• Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net
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    5 days ago

    Sometimes the people they work with, services, and customers need to be inconvenienced.

    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.

    • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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      5 days ago

      Ok let me expand that list

      the people they work with, services, and customers, their neighbors, the people in their voting district, the people in their country, the people in trading partner countries need to be inconvenienced

      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.

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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      5 days ago

      what’s the point of disruption?

      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?

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      5 days ago

      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:

      I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the White moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.

      • Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net
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        5 days ago

        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.

        • Doctor_Satan@lemm.ee
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          5 days ago

          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?

          • Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net
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            4 days ago

            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

            • Doctor_Satan@lemm.ee
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              4 days ago

              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.

              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.