this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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Sorry when you can get criminally charged for trespass, the "right people" can buy themselves a big moat of real estate to insulate from protests. Sometimes the people they work with, services, and customers need to be inconvenienced.
If you can't empathise with people protesting, and you just get angry at them, maybe do some self reflection on why you can't look at the bigger picture and not take things personally.
Thats what I'm advocating for. Targeted disruption is necessary. Indiscriminate disruption is harmful to a cause.
If your cause is so just that random people automatically empathize with your protestors as soon as they are aware of the protestors, no matter how much the protestors make their day worse, then what's the point of disruption?
Clearly they're just waiting to be made aware of your cause, just say hi and they'll join you. You've already won, go forth and make changes with your broad support of the population.
Ok let me expand that list
Sometimes you need to put pressure progressively up the chain into more wide reaching efforts. It's not like a highway blockade is day 1, other things were tried and ignored.
To force people ignoring the issue to engage with it. People who are fine with status quo and ignoring the issue now have to deal with it. Either they're going to be people who agree to some degree with the protestors and will be more voices saying "just give them what they want FFS so this distribution can end" or they oppose the protestors at which point why would the protestors be upset that they have been disrupted?
You do realise that you're literally being the person that's being made fun of in the OP, right? Do you think the suffragettes, the anti-apartheid campaigners, or American civil rights campaigners never impacted anyone other than those with direct power to fix things? As Martin Luther King Jr said:
People love trotting that quote out, don't they? They hide behind it, defending their ineffective protests and their unwillingness to improve. Any criticism and here we go, it's time to blame "the White moderate".
They think that gay rights started and ended with the Stonewall riots, ignoring how veterans of the Civil Rights movement taught the gays when and how to protest effectively. Protesting is a skill, and ignorance of that skill harms the cause.
Are you saying the Stonewall Riots were an unnecessary part of the struggle for gay rights? Also, what effective tactics do you think veterans of the Civil Rights movement taught the gay rights protesters? Do you think they taught them to be demure and to not disrupt anyone's day? Is that how you think the Civil Rights movement played out?
No, I'm saying that Stonewall was a singular event in a larger movement. I'm saying that indiscriminate disruption only turns everyday people against a cause as you are making their days worse. I'm saying that choosing your targets and your disruptive protestors to be disruptive is a skill.
Several months before Rosa Parks chose to sit at the front of a bus, an unmarried pregnant young black lady did the same thing. The Civil Rights movement chose not to elevate her and make her arrest a big deal, because it wouldn't have been bad optics. They waited and picked a nice old lady coming back from work, someone unimpeachable to turn into a national story. They didn't say "all protest is good protest" and throw their entire weight behind a figurehead that could be easily torn down.
So if you think all protest is good protest, then by all means, put on your "Palestine lives matter" T-shirt and start throwing rocks through people's windows in broad daylight. Your cause is so just that people won't help but join you, right?
I'm not writing the whole history of the gay rights and civil rights movement, do your own research, but I'll share this article for an overview:
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/different-fight-same-goal-how-black-freedom-movement-inspired-early-n1259072
So you think people in this thread want all protest to start out as a riot. That's not what anyone is saying. We are saying that when a disruptive peaceful protest turns into a riot due to the aggression of police or other agitators, the legitimacy of the protest is not diminished.