This is a warning for accusing another poster of trolling. This is not permitted in this forum.
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Gerrymandering.
Not seeing how that’s a good analogy. Rosa Parks didn’t shut down the bus line so no one could use it. Similarly, the “negro” protestors who tried to eat at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s didn’t shut down the cafeteria.
You sure he’s not that other thing?
To be semantically clear, I didn’t say that the poster in question was a troll. I offered the choice of the ways in which his post and subsequent reframing of it could be intepreted. Which interpretation is most fitting is an exercise for the reader, who may elect that posting a provocative opinion and then denying that said post was meant how it was widely interpreted is merely honest and forthright discourse.
Stranger
No one, except maybe Stranger, is sure about that!
They did shut down cafeterias. The idea was to fill it with people they were not willing to serve so that normal business couldn’t happen. It was an economic attack.
The lunch counter had only four seats?
But even if that were true, it would not be “shutting the cafeteria down”. How you can call “filling all the seats” with “shutting it down” is beyond me. That’s like saying all the folks standing in line to see the new Star Wars movie is “shutting down” the theater.
The first day, there were 4. By the third day, there were 60, who per the source cited in your cite (http://www.sitinmovement.org/history/greensboro-chronology.asp) filled every available seat at the counter. Until the counter was willing to serve the people sitting in, the counter was shut down (no one the counter was willing to serve could get a seat).
Is there a joke I’m missing here, John, or is that an actual question?
Ok, so what if instead of saying, “Pass this bill or we will shut down your cafeteria!” the protesters said, “PLEASE pass this bill or we will shut down your cafeteria ONLY IF YOU AGREE THAT WE SHOULD!”
Because as we all know, protesters who we don’t agree with are most effective when nobody notices what they are doing, and always mind their pleases and thank you‘s. Protesters we do agree with - say for example REAL Americans protesting liberal hypocrisy - ought to be afforded much more leeway, of course.
I’ve been meaning to ask you something, but you’ve blocked private messages. This is a bit of a hijack, but still related to immigration, so I’ll try here.
You’ve written at length, correctly in my view, about the looming dangers of global warming and other environmental disasters and how various technological solutions are misguided or more difficult to implement than commonly assumed. A proper plan, especially at this late date, would require a total reorientation of our society’s priorities. Given current trends that isn’t going to happen, so it seems sooner or late there will be a series of cascading refugee crises that make the current MENA fiasco seem quaint. Tens of millions will stream into the rich northern countries to escape drought, famine, economic collapse, war, and so on. The right has an answer for this problem – walls, guns, bombs, and blood & soil nationalism. The left has an answer too – seize the means, redistribute resources, remove the incentive to destroy the world for profit, and organize industry for the good of all.
From what I can tell, you hate the right-wing, and you also seem disdainful of anything to the left of the Clintons, though your views seem mixed there – you’ve praised European social democracy on healthcare, but you’ve also denounced Sanders and his supporters as dangerous fools because they want to break up the banks. You hate communism, and correct me if I’m wrong, you’re not any variety of anarchist, libertarian socialist, or non-Marxist leftist. So I suppose you’re a liberal centrist type, but they don’t have a solution to this problem. Sure, carbon taxes and government investment in renewables are all well and good, but as you’ve noted, that’s expensive and takes decades to implement, doesn’t pull greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and it doesn’t help when the refugees are on the move.
If that’s all true, this coming disaster seems to me like a reformulation of Luxemburg’s “socialism or barbarism” prediction, but you would probably say they’re both forms of barbarism. Would you side with the right because at least they want to protect private property relations? Or would you reject this choice as a no-win scenario? Or do you have some third way? Other than anarcho-primitivism after the collapse, of course.
Others have challenged you on this, but I want to push harder: civil disobedience has, since Thoreau and into Gandhi and King, involved shutting down business as usual–from sit-down strikes to blocking bridges with protests to filling lunch counters with customers that the counter refused to serve to standing in front of the tank. Grinding the gears of power to a halt is a time-honored tactic, and objecting to its use now while lauding its use in the past is most often done, I suspect, by folks who would have objected to its use in the past had they only lived in the past.
You can say this about the right: They are eminently reasonable and rational.
I strongly support DACA as well as a path to citizenship. One of my best friends is a Dreamer. However, I don’t agree with pointless protests and shutting something down and being an ass just to be an ass.
Protesting a segregated lunch counter is fine, because the lunch counter is committing a civil rights violation. But shutting down a cafeteria that has nothing to do with your intended target is just stupid. By all means, protest in front of the capitol, hold rallies, call senators and representatives, and educate people about who the Dreamers are.
Politics is the art of the possible. The Democrats would have been foolish to shut the goverment down over DACA. There’s still plenty of room to negotiate and I think there are enough Republicans that will compromise to get something done.
Except the folks in the OP’s link are not trying to be served in the cafeteria. Their only purpose is to prevent anyone else form being served. Once the “negroes” were served at Woolworth’s, all was good. They weren’t preventing anyone from eating there that any other customer sitting in the same spot would not have prevented from eating.
It’s a bad analogy.
It’s also a bad analogy to compare the taking over of a cafeteria and and offices to a worker strike. No one is legally required to work, except in rare cases where the government actually intervenes. Withholding your willingness to work is not the same as physically blocking someone from his place of work. If you think it is, I’d like to see your reasoning.
For Civil Disobedience to work, good people have to get themselves thrown into jail. They have to show they disagree enough to throw themselves into the machine so that others see the issue is worth that sacrifice, and so that the contrast between the “legal” injustice and the justice of the “illegal” position becomes clear to all. It’s best if the pathway had a direct connection, but Thoreau had to settle for not paying his taxes to draw attention to the injustice of the Spanish American war. That’s at least as indirect as this.
So this raises the question: if the important thing is that “in an unjust society, the only place for a just man is in jail” is there a more appropriate way for Dreamer supporters to get themselves thrown into jail? And when is it time for mild mannered citizens to start chaining themselves to flagpoles?
No, it’s not, because that’s not the important part of the analogy: a place of relative power to them was engaging in an unjust action, so they stopped the folks from engaging in business as usual until the unjust action ended. True, in the Woolworth’s case, there was a little better aesthetic symmetry going on, but the fundamentals of the protest were the same there as here.
Meanwhile, other protests in the civil rights movement essentially shut down cities. Do you think those were out of order?
There seems to be an idea that civil disobedience is fine as long as it doesn’t inconvenience anyone, or at least as long as it’s not illegal. That’s not at all how civil disobedience works.
The trick is juggling their actual definition (rich people) and the one they present to their rubes (white people).
You mean things like taking health care away from tens of millions of people, throwing
steelworkers out of work, ramming tax legislation through Congress before they have a clue of what all it will do - besides throw money at their big donors, of course - and lie about it to their own supporters?
Yeah, easy to see the confusion.
And as even Paul Ryan says, we need more young people entering the work force now and in the years to come to pay for the retirements of us old folks, so the best thing for the citizens of this country is to kick the Dreamers out.