Because if protesters in France take over their infrastructure the powers that be will surrender.
I Keed.
I think you misunderstand both the targeting of sit ins, their implications, what they intending, and the same for the protests like “Black Brunch” and random protests of a 100 year old guy receiving accolades from a U.S. Senator.
I’m familiar with French “strikes”, and I don’t think those much count as protests at all. Those are national temper tantrums.
This article makes an argument I largely agree with: protests are largely pointless. They effect very little, and rarely cause any meaningful change. Further, I think this is more of a modern, first world problem.
The author believes that it’s because social media and other communications technology has made getting tons of people to a place to act disruptive is very easy, but also means no professional organizers or political operatives are being groomed or involved in the process. No equivalent of MLK’s organization for example are springing up with these movements.
I think that’s true, and is part, albeit a minor part, of why protests in the modern first world are largely ineffective.
I think the larger truth is protests are most effective when they are targeted to something government can easily address, and when the redress is something with broad societal support. By “easy”, it doesn’t have to mean the issue is politically easy, it has to mean that mechanistically it is in the government’s wheelhouse. For example protests against cold weather can be as vehement as imaginable, and will never succeed. Government cannot control the weather. But where government can most effectively act is in changing laws and regulations.
I think that is largely part of why Occupy Wall Street failed, just targeting the vague concept of “the rich” simply can’t work. Government can’t act on that. If the occupy protests had turned that level of attention on say, raising the Federal minimum wage as its sole focus, it would have had a higher chance of success.
But there is still a second part there, it has to also be an issue on which there is broad societal agreement. In non-democratic regimes protests had a different mechanism of action, protests in those regimes presage potential violence against the regime, potentially regime-ending violence. Thus a response doesn’t have to have broad support, the regime just has to decide that giving the protesters some of what they want is the best course to maintain power.
In a democratic society, where at the end of the day the politicians are in fact concerned about getting reelected, protesters can whine and howl however much they want but politicians won’t vote against their constituents.
The Civil Rights protests were targeted directly at something that government could certainly act on (the 14th Amendment made most of the issues involved Federal ones, or at least ones in which the Federal government could intervene), further, while there were strong holdouts the majority of the country at that time did not believe segregation was noble, that denying blacks the right to vote was a good thing or etc. Thus a protest movement, serving to highlight exactly the societal ill it wanted fixed, and when society had at least a “passionate plurality” who agreed the ill needed redressed, that’s a perfect example of where protests can help effect change.
But fixing issues like police behavior is not a simple law. Unlike civil rights it’s not easily fixed by broad and sweeping Federal legislation, because there is already extensive Federal oversight over police officers in regard to civil rights. But the Federal government is bound by the constitution and by various limitations on the power of government. When police officers are accused of crimes they immediately receive extremely strong constitutional protections that simply cannot be waived away. Instead it’s something that only gets solved on a department by department basis. There is no slam dunk legislation, and even if there could be, there isn’t broad national consensus on the cases which have lead to protest. Blacks are outraged by Ferguson, but most Whites were not. In fact polls have shown that in cases where the evidence against the officer were stronger, whites were more likely to feel the officer deserved punishment. But blacks wanted officers punished regardless of the evidence, this shows that for a subset of the population, there is a mass irrationality going on, and it’s unlikely a majority of the country is going to sign on for that.
When people sit in at a restaurant they are angling to get arrested, to highlight the injustice of segregation laws. When they annoy people in a restaurant to try and…do “something” about police, they aren’t really doing anything meaningful at all. The injustice is in no way associated with the dining experience. The people being disturbed cannot meaningfully effect change, because police forces and the regulations of their behavior and the handling of accused officers is a complex issue that isn’t fixed with any distinct government action but a whole series of reforms that require buy in from various independent powers. One of which are frequently powerful public sector unions (ironically empowered by generations of Democrats that sought to give public employees labor protections which never should have applied to any of them) who are not accountable to the public and cannot, by law, be brushed away even by an activist mayor.
“Please protest somewhere in a way that doesn’t affect me at all so I can ignore you.”
Bit of a paradox, isn’t it?
The same people who disrupt other people’s brunches for “Black Lives Matter” would probably be angry if someone disturbed their own meals for “Free Tibet” or something.
Yes, most of what happens in France like this is really some public sector strike. But it’s not unheard of for farmers, protesting some government policy, to dump manure in roads in Paris (as an example of something that is not a strike).
That’s really a mis-characterization of the position. It’s actually: “Please protest in a way that is at least tangentially associated with the subject you are protesting, otherwise you just seem like a disruptive moron.”
For example, since this is a public problem, private property isn’t really the best place to protest.
Please instruct us all about the ways that one can protest without being visible to people who are otherwise disinterested, and why it is important that protesters ensure that no one who is disinterested in their protest ever has to suffer through the misfortune of hearing about it.
In particular, why it’s important that the protesters are neither seen nor heard, and why that’s helpful to their cause.
Suppose a white person–inclined, or potentially open, to sympathy to the issue–is having brunch where such a demonstration occurs. What is the appropriate reaction?
Ok… stand up, “Yes!” Then back to brunch…
Which is a really sensible thing to say.
The thing is, this is exactly on point for this particular issue. What they are protesting is that life for white people is *different *from life for black people. Nice brunches out are both a symbol of and a real facet of the ways that life is different. By crashing the brunch, black people are pointing out that they are de facto excluded from this and other ways of living that white people take for granted.
“Please come join us at the table.”
They aren’t excluded from nice brunches out because they’re black, though, right? It’s not like Greensboro.
The protests have worked. Confidence in police is now at atwenty year high.
The results of the protests are immaterial, what matters is that they make the protestors feel self-righteous, which is the true point of the protests.
Are these protesters different from any other protesters? Would you be OK with anyone coming in to protest in any restaurant? Can pro cop protesters come in to have their say? It just seems that if we’re OK with protesters at any time, anyone should be allowed to. To me it seems you might have the right to protest, like pro life protesters at a Planned Parenthood clinic, but it’s fair to think it’s kind of a dick move.
I’ve never been part of any protest in my life, and I have had traffic slowed down because of people demonstrating in the streets or celebrating things I had no interest in.
We have to put up with the God Hates Fags people protesting across the street from the funeral of a fallen soldier, whose service to the country is based upon the idea that the freedom to be able to protest things is something worth defending. And although I can’t always draw a straight line between that and some of the missions we send our troops into battle for, I can say that they’re invariably fighting against a group of people who think very, very little of people’s right to protest.
I think some of the protests have been ridiculous. I don’t think some of the outrage is warranted. I tend to side with the cops in a case where there’s no clear evidence of wrongdoing, or the witnesses are split half and half as to supporting the officer’s version of the events.
At the same time, the inconvenience of having to live in a country that supports pluralism and tolerates dissent and even people I disagree with, is not an inconvenience I’d ever want to go without.
Yeah, it is a bother when people protest things that you don’t care about, or don’t support. Sometimes it’s a bother when they’re protesting things that you do support. The bother is actually kind of equal, in that regard.
Oh well. This is part of living in a society.
I drive past the nutters who stand on street corners with stereo speakers and microphones and proclaim how lost I am without their idea of God. I live in neighborhoods where people roll down their windows and blast their music so loud that all you can hear from quite a distance away is the annoying non-melodic buzz of very deep bass noises and little or nothing else. Wherever I shop, I find the cashier is constantly trying to push a survey on me or get me to sign up to some club. I get junk mail all the time. I get advertisements on television which are of no use to me and don’t concern me and are annoying.
This is all part of living in a society where people are allowed to share what is important to them, and yes, it is extremely annoying.
Suck it up. What’s worse is losing a family member to a police shooting where your family member was unarmed and nonviolent. That shouldn’t be a systemic problem in a free and fair society, and we shouldn’t have to tolerate it.
Some things are far more annoying than protests. Deal with it.
The URL alone would cause most of the protesters to think that their actions are actually needed.
But was that the case?