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Comment by vackosar | Hacker News Reader

Is this approach working at all for their goal? It always sounds rather like they just annoy people they are trying to save, no?

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Think of it like an annoying advertising campaign where even if you don't like the advert now you are more likely to be aware of the product.

But if the campaign truly is annoying, couldn't it make people more aware, yet also more likely to side in the opposite way the campaigners intended/desired?

This is a common argument used to detract from protests (I'm not saying you are using it deliberately). People ask why people have to be so distruptive and question the methods to move from the issues and focus on the individuals. Why can't the protest just be a little more reasonable and acceptable to them. Even though the only acceptable protest to the questioners would be one that didn't happen and caused zero disruption.

Protests are intentionally disruptive to get attention. Otherwise they wouldn't work and news reports and stories about the issue being protested wouldn't be made. We know this protest worked because we're still discussing it.

True, but there's also a more rational angle to this - as an activist group, you have to ask yourself, how much sympathy for your cause are you willing to sacrifice to get more attention?

How is your point more rational?

I think it made that final even more entertaining than it was already being.

Of course it could, as we've seen with PETA many times and as the Critical Mass is continuously proving.

Sure, if you're morally depraved. But then you were never going to care about the injustices of a police state, so who cares where you stand.

It would've worked better if more people were doing it. I for one am disappointed the World Cup hasn't suffered any interruptions that would allow to showcase Russia's issues on the world stage.

Depends on what the goal is. Activists often have this bad tradeoff - be either reasonable but also invisible, or be unreasonable and thus visible, but risk polarizing people (including their own supporters) against their own cause. PETA is a great example of the latter; they're very successful at making people stop being vegetarian and support factory farming just out of spite.

Scott Alexander once wrote a great piece touching this phenomenon - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/.

I didn't like them when they weren't state-backed. Now I like them better.

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