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Protests are inconvenient. But if you can amass enough people day after day to block major intersections with crowds of people, then the correct thing to do is to block major intersections with crowds of people day after day.

If people don't want their intersections blocked by crows of people day after day, then they should consider the extent to which their interests are compatible with the interests of the protesters, and if necessary and reasonable, consider joining the protesters to help them achieve their goal sooner. If seventy percent of the US population were protesting, the protests wouldn't last that long - unlike in Hong Kong.

Being a large enough crowd to block an intersection does not mean your views are valid enough to be supported by everyone else. Would you really advocate joining KKK protests just because they were large?

White supremacists are actively trying to fly under the radar in open-carry protests right now.[1] There’s a lot of weird noise in that area online and off. So just because white supremacists and their sympathizers get to protest, that doesn’t mean other people get to protest? Sounds like separate but equal to me.[2] Not for me or mine.

This was your hypothetical, but it’s actually reality. Protest is protest. It’s for the whole society to decide what are valid forms of it, at every level.

[1] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-move...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal

" It’s for the whole society to decide what are valid forms of it, at every level."

That's just lawlessness.

There's not way to make up the rules as we go along, using the 'winds of the day' and what's happening on the news to determine what's a legit protest and what is not.

We do decide collectively what's what by using laws and policies. We make those, we make them clear, and then we apply them.

It seems as though you can't block traffic at a busy intersection 'because' - and so whatever the protest is today, it's not right.

We can't make up as we go along, that's chaos.

People can protest in parks, in front of city hall etc. - that works, it's peaceful and within civil framework.

As I said before, that is not backed up by Supreme Court precedent. You need to cite your claims as to constitutionally-protected protests being synonymous with lawlessness. As I read the Constitution, any act determined to be protest by the courts is legal until found otherwise. Police decisions about lawlessness are only valid in a law-enforcement context, and such police determinations are only provisional, and are not exclusively binding; they can be superseded by higher authorities in the executive branch, and challenged by the public, legislature, and judiciary, on legal grounds as well as humanitarian grounds.

You haven’t responded to my legal arguments and justifications. You are moving the goalposts and doubling down. Please keep on point or I will not have any substantial points to respond to.

> I would like to invite anyone to define exactly under what conditions people think they have the right to stop traffic at major intersections for hours on end, other than of course signalling to the city beforehand.

When peaceful protests have failed to affect change and police brutality (especially for POC) is continuing unabated.

I'll respond to this comment here on behalf of all of the responses to my point:

None of you have provided any reasonably objective definition of what could constitute an otherwise illegal, and sometimes violent protest.

These responses sound a lot like right-wing NRA 2cnd Amendment people barricading in buildings with guns and police surrounding them kind of rhetoric.

All three of the responses (at the time of my response) purport arbitrary definitions of self-determined, extra-judicial action - essentially vigilantism.

Literally, people inventing some cause and then taking over public property, sometimes causing damage, or worse.

If you accept your own definitions of 'legitimate cause' - I'm afraid you're really not going to like what a lot of other Americans would like to protest, just as violently.

If people are going to protest, especially when things can get violent, they're going to have to do so in a way that's not entirely disruptive -> like gather in a park, otherwise, it's just not going to work out.

We don't get to invent the law, no matter how passionate we are about something.

There are just a ton of better ways to create change that are totally within civil and legal framework, and there are many good examples to follow. And especially the rioting is probably counter-productive in almost every sense of the terms.

I'm sure the protesters will check with you next time about whats reasonable before they dare to object.

Whoa there, extremely confident used-to-being-right guy. You're digging in. I'm sure you feel threatened at the possibility you might be wrong, but take a breath, please.

By your definition, black people using or destroying a whites-only bathroom as a form of protest would be off limits. I'd recommend some time away from the keyboard and do some reading about protest and the cultural history of same. As a very basic starting point, you might consider reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest in its entirety.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the American Revolution.

A mark of any free democratic society is for the right of the public to engage in peaceful protest and for the form of that peaceful protest to be not be constrained by external parties.

For example it is not up to the government to define what constitutes an acceptable peaceful protest.

When you get to the point where the government defines what is and what is not an acceptable protest then you no longer have a free democracy society.

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Your priorities are reversed. Black lives being taken by police aggression are not less important than free flowing traffic. Even more so when the former has been the status quo since before the civil war.