The “disruptive protests are bad” people are straight garbage pieces of shit. You know what is disruptive? Blizzards in Florida, wildfires in California and Canada, and mass migrations of island people due to oceans rising. So go fuck yourselves with this “boo hoo traffic got held up a couple minutes “ bullshit you fucking pussies.
That's why protests in designated protest zones out of the eyelines and more importantly away from the profit operations of those being protested are an intentional and effective method of completely neutering protest.
We have protest in the US. It just doesn't mean anything anymore.
People hate protests even though they absolutely work because those people are for the status quo. I truly believe centrists are not actually on a line in between "right" and "left," but rather their own node so we all make a triangle. Much of what centrists believe are not anything like what the rest of us believe, but they are cowards who DESPERATELY want to be seen as the norm, as one of us by everyone (which is why they try to claim a "center" position, while the fascists and anti-fascists both recognize there is no middle ground between the two).
Centrism therefore should not be looked at as a mix of right and left, but as a mix of mainly centrist goals and thoughts. Teasing out centrism from the left will help us progress.
I think the key is who it is disruptive to. Blocking traffic just pisses off the average person. The decision makers don't care about the average person. You gotta disrupt the decision makers. But you also have to be prepared for them to fight back hard.
And these disruptions can be more than just an inconvenience. People can lose their jobs for being late. They can miss medical appointments and procedures.
Except many of us who actually care about the cause say this because traffic delays and vandalizing paintings irritate the fuck out of people and set them against the cause of the protest. You can spew more profanity against for being like that if you wish, but it doesn’t change facts.
It’s like finding a way to stage a protest that just makes eggs more expensive. Yay protest! But don’t expect any good to come of it.
Many protests like that in Germany for a few years now. Mostly adolescent people from XR and FFF who tacked their hands to streets in neuralgic locations with superglue. They were one of the most hated groups by normies here and were compared to the 70s terror group RAF by politicians and boulevard media like BILD. Many videos in which good citizens forgot their temper and acted out in violent self justice when they feared to get late to work.
In 2023 the country wide farmer protests started and held the republic captive. Thousands of 5-10 ton tractors drove down the whole country to Berlin. They did a lot of terroristy things like loading huge manure dumps and logs in the midst of highways and their exits, controlling the IDs of drivers to only let essential staff through, putting liable anti-constitutional placards on their tractors, purposefully obstructing traffic in the cities and some of them from east-germany wanted to storm the parliament. People died, car accidents happened, ambulances and doctors were to late for operations, huge loads of GHGs were emitted and streets were destroyed.
All this because of the traffic light coalition wanted to cut subsidies for agrar fuels which was reverted pretty fast. Did the farmers stop then? Nope of course not. Went on for a few months. Those poor farmers couldn't afford to live without the precious subsidies but could afford to blow heaps of fuel and not working on their farms. A young farmer tried to prove to the public that they were essentially poor by showing his tax documents on the german finance subreddit. It didn't went well because he was rich. He deleted his post.
Now from the sentiment on social media you could get the impression that a lot of the normies who wanted to have the "Klimakleber" (climate gluers) jailed or worse, cheered for the poor hard working farmers even when the protest really went violent. I live rurally and boy let me tell you how those poor farmers have plastered their barns and houses with solar panels because of the politics of the greens and the subsidies from the EU.
They kind of have a point about blocking roads being ineffective, but for entirely the wrong reason. Having been stuck in traffic caused by protests blocking streets several times myself, I know that for most of the drivers, it's utterly indistinguishable from all the other traffic jams. Unless you're right up front to see what's causing it, it could very well just be another event at the fairgrounds, or one of the regularly-scheduled crashes.
Put another way, maybe driving is actually a protest against cars? It is pretty damn effective at blocking streets.
Little old lady spends 20 months in prison for blocking a main road and being mad at rich people.
President of the United States, insurrectionist, creep, man who suggested he'd got a Nazi to hack the elections, certified felon, spends ZERO months in prison and gets to have a party.
Some time ago a politician in my country announced they would start treating the people who protested at highways harsher. She said "people think these people are just protestors, but they're criminals"* and that they were "damaging the rule of law"*.
* Translated
Earlier on Tuesday, the College for Human Rights ruled that the right to demonstrate is "under serious pressure" due to the arrests of activists. They had called for the blockade of the important thoroughfare.
Yesilgöz does not respond to this criticism. She says that the Ministry of Justice and Security will look into it together with the Ministry of the Interior. The ministry is already looking into the right to demonstrate, about which reports have been published *2.
/* 2 They're currently looking into methods to restrict the right to demonstrate.
It's honestly really worrying how people just accept and even approve of these actions. It's not just because people are being inconvenienced, almost everyone I spoke to never noticed it themselves and that's honestly the scary part.
It was surreal to read about talk of extremism, social disruption and the calls for corporal punishment (by police), long jail sentences and more, all for a 5-10 minute delay caused by the A12 blockade, when the day after I was helping out at the Egmond Half Marathon there was real disruption, where people really couldn't go places with their cars... not to mention events like the Dam tot Damloop or Amsterdam Marathon that effectively put parts of our capital city on lockdown. No calls for water cannons there.
People might say "Those are not the same!" and that's true - sport events are not a constitutional right.
There are states in America where it's legal to run over protestors.
They say it's only if the driver feels threaten but already had examples of drivers getting away after either driving though people leaving or going out of their way to drive into the protests so it looks like they're just trying to get away from the protestors as they run them over
I want people to hear my valid point of view so I am going to obstruct them from carrying out everyday tasks to see if that inclines them to listen and the publicity will mark us out as reasonable people.
Edit, I undeleted the original comment otherwise unchanged for reference, it was glib but reasonable I think. I believe the woman to be acting in good faith but misled.
Whenever people act like disruptive protest is such a terrible tactic, I have to wonder what they think would work instead. Like, do they think the letter writing campaigns that have gone exactly nowhere in 40 years are on the verge of a breakthrough?
Or would they prefer the environmental movement to compile an overly literal companion reader to Andreas Malm?
was sentenced to 20 months in prison for her participation in a climate protest on the M25 in 2022
This woman is one of the people that made me late to school in 2022. This woman directly inconvenienced my life and the lives of many other people who had much more dire consequences.
Yes. I am self centred. I demand basic rights to freedom be restricted, because these people did the same to thousands. I'm not going to decide not to go to school because a couple of hippies decided to do a protest
And me not going to school won't save the lives of billions of people. Such a braindead comment.
I don't know what it is about the British Isles but they produce some of the most bat shit insane takes I've ever read.
"This person made me late to school one time, so she should spend an extra month in prison." Like that is the most lead micromoles per litre of blood I've seen written in text.