To think protesting doesn't work anymore?

[022828MAN]

From BLM, Extinction Rebellion, Anti lock down protests in Melbourne.

I'm not arguing whether the context or reason for the protesting is justified or not, but I just wonder whether protesting is ever going to get results for anyone in this day and age.

It seems as though it's just the go-to answer nowadays, yet I've not seen anywhere it seems to have yielded any results. All I see is prolonged anguish, anxiety, vandalism, violence and arrests.

I feel like police / gov actively won't respond to demands through protesting as they believe it will show them to be able to be manipulated, and therefore they purposely do not give in to protests.

I'm not here to say people shouldn't be vocal when they believe in something, but is protesting the answer in modern times?

Trump supporters complain about the protests but defend Kyle Rittenhouse. You can't argue with people like that.

If you don't think suicide bombers have had an impact have you flown recently??? No liquids allowed in hand luggage over 100 ml, no bottles of water allowed through security, scanners for people and their shoes, no sharps allowed in hand luggage ... what have I forgotten?

Incidentally, for all the rose tinted view of suffragettes, it was only when they started planting bombs they started being taken seriously. If they had stuck to cake sales and knitwear, women would still be wondering when they will get the vote.

news.sky.com/story/women-would-have-got-the-vote-earlier-if-not-for-suffragette-terrorists-11227772

That's a UK view, by the way. Other countries probably had their own methods of suppression.

@zafferana

If you don't think suicide bombers have had an impact have you flown recently??? No liquids allowed in hand luggage over 100 ml, no bottles of water allowed through security, scanners for people and their shoes, no sharps allowed in hand luggage ... what have I forgotten?

Do you think they blew themselves up so that there would be longer queues at airport security? Ever heard of Israel/Palestine? Yes that why they blew themselves up along other Middle Eastern conflicts. And look what happened there. No change whatsoever. So no protest doesn’t work, even when people blow themselves up.

BLM and the climate change thingy do their cause no good by the aggressive manner of their protests

Decades of peaceful protest and scientific evidence hasn't worked, fossil fuel emissions continue unabated.

Arctic temperatures hitting 36'C ? and still no one is prepared to change their behaviors, even when we all know that what we are doing will wreck the lives of our children, we simply don't care enough.

So what is left for organisations like XR ?

@HeLa1

Protesting absolutely does work and it remains the only means of action many marginalised people have.

Take the BLM protests: in America, the murderers of George Floyd were only arrested after protests, Breonna Taylor's husband was only released due to the protests and the abolishing of "no knock" warrants was down to the protests as well.

In Britain, white society is starting to realise celebrating murderers and human traffickers is not the best thing and most importantly, the protests has shown that racism is not just an American problem.

Totally agree with this, in addition to the suffragettes and most recently A’levels/GCSEs.

People usually protest when they have tried all other avenues and have met nothing but indifference. Those who hold power remain comfortable and unyielding when appeals to good sense, fairness and equality are done behind closed doors, of course they and those who aren’t affected like it this way.

It might have more impact if a protest happened outside cities, where it's now all too common for some kind of protest to be going on, about anything that can possibly be protested about. It's become nothing more than a horrible inconvenience and disruption (and sometimes intimidation) for the poor everyday residents. Stopping people seeing family, getting to work to feed their families, attending hospital appointments. That's not going to endear people to your cause.

Perhaps if the protestors marched through the shires or a rural village, the novelty would attract more attention?

There also needs to be a solution offered. All too often nowadays there seems to be no clear goal beyond the actual protesting. Set out (non aggressively) your aims or desires, a realistic and reasonable plan if action, what you would like to see changed. And less 'demand' (too hostile) and more reasonable request.

Worth remembering that for all the placard waving protests against the poll tax, the government only backed down after a riot in Trafalgar Square.

Which is one of the dangers of the establishment trying to use the "we won't give in" bunny. It' just encourages protestors to up the ante.

And if you want to know how peaceful protest can end, educate yourselves about Sophie Scholl and wear a white rose.

There also needs to be a solution offered. All too often nowadays there seems to be no clear goal beyond the actual protesting. Set out (non aggressively) your aims or desires, a realistic and reasonable plan if action, what you would like to see changed. And less 'demand' (too hostile) and more reasonable request.

Isn't that everyday politics ?

If you don't think suicide bombers have had an impact have you flown recently??? No liquids allowed in hand luggage over 100 ml, no bottles of water allowed through security, scanners for people and their shoes, no sharps allowed in hand luggage ... what have I forgotten?

Well, they certainly caused a lot more travel restrictions, but they didn't 'work' in terms of benefiting the cause. They didn't make people sympathise/take note of their ideology. They just caused more predjudice against innocent Muslims.

Well, they certainly caused a lot more travel restrictions, but they didn't 'work' in terms of benefiting the cause. They didn't make people sympathise/take note of their ideology.

Partly because I suspect they have no interest in that. Total destruction of the West and all it's ways to be replaced by a Caliphate is the TL;DR of Islamic terrorism. There isn't really any middle way in that. In fact the last thing any Islamic terrorist wants is for people to start educating themselves about Islam as a result of their atrocities as it would mean they'd pretty quickly be rumbled. Luckily for them the SOP of the British public is to remain as ignorant as possible about the nuances of conflict. Something we certainly do lead the world in.

@Komacho

Trump supporters complain about the protests but defend Kyle Rittenhouse. You can't argue with people like that.

I'd be interested in your take on this.

I think it was the NYT that did a frame by frame analysis of what happened. Kyle's role in the first death is unclear because there isn't sufficient video evidence for the general public to draw a conclusion. He is certainly responsible for some of the gunshot wounds sustained by the first person who died but that person also had a gunshot wound to the back which did not come from Kyle's gun. He then ran from a group of people chasing him and only fired his gun when he was attacked.

He is certainly guilty of illegally carrying a fire arm and breaching curfew but he was chased by all three of the people he shot and as I understand it, Wisconsin is a "stand your ground"state. He was chased by the first person he shot because he was trying to put out a dumpster fire the rioters were pushing towards a gas station/auto repair shop (?).

There also needs to be a solution offered. All too often nowadays there seems to be no clear goal beyond the actual protesting. Set out (non aggressively) your aims or desires, a realistic and reasonable plan if action, what you would like to see changed. And less 'demand' (too hostile) and more reasonable request.

That is the issue right there. Unless it’s framed in a way that is acceptable to those who hold the wealth and power there will be no change. And there is no way of framing this in a way that is acceptable to those who do not want the new inequalities unchanged.

I don’t pretend to hold all the solutions to every issue, but the damage that has been done to the working population can be stopped - stopped, not undone, nothing can undo the damage already caused - by rolling back some of the change that has caused their problems. The solutions are there, have worked in the past and still work in other countries.

Starting with demolishing buy-to-let and the forced requirement for everyone under the age of 50 to spend their wages on private rent. Getting the housing market back under control and truly affordable, relative to the minimum wage as it used to be, would solve half of the problems.

Demolish the ‘rentier economy’ everywhere; return to the right to own what you are paying for.

I would also like to see the attacks on local government be reversed. Systems are broken from the bottom up in this country. Not least, reverse the attacks on education, so that the level of qualification required to get a job nowadays are free, as they used to be.

Ensure that work is paid and scrap the requirement to do ludicrous levels of voluntary work before you can apply for entry level jobs. We need the number of jobs, real ones with the rights and security and real-worth baby boomers enjoyed, to return. I used to work in an area where many paid jobs are being “outsourced to the community”, I.e. unpaid. I’m not doing them without a guarantee that they will lead to paid work, with pay that can buy a house.

In fact there’s a good summary of a demand right there. Or is it “too hostile”?

Taxation would need to return to the level it used to be at. The huge level of immigration is a factor in these issues, and that happened because Blair allowed it to. Leaving the EU will not solve this issue, it will make it worse as we have to jump to every other country’s tune.

These are ‘demands’ I’ve had for years, since the situation changed in the late 90s / early 00s, since the housing market started dislocating itself from wages. Occasionally they make it into the mainstream. There have been protests against tuition fees and then the raising of tuition fees. There were union complaints and professional murmurs about stopping the pay for jobs, I dont know what out-of-touch imbeciles thought that that would be a good idea. The state of the housing market is now well known, now that it’s hitting the middle classes. Nothing gets changed. The only thing that gets changed is the framing - asking for these things now is to be considered a communist. Yet it’s what people had.

I think suicide bombers have bought about immense change. Look at all the laws we have restricting what we can and can't do now, compared to 20 years ago.

Pretty sure those weren't the outcomes they were wanting!

The reaction of governments to terrorists has resulted in more disenfranchised people being radicalised, I have read.

So in that sense it does work.

I think suicide bombers have bought about immense change. Look at all the laws we have restricting what we can and can't do now, compared to 20 years ago

Pretty sure those weren't the outcomes they were wanting!

The aim was to cause disruption to our everyday lives, they'd be v happy to see what their actions have caused.
Add in the rise of the extreme right wing across the West and job done.

@Pepperwort I completely agree with those requests/demands. I post about these issues regularly (to the annoyance of many, I'm sure). The 1988 Housing Act, 'Right to Buy', Blair's war on the disabled, and the following government's welfare 'reforms' have destroyed many lives, communities, and will continue to cause much damage - which, as you say, is now affecting more than just the Londoners it initially hit hardest, and the middle class.

But not all protests are about that, and separately no protest should be violent, disruptive, or intimidatory. And some are. Some also have no coherent demand/request. They just chant about something or someone being bad but refuse to explain what they actually want done.

With wording, I guess it's all down to individual interpretation. I see 'demand' as hostile and aggressive, an attitude which often makes things worse. It doesn't achieve anything but turn people away from the cause - however worthy (and some protests have more reasonable aims than others).

I also don't see how helpful it is to have disruptive protests about issues that affect the poor the most. These protests are always in large cities. Which have big deprived communities. It's they who suffer when protestors make it difficult to get to work or hospital. The poor and disabled and vulnerable. Why don't the protests ever take place in the shires, where those in power actually live (not work)?

I could see your point, but protests are not random groups of people. Usually they are organised affairs by groups whose concerns are already very well known. As concerns they have been totally ignored.
Another example widely mentioned on this thread, if you want to forget the social ones for a moment, is X-RAY. I could come up with a list of environmental ‘demands’, or since you do not like that word, a whole bunch of polite information about the state of the environment and actions that need to be taken. Not one bit of it would be new, as for the social affairs. Environmental and special interest groups have been researching this since the 90s and before, and the info is out there. Action is what is needed and it has not happened. Even the one political party in Britain that used to represent the movement has now turned away and gone completely mad instead. Need I remind you of the importance of environmental affairs? We’re not talking about a fashion squabble, but of the death of this age of our planet, and billions of lives of all of its inhabitants with it. So it’s last resort time.

The suffragettes has a similar history of being nice, polite, reasonable... and totally ignored.

The idea of not protesting in cities would be nice if we could all get easily to the leafy stately homes if the rich, and to all of them at once given that they’re usually in their own land and spread out. Plus the security surrounding such people would stop them. It needs to be in an accessible, visible place, and if London doesn’t like being that then the regions of England would be only too happy to see the wealth being shared out again.

X-Ray?? Nice one phone. XR

I think it's rare that protests have ever worked, tbh.

The most good they do is raise awareness, but people are generally already aware of their causes, and besides, there are other ways to get attention.

Meanwhile, when they end up disrupting the flow of people's lives or destroying property or being intimidating, they create negative associations with their causes.

It's not helped by the fact that a certain number of so-called protesters don't give a damn about the cause du jour and are just looking for an excuse to be destructive.

It's interesting to study the [provisional] IRA in this regard. Not just their emergence against the ceasefire of the IRA proper (who had correctly worked out that an armed struggle wouldn't work).

Bearing in mind in 1960s Northern Ireland, if your Catholic house or business was set on fire, the Special Bs (reserve policemen) would actively prevent fire engines from attending.

But most interesting is the pIRAs switch from bombing innocent civilians - which the UK government was quite happy to carry on forever - to bombing innocent buildings. Because it only took one bomb in the city and all of a sudden the Westminster government couldn't start talking fast enough. And thank God they did, as we're celebrating over 20 years of the closest we've had to peace in centuries of Irish rebellion.

BLM wasn't in the news much when GF was killed. The protests were the thing that got the attention of the media. It was all over instagram, nowt of note in the papers until people reacted.

@Pepperwort I'm quite sure normal Londoners (the majority, who aren't rich) would be delighted if things were spread out across the regions. They might be able to actually afford a roof over their heads. London might finally stop being the part of the country with the most homelessness (including rough sleeping on the street). Londoners are the biggest victims of the last twenty years plundering of London (aka 'investment').

As for XR. I've been posting on here about how we could and should have protected ourselves (especially our vulnerable) from Covid. The island option that NZ, Australia, and the IOM took. Closed borders. Which would help the environment. XR are currently having some days out protests in our cities but are strangely silent on this. They've spoken a little about airports but their primary focus seems to be stopping deprived poor people in urban areas getting to work (to feed their families) or accessing hospitals. These people are very poor. They're the least likely to be driving (can't afford it) or jetting off around the world (affording food and energy and a roof over their heads is enough of a struggle).

It's not their fault XR can't easily get to the wealthy shires to protest. Why take it out in the poor and vulnerable? The people who are already environmentally friendly becsuse they reuse and repair and use secondhand out of necessity.

XR are particularly ridiculous because everyone including government has already agreed with their aims - reducing climate emissions. All they did was cause disruption and distress to deprived and vulnerable communities - who can't afford takeaway coffee and food (unlike XR) or travel across the country for a day out protesting.

@DGRossetti There was more than one bomb on the mainland! And the terrorists didn't just bomb The City of London either. Nor was it 'just' innocent buildings. People, including children, were killed and injured when the terrorists bombed buildings including pubs across the UK. It went on for some years. There was no one bomb and sudden immediate talks. It took years of diplomacy and talks.