I assume you supported Truckers' Protest, they used the same tactics. What right did they have? Traffic jamming, even bridge jamming and somehow everyone was cheering.
I assume you supported Truckers' Protest, they used the same tactics. What right did they have? Traffic jamming, even bridge jamming and somehow everyone was cheering.
The Truckers had a sympathetic cause and, under the Canadian Charter rights, a legal right to protest as they did.
The civil rights movement and suffrage were also peaceful protests (on the side of the protesters). The protesters in these cases could articulate what they wanted and gained popular support as a result of well-articulated reasonable demands that demanded nothing of others beyond equal treatment under the law as human beings. The protestors were entirely peaceful and, like the Canadian truckers, didn’t destroy things or demand others give up their lives and futures to accommodate their demands that centered around personal freedoms and equal rights.
The climate alarmists can’t articulate anything that will gain support. Their demands range from forced starvation of billions to forced abortions (which is what government population management is). The climate alarmists contribute nothing. They can’t articulate anything beyond nonsense dystopian babble. They have no idea what they are talking about. They offer zero solutions besides pushing crap to kill and impoverish a lot a people.
Anyone can claim they are engaging in civil disobedience. A car jacker can claim they are trying to combat wealth inequality. If anyone is going to block a highway in the name of a cause they darn well better have a sympathetic cause that gains popular support because civil disobedience that fails to garner sympathy is just plain old breaking the law. The climate alarmists are spoiled brats plain old breaking the law and it doesn’t begin to help their supposed cause.
Do you honestly believe it’s moral or realistic to assert those engaging in attention seeking criminal antics are the ones who get to decide if society see them as engaging in “righteous civil disobedience” regardless of the facts or objective reality?
As you well know, I am one single person and I alone cannot possibly decide what causes do and do not gain material support from the general public. On a personal level, we should differentiate hooligans from the righteous on the basis of our support, or lack there of, for the “cause” being promoted via illegal antics that often come at a very real cost to others that have nothing to do with the situation.
Blocking traffic includes blocking emergency vehicles like ambulances- and also drivers handling personal emergencies, at which point it's no longer fun and games. Not a tactic I endorse.
Ethical civil disobedience always reckons with the liability of penalties as a consequence of breaking the law. All too many young activists nowadays have been lulled into some cloud-castle fantasy that "civil disobedience" is a foolproof legal defense, and that any activism taken in the course of "redress of grievances" is indemnified against criminal charges!
This false impression has been encouraged by the tactical response of many locales where mass demonstrations have taken place- to dismiss all charges against demonstrators as long as their offenses are limited to "trespassing" or "obstructing traffic". The local courts in cases like those aren't dismissing the charges because the arrests were invalid, they're doing it for their own convenience.
While I can't stand Marcuse's ideas about "repressive tolerance" as a catch-all social explanation, I have to concede that the concept isn't entirely invalid: in any situation where it's taken for granted in advance all around that practically all of the arrested demonstrators are simply going to be detained for a few hours before being set free with no charges, the demonstrators are merely pretending to engage in acts of civil disobedience, and the police are merely pretending to arrest them.
I know I heard from one trucker in an interview and he said they were being very careful to keep roads open for emergency services. I think they went too far with the honking initially but they stopped that too.
Ironically, Capital Beltway traffic is already so prone to unscheduled slowdowns (and others you can practically set your watch by) that the trucker's "slowdown" protest hardly registered as an obstacle. A fact that also calls into question the "tactic" of pedestrians blocking a highway for the purpose of protesting climate change, something something...what's the specific target- petro-powered vehicles? the disinclination of commuters to use Metro, which is only a hybrid solution anyway, given that it usually still requires an auto commute?
Exactly how "effective" is blocking the freeway as a tactic to protest personal auto use, given that the drivers who receive notice about the obstacle will simply re-route off of an exit to the network of surface streets, often requiring a greater travel distance than the usual routine?
So why do it, then? To post videos on Instagram?
Any time someone wants to pursue a plan of political activism, the first thing to do is to be clear about goals, and the be clear about tangible benefits resulting from the action other than to the personal egos of the activists. Which starts by being real about it, that there are status bennies (or at least the promise of them) for the individual personal ego of the activists. Activists put themselves onstage, in the role of "hero of the people." So admit that upfront, because it's required for clarity. Because there has to be more to it than that, hmm? There had better be.
The next thing to do is to take personal ego out of the picture, and consider the benefits of a project for everyone else. Be clear about messaging. An example of an unclear idea is implicitly blaming everyone driving a car on the freeway (who doesn't own an electric vehicle.) That is not the place to start.
Have the protesters ever considered mounting a lobbying effort to have a sufficiently adequate fleet of circulating LNG or EV-powered light buses and vans offering door to door commuter service to Metro, with subscriber-based door to door service on subscriber phone request in daylight non-peak hours? Door to door dispatch service available, room for cargo like groceries and shopping, with driver assistance. Subscriber model, like $100-$200 a year, less for senior citizens. (Leave taxicabs, Uber, and Lyft for the night shift.) That idea has been around for at least 40 years, but no one could figure out how to make it work back in the 1980s, so it was forgotten about. Now we're well into the portable phone era, the LNG/EV-powered fleet era, and also the era when the benefits of lowering auto traffic per se can plainly be viewed as a worthwhile public investment. Consult with some traffic engineers and professional drivers, and figure it out. Makes a lot more sense than any damn UAV fantasy game.
I guarantee, if anyone- I don't care who- could clearly map out how a diversified public transit option using light buses and vans offering last-mile & cargo service could relieve a sizeable percentage of the auto traffic currently on the road in traffic-choked cities and suburbs, the locals would go for it whether it's Washington DC or Houston.
Even if they're already regular riders, practically any suburban commuter is disconcerted by the requirement to either drive and park or walk-wait-ride-transfer on a pre-scheduled fixed route before boarding at a metro station. And lugging something larger than a backpack or briefcase is something between difficult and impossible.
If they could get door-to-station service, or door-to-door to/from a market or mall, they'd go for it.
There's entirely too much rote formulaic emphasis in the pop media on "Americans love affair with their cars" as an explanation for the failures of public transit. There are a lot of cities where the automobile option isn't about love, it's just a flat necessity, and a hated one. And it's entirely possible to love the freedom of a personal automobile and still prefer public transit, because the "freedom" of a job commute that requires 3 hours a day harnessed to 2 tons of gadgets that you're required to drive is really dubious.
(I wonder how much traffic would benefit from an overall 20% reduction in vehicle use, or by a 30% reduction at rush hour. How many hours of life would become less tedious, for everyone involved?)
Public transit needs to be as close to door to door as possible, and it also needs to allow safe storage for cargo- because that's a big reason for people to go out. For groceries, if nothing else. But grocery shopping doesn't work very well, bus-stop to bus-stop. But that's the limit of public transit service. So the primary impediments to increasing public transit ridership are practical, not about American individualist love affairs with their cars.
my point is I support civil disobedience, but one has to accept the consequences whether that is being arrested and charged or dealing with a desperate motorist trying to get to his pregnant wife.
they seem to think that the “rightness” of their actions invalidate any prosecution, which, in turn, invalidates the purpose of civil disobedience.
Being in a prison cell does nothing unless you can flood the prisons. Even then it's out of sight, out of mind. But usually a cause which can summon that kind of support can more easily go into the streets and annoy people enough just by demonstrating.
I assume you supported Truckers' Protest, they used the same tactics. What right did they have? Traffic jamming, even bridge jamming and somehow everyone was cheering.
The Truckers had a sympathetic cause and, under the Canadian Charter rights, a legal right to protest as they did.
The civil rights movement and suffrage were also peaceful protests (on the side of the protesters). The protesters in these cases could articulate what they wanted and gained popular support as a result of well-articulated reasonable demands that demanded nothing of others beyond equal treatment under the law as human beings. The protestors were entirely peaceful and, like the Canadian truckers, didn’t destroy things or demand others give up their lives and futures to accommodate their demands that centered around personal freedoms and equal rights.
The climate alarmists can’t articulate anything that will gain support. Their demands range from forced starvation of billions to forced abortions (which is what government population management is). The climate alarmists contribute nothing. They can’t articulate anything beyond nonsense dystopian babble. They have no idea what they are talking about. They offer zero solutions besides pushing crap to kill and impoverish a lot a people.
Anyone can claim they are engaging in civil disobedience. A car jacker can claim they are trying to combat wealth inequality. If anyone is going to block a highway in the name of a cause they darn well better have a sympathetic cause that gains popular support because civil disobedience that fails to garner sympathy is just plain old breaking the law. The climate alarmists are spoiled brats plain old breaking the law and it doesn’t begin to help their supposed cause.
As usual, NCmom, you wrote my answer 🤣
Now I'll have to compose my thoughts farther down in the massive number of comments.
Guess I just slept too late.
So NCMom’s criteria for what constitutes disruptive hooliganism or righteous civil disobedience is whether she sympathizes with their cause or not…
I am rather surprised more people, NCMom included, don’t grasp the problem with this…
Do you honestly believe it’s moral or realistic to assert those engaging in attention seeking criminal antics are the ones who get to decide if society see them as engaging in “righteous civil disobedience” regardless of the facts or objective reality?
As you well know, I am one single person and I alone cannot possibly decide what causes do and do not gain material support from the general public. On a personal level, we should differentiate hooligans from the righteous on the basis of our support, or lack there of, for the “cause” being promoted via illegal antics that often come at a very real cost to others that have nothing to do with the situation.
And they’re not brats! Yeah!
both the Truckers Protest and the Climate “roadblock” Activists are forms of Civil Disobedience, which I support.
the problem tho, is when the governmental response is disproportionate to the actual crime or disobedience (in both cases, blocking traffic).
the climate protesters went to jail for the weekend, the truckers had their trucks towed and bank accounts frozen.
Blocking traffic includes blocking emergency vehicles like ambulances- and also drivers handling personal emergencies, at which point it's no longer fun and games. Not a tactic I endorse.
Ethical civil disobedience always reckons with the liability of penalties as a consequence of breaking the law. All too many young activists nowadays have been lulled into some cloud-castle fantasy that "civil disobedience" is a foolproof legal defense, and that any activism taken in the course of "redress of grievances" is indemnified against criminal charges!
This false impression has been encouraged by the tactical response of many locales where mass demonstrations have taken place- to dismiss all charges against demonstrators as long as their offenses are limited to "trespassing" or "obstructing traffic". The local courts in cases like those aren't dismissing the charges because the arrests were invalid, they're doing it for their own convenience.
While I can't stand Marcuse's ideas about "repressive tolerance" as a catch-all social explanation, I have to concede that the concept isn't entirely invalid: in any situation where it's taken for granted in advance all around that practically all of the arrested demonstrators are simply going to be detained for a few hours before being set free with no charges, the demonstrators are merely pretending to engage in acts of civil disobedience, and the police are merely pretending to arrest them.
I know I heard from one trucker in an interview and he said they were being very careful to keep roads open for emergency services. I think they went too far with the honking initially but they stopped that too.
Ironically, Capital Beltway traffic is already so prone to unscheduled slowdowns (and others you can practically set your watch by) that the trucker's "slowdown" protest hardly registered as an obstacle. A fact that also calls into question the "tactic" of pedestrians blocking a highway for the purpose of protesting climate change, something something...what's the specific target- petro-powered vehicles? the disinclination of commuters to use Metro, which is only a hybrid solution anyway, given that it usually still requires an auto commute?
Exactly how "effective" is blocking the freeway as a tactic to protest personal auto use, given that the drivers who receive notice about the obstacle will simply re-route off of an exit to the network of surface streets, often requiring a greater travel distance than the usual routine?
So why do it, then? To post videos on Instagram?
Any time someone wants to pursue a plan of political activism, the first thing to do is to be clear about goals, and the be clear about tangible benefits resulting from the action other than to the personal egos of the activists. Which starts by being real about it, that there are status bennies (or at least the promise of them) for the individual personal ego of the activists. Activists put themselves onstage, in the role of "hero of the people." So admit that upfront, because it's required for clarity. Because there has to be more to it than that, hmm? There had better be.
The next thing to do is to take personal ego out of the picture, and consider the benefits of a project for everyone else. Be clear about messaging. An example of an unclear idea is implicitly blaming everyone driving a car on the freeway (who doesn't own an electric vehicle.) That is not the place to start.
Have the protesters ever considered mounting a lobbying effort to have a sufficiently adequate fleet of circulating LNG or EV-powered light buses and vans offering door to door commuter service to Metro, with subscriber-based door to door service on subscriber phone request in daylight non-peak hours? Door to door dispatch service available, room for cargo like groceries and shopping, with driver assistance. Subscriber model, like $100-$200 a year, less for senior citizens. (Leave taxicabs, Uber, and Lyft for the night shift.) That idea has been around for at least 40 years, but no one could figure out how to make it work back in the 1980s, so it was forgotten about. Now we're well into the portable phone era, the LNG/EV-powered fleet era, and also the era when the benefits of lowering auto traffic per se can plainly be viewed as a worthwhile public investment. Consult with some traffic engineers and professional drivers, and figure it out. Makes a lot more sense than any damn UAV fantasy game.
I guarantee, if anyone- I don't care who- could clearly map out how a diversified public transit option using light buses and vans offering last-mile & cargo service could relieve a sizeable percentage of the auto traffic currently on the road in traffic-choked cities and suburbs, the locals would go for it whether it's Washington DC or Houston.
Even if they're already regular riders, practically any suburban commuter is disconcerted by the requirement to either drive and park or walk-wait-ride-transfer on a pre-scheduled fixed route before boarding at a metro station. And lugging something larger than a backpack or briefcase is something between difficult and impossible.
If they could get door-to-station service, or door-to-door to/from a market or mall, they'd go for it.
There's entirely too much rote formulaic emphasis in the pop media on "Americans love affair with their cars" as an explanation for the failures of public transit. There are a lot of cities where the automobile option isn't about love, it's just a flat necessity, and a hated one. And it's entirely possible to love the freedom of a personal automobile and still prefer public transit, because the "freedom" of a job commute that requires 3 hours a day harnessed to 2 tons of gadgets that you're required to drive is really dubious.
(I wonder how much traffic would benefit from an overall 20% reduction in vehicle use, or by a 30% reduction at rush hour. How many hours of life would become less tedious, for everyone involved?)
Public transit needs to be as close to door to door as possible, and it also needs to allow safe storage for cargo- because that's a big reason for people to go out. For groceries, if nothing else. But grocery shopping doesn't work very well, bus-stop to bus-stop. But that's the limit of public transit service. So the primary impediments to increasing public transit ridership are practical, not about American individualist love affairs with their cars.
yes, that’s a very insightful observation.
my point is I support civil disobedience, but one has to accept the consequences whether that is being arrested and charged or dealing with a desperate motorist trying to get to his pregnant wife.
they seem to think that the “rightness” of their actions invalidate any prosecution, which, in turn, invalidates the purpose of civil disobedience.
hardly MLK or Thoreau in a prison cell.
Being in a prison cell does nothing unless you can flood the prisons. Even then it's out of sight, out of mind. But usually a cause which can summon that kind of support can more easily go into the streets and annoy people enough just by demonstrating.