while restricting supply of dense multifamily housing. This subsidizes the price of the former, drives up the price of the latter, and physically displaces even some of the people who would like to live in dense multifamily out into the suburbs.
This is a pretty huge fantasy. Jobs like that have a strong tendency to be clustered around expensive business districts where those who work can’t afford to live. The average commute is half an hour by car or an hour by bus.
Outside of your fantasies they actually are. The average single family home is now 589k and many old folks are burning down the equity in their home rather than passing them down. Also its not much of a solution to tell everyone to move in from suburbia to the city to rent from a slumlord when there isn’t enough housing there NOW. A fraction could move in but it doesn’t scale to the rest of them until we actually build more housing in the places people want to live.
I don’t see how carpooling is relevant here at all. Even if you carpool or take a bus, you still need the road and wouldn’t be able to commute if that road gets blocked off.
The person said the people on the road were responsible for the climate issue when individual decisions other than whom to vote for often has limited impact. If we want to effect meaningful change we need collective action on the part of our nation and government not just individuals.
Putting the blame on individuals knowing that the sum total effect of best case individual action means jack shit is a way to defect attention away from the decision makers whose actions actually have some hope of changing our trajectory.
You… honestly think this is the first time anyone has ever protested directly to the CEO of UHC? You don’t think the guy got thousands if not tens of thousands of direct one on one calls/emails/texts/personal pleas over his tenure?
And if those walk out or sit ins were successful, would people not also die? Imagine a vast coordinated effort. Thousands of climate protesters break into various oil processing and refining plants and do everything they can to disrupt operations without killing anyone directly. They throw emergency stop switches. The close valves and epoxy them shut. They drain critical pipe segments and then cut them open with torches. And they chain themselves to equipment. Or maybe they just force everyone out of the facility at gunpoint and set the whole place on fire. Through their efforts, they substantially reduce US oil production for a period of time. That’s what a disruptive protest of the kind you’re suggesting looks like. Direct action against the most offending industries, done in a way that takes no human life.
And yet, people would still die. What good is an unblocked road if you don’t have fuel? People would lose their jobs because they couldn’t afford the fuel. People in critical condition would die, unable to get to the hospital.
The point is that any event that actually seriously disrupts the operation of any major company or industry is going to inevitably hurt regular uninvolved people as well. We live in a system and all that.
And the point of blocking roads is not to “draw attention.” The point of direct actions like that is to cause economic disruption. The key thing to keep in mind is that the truly wealthy are highly diversified in their investments. Those with the real power to change things aren’t moved by a single factory somewhere being inconvenienced. Change in societies like ours really only happen when the reform movement, whether peaceful or violent, grows to such an extent that it risks taking a serious chunk out of nationwide GDP. All the people at the top really care about is money. And there really isn’t any way to hurt them financially without throwing a wrench into the gears of the entire economy.
That is ultimately what it took for the Civil Rights movement to secure its victories. Black people then were around 12-15% of the population. That number of people is never going to be able to secure their rights on their own through the ballot box. But even 1% of the population working together through direct and indirect action can be enough to grind an entire national economy to a screeching halt. Historically, that is what it has taken for any group to ever secure rights from their oppressors. Asking nicely never works. It always comes down to, “compromise with us, or we will (metaphorically or literally) burn this whole place down.”
Change and reform are disruptive by nature. There is no such thing as a successful reform movement that only hurts a few narrowly defined perpetrators.
There is a tangible difference between cutting off utility infrastructure and the fallout from shutting down oil refineries. Sabotaging a substation or power plant, blocking vital thorofares, shutting down water plants, etc will cause direct deaths and fall more in line with an attack on the population than a protest. That is what certain countries are doing to their neighbors and we rightly condemn that even in war.
Causing a drop in available fuel through refinery or pipeline embargo or sabotage would at worst cause rationing and prioritization to emergency services. This will of course cause damage to those that rely on transportation, but allows the ability to plan for/around that infrastructure disruption does not.
Blocking roads is the least impactful infrastructure disruption obviously, but disruption of fire, police, and other emergency services is still a more direct impact than what would amount to the 70s oil embargo.
When we get into acceptable losses, it can sound like the “left’s” equivalent to gun rights. I am not saying these are the same, or of the same magnitudes, just that the argument is made for how many gun deaths are acceptable to retain fundamental liberties. Both are probably important discussions to have, but there will be people who is answered to both will be zero or who don’t even want to engage with such a topic.
Firstly, your hyoptheical protest is no such thing and a strawman, that is an act of war, expected of despots and revolutionaries, not groups of rational individuals demanding change. It also highlights my point, you stated that reform movements begin to gain steam when a critical mass of the population backs them, how can a group expect to gain such a following when their protests cost proportionaly more to the people you need to support your cause than it does to the people actually making the decisions?
How do you expect to find supporters if you cost average people a measurable portion of their living. I did some napkin math, assume a days worth of hourly work at 15$, before income tax, thats ~120$, versus an oil C-suite who according to my search take home ~24m a year (does not include the other parts of their pay and benifits) meaning you have to cost them ~100k of their personal take-home income to proportionaly effect them the same way. This is not worth noticing for the suit (notice how all those Return-to-office articles only mention normal workers and not executives) and personally damaging loss of income for the average person who statistically has little savings.
This was my point about being better protestors, damaging or disrupting public infrastructure (roads, rails, things essential to emergency services) should be reconsidered as venues for the protest because its disruption alienates the people who you would like to support your cause, is ignored by the people with the power to affect the change being demanded and makes the protestors themselves look like fools.
Apologies for the late reply, people got to sleep ya know.
Provided they are ineffective and easily ignored.
they’re not trying to sway the jet riders. what a fantastically incorrect takeaway. goddamn.
you don’t understand how any of this works, obviously. just an angry moron who’s upset a road got closed that one time.
Then argue against my point, (did a quick search) the Stanford University debate rubric has “respect for the other team” as the first field. Insults will reduce score and also indicates you do not have a rebuttle (also a points reduction). Im simply trying to get my replies to work through the logic of the discussion.
yet another concern troll. blocked
I see you didn’t reply to @WoodScientist@lemmy.world. It’s a long comment but I think it tweaks at your preference in an interesting way
People got to sleep yall, also thanks for the discussion, trying to treat this like a formal debate, but its a tough crowd…
deleted by creator
“I see your point, but… downvotes” -Lemmy
The person proposed that people protesting climate change shouldn’t block roads because cars are more important (or something - they didn’t argue all that thoroughly and their one example wasn’t as they described it)
I think they deserve the down votes
I think the point is that making people hate you isn’t going to bring them to your side. If you look at the successful protests throughout history, you’ll find that none of them tried to make the general public hate them.
The goal isn’t to get random people hearing about it to support you. The goal is to sabotage and disrupt fossil fuel production or consumption. Being inconvenient is the entire point.
If that was the goal, they are even less successful than I thought. No wonder the big oil companies are willing to fund them.
This is indeed what the masses do on every social platform. Too lazy to have a discussion or formulating a response. Down vote, and on with my day, let’s go. 👉
I see at least a dozen of answers, and they all add something to the discussion instead of just repeating “don’t block traffic”.
I said “the masses”.