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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

Which is maddening, given how much damage these existing policies are doing, and how many other zeitgeist issues (homelessness, affordability, robust economic growth etc) are downstream of this.

I wonder if this movement needs a form of performative extremism somewhere (think bridges being forcibly closed for causes), so that then the mainstream notices the sensible compromise and pushes for it. The YIMBY's have never played Overton Window games, but maybe they need to hold their nose and play it.

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> think bridges being forcibly closed for causes

Has irritating the Average Joe ever resulted in political support from Joe? I can't help but think that these guys sitting in front of traffic, forcing normal people to be late for work, are just doing damage to their own causes, in hopes of just getting some "visibility" to those causes. Yea, it's visible now--visible as something annoying and ultimately counterproductive.

Local politics are very different, especially in responsiveness, to state and national politics.

Famously sit ins and marches across public streets and bridges did some work for the civil rights movement, but they were certainly not popular with the locals either.

They largely weren’t for the locals. The biggest wins were from deliberately provoking extremists who foolishly allowed nationwide pictures of dogs and water cannons being used to attack children, which attracted attention from people elsewhere.

> they were certainly not popular with the locals either.

No, but the cause was popular enough with broader electorate.

Doing a little looking around about why some of those worked, and so few have since, was interesting to me.

Length, economic impact, cold war politics, regional vs national opinions, how actors reacted (sometimes violently), the way information propagated at the time… an interesting confluence of events.

Parent is not claiming that protesters generally gain support for their own cause. Parent claims that protests shift the Overton Window such that more reasonable stances can fall within and gain support.

Yes. Thank you. And actually, when you have a non-politically charged conversation offline with some of the political operatives that cause these bridge shutdowns, they will admit that this is their goal as well. They know it's ragebait, but bait nonetheless.

Those are the same argument. The idea that “I’m the moderate and if you don’t vote for my position, you’ll get the extremist” is a form of blackmail.

Not quite - that’s if you believe the moderates control the extremists. If they don’t, it’s more like “I’m the extremist and I am currently so unhappy I will do this. What will you do to make me less unhappy?”

This doesn’t seem to follow? No “control” is needed, a quid quo pro is more than sufficient.

Control/coordination

It’s a terrible idea and I believe a substantial portion of the world’s polarization issues stem from this “overton window” nonsense.

How are you ever going to find common ground if everybody who cares deeply about an issue constantly makes the moet extreme version of their argument?

Bold of you to assume extreme version arguments are by people who legitimately care, and not in many cases griefers, rage baiters, etc.

Either way, the shift in day to day to day stances is apparent on many topics.

as a general case yes, people like things more the more times they hear about them.

trump constantly doing annoying stuff for instance, was good for him getting elected.

visibility correlates positively with likeability

> trump constantly doing annoying stuff for instance, was good for him getting elected.

And I remember when just yelling on stage got you disqualified from running for president (Dean scream)

Now, you can chant fascist rhetoric on campaign, and the MAGAts eat it up.

How times and decorum change.

The left is held to a much higher standard than the right in the US. By both sides.

Trump was a convicted sexual molester when last elected. Senator Franken was asked to leave office by his own party for a decades-old (tasteless) joke-photo.

This titanic difference in standards helps enables people to pretend "BSAB".

On principle I usually vote against anyone who harms me, my life, or my family’s life. I’ve never accepted the claims that people who hold up traffic to “raise awareness” for global warming were effective. We’re all aware of the phenomenon now. You’re just being an asshole and throwing a tantrum because people aren’t voting like you want them to.

I'm not sure I understand what work "on principle" is doing in this sentence.

What's the difference between voting against anyone who acts against your interests "on principle", and voting against anyone who acts against your interests "out of self-interest"?

(I am not suggesting that you shouldn't vote self-interestedly; arguably democracy works best when everyone does.)

Assuming I understand your question, I vote for people I would not have otherwise voted for merely to spite the people who have harmed me in some way. It's petty but it makes me feel like I have reclaimed some agency against said aggressors.

The phrase “cutting your nose off to spite your face” springs to mind.

or the phrase lesser of two evils...

Candidate A - will do X, Y, Z all in ways I think are the best Candidate B - will do A, B, C which I prefer less than X, Y, Z but in the grand scheme likely impact my day to day life little. Candidate A - also supports (or is supported by) people / movements that actively make my life harder and piss me off.

That's not cutting off my nose that's deciding I can live with a less optimal solution to some problems to avoid something that pisses me off massively from growing more powerful

>I’ve never accepted the claims that people who hold up traffic to “raise awareness” for global warming were effective

Martin Luther King wrote an essay about people with this exact attitude called "the racism of the polite liberal"

There were obviously just as many people back then who thought his type of activism - e.g. blocking a freeway would never achieve any of his goals. They thought it was just annoying, even though it was successful.

I find it fascinating when people make the argument that the reason the civil rights movement succeeded was the harm done to society, and not because it was morally right. The implications of this claim are frightening, and can be used to justify all manner of violence for any and all political causes. Should someone wish to restrict abortion rights, they just need to sufficiently terrorise the nation to the degree that they get their way? I strongly disagree that that is how laws and rights work in a democracy.

I believe the civil rights movement succeeded in America because it was morally right. Not because black activists caused social harm.

That's incredibly naïve. If being morally right was all it took, slavery would not have been a thing in the first place.

Do you think people just naturally become more aware of immoral things? Even if you assume better education is the single reason, that's something that's very much not a given, and is in fact constantly being attacked by people who benefit from it not being guaranteed.

When you're fighting against billionaires who want to act against your best interest, do you believe you just need to appeal to people's morality and it's an easy win? Sorry to say it doesn't work like that, though it'd be wonderful if it did. People's minds are swayed easier by financial interests than they are by moral value. That's the impact of a capitalist system allowing levels of inequality putting even people's livelihood in danger.

Status quo is much easier to defend than it is to disrupt, regardless of how immoral it is in the first place. And disruption needs drastic measures to be successful when fighting an asymmetrical war of resources.

> That's incredibly naïve. If being morally right was all it took, slavery would not have been a thing in the first place.

I think this is incredibly naive. Morality isn’t objective. It changes and adapts and grows. It is the product of culture and religion and circumstance. Values can deviate markedly between people in a single family, let alone within a nation and between nations.

Slavery used to be considered moral in the West. Then some time in 1833, the British people voted to end it across all colonies. Not because slaves terrorised British citizens into acquiescence, but because literature and education and culture had advanced, and the British no longer believed that people should be enslaved.

I’m sorry, I simply do not subscribe to your vision for society of might making right. That is the domain of dictators and despots, not democracies.

That sounds like a strawman. What you're arguing against is not how I read the parent

I don’t think you read the comments above before you replied. They argue for “disruption” and “drastic measures.” Do you think they’re talking about a dance troupe?

>I find it fascinating when people make the argument that the reason the civil rights movement succeeded was the harm done to society,

I find it fascinating that what Martin Luther King described as the "polite liberal racist" who moaned about blocking a freeway is still alive and well.

>I believe the civil rights movement succeeded in America because it was morally right

No, it worked because of Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest tactics - the ones which you described as terrorism.

This comment doesn’t respond to anything and adds nothing helpful. I flagged it

Thats your right of course, although the parallels to MLK's essay about the backlash he faced for holding up traffic are still precisely applicable here no matter how upsetting you may find that.

I don’t subscribe to your violent retelling of MLK. He spoke at length on countless occasions of using words, not violence to affect social change.

There is no violent retelling.

Your choice to depict blocking a freeway as "violence" doesnt make it so, it simply puts you in the camp of liberals he criticised for indirectly supporting the racist status quo.

Using force to prevent people going to work, or seeing their family, or getting to hospital, is wrong. Especially if the goal is to coerce people. If I came to your house and physically prevented you from leaving I doubt you’d be making equivocations. Whether you want to call it violence, force, or any other fluffy euphemism, I do not subscribe to your vision for society or your retelling of MLK.

"Roadworks and heavy traffic are violence"

What is morally right is a matter of public consensus, not a self-evident fact to those outside that moral context. Law is the expression of morality at a societal level. How do you propose changing the societal expression of the public consensus without making a nuisance of yourself?

The same way all progress is made in a democracy: dialogue. Violence and domination has been frequently used throughout history, but we no longer solve our differences that way. At least, I don’t want to live in such a society.

I don’t think dialogue has ever been the principal motivator for social change.

> I don’t want to live in such a society.

You kind of already do, but kind of don’t. Coercive politics still rule, but countries with strong civil liberties protections allow less harmful forms of coercion. Under strongman rule, coercion looks like the threat of murder. Under a liberal democracy, coercion looks like blocking traffic. That’s a big improvement.

Positive incentives (bribery and upside) also play a role opposite coercion. But “dialogue” absent self interested or dominance-oriented goals is a much less significant influence—unless you loosen the definition of dialogue to include things like “I convince you that it’s in your interests to vote for X so that protestors stop blocking traffic”, at which point there’s no distinction between the concepts.

> I don’t think dialogue has ever been the principal motivator for social change.

You cannot divorce dialogue from change in sentiments among the public. It spreads for a reason.

For instance, we've entered a period of populist hysteria with both left/right variants.

I don't think any significant social change has been bought about by people asking nicely. Votes for women, anti racism, worker's rights, land rights - all hard fought for.

What a shallow understanding of history. Men didn’t vote to give women the right to vote because women waged war on men. It was a centuries-long process of cultural and educational and social progress beginning in the Enlightenment in 1650.

I don’t subscribe to your belief that politics and society requires power and domination. I suggest you look to nations and cultures which follow such beliefs to see how well that turns out.

If their take was shallow yours is revisionist to the point it's ahistorical.

Choosing to focus on the "centuries-long process of cultural and educational and social progress beginning in the Enlightenment in 1650" but then ignoring that the suffragettes were bombing buildings within the decade they got the vote, do you not think you're laying your own narrative on a little too thick?

I agree. Look at the swing from opposing gay marriage to supporting it. It went from mostly opposed to mostly supporting it in ten years. Obama went from opposing to supporting it during his presidential term.

And it wasn't violence or obnoxious protests that changed people's minds. In large part, they just saw it, talked about it, experienced it, and became ok with it. Mostly because the culture had advanced to a point where the discussion could be had.

How do you convince white people to have a dialogue with you when you're black in the highly segregated and extremely racist society we had 60 years ago? How can you make them understand what you live when there is a legal policy of separation between you? I don't think you really understand what segregation and racism being accepted facts of society ("morally right" in the views of many whites at the time) or lynching being not an unheard-of barbaric act but a form of popular vigilantism punishing any kind of "miscegenation" or "uppity" attitudes really means. The fact that the civil rights movement was largely peaceful was a marvel when you look at the actual facts of the time, because the oppression of non-whites and retribution activists faced was certainly not peaceful.

> How do you convince white people to have a dialogue with you when you're black in the highly segregated and extremely racist society we had 60 years ago?

The vast majority of black and white people had reasonable dialogue all over the U.S. in the 60s. There were obviously places where racism prevailed to greater degrees, and I think the record reflects that dialogue was less successful there. Which is why they were forced at the federal level to desegregate. The reason that the laws were passed at the federal level was dialogue. Outreach, lobbying, fliers, marketing, campaigning. All the things which make democracy great.

Remember that the reason the Civil and Voting Rights Act(s) (and their amendments) passed in the 60s was because white people - the major and predominant voting bloc - believed they were morally right. Black people didn't terrorise white people isn't submission. That would have backfired spectacularly.

> Remember that the reason the Civil and Voting Rights Act(s) (and their amendments) passed in the 60s was because white people - the major and predominant voting bloc - believed they were morally right. Black people didn't terrorise white people isn't submission. That would have backfired spectacularly.

Civil disobedience is not terrorism. Conflating the two is highly problematic. Civil disobedience was a large part of the reason white people changed their views. Without courageous blacks standing up and protesting and making themselves heard and seen in public, most white people wouldn't have cared. The government and other influential groups tried to suppress the movement until they couldn't anymore, and then they caved. Acting as if they did so at the first moment because everybody recognized the moral correctness of equality is totally ahistorical and a whitewashing of history.

"Terrorised" and "terrorism" have different definitions. I'm disappointed that you would attempt to conflate the two in an attempt to refute an argument I didn't make.

If you believe that black people harming white people - whether by the use of force, preventing free movement, or any aphorism you would like to use - was a "large part of the reason white people changed their views" then I would like to see evidence of that. Force works in dictatorships but I don't think it's effective in democracies. Why would someone vote for a person who has materially harmed them or made their lives worse? Surely that would make it less likely to win a vote.

Civil rights wasn't decided by plebiscite - it was decided by elected representatives. They saw huge crowds gathering in support, tremendous amounts of dialogue about what and how and why activists and government were doing. The activists made some people temporarily angry by blocking traffic or violating their ideas about proper societal organization, but the TV and newspaper coverage reached many more and managed to convince enough of them speak up that the representatives went along with it. Of course dialogue was a huge part of this, but that dialogue wouldn't have existed on the same scale or been nearly as effective in bringing change if activists hadn't caused a big fuss in the first place.

If a child is bullied at school and suffers in silence, chances are they will continue being bullied. If they fight back or make a scene, a teacher is far more likely to take notice and possibly be convinced to correct the situation. The same principle is at play in most political movements. To get people to care, you have to make them pay attention first! You have to make them outraged, make them react, make them think, make them do something. When representatives see people in a furor they know they have to take a side, and usually the side that makes more noise wins.

The US itself was founded like this - the Boston Tea Party is one of the most famous acts of civil disobedience in history. Our electoral system is a process of continual revolution, continual change and upheaval. This process is necessarily just as messy and ugly as our own society. The fact that even in the very ugly and full-of-contradictions pre-Civil Rights era USA we could have a revolution with relatively little loss of life and mostly minor disruptions to the lives of people should be celebrated rather than bemoaned. Look at what it took to be rid of monarchy and slavery and see that the way we overcame/are still overcoming segregation and racial bias shows vast improvements and gives hope for even more civil revolutions in the future.

Lest you forget, the people vote for the representatives. There were 18 different consequential national elections between 1955 and 1968, in which every single member of the House, Senate, and Presidency were up for election multiple times. To characterise this as legislative activism is outrageous and without any historical corroboration. The vast majority of voters were not harmed by black people. They voted for change because they believed it to be moral, not because they saw black people harming white people on the news. I asked you to substantiate your claim and given this response it seems clear you know that you cannot.

> If a child is bullied at school and suffers in silence, chances are they will continue being bullied. If they fight back or make a scene, a teacher is far more likely to take notice and possibly be convinced to correct the situation.

This is not how it works in most parts of the Western world anymore. The child who is being bullied reports the bully and the authorities (usually a teacher or other faculty) address the issue with various forms of remediation. I feel sorry for you if this was your experience at school. It sounds awful.

> The US itself was founded like this...

I'm not sure if you understand the implication of invoking the founding of the nation as a cultural pillar for future change. At this time slavery was moral and legal. Women couldn't vote. They were effectively property. It seems you're being selective about one aspect of the past to justify a vision for the future in which force is required for change.

Do you believe that it is moral and just for anti-migrant protestors to use force against you? Or is it just the things you personally care about where force is acceptable? I think we both know the answer to that question. This is why in a democracy we give everyone one vote, and we require them to follow the law. That means not using force to coerce others. If you were to succeed in your vision for society, you'd have to accept that others would use force against you for their aims, and you'd be a hypocrite to condemn it.

> This is not how it works in most parts of the Western world anymore. The child who is being bullied reports the bully and the authorities (usually a teacher or other faculty) address the issue with various forms of remediation. I feel sorry for you if this was your experience at school. It sounds awful.

It's very hard to take your opinions as sincere and earnest when you're in one comment selectively pruning hundreds of years of history to make your point and then pretending that bullying is a solved problem to make your point in another. Just a reminder that we're living in the realm of rising teenage suicide rates, much of that rooted in the trauma caused by bullying.

If nothing else I'd call on you to be kinder to the people you're responding to, who put in the effort when you're clearly not doing the same.

Success of protests and grassroots movements does not scale with harm/annoyance to society. If that were true you'd just have to be as annoying and hostile as possible to win, which would have been sussed out a long time ago.

The predictor is public moral sentiment, and maximizing exposure to an issue people would be sympathetic to.

Blocking traffic "for climate awareness" does not engender sympathy. People think themselves "aware" that climate is an issue, but aren't on board with perverse degrowth solutions.

If there's one thing that is universally hated left, right, and center, it's traffic.

Agree with NIMBY's that a lot of constructions are a blight. Propose to demolish their own house, as you believe its a blight upon the place. They should agree to it after all and be proactive about it given how earnestly they believe in keeping the locality pretty.

People buy a house with an implicit expectation that zoning regulations and building code will be relatively stable. Even if those laws are unnecessarily restrictive or nonsensical, I don’t think the NIMBYs are crazy for being upset about changes to those laws that will lower their property values. They may even want to change them but the fact of the matter is they have a financial incentive to protect the value of their property.

Implicit but unreasonable.

Successful areas change: you get a few people, then you need a store, then you get more people and all of sudden there's nowhere to walk, so you make a park and some avenues, then people like those and move in, then you need a school and a hardware store and a power plant even if the OGs were homeschoolers with donkey power and hate your guts.

Don't like it? Hold on to the land.

Dire Straits' Telegraph Road is a good documentary on the subject.

It isn't clear that upzoning reduces property values, as it increases the potential productivity of a given parcel of land.

People have all sorts of unreasonable expectations and we are not obliged to honor them.

Upzoning increases property values, because the increased flexibility for development makes the land more valuable.

Plenty of ideas have shifted public opinion because people argued for them in good faith. But performative extremism doesn't automatically insert ideas into the Overton window.

The best reading of the literature is that radicals can make moderates look reasonable but reduce overall support for their cause. See these recent papers for the research:

- "Radical flanks of social movements can increase support for moderate factions": Simpson, Willer & Feinberg 2022, https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/1/3/pgac110/66336...

- "Extreme Protest Tactics Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements": Feinberg, Willer & Kovacheff 2017, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2911177 (this is the working paper, since the published piece is paywalled)

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