Is There Any Point to Protesting? | Hacker News Reader

Is There Any Point to Protesting?

newyorker.com

212 pointsrafaelc252 comments

Yes, there is a point to protesting. This paper used rainfall as a source of exogenous variation to measure the effect of the Tea Party protests.

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/128/4/1633/184...

Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? We address this question by studying the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through coordinated rallies across the country on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. We exploit variation in rainfall on the day of these rallies as an exogenous source of variation in attendance. We show that good weather at this initial, coordinating event had significant consequences for the subsequent local strength of the movement, increased public support for Tea Party positions, and led to more Republican votes in the 2010 midterm elections. Policy making was also affected, as incumbents responded to large protests in their district by voting more conservatively in Congress. Our estimates suggest significant multiplier effects: an additional protester increased the number of Republican votes by a factor well above 1. Together our results show that protests can build political movements that ultimately affect policy making and that they do so by influencing political views rather than solely through the revelation of existing political preferences.

The tea party was very astroturfed at the beginning -- how many of these protests were co-funded by investors in republican campaigns?

If funding to protests were correlated with funding to candidates (which in this case, it almost certainly is) then the variable with political consequences is "amount of campaign funding".

It was correlated with rainfall.

Yes, but are they looking at protests in the sense meant in OP?

A campaign rally funded and organized as a protest is not a protest. If these were astroturfed then all they tell us that attendance at campaign rallies can have political effects.

"Let me flash back to November 15th 1969, Washington DC and the Moratorium for Peace in Vietnam. This was probably the single biggest anti-war demonstration of the era, estimated at half a million by some and twice that by others...

"My scepticism about the demonstration’s effect seemed warranted when five months later, at the end of April, 1970, the US extended the war into Cambodia. In the protests that followed six students, four at Kent State in Ohio and two at Jackson State in Mississippi, were shot dead. The upshot was the biggest student strike in US history: more than 4 million students walking out of classes in universities, colleges and high schools across the country. Yet still the war did not end. Two and a half more years would pass before the peace treaty was signed in Paris in January 1973. By this time there were millions upon millions dead, disabled, bereaved, traumatised. Nonetheless, the movement against the Vietnam war is widely considered the most "successful" anti-war movement of modern times, against which more recent movements have measured their "failure".

"Many years later, I learned that the Moratorium demonstration was, in fact, anything but ineffectual. In July 1969, Nixon and Kissinger had delivered an ultimatum to the Vietnamese: if they did not accept US terms for a ceasefire by November 1st, "we will be compelled – with great reluctance – to take measures of the greatest consequences." The US government was threatening and indeed actively planning a nuclear strike against North Vietnam. In his Memoirs, Nixon admitted that the key factor in the decision not to proceed with the nuclear option was that "after all the protests and the Moratorium, American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war." What would have been the world’s second nuclear war was averted by our action, though we couldn’t have known it at the time..."

http://www.socialsciencecollective.org/success-failure-polit...

So protestors caused USA to lose the war, as Nixon complained?

So, let me get this straight: you'd rather have nuclear weapons become a normal weapon of war, as opposed to a deterrent, than have people complain about a war? Wow.

Certainly a nuclear strike would have been a quicker ending with less casualties, no?

If China and the USSR didn't have a vested interest in the outcome of the Vietnam War? Perhaps.

If it didn't cause the NVA to completely dissipate into full on guerrilla warfare? Sure.

Perhaps initially, however their use would be normalised and so ultimately casualties would likely be higher as more were used. Also radiation pollution would be the gift that keeps killing.

This "quicker ending" narrative justifies unlimited escalation of violence.

He's saying exactly the same thing that was, and still is, used in defense of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; that the human loss in ending the war quickly was far less than it would have been in continuing it. He is not saying anything about using them as normal weapons of war.

Whether or not you consider this a reasonable argument is up to you.

>that the human loss in ending the war quickly was far less than it would have been in continuing it.

Exactly, Firebombings in Japan resulted in about twice as many human casualties than with Little Man and Fat Boy combined.

Before the 1st bomb the United States called for the unconditional surrender or "face prompt and utter destruction". Japan's response was their intent to fight on to the bitter end. After the first bomb Truman called for Japan's surrender, or "expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth."

To no avail, and after the second bomb was detonated Emperor Hirohito called for accepting the terms of the allies, but even the surrender, in hindsight, was probably lucky as there was a failed coup, which if successful would have lead to the continued and ongoing armed conflict.

That is a Cold War propaganda tale that is not entirely accurate. The main motivation for the use of the atomic bombs by the US was as a show of force warning to the Soviet Union. The bombings were planned to coincide with the start of the Manchurian Operation (Soviet declaration of war against Japan). The main motivation for the Japanese surrender was the Soviet declaration of war, and the Japanese decision to surrender would have been made without the atomic bombing.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japa...

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/hiroshima-nagasaki-atomic...

That it a very strange interpretation of your own links. Essentially, what those articles were saying is that Japan was holding out on surrender to negotiate better terms, hopeful that consistent with the 5 year neutrality agreement with the Soviets the Soviets would assist in negotiations with the US. Short of obtaining the more desirable terms Japan seemed to be more than willing to accept the loses, in fact their leaders are quoted as saying the loses would only strengthen and unify the Country further.

You can claim Japan was going to surrender, but they were not, the Soviet invasion was helpful in the sense that it made clear the Soviets were not going to assist in negotiations, so there was no more reason for a holdout on diplomatic terms, but as a result Japan was beholden to the military option over unconditional surrender, until the 2nd bomb, and again even then surrender may not have occurred if the coup was successful against the Emperor.

Finally, if it were really the Soviet invasion, you think the Emperor would have been more inclined to acknowledge them, rather in his surrender speech he mentions only one concern, specifically:

"the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization."

This doesn't seem like it contradicts the parent

At the time of writing the comment you're replying to says this:

> So protestors caused USA to lose the war, as Nixon complained?

Which doesn't seem to me to contain the meaning you're inferring at all.

In a sense yes actually.

Take the Tet Offensive for example. From a purely military perspective it was a total disaster for the NVA. Casualties were incredibly in the favor of the SV and US forces for a fairly small amount of territory gained. What the NVA realized correctly though was the effect that the Tet Offensive would have on an already questioning American public. The media impact of the Tet Offensive along with the request for another 200k recruits did a major blow to the American public who really began to lose faith with the war. The NVA understood that they didn't have to beat the US Army, they just had to make the American public unwilling to fight.

Note that this isn't an argument that the War was worth fighting or not. Simply that protesters can and do have an effect on how the enemy fights and can assist the enemy intentionally or unintentionally. War in the modern era is no longer just calculated in how it affects the battlefield at hand, but also the media landscape. That was one of the major lessons of the Vietnam War.

The general consensus is that the US could not win the war in Vietnam, because the vast majority of South Vietnamese were not on board: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/opinion/vietnam-was-unwin...

I would agree that the major lesson the US military learned was "manage public opinion", but that wasn't the actual lesson on offer, which was that you can't win a country without winning over its people, and that was learned all over again in Iraq between 2003-2008.

Your article doesn't support your claim:

> "Despite its ally’s fundamental weakness, the United States might possibly still have won, of course, had it been willing to fully mobilize its own national power. But that would have required raising taxes, calling up the Reserves and other sacrifices that President Lyndon Johnson shrank from asking the American people to make."

...

"But Johnson was the most astute politician to sit in the White House during the 20th century, and he knew that he faced a paradox. As long as the war in Vietnam didn’t demand too much of them and they believed that victory was just around the corner, most Americans would support it. But if Johnson admitted publicly that South Vietnam could not survive without a full commitment by the United States, he knew that support would crumble."

Yes the SV government was autocratic, corrupt, incompetent, and this made it harder for the SV to get on board. But saying that's the majority reason is frankly incorrect. The full power of the US military would have been enough to guarantee victory or stalemate.

Further counterpoint. See the Korean War. Deeply unpopular at home. Most people didn't even know where Korea even was or fully understand why we were fighting. It was one of the major reasons why Truman's approval numbers were so low. S. Korean government at the time under Rhee was corrupt as all hell and undemocratic. In fact most of S Korea's history is undemocratic. S Korean Army units a total disaster for the most part. Yet S Korea still stands independent largely because we never faltered in giving them the military support they needed.

Also Iraq in 2003-2008 was less about winning over the people of Iraq and a lot more to do with other issues such as the refusal to utilize former Ba'ath party members and generals in the formation of the new government. Arguably the worst screw up was the unilateral exit of the US from Iraq under Obama which lead to the chaos we have to deal with now.

You're arguing "if the US political climate was totally different, the US may have been able to win." Of course if we posit a totally different reality we can have a different outcome.

Under that logic we may as well never study history. Pinpointing critical facts that lead to an outcome can help the planning in the future (for better or worse).

> Pinpointing critical facts that lead to an outcome can help the planning in the future

I agree. The critical fact in this instance is that the vast majority of Americans were willing to put up with the war in Vietnam as long as it didn't grow. Speculating about an alternative America where this wasn't the case requires us to make up many, many facts, that would significantly reduce the believability about any conclusions we draw.

That's why historians discourage speculation - because it reduces the legitimacy of the field and the value of its conclusions.

> Under that logic we may as well never study history

I would love to understand why you think my statement implies this.

I think it's particularly interesting given that I have a degree in history, with a specialization in US National Security Policy in the 20th century, so I don't think I generally give people the impression that "we may as well never study history," especially the history of the Vietnam War. In general, the reviews I receive are quite to the contrary.

Perhaps my statement was overly broad. However I'd argue that thought experiments are a useful way to reflect on history. They are of course uncertain - but provide a framework.

Nuclear weapons were never seriously considered for use in Vietnam either during the French War or American war.

Saying your actions prevented something isn't that compelling if it was never likely in the first place.

It sounds absurd because Nixon was paranoid but he wasn't completely stupid. There would be no benefit to nuking North Vietnam. You'd enrage already pissed off citizenry, turn the world against you, maybe bring the Soviet Union into the war, and all for what, nuking Hanoi when the real problem was guerrilla warfare? It makes no sense.

we will be compelled – with great reluctance – to take measures of the greatest consequences

It seems like the author is interpreting this as "nuclear weapons", but it could very easily be political posturing, or an increase in conventional conflict. Disappointing if it's exaggerated to make the author look better, and to see that statement made and accepted so uncritically.

Just googling, can't find any good sources suggesting nukes were seriously considered (as you said). Is there something more concrete than a favorable interpretation of that quote?

edit: this seems to be Duck Hook

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Hook

Is this real?

In his Memoirs, Nixon admitted that the key factor in the decision not to proceed with the nuclear option was that "after all the protests and the Moratorium, American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war."

Then that is concrete proof of nuclear considerations

What do you mean is it real? Of course skepticism is real as it should be for all claims about history. The author tells us what Nixon is admitting and to do so uses an out of context quote which at best suggests escalation. That's a low standard for concrete proof.

Actually having pulled up that section of the memoirs, "escalation" is used repeatedly. The nuclear option is never even mentioned (though whether Nixon avoids mentioning this is something else entirely). Furthermore, the author doesn't just assert that Nixon considered nuclear weapons, they assert they are directly responsible for avoiding a nuclear war. Maybe a bit too self-congratulatory and subjective:

What would have been the world’s second nuclear war was averted by our action, though we couldn’t have known it at the time...

http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/uhic/ReferenceDetailsPage/Referen...

In addition, away from the public eye, Nixon’s negotiation strategy in 1969 consisted primarily of a threat to North Vietnam that if they did not become more conciliatory at the peace table, he would unleash the full fury of American power as they had never seen it. Their deadline was 1 November 1969. Consistent with this, Nixon considered escalating the war in various ways in a proposed assault known as Operation Duck Hook. According to historian Marilyn Young, Duck Hook “explored a new range of options [intended to end the war], including a land invasion of the North, the systematic bombing of dikes so as to destroy the food supply, and the saturation bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong.”

Huh, that does sound like non-nuclear escalation.

The quoted part can be found on Google Books in "The Memoirs of Richard Nixon -- By Richard Nixon". The context there does not mention the word "nuclear" though, only "increased force". Some other quotes from there:

"My real concern was that these highly publicized efforts aimed at forcing me to end the war were seriously undermining my behind-the-scenes attempt to do just that."

"What counts is whether the demonstrations, regardless of intention, does in fact give encouragement to Hanoi and thereby presumably prolongs the war."

"If a President - any President - allowed his course to be set by those who demonstrate, he would betray the trust of all the rest. Whatever the issue, to allow government policy to be made in the streets would destroy the democratic process."

"I thought about the irony of this protest for peace. It had, I believed, destroyed whatever small possibility may still have existed of ending the war in 1969."

These are very interesting considering how they show the xact opposite side of the OP's debate.

I find it very amusing when articles quote someone to support their arguments even though the person actually disagrees with their PoV

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/10/25/nixon-and-the-bomb...

Use of nuclear weapons seems to have been seriously discussed by the US to help rescue French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vulture

> seriously

weasel word or are the considerations mentioned really just a joke?

Nonsense. Nixon wanted to be portrayed as a madman but it doesn't mean that he actually had any plans to use nukes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory

"During a spring offensive by the North Vietnamese in 1972, Nixon told Kissinger:

''We're going to do it. I'm going to destroy the goddamn country, believe me, I mean destroy it if necessary. And let me say, even the nuclear weapons if necessary. It isn't necessary. But, you know, what I mean is, what shows you the extent to which I'm willing to go. By a nuclear weapon, I mean that we will bomb the living bejeezus out of North Vietnam and then if anybody interferes we will threaten the nuclear weapons.''

A week later, he continued to a somewhat horrified Kissinger:

Nixon: I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready?

Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.

Nixon: A nuclear bomb, does that bother you?... I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ's sake! The only place where you and I disagree is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about civilians, and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.

Kissinger: I’m concerned about the civilians because I don’t want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher.[1]

...

"In a 1985 interview, Mr. Nixon acknowledged that he had considered ''the nuclear option.'' He told Time magazine then: ''I rejected the bombing of the dikes, which would have drowned one million people, for the same reason that I rejected the nuclear option. Because the targets presented were not military targets.''"[2]

[1] - http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/10/25/nixon-and-the-bomb...

[2] - http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/01/world/nixon-proposed-using...

It depends on how you protest and who does the protesting. The lame-ass protests you see happening in most of the United States are ineffectual because they don't threaten those in power, because they're either holiday-looking marches or they're staged by students/young people, who are easy to ignore.

The only way you can change something by protesting is by projecting power. You do that either by the way you do the protesting, i.e. by actively engaging the police forces in trying to reach the seats of power (Parliament, Government's buildings) or by taking up in the streets the people who have the most power come election day, i.e. lots and lots of middle class people.

Movements like BLM are ineffectual when protesting because they do neither of the 2 things I mentioned above: they don't actively engage the powers in Washington and they are not joined by lots and lots of middle class people. As such, they'll remain ineffectual as long as nothing changes.

Source: me, a guy living in Eastern Europe who has grown-up by watching protests toppling Governments and who has actively joined those kind of protests once I grew up.

BLM entered the social conscience of plenty of people, and managed to influence discussions in the media, even in some countries outside the US. That in itself is a pretty strong form of power.

Awareness and media attention has potential for power, but unless one is able to follow through and use this to gain something tangible it is not worth much.

There is also a huge difference between media being willing to cover the conflict, and media willingly amplifying your message. In the former the power stays in the hands of the media (and the people it usually serves), only in the latter I would say that one has something that can be an effective power.

More a general comment, I don't know how BLM does wrt to media coverage.

Black Lives Matter gets little media coverage, with a lot of what they do get being demonization from right wing outfits.

I saw a comment here not long ago that managed to peel off the vehicle murderer in Charlottesville from the white supremacist organizers that praised him and at the same time directly blamed BLM for police killings that many leaders in the movement have condemned. I imagine media coverage contributes to such mental acrobatics.

I agree the logical standard is either the extreme mentally ill elements of a group are a groups responsibility or they are not. It simply can't be both.

In Toronto BLM hijacked the gay pride parade and prevented police participation in the parade. The founder of BLM in Toronto has called whites subhuman.. but BLM still has apologetic articles written in its defense by the left wing media. Defending such a useless harmful and racist organization is a far worse mental acrobatic

It's hardly only BLM who doesn't want police in pride parades. The phenomenon of gay-pride marches started on June 28, 1970, to commemorate the one-year anniversary of an NYPD raid on a gay bar in New York, and the movement has as a result been very anti-cop since the beginning. It's only in recent years, as corporate Democrats and other politicians of that kind have found it fashionable to join the movement, that anyone would dream of inviting cops to a pride parade in the first place. Unsurprisingly, not everyone is on board with the change.

That should be the decision of the organization hosting the parade, not a separate group with it's own agenda.

Hey look a leftist rag published a column calling for her to resign:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/james-di-fiore/black-lives-matt...

Quite the apologia.

Well the Toronto Star actually let her write her own op-ed! https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/04/10/i-was-...

https://i.imgur.com/Gf86VlO.jpg

Yes, newspapers often publish the writings of public figures, it doesn't imply an endorsement.

Do you think they made a mistake by publishing her op-ed?

> respectfully, it is time for her to resign.

> maybe if this was her only controversial statement all could be forgiven

A rare thing for someone to get so toxic even HuffPo calls her out, but flip it around and they would have no problem calling someone white with similar views a white-supremacist, and condemning them - without the "respect" or second chances.

In fact, they pretty much spell it out:

> many media outlets faced scrutiny for focusing on that tweet instead of the issues black communities are facing

Yusra is now causing more harm than good, so she has to go. Otherwise, they'd tolerate her.

I can't find the transcript or quote, but Jon Stewart said that all the work he does and all the voice he has doesn't have real power; it's the politicians that have the power. He likened his crusade to get the NYC first responders health coverage to the movie Ghost where Patrick Swazye spent a ton of energy and effort to the point of draining him for hours to just move a penny a few feet.

With their constant crying wolf and manufactured outrage, the US media has all but neutered themselves.

However BLM was less about injustice and more about a minority group trying to capture and exert power over people they perceived has wronged them. The entire BLM movement is about power. Once people started realizing that it totally lost its momentum.

I'm more than a bit confused by your argument.

First of all, it strikes me that pretty much any movement concerning a minority is fundamentally about power.

Second, surely 'perceived [have] wronged them' is an odd statement in the context of a minority group that has seriously been wronged in the distant and recent past, and not to mention is still suffering from being wronged on a regular basis.

Now I don't know the fine details of BLM as a movement so I'm honestly open to hear where my thinking is faulty. Could you elaborate a bit?

> The only way you can change something by protesting is by projecting power. You do that either by the way you do the protesting, i.e. by actively engaging the police forces in trying to reach the seats of power (Parliament, Government's buildings)

>Movements like BLM are ineffectual when protesting because they do neither

Can you imagine the tone of public discourse if it even appeared that BLM was trying to overwhelm the seat of governance? I mean people scream 'thug' and call in the National Guard at the sight of African-Americans breaking a supermarket window what do you think they'll do if it appears they might overthrow a government (even a local one)?

I am currently giving a other interpretation of paganel comment that "projecting power" don't mean violence, but rather to carry voter support.

Riots and revolutions have shown historically to be very effective at: getting people killed, at decreasing voter support, giving the opposing side more power, and be successful at toppling power. In more instable regions where such events happen in regular waves, the ability of violence to cause lasting change is minimal to none unless you are willing to commit genocide.

That's the point, looting doesn't solve anything.

If for an example, BLM would convince all the nurses to halt their job, all the firemen -- that would make a difference.

But by the look of it, BLM does not have the support of the average working class person. Maybe I'm wrong, I'm not from the United States. The police killings are rare, especially when it comes to killing black people and the topic is only political.

I find this very curious - why do you think this movement came to attention if the killings are rare?

Also, your comment implies that there's an acceptable number of police killings of unarmed/fleeing suspects - what would you say that number is in your country?

Because media needs to write about something and they don't care if they fuck up the country and divide you?

More white people are shot by police officers in your country, yet black community has a bigger crime rate.

[0]:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/1...

The article wants to talk about population but we all know that crime rate is what matters. If anything, you should protest all the killings, but media has turned into a racial issue.

One possible explanation is that's what the accepted narrative is based on media coverage. Also you have to get a bit specific when you consider what kind of killings are rare. US Police shoot and kill quite a few people to be sure. But statistically, shooting of unarmed black males is less than 4% of fatal police shootings.

> "A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police.

But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias."

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evi...

http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399.pdf

> "The conventional thinking about police-involved shootings, and some scientific research, has been that black suspects are more likely to be shot than white suspects because of an implicit racial bias among police officers. But now a new study has found exactly the opposite: even with white officers who do have racial biases, officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/27...

I remember seeing this result. It's tantalizing but - and in the absence of mandated reporting perhaps the best we may have. I will take a look at the paper but I wonder what biases exist in officer-initiated reporting.

Lastly, we're setting a low bar if our standard for police mistreatment is killing as opposed to inappropriate behavior, writ large.

I do see your point, but I'm not sure this data undercuts the importance of a movement like BLM.

EDIT: For the second link, I'm not sure how much I believe a psychology experiment in this setting - I don't know this literature but my a priori bias is that the individuals who would do this type of study in Seattle are not representative of the median US police officer

The second link wasn't done with officers in Seattle, it was done with officers in Spokane. Washington gets a lot more rural once you leave the Seattle area, so I think it's a lot more representative than you give it credit for. Honestly you seem to be operating from the assumption that the median police officer is a racist rather than giving the benefit of the doubt.

None of the articles or studies undercuts BLM. They're meant to show that the situation is more complicated and nuanced and teasing out proper and actionable conclusions will take more data and time. But that kind of headline doesn't get you eyeballs and clicks.

As a unarmed white person that was shot at by the police. I anecdotally agree. The biggest problem I have with BLM is that they seem to miss the militarism of the police as the driving force in this.

>The police killings are rare, especially when it comes to killing black people and the topic is only political.

Viewing it in this way is a bit ahistorical. The problem is not just police violence, but a generally turbid relationship between law enforcement and communities of color. There is widespread distrust on both sides, so when a killing happens it is difficult for the community to take it in good faith.

Also, for comparison, the last time there was a high profile wrongful police killing of a white person, the police chief of Minneapolis had to resign almost immediately. I'm hard-pressed to find the last time one had to quit after the killing of a non-white one.

But considering your population and crime rate in black communities, it's a nonissue in a sense that it happens so rarely. It's political and media issue. The latter needs to write about something so they don't care about the consequences.

You have distorted world view that there are only two ways of living. Either democrat or republican and it all comes with a package, beliefs and media you watch.

[0]:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/1...

The article wants to talk about population but we all know that crime rate is what matters. If anything, you should protest all the killings, but media has turned into a racial issue.

If you're going to argue that it's crime rate, it's disingenuous to then link to a story talking about raw numbers, not rate - you should know the rate of black Americans killed by police is over double the rate of white Americans.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...

The point of BL M and many protests is not only the number of people killed by police, it's a symbol of a more widespread issue of racial injustice, specifically in the criminal justice system. Why are our increasingly militarized police murdering and brutalizing unarmed or non-aggressive citizens? Aren't these people they're supposed to be protecting?

Why are we letting white supremacists and racists in our police forces?

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/fbi-white-supremacists-i...

Why is there almost a gap of 20% in sentencing rate between black and white people, for the same crimes?

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2012/03/13...

Same for the disparity in conviction rates. Did you know many states strip felons of the right to vote?

Why are drug crimes, despite similar usage rates among races, so skewed in actual prosecutions and incarcerations towards blacks?

https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/03/02/us-drug-arrests-skewed-r...

Protests are only effective if they affect economic structures.

One of the most effective protests in Indian history was the Gandhi-led boycott of British-made goods. This directly impacted British economic structures.

A handful of people blocking a highway for a few hours isn't going to impact anything much.

Yeah ironically it only tends to impact people who are just as powerless as the protesters.

Well the article mentions one of my favorite protests, the Montgomery bus protests/boycott, that was ultimately started by Rosa Parks, history may remember her as some grand civil rights leader, but that wasn't her intent she was just a tired black woman going home from work who refused to give up her seat to a white person. That was a successful protest/boycott without a bunch of middle class people or engaging Washington.

The majority of the article is about the Vietnam War, but do a search and you won't find either Muhammad Ali or even the word "draft". Muhammad Ali was an outspoken, black, Muslim who refused the draft, again history might pretend he had the love and support of the people, but he didn't at least at the time. The War still had the full support of the American people, and Ali was persecuted, striped of his championship title/livelihood, labeled Anti-American in the media, he was also prosecuted by the Government, and convicted of draft dodging and sentenced to 5 years of prison. But he continued to fight, the Country began shifting its attitude about the War and the draft, and Ali prevailed in the Courts.

Obviously Ali wasn't alone, just look at some of the most famous 1st Amendment cases at the time. The Government prosecuting a guy for wearing a jacket that read "Fuck the Draft" in a Courtroom trying to chill his speech, eventually the Supreme Court agreed that was protected speech. Or the Government prosecuting protesters for burning their draft cards, ultimately they lost and the Supreme Court ruled burning draft cards is not protected speech. All these anti-war protests were done majorly by students, granted to your point their message and goal was much clearer than protests of today. Never mind the individual wins and loses, they were done by students, not middle class, and still they won overall because there hasn't been a draft in the US since, because its become politically untenable. Students, racial minorities, religious minorities...not the middle class.

>history may remember her as some grand civil rights leader, but that wasn't her intent she was just a tired black woman going home from work who refused to give up her seat to a white person.

Such is the popular image, but it is incorrect. She was the secretary of her local NAACP chapter, and she certainly was making a stand for civil rights. From her autobiography:

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

I haven't found a good citation yet, but my understanding was that it was carefully planned and she was chosen.

This gets into it a little ...

http://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719889/before-rosa-parks-th...

When asked why she is little known and why everyone thinks only of Rosa Parks, Colvin says the NAACP and all the other black organizations felt Parks would be a good icon because "she was an adult. They didn't think teenagers would be reliable."

She also says Parks had the right hair and the right look.

"Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class," says Colvin. "She fit that profile."

David Garrow, a historian and the author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, says people may think that Parks' action was spontaneous, but black civic leaders had been thinking about what to do about the Montgomery buses for years.

According to Parks herself it was a spontaneous act:

"I did not think about [being the test case for the NAACP] at all. In fact if I had let myself think too deeply about what might happen to me, I might have gotten off the bus. But I chose to remain."[1]

There's a lot of propaganda chaff around Rosa Parks. It seems that it was neither carefully planned, nor a completely spontaneous act of rebellion. She and a great many other people had been seething about the buses for years, and on that day she had simply had enough. I suspect the "carefully planned NAACP sting operation" narrative arose as a backlash to the equally inaccurate "totally random uninvolved old lady stands up for herself" narrative.

[1] https://contexts.org/articles/telling-stories-about-rosa-par...

The New Yorker article says that the organizers were waiting for the right opportunity to come along, and this was it. Seems reasonable?

Well fair play, I guess you could interpret tired in two ways, phycially or as Parks hereself said in her quote you posted tired of giving in. Second if being secretary of her NAACP chapter makes her a grand civil right leader fine, I challenge you to name a single other secretary from a local chapter beyond Parks, again I think history just has an ability to Monday morning quarterback. And fine maybe any member of the NAACP can be considered a grand civil rights leader, that's subjective anyway, my comment is replying to someone who believes protests must include the middle class to be successful, I believe history suggests otherwise and if you want to identify Parks as middle class too, fine I don't care to argue the point.

Here is a pretty famous Parks' radio interview from 1956, I'll just say I have listened to it for inspiration for sometime and will continue to do so, I may not know much, but I know her own words well, and I just don't think this was some grand scheme she was cooking up for sometime as a leader of the NAACP;

>The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed, I suppose [tired] They placed me under arrest. And I wasn’t afraid. I don’t know why I wasn’t, but I didn’t feel afraid. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama.

https://www.democracynow.org/2005/10/25/rosa_parks_1913_2005...

> history may remember her as some grand civil rights leader, but that wasn't her intent she was just a tired black woman going home from work who refused to give up her seat to a white person

STOP. SPREADING. LIES.

Parks herself:

> People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true

Parks 1956 radio interview, listen to her own words and learn:

https://www.democracynow.org/2005/10/25/rosa_parks_1913_2005...

> The lame-ass protests

Please, give me an example when ever in history a or a series of not-lame-ass protests did change something.

G20 in Hamburg was a good example of several not-lame-ass protests which didn't lead to anything beyond violence and destruction. Absolutely nothing changed or started to change because of them.

A protest by its very definition is 'lame ass'. When you protest you're accepting the status quo, that's why they're allowed even in places like Turkey and China. They're a steam valve for people to feel they're doing something then they go back to their television and Big Macs.

For a protest to achieve something it has to have a goal, and the goal is always 'protesting', that doesn't change anything.

If you want to overthrow the Government then go shoot your local senator[0], taking the kids and waving hand made protest signs at the local park isn't going to do sh*t.

[0] It's an example. I'm in no way advocating anyone actually do this!

You're getting downvoted but you've hit on something: Most of these protest movements are or aim to be nonviolent, whereas the power of the state is always ultimately projected via violence. For a protest or movement to have real impact, it has to either use violence itself (projecting political power directly), or it has to prepare for a sustained nonviolent absorption/withstanding of state violence (to get political power on its side). Either way you need a lot more determination, organization, sustained effort, and friends than it takes to organize a flash mob.

It is about who is protesting. I will give MLK and Gandhi.

Many of these protests don't effect change because their cause is not worthy. They have no coherent message nor righteous cause as in mlk and gandhi.

Eh, there are peacefull demos, which damage society even more. For example the bought Doctordemo in berlin.

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/die-gekaufte-demo/789302.h...

So how many people should be engaged in protest to topple a government recently elected by democratic vote? Presumably you think that at a certain state a protest trumps a democratic election?

Enough to convince the military to execute a coup de tat.

That's a little extreme, don't you think? How about a nice, quiet impeachment first?

Not if you're Venezuelan.

movements like BLM and OWS were ineffective because they were manufactured by political action groups not to improve the lives of people but to demonize but to distract from the fact that government itself was the problem. So instead on allowing the focus to be about mismanagement at levels from city, state, to federal, the politically adept turned the focus to divide people based on economic, gender, or racial lines. It is classic American politics, hence why the groups never gained traction because they weren't from the ground up. It took over a decade for the Republican party to stomp on and co-opt the tea party and the outrage at the time when it surfaced was because it was not under control of either party.

American's protest problem is simple, life is too easy to have anything generate enough interest for people to assemble about other than bad government and the political parties have figured out how to effectively redirect that ire.

> because they don't threaten those in power,

Yeah okay you try threatening people in power and see how far that gets you. They will show up at your house with machine guns, murder your entire family, and then they'll lie about what happened to the neighbors. "Drug bust gone wrong" or something. If you're a person who exercises your 2nd amendment rights they'll say you had a "cache of weapons". Remember WACO? That's what they do to people who threaten those in power.

The neighbors will believe whatever they're told, for 2 reasons. They don't want to believe that life is a nightmare, or they are already terrified for their lives and want to go on clinging to whatever table scraps they're currently feeding on.

This stuff has been going on for many many years.

"They will give you ALL the tools you need to destroy yourself." - Afeni Shakur

> If you're a person who exercises your 2nd amendment rights they'll say you had a "cache of weapons". Remember WACO? That's what they do to people who threaten those in power.

But... the Branch Davidians did have a cache of weapons.

> But... the Branch Davidians did have a cache of weapons.

Which is a constitutionally protected inalienable right given to all citizens of The United States. There is no limitation to how many firearms a U.S. citizen can own. There are many people who own hundreds of rifles and handguns. Any other commodity and we'd call it a "collection" but when it's firearms suddenly it's a "cache of weapons".

What matters, what you seemed to miss, is the way they describe the situation. They call it a "cache of weapons" on TV because that sounds like terrorism. When it's only American citizens exercising their rights.

They do that to manipulate ignorant people. They don't want you to ask questions when they murder a house full of people. Which they do a whole lot. WACO was unusual, being a big media circus, but they're actually really efficient at this murder business and it happens pretty frequently.

As another Eastern European, you beat me to it.

Here in my country we even had politicians caught on tape laughing and joking: "What are they gonna do, kill us? They can't do shit, they can only distract themselves from their miserable life...<pause and laughter>...and that's the only reason we don't bomb the protests with tear gas, so these peasants can feel better about themselves that they are actually changing something". Then the whole table full of politicians proceeds to laugh even more.

...You know what? They are 100% correct. Protests amount to nothing.

If you don't hit the politicians where it hurts -- their funding and their political power -- then they'll never change anything. That's just how human beings in power always worked, and whoever disagrees with that is blissfully deluded.

Isn't the issue here that whatever government does there still will be someone protesting against it?

You know, watching the news and seeing 100k people protesting looks impressive, until you realize that you live in a country of 350M citizens and that 100k protesters is just 0.029% of total population. Add social media to the equation and it is entirely possible to organize flash mob of 100k of Game of Thrones fans demanding "EPIC BOATSEX".

So, as a politician you learn very early in your career to ignore all protests, simply because someone is always protesting against something. You wouldn't get much done if you spent most of your time talking to protesters.

Coming from another guy living in Easter Europe (Romania)... one of the things that seemed to me very wrong about some of the recent US protests was the imbalance between participation and motivation/demands.

You get millions on streets to protest on the day Trump took office, to ask for.... WHAT? The guy is democratically-elected. He made no huge mistake at that point. Apparently they were "supporting women" or "anti-discrimination" or something. I get it, you don't like him - but this was just wasted effort. No, it was worse than wasted effort - it discredited the idea that millions on the people on the streets would mean something. It would be one thing if millions came out after the announcement of the muslim ban, to protest against THAT.

You don't protest against a person, that is ineffective - you protest against policy changes. If you tell someone "I will never vote YOU"... well, ok, what can he do? Nothing. if you say, "I will never vote those who support this policy!", then politicians actually have a choice to back off

Remember the Occupy movement?

They had no immediate demands. People thought it was pointless and the protestors copped a lot of criticism because of it.

Almost ten years later Bernie Sanders rallied millions around a platform that was based on the idea of 'the one percent'. That wouldn't have happened if the idea hadn't already been made popular by the Occupy movement.

So yes, there is a point to protesting - even if you don't have any demands.

While Bernie Sanders may have rallied some people, in the end he didn't actually end up accomplishing much of anything.

"It doesn't matter! he did it! he inspired people!"

To do nothing.

These sorts of things happen on long time scales. Let's see what the future holds.

The people who backed him have gone on to participate in and influence state-level races:

- https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2017/08/why-bernie-...

- https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/bernie-...

Sanders' backers are arguably pushing potential 2020 candidates farther to the left than had Sanders not become popular. I think single-payer as a litmus test could be somehing that impacts the race, and Sanders can get credit/blame for that: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/healthc...

His organization is funding and supporting local elections and initiatives across the country. If you accept that local politics is the foundation of national politics in the US, over time he may accomplish a great deal.

Really? Bernie is the most popular politician in the country, and now billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and even the Ayn-Rand-reading Mark Cuban are promoting single payer healthcare. That's a big change.

>Bernie is the most popular politician in the country

What? How did you watch him lose the democratic popular race and come To the conclusion he's the most popular?

This is possible if he's more popular than Clinton among voters who did not vote in the Democratic primary: Republicans, independents, etc.

Sure but its absurd to just assume "all non-votes were for bernie". Do the same for Christie and now he's the most popular politician in the country...

That's not an assumption, that's an answer to "how is it possible?". The answer to "how do we know that's the case?" is "polling": http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/329404-poll-bernie-sand...

The latest Harvard-Harris poll, table 31

http://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/HHP-...

You say that like it's some damning put-down. Of course he didn't succeed; the elites usually win. That's why they are elite. It's no shame to have tried and lost.

Except for the shift left that Clinton's platform made in the last couple mounts of the campaign? Bernie, even after losing, move the Overton window a couple notches. Unfortunately it was too late by then.

Too late? If Bernie's campaign managed to force Clinton to the left he's as responsible as anyone for Trump's presidency.

The Democratic Socialists of America went from 5,000 people to 25,000 people in a year.

To be fair, that may more be a function of Trump more than Bernie.

On a small scale, this election seemed to make a significant fraction of people more able to identify with what they actually believe, rather than in terms of what they oppose. And I think that will have a lot of value, long term, for political discourse.

Now, I can say with some confidence that I’m a left-wing libertarian. Before this shitshow, I don’t think I was really politically aware enough to be able to identify as anything but “anti-Republican”.

Yes, and the National Socialists had similar growth in response. I'm not sure that was a good bargain.

That was not a bargain because one event don't cause the other but both events have a common cause.

The common cause is that people is tired of the establishment. When this happen, some go one way and others the other way.

It's not new, it's a historical pattern.

Bullshit.

He was able to have some success on his platform, which would have failed earilier. This most definitely helps with discussion later. He was able to influence a section of society enough to get into politics. He's still able to command attention when he speaks about something. He likely inspired some other folks and made it more OK to be a democratic socialist. (Unfortunately, this has worked on more detestable outlooks with this last election as well).

The aftermath of him not winning the primary influenced the election itself. Some folks voted differently than they might have otherwise and third parties were a real topic of discussion, even though no one actually thought they would win. Heck, even being able to run for president - something most citizens couldn't pull off - is a win in itself. And he did it with that message and on one of the two major parties' tickets.

Not every accomplishment involves a clear defined win or money.

Frame Alignment theory is the sociological term for what you're describing. After Occupy there were millions of people who were more prepared for a message about the corruption of elites and the need for ordinary people to reclaim democracy in a profound way.

Beyond framing, Occupy also created social networks between activists, and those activists gained a lot of experience and developed specific skills. We saw an example of this network and these skills being deployed with Occupy Sandy, where those networks were used to out-organize FEMA and the Red Cross in areas of NJ after Hurricane Sandy.

Occupy also popularized and tested various forms of social organization and social technologies. Thousands of people now know from experience the strengths and weaknesses of permanent encampments as a tactic, consensus decision making, the people's mic, etc. Mass R&D.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/nyregion/where-fema-fell-s...

Trump also took on this message as well in his own way.

How about frame alignment but in the opposite direction? I'm convinced the cruddiness of Occupy made more conservatives out of my somewhat liberal friends than any thing conservatives specifically did in the recent past.

Really? Because there are a lot of cruddy things in the recent past to consider. I lived in New York during the Occupy rallies several years ago, I don't recall them having significant effects much beyond Wall Street (literally, the street/downtown train stops). There was a lot of coverage, but I didn't get the impression that people were losing their shit about it.

People weren't losing their shit...more like laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.

I'm suspicious of the "made conservative" notion there. If someone's devotion political point of view A is so shallow that some people being irritating is enough to change them to B forever, I suspect they were always a dispositional B.

Young people getting conservative as they get older is nothing new. As Douglas Adams wrote:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

And that's for something as neutral as tech. The older people get, the more they get out of the status quo. My dad jokes that he got a lot more conservative when his bank account had something in it.

Sure, but Sanders, and later Clinton, still lost... to a man so regressive and unfit most people believed he could never ever win.

So while Occupy may have brought the concept of the "one percent" into the public consciousness, did anything actually change because of it?

At this point I'm of the opinion that Trump will ironically cause much more (progressive) change simply because he makes people, even conservatives, angry enough that they swing the other way.

If the Democrats regain control of Congress in 2018 I expect it to be in no small part because Trump is in office. I expect this to be easier than if someone like Kasich or Rubio was sitting in the Oval right now instead.

Assuming I'm right, the major downside is that a lot of less privileged people will be in much worse situations for a while.

In fairness, Sanders polled significantly better vs Trump than Clinton did. How he would have done in a straight matchup is speculation, but at least based on polls before Clinton won the nomination, he had a better shot.

>most people believed he could never ever win

Given he won an election, this seems unlikely.

Why? Voting for someone doesn't mean you think they will win. It seems that for many Republicans it was a happy surprise. (Going by post-election news reports from West Virginia.)

I suppose when I say "people" I mean pundits & pollsters, not American voters as a whole; my bad for not being specific. There were certainly some people in the media (Nate Silver, for one) who absolutely acknowledged that there was a strong chance Trump could win, but theirs was a minority opinion.

Not even ten years later. Occupy was fall of 2011. Bernie Sanders ran in the primary from spring 2015 through spring/summer 2016 for the election of fall 2016. So, more like four to five years later.

We've forgotten the core point of protesting. The article skirts near the truth in the section about how hierarchical organisations are more effective than the modern decentralised variety, but it frustratingly seems to still miss the point.

The Iraq war protests, while massive, never seriously threatened the government or the established order of things. Whereas, the Poll Tax riots in the U.K. where relatively small, but Thatcher was ousted by her own party within months.

Protests work when they threaten to overthrow the government. They could either do that through existing democratic processes, via financial means (e.g. tax revolt) or violently. But the point is the same, governments are motivated by self preservation.

Protests need either powerful organisational structures with figureheads that could assume power, or a broad enough base with sufficient reckless abandonment that it could turn into armed uprising. Without either of those things, the incumbents in power are not threatened enough to act. The actual event where you all march on the streets is just a demonstration that your organisation is powerful enough to threaten the government. It's not meant to be a fun day out with the kids.

Zeynep Tufecki's boom Twitter and Tear Gas argues this exact point very thoroughly. Would recommend to anyone interested by this discussion.

This is the only thing that makes sense. The people, governments, and institutions being protested only know one language: violence. Otherwise, they will hold onto their power no matter what, as long as they can. People often forget or never learn this. There are lots of parents teaching their children all sorts of fantasies about government, armies, and police, that these are institutions that should be respected and trusted rather than feared, disbelieved, and toppled. Attitudes like that lead to the ineffective protests we've seen lately. The people being protested do not care if there are millions in the streets if those millions will never pose a threat and those millions cannot pose a threat if they have delusional misconceptions about their role and the role of the people they're protesting. A lot of power and responsibility lies with parents and many of them are too clueless to see the world for what it is, let alone teach their children to react to it properly.

> "This is the only thing that makes sense. The people, governments, and institutions being protested only know one language: violence."

Not true. They also understand money. I'd say money is the best thing to focus on if you want a truly effective protest. Violence is too easy to condemn by those not taking part. That's why I'd say we'd be better off arranging protests as boycotts rather than marching in the street.

That said, there is a sense of community with collective gatherings like street protests. I'd say fostering connections between people is probably the main strength of protesting in the streets.

The threat of economic reprimand ("money") is indirectly and maybe unknowingly a threat of violence.

> That said, there is a sense of community with collective gatherings like street protests. I'd say fostering connections between people is probably the main strength of protesting in the streets.

Yes!

After Trump was elected, I went to my first street protests and I was shocked at how positive it felt. The sense of community and togetherness was amazing. I talked to more strangers that day than I had in the previous year. People were kind, and funny, welcoming.

"If a protest falls outside of the media, does it make an impact?"

No. But in my lifetime these protests changed life

Womens rights. NOW. riggs vs billy Jean king. Women took a job away from a man. Now you cant afford to own a house without a woman's income.

Vietnam war. War is bad. Draft is evil. How america treated returning soldiers means today it is taboo to say anything negative about a veteran. (yet 20 years earlier there was family shame if you didn't enlist for wwii)

Civil rights. Who even met a negro back in 1966??. Now who cares.

Gay rights. So.. Its not about inability to procreate... Before gays were oddities. Now.. Who cares. Marriage even.

Animal rights. Yeah, out of sight... Lets protest. Cleveland amory. Aspca.. Now we turned the word "rescue" into a washed out version of saving.

Nukes. We forget that one nuke will wipe out life with years of darkness... Remember iran in 1979??? "Nuke Iran"

YES. PROTESTS MATTER

But are those changes due to a shift in people's perception and values, inherent to evolution of newspapers and universities (or anything that changes culture, including the job market), or were these changes actually triggered by the demonstrations?

I mean, it's all interconnected, so yes.

- Activists who lead protests often work with writers, journalists, and professors

- Protests also draw attention to otherwise less mainstream issues - just look at how we talk about income inequality today vs before Occupy, or prison reform and police brutality before BlackLivesMatter

- There are feedback loops. Successful protests draw more protesters in the future by drawing attention to and legitimizing grievances.

- yes, changes in technology or the economy also matter

This all seems to be an expression of the zeitgeist. Popular perceptions shift. Things get accomplished democratically (or through court fiat without too much blow-back) and protesters protest, because, you know, man, that's what they do. Other than creating some photo fodder for the National Geographic 2100 edition of the natives, I'm not sure that protests do anything more than pound the dirt on things that are already top-of-soul to the public.

In other words: Maybe minds are not changed. It seems to me, as I observe it, the after effect is that they are hardened and protests are actively harmful in that regard.

I'd like to hear your counter-x on that.

I'm confused why you think protests aren't a huge part of all those zeitgeist shifts. Even today, look at BlackLivesMatter: people are talking about police brutality and prison reform now - that was not even close to being a mainstream topic 10 years ago. People didn't just magically change their mind overnight.

My counter-example is me.

I was pretty ignorant about the US's long history of structural racism before Ferguson. But when that blew up, I was surprised. Clearly, there was something I didn't understand going on.

I started following a lot more African-American voices on Twitter (and do to this day). I ended up reading more about the history, both distant and recent. I dug into the economics of it. [1] But mainly, I listened to non-white reactions to current events.

My initial reaction was often denial. "It can't be that bad!" And that's easy to say when you have a small n. But as the n gets larger, I had to give that denial up. What I wanted to believe about America was contradicted by the facts.

I'm sure some people do bunker down in their denial rather than taking time to hear out the protesters. But I suspect those are the people who wouldn't have changed their minds regardless.

[1] E.g., https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/7/7/15929196/police-fine... or http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 or https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...

I tend to be more convinced by good writing and reporting than by the protests themselves, but why do those reporters get assigned and why are all those essays getting written and published and read? Making the national news matters.

>Nukes. We forget that one nuke will wipe out life with years of darkness

Whut?

And what have protests ever done for nuclear disarmament?

Well...im not really sure why a nuke hasn't been deployed yet. But for me the protests allowed me to learn the significant difference between an atomic bomb and a nuke. I always thought it was just a larger bomb.

Protests helped me realize what people dont say anymore: one nuke will cancel the species.

A "nuke" is simply slang for "nuclear weapon", and the US deployed two in WW2. It sounds like you might be talking about fusion weapons, which have certainly been tested but never used in anger; these are, in effect, just bigger bombs. No one bomb that humans possess can wipe out the species, or even make a dent. Nor is it a given that a single nuclear attack will lead to nuclear war.

As to why no one's used nuclear weapons since WW2, it turns out they're not hugely useful weapons outside of a "total war" context. Too blunt an instrument; rarely do you wish to simply wipe out a few square miles and everything in it.

I predict the first use, if it happens, will be naval.

Omg. What i learned would not allow the comparison and analysis you used.

I wish it was 1979 again and i could have recorded my physics prof...

If you can't remember the evidence how can you be so certain?

Doesn't the fact that hundreds of nuclear bombs have been tested without destroying the species hold any weight?

Perhaps the argument is the retaliation would be world ending but even that is not clear.

If you're hoping the point is instant change, no.

If you're hoping for more realistic gradual change, then yes. Peaceful protest in particular gets your message to the masses.

That's really the most your can hope for. Real actual change takes generations.

Yes, peaceful protests achieve more than violent protests.

I feel bad that people die in protests or get arrested, etc. Current protests have people throwing bottles and rocks at the police, even peeing into bottles and splashing the police with their urine. That is not peaceful and provoking people.

Better than protesting is getting people out to vote against Trump and the GOP next election. Get some Democrats and third parties in Congress and make Trump compromise. That would do more than protests ever will.

I don't get this identity politics, and gender politics, etc. Identity and gender are social constructs I am told and the right does not control society the left does. I've never fit into society and getting an identity. I'm like an outcast because I don't have many social skills to get these social things. If the left controls society by tv shows, music, movies, plays, education, liberal arts, etc they would make better social constructs of identity and gender to help pass legislation to protect people in certain groups. But beware, for if you protect one or more types of genders or identities you have to protect them all, even the ones you don't like or agree with.

That went to some weird places

- Modern protests have largely been peaceful. There's a protest every week nowadays, and the only violent ones I can recall in the past few years were Baltimore and Charlottesville. Smaller scale violence does occur at these protests, but it's usually a few bad actors.

- It's a common and well documented tactic for governments to send provocateurs to delegitimize protests

- Protest organizers know better than anyone the importance of getting out the vote, and are often part of that effort. Also, the midterm elections are still a year away.

- Uh not even gonna touch your identity politics rant tbh

There have been quite a lot of protests over the last few years that have gone violent. G20, The Berkeley Milo Speech, The Free Speech Demonstrations in Berkeley, Ferguson, etc. I don't know what you call "small scale" but these events have had a substantial amount of brawling and property damage being done. Maybe not Rodney King level, but definitely noteworthy.

In many of those cases, it's far more than just a few bad actors. If you watched footage from the Milo event for example, the Antifa crowd had a lot of people out in force. Ferguson had a lot of out of towners come in to create trouble despite the locals trying to keep things calm.

I encourage you to spend more time thinking through your views relating to that last paragraph, as it comes across as pretty muddled to me.

Identity and gender are social constructs, sure. But social constructs like "black" and "gay" were created by dominant groups as means of control and exploitation. The left's desire to protect people in certain groups is about undoing that historical oppression. So it's not about "liking" or "agreeing with". It's about solving systemic problems.

As an example, I'm a straight, white dude. I'm also opposed to dominance as a way of running things. Historically, people who aren't straight white dudes have gotten the short end of the stick. So I support action to stop the deepening of that and to erase the historical effects. But I oppose similar action in favor of straight white dudes because that would reinforce the historical imbalance.

If you really struggle with sentences about, say, white men, then just replace words you don't like with things "group that benefits from structural oppression" and "group that is harmed by structural oppression". That may make it easier to see that it's not about you personally, but mainly about hundreds of years of history.

As a side note, I also didn't have many social skills. I was weird and awkward. But they are skills! You can learn them! Find a good therapist and spend a few years catching up.

We can't afford for it to take generations :(

"The biggest mistake that was made during the Holocaust was that people didn't speak up. The Holocaust took place because individuals, groups and nations made decisions to act or not to act. The world was quiet then, but we must not be quiet again. Now we know better. We must all commit to making the world a better, kinder and more understanding place. Perhaps it's as simple as speaking out when you see something wrong and saying, "I know better." But please, never be a bystander or a perpetrator."

--Sonia K., Holocaust survivor. http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/19/opinions/holocaust-survivor-tr...

Fascists gain power when good people stay silent out of fear or ambivalence, when the millions who might oppose them each believe themselves to be alone. Protests may not cause direct and immediate policy changes, but they let allies know that they are not alone, they let enemies know that they are not in total control. That's huge. It's vital.

In terms of anti-Trump Resistance, I was skeptical in the beginning, but the Women's March did show that getting together in big numbers gets people's attention. If nothing else it manages to rattle a President who is addicted to watching TV!

But I do think one big problem is how to channel the energy the American Left has for marching, protest etc. into voting. Maybe there needs to be a 'March to the polls' on voting days! Everyone from a specific district or area get together, then groups go to their specific local voting locations.

Well, Hillary did get at least 2.9M more votes than Trump. So voting wouldn't seem to be a problem. Instead we have a gerrymandering problem, we have a voter suppression problem and we have an election that was probably hacked by Trump and the Russians.

True. But the problem is that Democratic voters are overly focused on the Presidency and don't turn out in large enough numbers in off-year elections. The reason the GOP has a stranglehold on government (including being able to gerrymander and suppress votes) is because they won big in the 2010 Congressional elections.

>2.9M more votes than Trump

And 90M people eligible voters chose not to vote at all. For as bad as people claimed Trump was, that's a staggering number of people to just say "meh, I don't really care."

Based on all the reports I've seen coming out of the two candidate's campaigns after the election, Hillary was probably the only one who was even trying to win the popular vote - and it can be argued that focusing on this cost her the presidency. Bragging about it always seemed a little wrong-headed under the circumstances. (Yes, I've no doubt Trump would do the same if the roles were reversed, but he's not a role model anyone should imitate.)

Seems the left just burned too many bridges and lost the rust belt. I also don't think their identity politics garnered any affection.

I hear this point thrown around a lot by the right "the left plays identity politics too much". Have you ever stopped to consider that Fox News, Breitbart and the Republican Party are playing the same identity game, they just restrict it to a single demographic?

Irrelevant hogwash. The left absolutely lives (and perhaps dies) by identity politics. Individuals are invisible non-entities unless and until you can lump them into some race/gender/oppressed group.

Name me one signature left policy isn't couched and positioned in-terms of victim identity politics?

Environmental issues and class economics.

But of course, this is my white male privilege speaking.

> Environmental issues and class economics

Nope, at least not in my experience.

I attended a small protest at the SF EPA offices in support of the agency and against the funding cuts from the Trump administration. It's fair to say that everyone there was an environmentalist who cared deeply about EPA efforts to curb pollution and encourage green energy. It's stands to reason that the organizers would focus on the thing that united everyone in attendance, right? But, instead, they brought up Native American speakers who offered prayers and talked about how non-Native Americans could never experience the same connection with the land that they had. They brought up Latin Americans who similarly talked about their special exposure to environmental issues. They took what little cohesiveness the group had and fractured it by having to acknowledge people's individuality.

We then marched to the Federal building. But on the way, they had multiple stops to protest non-environmental issues. They stopped at a housing developer to protest the new housing they were building, just because it happened to be near an area that's currently low income. Never mind the studies that show that any new housing, even luxury, helps keep rents lower at all levels. And then they stopped to protest in front of an industry conference of some sort. I forget their specific grievance, but I remember distinctly feeling like it was naive and I didn't support it.

The whole experience left me with a particularly distasteful feeling. I went to support increased funding and regulation by the EPA and somehow got roped into supporting a ton of crap that I disagreed with. And if this was an isolated incident, I could write it off as being poorly organized, but I've been to a few of these leftist protests now and, with the exception of the march for science, none of them were able to stay on message. They were all sidetracked by focusing on what divides us into individuals as opposed to what united us all to come protest. We're all multi-faceted people, but I think the left needs to learn that when we protest, it's okay to focus on the single facet that unites everyone protesting rather than the many that divide us so that we can speak with a single, powerful voice with a clear and coherent message and not a multitude of easily ignorable voices, each with their own unique message.

I know when the right rails against "identity politics" this is not what they mean, but as a progressive, I feel that this sort of identity politics gets in the way of building a coalition large enough to make progress.

> I know when the right rails against "identity politics" this is not what they mean, but as a progressive, I feel that this sort of identity politics gets in the way of building a coalition large enough to make progress.

When stated motives are questionable, look at the outcomes and use those to infer what the true motives were.

The poorest people in this country are black and brown. The first people impacted by environmental disasters (and soon climate change) will be black and brown (Katrina, oil spills, [1]). That's why the people you decry as focusing too much on identity politics are at the forefront of pushing for universal healthcare, broader safety nets, and environmental regulations.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/529137/environmental...

You're making my point, you can't control yourself!

Race and climate aren't naturally connected concepts. It's fair to conclude you use race and class in this way as a wedge to divide people and pit them against one another in order to batter your political enemies and increase your power.

If you want to be a Marxist, just be a Marxist and don't hide your beliefs.

Clean energy. Universal healthcare. UBI, although that's still quite far from the mainstream.

> Name me one signature left policy isn't couched and positioned in-terms of victim identity politics?

All major policy proposals are described in terms of the victims that will be saved, regardless of left or right. You can't get the public to back anything unless you make it personal.

I can't tell from your comment whether you're satisfied with this victim identity politics or whether you're simply stating facts.

If it satisfies, then you're claiming the ends justify the means. Lots of mischief and tragedy has been rationalized in that way throughout history.

Merely stating facts that this isn't a left vs. right thing. I don't find that either side in the political spectrum can legitimately claim a moral high ground, so prefer focusing on actual policies than on how those are packaged up.

Ok, thank you for clarifying. I absolutely agree, I believe we must all focus on policy and debate the details.

> I don't find that either side in the political spectrum can legitimately claim a moral high ground

Ah, well, I think we could complain that the moral high ground no longer exists. We've spent the past 100 years telling ourselves that there is no objective truth and therefore there is no moral basis for anything.

"Family values" on the right is the ideological shadow of traditional Judeo-Christian ethics and morality. And "identity politics" is the ideology of some twisted-up cultural marxism that seems to hold "being nice" up as the highest virtue. Both left's and right's claims lack all conviction or consistency and are too flimsy to represent any kind of moral high ground.

I suppose a lack of specificity means you're less of a target for your political foes and you have fewer concrete campaign promises to make and keep with the voters.

I'd say that conveniently, this lack of moral high ground allows snaky politicians to passionately proclaim whatever obscenity they fancy is moral since people hunger for a framework. Damn the consequences, the world is their political science petri dish.

Yeah, these outlets are the right-wing response to left-wing identity politics. I guess I'm less worried about that because it's so niche and ineffective. Liberal identity politics are mainstream in universities, corporations, media, fine arts, etc, and it damages careers and reputations and generally creates a hostile environment for the outgroup.

Yes it seems the DNC didn't expect the 'Blue Wall' of the Mid-West to crumble. But (while I'm not generally on board with a lot of identity politics as seen on social media) I don't really understand comments saying that Dems need to focus less on minority issues to win back working-class whites.

For example, a Democratic party chair from Ohio said of the national party, “While Trump is talking about trade and jobs, they’re still obsessing about which bathrooms people should be allowed to go into.”[1] But when it comes to things like the Muslim ban, transgender bathroom bills, etc. it seems like the GOP is trying to use identity as a wedge--the Dems and the left in general are just responding. It would probably be a mistake for Dems to give up on civil rights issues and just focus on economic issues.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/democrats-are-still-...

The democrats don't need to abandon identity politics, but talking about poverty helps minorities and white poor people.

As it stands though, the Democratic party won't touch economic issues. They've got a supermajority in California , have a bill passed by the state senate for single payer healthcare (SB562) and the (democrat controlled) assembly shelved it.

> a mistake for Dems to give up on civil rights issues

It's difficult to summarize why they've lost the election. But it's probable their focus on wrong civil right issues made them lose, when those rights were exaggerated. Some of those rights alienated voters the point that people preferred voting for a (let's be honest) stupid spoiled child than for the Dems. It's important to choose the correct civil right issues to fight for when you're running Dems, perhaps when fighting against "privileges" and 90% of the population ends up in one of the "privilege buckets", that may be a sign that the threshold for the notion of "privileges" goes way too far. Same goes for safe spaces, authorized speech (James Damore), overprotection of minorities, I wonder what would have come if the Dems left all this "privilege hate" aside and their program went just "Let's extend Obamacare and drop the TTIP".

That would truely help minorities yet not be hate speech against the so-said "privileged".

You're right that there isn't any conflict between supporting civil rights and the working class, but identity politics is a perversion of social justice that treats everyone according to their external characteristics. In this case, working class whites have heard about how privileged they are to be white (while everyone's wages have risen around them) and how racist they are for opposing the illegal immigration that threatens their stability. And this is coming to them largely from upper and upper-middle class elites with no skin in the game, who largely make no attempt to understand their perspective.

Mind you, the GOP and Trump aren't models of virtue. The message isn't "the Dems should be more like the Reps", it's "be compassionate and nuanced and stop abusing the innocent people you depend on".

Identity politics is not some weird Tumblr creation. America was founded by and for well-off white men. They were the only ones who could vote. America's history can be written as the slow removal of those limits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St...

What most white dudes critique as "identity politics" is people talking about and trying to remedy historical identity-based oppression. But they don't like these things being explicitly talked about, because sweeping the historical oppression under the rug is one of the mechanisms by which that oppression is maintained.

If you really don't like identity politics, you too should work to help undo America's long history of pro-white, pro-male, pro-upper-class identity politics.

I don't think anyone disputes historical oppression (or at least those who do are outliers), I think the concern is that the identity devotees deliberately try to conflate real, historical oppression with things like women making different career choices than men. Their propensity to conclude oppression at any sign of a disparity (but only disparities that disadvantage one of "their groups"; e.g., wage gap is oppression but not workplace fatality gap) and constant mischaracterizations of opposing arguments ruins their credibility as advocates for real social justice. To put it bluntly, the "social justice left" appears to be more concerned with hating "white dudes" than it is with addressing actual social justice problems, and when a huge portion of your voting base is comprised of people you appear to hate or at least treat very badly, you should not expect to win an election.

Plenty of people do dispute historical oppression. Plenty of people deny outright that it was oppression at all. They think it was better back then. And they are not outliers.

But if you're claiming that historical oppression totally ended at some point, what date do you believe that was?

As a white dude, I disagree with your reading of the American left. I don't think I've ever experienced a personal hate for myself. They do take issues with a lot of the behaviors of a group that has benefited from and sustains oppression. But I object to that too.

> Plenty of people do dispute historical oppression. Plenty of people deny outright that it was oppression at all. They think it was better back then. And they are not outliers.

I would be surprised of slavery deniers or any comparable entity comprised more than a tenth of a percent of the U.S. population, but I'm happy to be disproven.

> But if you're claiming that historical oppression totally ended at some point, what date do you believe that was?

It depends on how you precisely define "historical oppression". The most common definition I'm aware of refers to slavery, Jim Crowe laws, lynchings, etc. Those things largely ended in the 70s in most places in the U.S., but I'll go so far as to say the 90s.

> They do take issues with a lot of the behaviors of a group that has benefited from and sustains oppression. But I object to that too.

This is sort of my point. I have no idea what you possibly mean by "oppression" or "benefited from" or "sustains". Team "identity" has watered the term down such that I have no idea if you're talking about real oppression (probably not, since that would be newsworthy) or merely women having different career priorities than men. I'm inclined to think if you were talking about meaningful oppression, you could call it by name and wouldn't need to rely on the shock value of the word 'oppression' to advance your position.

If you want to (for example) make things better for inner city black communities, come grab a shovel. But no one is oppressing these communities nor do they have an incentive to do so--poor communities are expensive. If poverty were an easy problem, it would be solved. People who talk about "oppression" and "structural racism" seem to think that wealth is the default state of man, and that poverty can only be explained by oppression.

You note the circularity of your definition, right? Oppression is something that is over. What's oppression? Those horrible things in the past.

That rhetorical tactic works wonderfully at any point in American history. "Why don't you [group name] just shut up and enjoy this now perfectly fair society we white men have built for you? Why keep dwelling on the past?"

I believe that you don't know what I mean. But that's because you don't understand the history. If you'd like to understand, try taking a course. It's not an easy subject, but it's worth the time. Your local college surely offers something. Mine does: https://www.usfca.edu/catalog/undergraduate/arts-sciences/in...

> You note the circularity of your definition, right? Oppression is something that is over. What's oppression? Those horrible things in the past.

I think you misunderstood me; I never said any such thing. Historical oppression is simply oppression that happened in the past. I'm not using "oppression" outside of its normal context.

> But that's because you don't understand the history. If you'd like to understand, try taking a course. It's not an easy subject, but it's worth the time. Your local college surely offers something.

You're being awfully condescending for someone whose argument is roughly "uh... history and stuff".

Ok, back to the beginning:

You were dumping on "identity politics" as if it were some weird new thing invented by the left. My point is that by any reasonable definition, identity politics has been sustained and enforced by the right in the US. For centuries. It is the left that has been trying to tear it down.

The move you're making is known technically as "erasure". Instead of admitting that the status quo is the result of energetic pro-white, pro-male, pro-rich stacking of the deck and honestly proceeding from there, you erase the history and treat pro-white-male identity politics as normal. That makes any deviation from or challenge to it supposedly problematic "identity politics". Even though the very identities at stake, like "black", were constructed by white men, you blame the victims.

You also conflate "real" oppression with "historical" oppression. Your effective definition of oppression isn't some objective measure of misuse of power. It's "the bad shit in the past that is definitely now over". Which is an incredibly convenient definition for your line of argument.

These are only plausible rhetorical moves if you don't really understand the history. You are making bold pronouncements on a topic you obviously don't understand. Why? From here it looks like motivated reasoning with a goal of protecting the status quo. Thus my suggestion that you go take a class. Which I still recommend.

> You were dumping on "identity politics" as if it were some weird new thing invented by the left.

I wasn't. I only said that the left's identity politics probably helped to alienate an important part of their former voting base.

> My point is that by any reasonable definition, identity politics has been sustained and enforced by the right in the US. For centuries. It is the left that has been trying to tear it down.

I don't see how we can meaningfully refer to "the right" or "the left" across such a large time span, but I'm not interested in debating it, so I'll concede that point if it's important to you. I certainly agree that from the civil rights era until roughly ten or twenty years ago, the right was generally in favor of identity politics and the left was against it. Since then, the right have largely accepted the "no more identity politics" position (with notable exceptions here and there), and the left has largely regressed to a pro-identity politics (likewise, with notable exceptions).

> The move you're making is known technically as "erasure". Instead of admitting that the status quo is the result of energetic pro-white, pro-male, pro-rich stacking of the deck and honestly proceeding from there, you erase the history and treat pro-white-male identity politics as normal. That makes any deviation from or challenge to it supposedly problematic "identity politics". Even though the very identities at stake, like "black", were constructed by white men, you blame the victims.

No, no. You're simply wrong about this. I never said or implied any such thing. I've said repeatedly that white oppression existed throughout history. I'm sure I've been less than clear on other points, but I've been perfectly clear about this one.

> You also conflate "real" oppression with "historical" oppression. Your effective definition of oppression isn't some objective measure of misuse of power. It's "the bad shit in the past that is definitely now over". Which is an incredibly convenient definition for your line of argument.

Again, I never said any such thing. The only statements I made about oppression is much of what is called oppression today (things like women choosing their own careers) are not actually oppression by any reasonable definition, and this abuse of terminology by the left has made it really hard to identify and talk about legitimate oppression. I never said anything that could be interpreted as "legitimate oppression is that which occurs in the past"; there are certainly forms of legitimate oppression that exist against minorities today--intimidation of minority religions and communities, for example. It does no good to conflate actual oppression with different outcomes from freely-made choices.

> These are only plausible rhetorical moves if you don't really understand the history. You are making bold pronouncements on a topic you obviously don't understand. Why? From here it looks like motivated reasoning with a goal of protecting the status quo. Thus my suggestion that you go take a class. Which I still recommend.

I don't appreciate you saying I don't understand this. You've erected blatant strawman after blatant strawman (willfully or accidentally), and you tell me to take a class? Come on, you're not being a good faith participant here. I know there are good, legitimate arguments to be made against my points (and I'm sure you're capable of presenting them). Don't insult me by refuting arguments I never made and then telling me to take a class...

> Since then, the right have largely accepted the "no more identity politics" position

This is at best nominally true, but only because being openly pro-white became socially untenable. But it has been a tacit driver for anybody who cares to look, and has again started coming into the open. E.g., Trump ran a pro-white, pro-male identity politics campaign, called white supremacists "very fine people" and just used the power of the pardon to excuse a racist oppressor of Latinos.

> I've said repeatedly that white oppression existed throughout history.

Except that in your view it vanished when rhetorically convenient for you. (You're getting closer, though. Now your past is only ten years away.) That's not "throughout history" in any useful sense. We're still in history. As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

> It does no good to conflate actual oppression with different outcomes from freely-made choices.

This is an example of the erasure I'm talking about. "Actual oppression" is what you as a white man are willing to accept as oppression. Everything else is fake. Who gets to decide? Not the people experiencing it. Not the experts in it. You, a random white guy with no particular expertise. And conveniently, the dividing line between "real" and "fake" is the one that lets you off the hook. What a surprise!

> I don't appreciate you saying I don't understand this.

Noted. I don't appreciate you opining like you understand it when you don't.

> you're not being a good faith participant here.

Ah, so you also get to define good faith. Of course.

That I am not accepting your framing is not a sign of bad faith. It is also not my job to make you feel comfortable about this. Your discomfort is a sign that you could heed if you wanted to: http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249

Just a reminder that pro-black is seen as socially acceptable while pro-white isn't because "black" and "white" aren't comparable concepts.

Black culture is a real thing: it is the culture created by kidnapping millions of Africans, stripping them of their names and heritages, and leaving them to their own devices in a new country. (This sounds activist-y, but it's not; it's a simple statement of fact).

"White culture", on the other hand, is not really a thing. Irish people don't share the same songs, eat the same food, tell the same stories or wear the same clothes as southern Italians. And, in fact, at points not too far back in history, neither the Irish or the Italians were considered "white"!

Compare "pro-black" with "pro-Irish" or "pro-German". You'll find that people are out and proud about their Polish or Lithuanian heritage.

The problem with being "pro-white" is that, when you dig into the history of the concept, it's really just a way of being anti-black (or, if you want to generalize, of being "anti the outgroup of races and cultures not currently accepted into the coalition of races and cultures we currently deem "white").

Signal received!

Just a reminder to you that we're supposed to be a color-blind society. What you've written here is quite wicked and racist because most Americans are ignorant about their history.

That cluelessness presents us with an fantastic opportunity! If you observe the average American numbskull, you'll see he'll treat his peers objectively in the here-and-now rather than through historic racial filters. Given people are now like blank slates, it's cruel of you to pigeon-hole everyone into racial and ethnic buckets the way you've done.

By repeating these confusing things to our lovable idiots, "there's race, historic oppression", you continue to divide people.

You've made yourself clear that you're not interested in an honest debate, and I'm not interested in a dishonest one, so I'll leave you to have the last word, though I won't bother to read it.

He says, disingenuously claiming the last word.

I'm totally interested an honest discussion. Once you start being honest about how your framing of these things is part of America's historical structure of oppression, we can have one. But as long as you keep pretending without evidence that oppression miraculously ended in "in the 70s", "the 90s", or "roughly ten [...] years ago", we can't have an honest discussion.

We both agree America was founded with oppression built in. We both agree that it carried through until recently. You believe that those structures and attitudes totally ended at some hazy time by undescribed means, a time that just happens to be convenient for your argument. I don't. I believe it has continued, waxing and waning just as before.

Per Occam's Razor, you are making the claim that requires justification. The only reason you can act otherwise is that you hold one of the beliefs necessary to prop up oppression: that the current structure is perfectly fair. Suddenly, identity politics is not what white men have been doing in America since 1619. It's what those other people do. Without you ever catching on that your beef with those uppity other people is the same complaint that's been voiced at least since white people were fretting about slave rebellions.

So if you want honesty, get honest. Go take a class and learn the history. Maybe you'll discover some proof that oppression really did end the day before yesterday. But my bet is you'll realize that your claim is bunk.

> This is an example of the erasure I'm talking about. "Actual oppression" is what you as a white man are willing to accept as oppression. Everything else is fake. Who gets to decide? Not the people experiencing it. Not the experts in it. You, a random white guy with no particular expertise. And conveniently, the dividing line between "real" and "fake" is the one that lets you off the hook. What a surprise!

Oh gosh, you are so abrasive!

First, I think she said she was a black woman, so clearly you haven't been a good faith participant with cracks like that.

Second, your use of the word oppression is too loose. You can't slap that word on practically every interaction between humans and not have it lose meaning!

>I don't really understand comments saying that Dems need to focus less on minority issues to win back working-class whites

Its just about strategy, they can still fix the civil rights issues when they get to office. But they don't need to run on them, everyone interested in identity politics (sans the white nationalists) is already voting Dem. Campaigning on these issues doesn't win any new voters. They need to court all the centrists and right-wing people who aren't rich.

Make the election about putting more money in everyday people's pockets. Run on "no taxes on your first $30k of income". Severely cut taxes on everyone below $100k, and start adding new brackets at $1m and every $500k above that.

No of course there isn't.

And if you're only just now figuring that out, now in 2017? Then you haven't been paying attention.

Come on, protesting hasn't been real since the requirement of having "permits", and the creation of "free speech zones". We live in a tyrannical police state masquerading as a peaceful democracy, where trouble makers are gunned down by death squads who are later pardoned by the courts.

Just posting a comment like this on the internet will lead to downvoting and social penalties. Did you know that this site participates in the practice of "hell-banning"? That is where they silently blacklist people for expressing their unpopular opinions about any particular subject. Those people can no longer contribute, but they believe that they can because the system lets them post. But nobody ever sees their comments. It's the exact same thing as what the government does.

Many of "the people" belong to the tyrants' pyramid of control and those who don't are brainwashed by it.

"Is there any point to protesting?", hah I say. Wake up.

I know reddit has shadow bans but I am not aware of it on HN. Do you have any proof?

No they don't, they just ban people. Maybe they used to, but it's an unpopular method.

A HN ban is a shadowban. The user doesn't know he is banned unless being told, and he can post normally. You can, however, see all dead posts by enabling showdead option in your HN settings. I encourage everybody to do that. There are extremely few spam posts, most dead posts are dead for different reasons. Often I see people having been shadowbanned for years.

Enable "showdead" in your profile. You can then view posts by banned accounts as well as posts that have been killed.

Can confirm, this post is absolutely invisible to me

Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later claimed the catalyst for his change of heart on Vietnam policy was when Norman Morrison burned himself alive outside the Pentagon in protest.

I suppose that's one data point in favor of the effectiveness of self-immolation, at least

A self-immolation of an impoverished street vendor is credited with starting the Arab Spring.

The self-immolation of dozens of Palestinians and Tibetans didn't change much. Immolation might be good when the balance of powers is toi strong, but the conflict isn't muddied yet.

I would like to think that there is but it seems like any time the current administration gets significant negative reaction it just turns even further towards racism. As for local members of congress, I live in Indiana and our republican senator seems content to toe the line despite the fact that many of my friends called in protest of the healthcare repeal and I did not see a single post on his facebook page or at him on twitter that supported his vote.

My fear is that Pence does somehow end up as president since he is both a career politician who knows how to work the system and seems to want a theocracy.

My first reaction is to not let the threat of a foolish group of leaders to become more foolish override ones place to voice their opinion.

Second thought is that these foolish leaders stay in power as long as they can point a finger and or claim superiority

I don't think silence helps but it's important to stay principaled and not turn protests into riots which gets difficult at high volume and where people are instigating it

The author puts this transitional, rhetorical statement in the middle of the piece:

> The question, then, is what protest is for.

and somehow doesn't even realize that they largely answered it in the quote that seems like it was included to fill out a "rule of threes" set of examples of protests from the 70s:

> and the pushy, calculating Earth First! movement, which sought to “make it more costly for those in power to resist than to give in.”

If we're talking about protests throughout history as a tactic for change, that quote encapsulates not only the purpose of protests but also the metric by which we retroactively measure their success. (I say retroactively because the most important protests happen under dictatorial regimes that typically aren't keen on accurately communicating to a resistance movement how much they've managed to deplete the dictator's coffers.)

There are certainly also such things as symbolic protests, but it's a truism that those are more amorphous and less likely to lead to change than more serious ones. And if the idea was to use the word "protest" as a shorthand for the set of symbolic protests in the U.S. that seem at the moment not to have had any measurable effect, that is unclear and prone to confusion.

When I hear this question, my answer is: Imagine the world without the protests. Imagine if nobody protested Trump's actions, or Putin's. Imagine if something horrible happened and nobody responded, they just went about their days. Imagine the terrible, demoralizing, crushing silence.

Protests are a public service message that what is happening is not ok with your neighbors; that it matters to them. That's why I encourage people to show up, even if it seems pointless; each additional body matters: 10 people is still better than none; 100 better than 10; 1,000 better than 100, etc. Silence = consent.

Oh yes, imagine the silence of people peacefully talking with each other and forming their own opinions, and come election time change the government. Having opinions without being told by the opinions makers, crushing.

Imagine the property that wasn't destroyed, the lives that weren't lost, the sides that didn't become more and more polarised.

I'm against any violence. Protest does not at all require violence.

Protests are a consequence of a democracy that isn't.

If people had power, they would cast votes (on laws or representatives) instead of wasting their precious time walking around with little to no observable effect.

Well no, because you still need to convince the majority to your opinion... your single individual vote is still meaningless on the macro scale

Protests also needs to convince but in protests consent/dissent is not even measured ...

Protests aren't meant to persuade - they're meant to draw attention. Persuasion is a separate step in the movement. Look at BlackLivesMatter. The initial protests drew attention to issues of police brutality that most Americans had little knowledge of. Then, journalists contextualized the history of police violence and attempted to persuade readers. Protests also help frame a narrative, which make people more amenable to persuasion.

Why should the majority share my opinion? Maybe I am wrong. Maybe it would be boring, because there wouldn't be discussions any more.

Different opinions may coexist.

....because in a democracy, majority vote rules

So obviously if you want something to change...

If the majority of a population think being gay or bisexual is a horrific thing, and are OK with barring these folks teaching jobs and the like, what happens then? If one doesn't protest and can't get jobs in positions that reach folks, what are the other options? Pretend you aren't gay? Pretend you only like the opposite sex? How in the world does this person fight religious messages saying this is wrong?

If you are in a country where such discrimination is OK, I don't think that the general population is going to look too kindly on the oppressed class protesting. There are already cultures where if you go against the majority opinion you can end up burning all the bridges to your family and friends.

The US, though? That's where I've experienced this stuff. It isn't always "kill the gays", just like it isn't always "kill the minorities".

The social backlash can be bad enough: I was 13 when some girls figured out I was interested in other girls. I sat alone the rest of the year and folks wouldn't speak to me. The high school I gradutated from (different school system) would not allow same-sex couples to go to prom together. I know of a school superintendent that tried not to hire gay teachers, as he thought a gay teacher turned his son gay. I personally identify as bisexual, but the options I had with women in the US weren't the same as men. A woman couldn't adopt my child, nor could we be legally married until recently.

As recently as 1998, oral and anal sex was considered sodomy by US military code. Guess what that means? Same sex sexual relations can get you dishonorably discharged.

And you are correct - few in the states look kindly on the oppressed class protesting. And it is supposed to be a right.

Sexual orientation wasn't considered a protected class until recently. EEOC took their first case only a year or two ago.

There is often a large discrepancy between what people say that they believe, and what they actually believe. In a 'Christian middle-class family', it may be that everyone believe that everyone else is against homosexuality. The priest says it is a mortal sin, and no-one has said they disagreed. Secretly the kids might think homosexuality-as-sin is an disgusting idea, the wife might think 'of course gays rights should be respected', and the father might feel 'whatever, I don't care what people do in their bedrooms'.

In this example the personal opinion has shifted in favour of homosexuality, however the public opinion has not caught up yet. To break the stalemate of everyone holding their potentially-controversal-but-not-actually opinion to themselves, some external nudge might be needed. A protest might be what brings the topic up, so that peoples actual opinions can come forth.

Such outing can have ripple effects. Kid talk about their family fight-which-wasnt to other kids, and find out their families also are in support. Soon everyone in the church is collectively rolling their eyes when priest harps on gays. Eventually the priest picks up the vibe and stops mentioning homosexuality as a sin altogether.

The problem isn't that the democracy "isn't". It's that people joining these protests are in a minority, sometimes a tiny minority, and democracies don't cater to minority opinions.

There are point(s) to protesting the state, but not other groups of fringe citizens who disagree with you. They would be better dealt with by ignoring them.

The people showing up at these 'stand-off' style events are not wrong, but they are probably just short-sighted and distracted by boogeymen.

There is a point in counter protests, you show others that they have good people on their side.

Doing a counter-protest the next day or at a different location would also do that.

The Boston counter-protest clearly had some effect. A large number of nationalist rallies have been cancelled [1], as a result. So there does seem to be a point.

Also, it does raise public awareness of matters, in general, as long as the media doesn't just ignore or downplay things.

[1] https://twitter.com/joncoopertweets/status/89980448626848563...

Do not go gentle into that good night

Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953

  Do not go gentle into that good night,
  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
  Because their words had forked no lightning they
  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
  Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
  And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
  Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  And you, my father, there on the sad height,
  Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

That poem means the exact opposite of what you seem to think it means (like most allegories, to be fair).

It seems like it means what he thinks it means.. What do you think he meant and what do you think the poem means?

What does it mean?

It's artsy nonsense pandering to people who think unqualified anger arising from helpless dissatisfaction and lack of composure is cool and praiseworthy. It's not, just like the protests.

I'm surprised by your strong reaction. What makes you think it's artsy nonsense?

Please, elaborate on the opposite meaning!

Dylan's poem seems much more straight forward (unlike Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening for one)

For humanity it is all ephemeral/useless but give a good fight anyway. Oh vanity of vanities...

If there is an alternative/hidden meaning to this poem it would be fascinating to hear about it.

All critics/readers seems to think that father was indeed his own father that Dylan was writing to. Maybe it was not so?

What do you think it means?

OT: I've learned in life that such words are often more about the adult child's fear of death and fear of the fading and loss of their parent's help and love, than it is about the father's feelings. I'd love to have seen what Dylan Thomas would have written about it in his declining years.

It's a poem I see quoted far more by the young than by the elderly, and I don't think the young want to hear why.

It's a stupid poem. A man who's lived properly to old age dies in peace, having already raged his entire life.

There was a protest in state of Tamil Nadu, India in regards to jellikettu(bull racing) where the central government banned it. The whole state protested, and the ban was lifted.

Is that a good thing though? Maybe the government banned it because they found that most of the population is opposed to it. Then it got reinstated because of a loud minority. Why should a loud minority get their way at the expense of everyone else?

If most people were opposed to it, then they would have voted out the law makers who reversed the ban.

For some subjective perspective, Tamil Nadu is basically a hardcore Hindu area. The people are positively fervent. It seems like Tamils sort of see themselves as protectors of ancient tradition (they are one of the oldest communities in India). It's really conservative: in the cities you rarely see women alone on the street. If you go there during election time the election posters are hilarious. Examples: https://goo.gl/photos/nLsD5XFYT3t2XVpu8 https://goo.gl/photos/AmZrD94WWBk3ddup8 https://goo.gl/photos/ETSdFDftX8fvcLVU8

Indians, like Americans, are notorious for voting against their stated interests. They have high corruption but keep voting for corrupt politicians. Similarly, most of America's problems are caused by the same two parties that almost everybody either votes for or complacently allows to get elected. We should really put more blame on voters instead of governments to remind people that they cause their own problems and can fix them too.

Maybe protests do something, but they are less important than the primary elections every 2 years. The House can be completely changed every 2 years. People just need to get smarter with their voting and candidates will start to represent the people.

The time spent protesting is better spent fielding candidates, coming up with a platform that helps 80% of the population, and going door to door to spread the message.

An easy way to test this article's hypothesis would be to sit down with the old hands who help organize these protests - let's say, some of the old former SNCC and Black Panther types advising the younger Black Lives Matter organizers, and ask them if they think a series of demonstrations are the means to change things. I am pretty confident, because I have spent a lot of time around organizers of different colors who go back to the 1960s (or 1930s) that 99% of the time, they are going to say no. It's a very easy way to falsify this hypothesis. I mean, you might get this reaction from some 16 year old who has come to their first demonstration, but you would rarely get it from someone seriously involved. New Yorker articles about such matters usually have some flaws, but this one is much worse than usual as he didn't do a very simple thing to falsify his hypothesis.

A protest can only work if the people who are in power feel that their lives are being threatened. They get death threats all the time and they take notice of big upticks in numbers.

If enough people want a politician gone, they will be. There is a point when people's will can transcend the boundaries of the law.

If you want to influence someone, or some orgnanisation, you need leverage. It could a reward, or a threat, something. Otherwise how can you motivate them to accommodate your wishes?

_ Eg. A well organised strike threatens the businesses profits and can be effective.

_ But simply marching on the street, who cares about that?

This is the 21st century, protest via social network sites. Tell your grandmother that Trump is a jerk, etc by uploading a meme or something so she can share it with her friends, etc. :)

Sign an online petition to boycott a place that does something wrong. Write to advertisers and sponsors of their advertising that you will boycott them as long as they support that group and tell your friends and family.

Maybe someone can make a protest website called iprotest.com or something?

What's worked recently in the US in protesting? Gay marriage succeeded, transgender rights backfired, some local success on $15 minimum wage. The Bundy Malheur takeover fizzled out. Big wins on gun rights. Any visible pattern?

One might argue that gay marriage succeeded because it is good for the economy. All gays I know are incredibly smart, savvy and professionally successful. They worked for many years and became a financial and political force, not to mention they succeeded in getting people to like them and empathize with their cause.

I think this is the point. The success of any protest movement depends on whether it can be galvanized into a political force. This can happen either when the protesters have economic and financial influence in terms of sheer numbers. Alternatively, it can happen when the protesters learn to organise in a way that they become politically relevant by voting along certain lines or candidate, but even here the numbers are important.

Gay marriage didn't become a legal right in the U.S. through protests. It became a "right" after the U.S. Supreme Court dictated that States cannot makes laws banning it.

A viewpoint from the political world: In a word, no. This is because the protests are mostly running on raw emotion and not sustained. I see people screaming at empty buildings on the weekends in DC and it accomplished absolutely nothing. If you really want to make change in America with a protest, it must be consistent, and constant. Show up at 10am on a Tuesday at the US Capitol. Return every single day. These one-off venting of outrage is too easily ignored.

Protesting is also a personal act. Regardless of the actual usefulness of protesting, protesting definitely helps us to actually not resign. Protesting in itself is a commitment of oneself to a cause. Not protesting is definitely putting oneself away from that cause. So the question of the consequence on the "system" is, to me, second. I protest because I disagree, then I protest to remove the cause of that disagreement.

The author manages to completely rip off Adam Curtis's excellent documentary film Hypernormalisation without a single reference to it. Well done.

Protests speak, but so does money, and since citizens united, it speaks louder them ever before, drowning it the relative whisper of the people.

Perhaps not directly. But might initially ineffective protests consolidate and inspire the participants towards larger actions?

Right leaning = "wing nut", Centrist = "quailing".

You certainly get a lot more bang for your protestor buck when you're able to show the politicians that their own electorate is against issue X.

Are there modern examples of this?

Follow up questions: 1) Especially for issues relevant to the tech community? 2) Can that be done by an average citizen?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA

About the only supporters those bills had were IP owners; effectively everyone else in the US was against them and Congress got the message.

Gotta pay rent.

You need to very well understand what you are protesting against, that this monolith of power is not a monolith - more something like a medieval wall, with cracks and fractures. You need to find these fractures, and apply force only to these weak points, to bring down a avalanch.

And then what? Then the machinery will repair itself- replacing damaged careers with new up-jumped individuals and the process will continu.

The goal should actually be to understand the nature of humanity, not as in "I-understand-to-feel-self-rightous-about-it", but in a "Know-your-bricks-to-build-a-house" way.

There will always be those who claw and crawl for power and control. Taking away that control, for example by a basic income, is percived as hostility towards by that mindset. So protesting for it, will not lead to change.

Now, if you state that anyone who recives basic income must join a group- who strives for a endavour, and that the most succesfull of these groups shall be taken as example policy in that sector.

You only subtile changed the demand. But you crafted it more compatible to human nature. Suddenly protests can be succesfull.

Only a hipster snowflake's magazine could put such question in a headline.

A crowd is a major hardwired social heuristic. When someone sees a crowd of protestors or supporters almost automatic mental processes of estimating it's size and more importantly of taking a side wether one is with it or against it are triggered. It also forms a emotionally charged long lasting memory - a hostile crowd is a major life threat. Crowd of supporters is associated with protection and change. This is freshman's social psychology 101.

Number of likes, BTW, and numbers related to social events in general works in the same way. Social heuristics are hardwired and hence easily exploited by media or sales departments. The best strategy is to convince a potential buyer that there is a presumed crowd of enthusiastic buyers behind him. Tesla is the obviously example.

Crowd of protesters is a major concern even for Trump.

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