pol annoyance
god redditors are fucking pathetic
"protest is only good as long as it's not an inconvenience to anyone and also if it's actually effective it will make the movement look bad and also you should simply stop doing anything"
every fucking time, it's either the SUV tire deflating people, or the van gogh painting thing (where the painting is safe behind a glass panel btw), or that one person who cemented their hand to a road to create a traffic jam
the responses are always "oh but what if the person driving that SUV happened to be in a life or death situation. see you just killed a person. what if the SUV was actually an ambulance. youre basically jeff bezos" "oh but theyre just making the movement look bad!! much better activism is when you do nothing"
fucking hell, a quote: "No, in response to some of the posts here, I am not a radical, because radical activism generally just harms everyone."
imagine being such a coward
people say "I think [thing] is good and we should definitely stop climate change/car dependency/etc" but then as soon as anyone actually does anything about it, and is in any way effective (you can't just say it's not effective when hundreds of millions of people saw it in the news. that's just not how it works), they come up with the silliest excuses to go "actually they should simply not do anything about it. we should get rid of climate change but at the same time not do anything to get rid of it"
it's the classic "I /would/ have supported gay people, but there's this one person [name], and they make gay people look bad, so actually I don't support gay people because of that person" - person who has never supported gay people
its frustrating. any time anyone is getting shit done there's always a huge group of people who go "hmmm no. this is probably a hypothetical slight inconvenience to someone, so it's bad activism. it's better to get things done by doing nothing"
pol annoyance
Sometimes you can protest in a way that has an impact on some entity, but doesn't make _public's_ life harder (e.g. bus drivers that strike by refusing to collect fares), but that's rather an exception than a rule. I expect (but might be wrong) that most people espousing that view would not consider such protests bad. Do you think otherwise?
Also, let me steelman that view: There are some implicit rules that we expect people to adhere to, and we adhere to, so that life in the society is more bearable. If those rules start being broken all the time, the loss caused by that is larger than the directly observable costs, because it also:
a) destroys trust that those rules will be adhered to,
b) makes others think that they also have a good reason to flaunt those rules.
So, one should break them only if one thinks that it'd be fine if everyone with at least as good a reason to break them would do so. Reason to break rules is evaluated on two axes: how important is the thing one wishes to affect and how affected it will be by this act that breaks them. Often protesting in a way that simply causes cost for a random set of people is low on the second criterion.
Do you think this is a reasonable steelman of their position? Is there something obviously illogical in it?
